Four years ago in the fall of 2014, media reports about the horrendous abuse of refugees by private guards in an accomondation in the German city of Burbach shocked the national public. Yesterday, the criminal trial against 32 persons involved in the scandal started and the Deutsche Welle interviewed Helge Staff, on private security guards in German refugee shelters, the role of regulation and the recent reforms in German private security law. All of these topics feature prominently in his dissertation project “The Political Economy of Private Security”. The full interview in German can be read here.

The German system of academia has many peculiarities. One of these idiosyncratic features is the famous “research semester” – half a year in which a professor will not have to teach courses at the university. A professor can apply for such a semester if two conditions are fulfilled: First, she or he has to have served as university staff with full teaching load for a certain amount of time – depending on the Land, this varies from seven to nine terms (see the overview here). And, second, she or he has to assure that the classes are taught by someone else or that, at least, there is enough teaching to run the study programs. It is then up to the faculty board and the President of the university to decide whether this research semester is granted.

This fall, I am in the comfortable situation that both conditions are fulfilled. Thanks to the WSCEP-project, where I have applied for teaching buy out, Dr. Colette Vogeler has been hired to take over my usual classes taught every fall term (e.g. lecture in political economy). And as I have been working as a professor at TUK for four years now, I could also apply for the research semester – an application which the faculty board and the President have accepted. But what do I do now with all this time?

Well, in fact, the time is running and running very quickly. The first weeks were still characterized by reading thesis and term papers from the summer term, participating at Conferences (such as the DVPW) as well as some administrative tasks. Since mid-October, I begin to feel that more space is free to do research. I have two main tasks that I will pursue during the upcoming months:

First, I will write the first chapters of a book entitled “Reforming the welfare state” and co-authored with Carsten Jensen. In this monograph, Carsten and I will use the data collected in the WSCEP project on changes to welfare legislation in Britain, Denmark, Finland, France and Germany. We analyze the reforms of the welfare state from different angles and investigate how the substantial changes that have occurred in the last 40 years can be explained. The book is under contract with Routledge and will appear in 2019.

Second, I will finish up my book on the partisan politics of law and order (with Oxford University Press) which will be published in 2019, too. The book is based on the research project on law and order financed by the German Research Foundation and uses large-N-quantitative analyses as well as comparative case studies to explain patterns in law and order politics and policies. The main argument of the book is that partisan politics add substantially to the explanation of the variance of law and order policies in Western industrialized countries. As I am at around two thirds of the next body right now, I am confident to succeed in finishing it until January.

All this work will be done from my home office (for the great view from my desk into our november garden , see picture) and from an office at Aarhus University, where I will stay for a couple of weeks in November. Thanks to the research semester, I can manage to work in close collaboration with Carsten on the book project and hopefully make a big step forward when being in Denmark.

Georg Wenzelburger

Livestock farming is an important pillar of European agriculture, in Germany more than 200 million animals are permanently kept. At the European Union level, animal welfare policies have been developing since the 1970s. However, national regulations vary considerably between member states. A systematic comparative analysis of factors that influence these differences in national farm animal welfare policies has yet to be carried out. In my recent study, published in the Journal of Common Market Studies, I address this research gap by applying theories from comparative policy analysis. I find that societal concerns and partisan politics can contribute to the understanding of varying animal welfare policies. My results contribute to the exploration of a hitherto under-researched area in public policy, the field of farm animal welfare.

Colette Vogeler

Yesterday, Prof. Dr. Annette Spellerberg, chair for urban sociology at the University of Kaiserslautern, and Prof. Dr. Georg Wenzelburger welcomed a range of experts from both political science and sociology to a joint workshop on “Security: Politics, Culture and Concepts”. The workshop was an important step in the preparation process for a grant application by Prof. Spellerberg and Prof. Wenzelburger.

Their draft project focuses on the variance of security policies across German states as well as German cities. The multi-level structure of the German political system featuring federal, state, and (several) local levels of government exhibits a remarkable diversity in the delivery of security services. The project aims to explore and to explain this diversity by analyzing the impact of “security cultures”. Within organizations such as the state police forces, courts but also political parties or local administrations particular practices, understandings or norms of how to deal with security issues – and also what to regard as a security issue – have been established over time and are passed along. These cultures and their interplay with other causal factors are the focal point of the planned research. The draft project is structured at the moment in four sub-projects which will deal with (1) the exploration and explanation of the variance on the state level, (2) the impact of security cultures on policy transfer across states and between levels, (3) the impact of local security cultures on security concepts within cities, and (4) the influence of such local security concepts on the feelings of insecurity within cities. The sub-projects are tightly linked by studying the same cases of security concepts for mass events and for urban hotspots of insecurity.

At the workshop, Prof. Dr. Dietrich Oberwittler, Prof. Dr. Rita Haverkamp, Dr. Jasmin Riedl, and Dipl-Pol. Dipl.-Psych Hermann Groß held short presentations on current questions of security research before – along with further guests – they commented on the draft project which was presented by Michaela Ehbrecht and Georg Wenzelburger. The ensuing discussion yielded many insights and very good hints of how to further improve the project. The discussion zoomed in on the concept of “security culture” and very importantly how to operationalize such a concept and to ultimately measure it. Very important in this regard were remarks by security practitioners such as personnel of the local police departments who also attended the workshop.

In sum, the workshop proved once again the need for cooperation across the disciplines of social science, the value of a dialogue between academia and practitioners, and the merit of seeking advice and critique when developing a draft grant application.

Helge Staff

[photo by the author, diagram by Georg Wenzelburger]

Probably one of the most important skills a political scientist needs in his daily working routine, is the capability of academic writing. Therefore acquiring knowledge of academic writing techniques is an absolute necessity for every political science student.

At the end of the undergraduate seminar on policy processes (click here and here for our previous blog posts), students were asked to write a term paper on an individually chosen policy process using the theories (e.g. ACF, MSF, PET) introduced in the class sessions. Since most of the students had never written an academic paper before, we decided to offer three voluntary tutoring sessions during the summer break. The idea was to provide theoretical basics of academic writing on the one hand, and on the other to accompany the individual writing process by providing practial knowledge, first hand tips, and individual tutoring.

Having those two goals in mind, I planned the three sessions following the steps of an ideal writing process. Hence, we started by asking basic questions such as: How to do scientific research? What are scientific sources and where to find them? Or how to find a research question that meets not only the guidelines provided by the lecturer but also my own interests within the context of public policy processes? Afterwards we focused on structuring the term papers regarding the paragraphs that need to be included (introduction, hypothesis, theory, analysis and key results). In the last tutoring session we focused on the topics of citation and other formalities, which I remembered to be a major issue to me when I started my studies.

The tutoring sessions conclude our undergraduate seminar and hence also our mini series on teaching policy process analysis featured on this blog.

Kathrin Hartmann

[photo by Helge Staff]

The last three days, Colette Vogeler and I visisted the ECPR General Conference 2018 in Hamburg to present our latest research, to learn about new approaches in policy analysis, and to meet the international community of scholars developing, modifying, and applying theories of the policy process. This annual event is the largest political science conference in Europe with more than 2500 scholars from around the world. Although such a large conference naturally covers the whole variety of different sub-disciplines and issue areas, in recent years the ECPR General Conference also features a very good section on policy process theories. This section and its individual panels are a great opportunity to hear about the latest results of others, receive feedback on one’s own research and to engage with a growing international community.

Colette Vogeler, who will head the Chair for Policy Analysis and Political Economy in the next semester, presented with her co-author Malte Möck the results of a research project on the water-food nexus in German livestock production. In the two presentations, one in the policy process section and one in a food governance section, Collette and Malte highlighted the problematic constellation of the specialized livestock production in North-Western Germany in terms of Nitrate pollution in the groundwater. This specific constellation of natural, economic, and policy factors has led to a governance failure. In her contributions, Colette showed how de-coupled policy-making in food and water sectors cannot solve the existing problem and how decisions in energy policy worsened the situation – hinting also at interesting cross-sectional policy effects.

In a panel on the Multiple Streams Framework (MSF) I presented preliminary results of my dissertation project “The Political Economy of Private Security”. Making use of the recently collected data in Spain, I am now able to compare three policy processes of private security regulation in Germany, the UK, and Spain. My paper in Hamburg drew on this rich qualitative evidence of the three case studies to illustrate the working of a causal mechanism, which spells out a link between the MSF and the idea of “families of nations”. This concept developed by Francis G. Castles draws on historical, legal, and cultural factors and shows that European states cluster in their policy output in five distinct families of nations. I related this concept to one of the MSF’s criteria for survival of an idea within the discourse of the policy community: value acceptability.

After four days of inspiring panel talks, critical discussions, and meetings with colleagues in the field of policy process research from around the world, we head back from Hamburg with a whole treasure of new ideas for our current and future research projects

Helge Staff

[photos by Colette Vogeler, Johanna Hornung, and the author]

Last week, I was invited to give a talk at the Research Colloquium at the Bavarian School of Public Policy of the TU München (Hochschule für Politik). I decided to present a recent paper that grew out of the WSCEP project and demonstrates that voters indeed punish governments for cutting back the welfare state. The paper is a joint piece with Christoph Arndt and Carsten Jensen where we use German micro polling data from Politbarometer-surveys and our manually coded data on welfare state legislation to demonstrate how voters react to welfare state change. In a way, it gives a micro-foundation to our results for UK and Danish data as published in last year’s BJPS-article (Lee et al. 2017). As expected by us (but challenged by other literature, such as Giger and Nelson (2011) on the welfare state or Achen and Bartels (2016) on democracy more generally), voters do indeed “reward” sitting governments for expanding the welfare state with a higher probability to stay with the government (as indicated in polls) and they “punish” them if they cut the welfare state with a higher probability to change their vote intentions from government to opposition in the polling data.

While the general pattern is quite clear, there are still several questions open and the discussion at the Research Seminar very much helped to see where we still have to dig deeper. One issue is the time lag between the legislation and the voter reaction as well as the question how long the effect of reward or punishment actually lasts. In fact, the finding of several studies that there is no systematic punishment of welfare state retrenchment at election day (Giger 2011; Giger and Nelson 2011; Schumacher et al. 2013) can also be explained by the fact that voters simply forget about what happened after a couple of months. Hence, when using polling data we find that voters become annoyed in the short term if their government cuts welfare benefits, but that they forget about this after some time and don’t punish at the ballot box. Another point that came up during the discussion at TUM concerns the reactions of different voter groups, but here the data only allows for a limited inspection of such important questions. At any rate, we will use the comments to revise the paper in the next weeks and will hopefully publish it once it is in adequate shape.

Besides research, the Bavarian School of Public Policy provided an excellent program for me as a speaker with opportunities to connect to colleagues around lunch, dinner and even during breakfast (!) as well as to get in touch with students and doctoral researchers.

Georg Wenzelburger

 

References

Achen, Christopher H., and Larry M. Bartels (2016). Democracy for Realists. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press.

Giger, Nathalie (2011). The risk of social policy? : the electoral consequences of welfare state retrenchment and social policy performance in OECD countries. London Routledge

Giger, Nathalie, and Moira Nelson (2011). “The electoral consequences of welfare state retrenchment: Blame avoidance or credit claiming in the era of permanent austerity?”, European Journal of Political Research, 50:1, 1-23.

Lee, Seonghui, Carsten Jensen, Christoph Arndt and Georg Wenzelburger (2017). “Risky Business? Welfare State Reforms and Government Support in Britain and Denmark”, British Journal of Political Science, 1-20.

Schumacher, Gijs, Barbara Vis and Kees van Kersbergen (2013). “Political parties’ welfare image, electoral punishment and welfare state retrenchment”, Comparative European Politics, 11:1, 1-21.

On the occasion of his appointment to full professor for Policy-Analysis and Political Economy at the University of Kaiserslautern, the team made the gift of a special “team challenge” to Georg Wenzelburger. Of the many activities to choose from he selected a hiking trip through the Palatinate Forest in combination with a wine tasting event.

Thus, last Friday the whole team met and enjoyed a great summer team event. We first took a bus out of the city and into the cooler Palitinate Forest, where we climbed the “große Humberg” as well as the historic look-out. Then we followed a path down hill and visited the “Game Park Betzenberg” featuring many species native to the Palitinate Forest. Along the way we tasted a selection of local and foreign wines before hiking back to Kaiserslautern, thus completing the “Team Challenge 2018” and a wonderful summer team event.

Helge Staff

[photos by Georg Wenzelburger]

This summer term I had the opportunity to assist in the under-graduate seminar on policy process theories taught by Helge Staff (see also the previous blog post on our seminar). Still working to complete my Master’s degree, this opportunity allowed me to get a first glimpse ‘behind the scenes’ of university teaching. Besides preparing different data sets for the research sessions, offering individual mentoring and of course becoming an expert on all the different public policy theories, I was also offered to prepare and hold my own seminar sessions. As you can imagine, this was truly exciting for me. Through all the times of my studies, most of my experiences in talking in front of other students were twenty minutes-presentations on selected aspects of a theory or a given topic.

This time I had to prepare two seminar sessions on the Punctuated Equilibrium Theory (PET). Even though Helge had already chosen the text for the ‘theory session’, I saw myself confronted with a lot of difficult questions. How to present and explain the PET in about fifteen minutes? How to link the PET to our chosen policy cycle on the road user charge in Germany (“PKW-Maut”)? What information do the students need to successfully complete the exercises of the ‘research session’?

Since the aim of the seminar is not only to introduce the students to different public policy theories but also to teach the basics of empirical research, I decided to also put an emphasis on that in the ‘theory session’. Thus, I gave some advice on the correct formulation of research questions and the factors which need to be considered when formulating a good hypothesis.

Due to special circumstances, both sessions were held on the same day which meant three hours of teaching for me and even more important: three hours of learning for the students. Since I remembered attending such long sessions myself, which sometimes felt longer than they actually were, I tried to break the classic seminar structure and let the students play a modified parlor game. In my case, I decided to develop a little “memory” covering all the significant terms of the PET. Groups of students would then compete with each other who could match all the PET terms with the adequate description correctly first.

For the ‘research session’, we analyzed budget data on federal spending in transportation policy collected by the Federal Statistical Office. Before doing so, I gave a brief introduction to Excel, which I chose as the best opportunity for the analysis in our seminar context. Afterwards, students were asked to discuss and interpret the given data concerning the research question: Can significant changes be observed in budget data during the period between 1963 and 2011? I had prepared a working document which detailed the single steps towards analyzing the data. The students executed these steps and in the end, and after only one hour, we were able to arrive at the classic and basic PET result of a general incremental policy development punctuated by a few instances of radical change.

To sum up my first teaching experience: After all my preparations, reading and thinking about structures and the methods of teaching, I was still very excited before the seminar actually started. Today, knowing it all went well, I can say: I am already looking forward to organize and execute the tutoring sessions on term paper writing which will take place in the following three months. Look out for my report on those, here on this blog!

Kathrin Hartmann

[photos by Helge Staff]

In a previous blog post on my dissertation and the experience of a research trip to Spain, I already commented on the highly useful technique of semi-structured expert interviews to collect qualitative data on policy processes. It is the insider perspective of persons who actually participated in the policy process, which can provide a unique insight into an often complicated series of events and the interrelation between these events.

To conclude my qualitative data collection and finalize the last case study I am working on, I traveled last week to London and interviewed policy experts both on the process of the Spending Review 2010 and the Private Security Industry Act 2001. This latter process is comparable to the two other policy processes of private security regulation in Spain and Germany which I analyze. The policy process of the Spending Review 2010, however, is different in so far as here the interesting outcome is a severe cut in police and Home Office (about 23 % ) spending implemented by the Conservative-Liberal coalition in 2010. However, cutting public spending on police and other public security services – while societal demand for security is growing – is thought to be an important driver of the growth of private security services.

Yet, my preliminary analysis suggests that “security” was not at all of importance in the policy process of the Spending Review 2010: Between the years 2006 and 2009 – and accelerated after the crisis hit – the latter chancellor George Osborne formed an opinion on cutting public spending to base the UK’s finances on a more solid foundation. Within the election campaign 2010 all parties promised to ‘tackle the deficit’, yet differed in the envisaged degree and timing of the cuts. The decisive moment for this general direction of the policy process were the negotiations between Labour, the Liberal-Democrats, and the Conservatives following the general election on the 6^th of May 2010. Within days the Liberal-Democrats negotiated with both parties and arrived at a consensus with the Conservatives to form a coalition devoted to immediate cuts of £6 billion in 2010/2011 and further cuts to be decided upon in a comprehensive spending review.

This process of the spending review – like the June emergency budget directly following the election – was characterized by a series of negotiations between the individual departments and the Treasury, which already had identified saving capacities in the single departments. But the final number was up for negotiation between the department heads and – for the most part – Danny Alexander, the Chief Secretary of the Treasury. My interview partners having participated in one, two or even all three important steps of the process (pre-election, coalition negotiation, Spending Review) agreed in the conclusion that the policy issue of security was not important in this process. The issue area had not been ring-fenced like others (NHS, foreign aid) in the coalition negotiations and thus everybody, also the Home Office, ‘had to give their share’. Thus, the severe cuts in police spending seem to be driven most importantly by a low salience and by factors exogenous to the policy area like the intent of the government to show the financial markets their credibility in cutting the UK’s rising deficit.

Over the next weeks I will assess these preliminary results more carefully drawing on literature and document data before applying my hypotheses based on an updated Multiple-Streams-Framework. Thus, at the end of the summer I hope to have concluded the work on all six case studies of policy processes. The following fall/winter term I will devote to further quantitative analyses and writing up my dissertation thesis to be concluded – hopefully – over the next year.

Helge Staff

[photos by the author]