Project description
Shedding light on how government structures affect government policy
Since modern states emerged in Europe in the early 19th century, governments have built and adapted their structures – ministries and agencies – to develop government policy. However, most research focuses on the postwar period and hence on parties to explain changes in these structures. Funded by the European Research Council, the STATE-DNA project will investigate government structures on a more granular level, analysing the units inside ministries and agencies. The aim is to find new explanations for structural change by tracing the evolution of these units across several countries for a period of more than 200 years. The project will also study how the units' structural evolution affects government policy, seeking to explore opportunities to forecast what will happen with government structures in the future.
Objective
Why do government structures change? Traditionally, the answer refers to political parties exercising control over a state bureaucracy. Yet government structures have been changing ever since they emerged alongside the modern state and thus already before parties existed. The recent decline of party government worldwide also begs the question whether other actors and mechanisms matter that have been underestimated so far. Meanwhile, it became a truism that “structure shapes policy”, but existing research focuses on other effects of structural change in government, such as democratic and economic outcomes or cabinet governance. We lack systematic analyses of how structural change affects government policy.
To address these gaps, STATE-DNA studies the change of units inside ministries and agencies as the ‘building blocks’ of the modern state. It submits a novel theory of evolutionary government that regards structural change in government as an interplay between a unit’s structural features and its organizational and environmental environment. This notion of multiple levels allows to study more than ‘party-centric’ causes of change and, for the first time, to analyze the effects on government policy explicitly, as evolutionary consequences managed by distinct units.
STATE-DNA breaks new ground by applying genetic measures to assess structural change in government, establishing the most comprehensive data set, which begins with the ‘primordial soup’ of the early 19th century when government structures fragmented (~150,000 units, six countries, 1815–2025). For the empirical analyses, existing (historical) data on legislative activity, organizational, and environmental features will be used and extended. STATE-DNA will exploit methodological advancements in biology, such as data assimilation techniques, to analyze the origins and consequences of structural change in government and to forecast such change, thereby injecting a predictive notion into government studies.
Fields of science
Keywords
Programme(s)
- HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC) Main Programme
Funding Scheme
HORIZON-ERC - HORIZON ERC GrantsHost institution
14469 Potsdam
Germany