Modern states rely on complex government structures to make and deliver policy. These structures are not static: they evolve, expand, merge, or disappear in response to political demands, social change, and historical shocks. Yet despite their importance, we still know too little about why such changes occur — and how they shape the policies that affect citizens’ lives.
Traditionally, scholars have explained structural change as a matter of party politics: parties competing for power, redesigning ministries or agencies to secure control over the bureaucracy. But this view leaves much unexplained. Government structures have changed since long before mass parties existed, and they continue to do so even as party influence declines. This gap in our knowledge is particularly concerning at a time when citizens expect states to respond effectively to global crises such as climate change, pandemics, financial shocks, and digital transformation.
STATE-DNA addresses this challenge by developing a new theory of “evolutionary government.” Just as DNA determines how organisms adapt, the “structural DNA” of government — the units inside ministries and agencies — determines how states adapt to their environments. These units draft laws, manage policy domains, and allocate resources. Their creation and redesign leave lasting marks on policymaking. By studying these micro-level structures over more than 200 years in six countries (France, Germany, Japan, the Netherlands, Norway, and the UK), the project will uncover patterns of structural change and assess their consequences for policy.
The project pursues three main objectives:
Theoretical innovation: to explain structural change as an interplay between unit-level features and their organizational and institutional environments, moving beyond party-centric accounts.
Empirical breakthrough: to build the most comprehensive dataset ever on structural change in government, spanning two centuries and six countries.
Methodological innovation: to apply techniques inspired by evolutionary biology — such as genetic measures and data assimilation — to trace lineages of change, analyze their effects on legislative activity, and even forecast future developments.
The expected impact is twofold. For scholarship, STATE-DNA will transform our understanding of government by integrating insights from political science, public administration, history, and evolutionary theory. It replaces selective case studies with systematic, long-term, cross-national evidence. For society, it highlights how government structures shape the capacity of states to respond to crises, deliver policies, and sustain democracy. By making all data openly available, the project will also empower policymakers, journalists, think tanks, and citizens to better understand the “machinery of government” and how it can be improved.
To sum up, STATE-DNA sets out to decipher the structural DNA of the modern state. By explaining how and why government structures evolve — and what difference this makes for policy — it will provide knowledge essential for meeting today’s pressing challenges and strengthening democratic governance in the future.
