Chair of Public Administration & Public Policy

Profile

At the intersection of public administration and politics, the Chair of Public Administration & Public Policy focuses on the management of public organizations and their impact on politics and society.

The chair studies the phenomenon of administration in its entire scope, from the local level, the interaction between officials and citizens and the employment of artificial intelligence to international organizations and their influence on global policy making and implementation.

A methodological focus at the chair is research into the use of computer-assisted text analysis and machine learning for the study of political phenomena.

Research

The chair implements several multi-year research projects at Zeppelin University and in cooperation with other international partners and universities:

Innovations in Local Crisis Management (InnoLoK): Building on the preceding HybOrg project on the so-called refugee crisis, the project asks about the societal impact of variation in local crisis management with a focus on the Covid-19 Pandemic. The project is funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF).

Artificial Intelligence and Administrative Language in Citizen-Government Interaction (BiASE-AI): The project, funded by the European Research Council (ERC), examines how communication between public administrations and citizens changes when artificial intelligence complements or replaces human interaction. It analyzes both real and experimental conversations to assess the impact of different communication forms on clarity, fairness, and trust. The aim is to provide public authorities with evidence-based recommendations for citizen-friendly, clear, and fair communication in the digital age.

Explaining the Performance of International Organizations: Increasingly, international organizations and their administrations are the focus of criticism and politicization. The project investigates the consequences of these dynamics for their performance in policy implementation. Using text mining and natural language processing, a dataset of over 20,000 evaluation reports will be created and analyzed. The project is funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG).

Teaching

The chair offers courses in the area of public administration, policy studies, and organization research. Advanced and in-depth courses provide organizational perspectives on international administrations in global political processes, especially in the area of peace and security; and they focus on local administrative action at the interface between state and population. Occasionally, the chair also offers applied research seminars where participants train specific research methods or data collection techniques.

The goal of the Chair’s teaching is to provide students with knowledge regarding the functioning of public organizations. The focus is on the encounter between theory and practice: students learn basic theoretical perspectives on public institutions and discuss them using practical and current examples from policy design and implementation. By engaging with scientific research methods, students are also enabled to conduct independent research projects.