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 and the interaction between officials and citizens to international organizations and their influence on global policy making and implementation.

In addition to applying qualitative and quantitative scientific research methods, the chair also explores computer-based analysis of large amounts of text for capturing 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).

Linguistic Analysis of Public Service Encounters: This interdisciplinary project studies the verbal communication between public authorities and citizens in so-called Public Service Encounters. Associated with the Cluster of Excellence at the University of Konstanz and in cooperation with the University of Passau, the project team develops a novel method for recording and linguistically analyzing real conversations between public officials and citizens.

The Politics of Evaluation in International Organizations: The project studies political dynamics of evaluation in policy processes of United Nations system organizations. For this purpose, a new text corpus of more than a thousand evaluation reports was built and analyzed with methods of Natural Language Processing. The project has been funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) since 2017.

Local Knowledge in International Intervention: International interventions in the context of development aid, humanitarian assistance or peacebuilding are a common phenomenon in the globalized world. The effectiveness of these interventions depends in part on how well local political dynamics of recipient countries are understood. This project, funded by the Canadian Research Society (SSHRC) in collaboration with the University of Ottawa, British Columbia (both Canada) and Readings (UK), focuses on the design of such processes of local knowledge generation.

Text as data: The Evolution of the UN Security Council Debates (1995-2020):

The research project created a dataset of 80,000 speeches from UN Security Council meetings taking place between 1995-2020. The team extracted the speech data from 6,000 meeting transcripts. The project further combines natural language processing and network analysis to analyze the data and study the role of UN-bureaucracy in the security council.

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.