Core themes

Our research is focused on three axes:

• Diversity and equality in politics & public governance
  
• Knowledge and information in and through politics & public governance
  
• Politics & public governance in a European multi-layered and multi-actor context
  

The first research axis studies how different needs and interests are mobilised, recognized and represented in political and administrative decision-making, how groups organize to compete for influence, and how politics and governance (re-)produce equality and inequality. The main focus is on how societal, political and administrative institutions and practices bring about intended and unintended inequality, discrimination and exclusion on the basis of social markers such as gender, ethnicity, disability and sexuality. Further attention is given to how policies can be coordinated and integrated in order to respond to more diverse needs, but also how administrative routines and citizen state-interactions at the front-line can bring about and sustain inequality and exclusion.

The second research axis studies how politicians, policy-makers and public administrators make decisions. On the one hand, there is the increasing use of indicator-based information in public decision making to make governing more evidence-based and technocratic. This indicator-based governance affects the positions of politicians, citizens, and civil servants and their relations. On the other hand and in contrast to this, non-technical, layman information is emphasized more and more in processes of cocreation and co-production. Often, technocratic and user/citizen-sourced information clash and give rise to the public contestation of policies. In this context, we also study how (future) policy-makers can learn to cope with complex decision-making environments and how such skills-teaching can be embedded in academic curricula.

The third research axis focuses on the horizontal and vertical complexity of contemporary politics and public governance. Supra-nationalization, decentralization and decades of administrative reforms have dispersed public authority into institutional constellations that are governed by combinations of hierarchy, market and networks. Boundaries between public, non-profit and private responsibility for public governance have blurred. Increasingly, parliaments, cabinets, administrations and agencies at EU, national, regional and local level as well as private actors have to collaborate when making and implementing policies, regulations and service delivery. We focus on how political and public governance actors and systems deal with the changing and often conflicting institutional logics (in terms of e.g. action strategies, organizational and legal changes). Also we study how interest groups mobilize, organize and implement strategies to generate impact on decision-making and policies in complex multi-layered environments. Finally, this axis contains research on the effects of state-society relations within multilevel environments on the performance, innovation, accountability and legitimacy of the political and administrative systems.