The Politics of Portfolio Design in Germany

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Government ministries are omnipresent in modern democracies, e.g. as core payoffs in government formation, as central actors in policy-making and as most important access points for organized interests. Political science literature usually treats ministries as stable units with fixed jurisdictions. This assumption is hardly tenable empirically: New ministries are created (in the German case e.g. the Ministry of the Environment in 1986), old ones are abolished (e.g. the Ministry of Postal Services in 1998), ministries are fused (e.g. the Minstries of Economic Affairs and Labor in 2002), and their jurisdiction undergo substantial change (e.g. the bundling of previously scattered jurisdictions on energy policy in the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Energy in 2013). Even though such reforms of portfolio design attract massive public attention, their causes and consequences have hardly been studied by political scientists.This project provides a systematic analysis of portfolio design in the German federal government since 1949. The core question is how often, how extensively and to whose advantage has the design of government ministries been reformed and how can we explain these reforms? The project draws on arguments from coalition research and public administration research to develop theoretical answers and derives empirically testable hypotheses. Empirically, it systematically measures and describes the assignment of jurisdictions within the federal government on the level of intra-ministerial units. This new panel dataset is used to statistically test hypotheses derived from two competing explanatory models for reforms (based on power considerations within the coalition and on organizational efficiency concerns, respectively). Furthermore, the motivations of the relevant actors are reconstructed on the basis of interviews. Furthermore, the project explores the question of how such reforms affect policy processes and outputs through interviews with affected actors in ministries and interest groups and hypothesis-generating case studies of policy processes before and after large jurisdictional shifts between ministries. This inductively derived theoretical framework for explaining the consequences of reforms shall be tested in a subsequent research project.The findings of the project and the panel dataset on the development of portfolio design (which will be publicly available after the end of the project) allow (1) future research a more adequate modeling of portfolio allocation in Germany, (2) offers public administration scholars disaggregated panel data on the organization of the federal ministerial bureaucracy in Germany, and (3) enables policy studies to analyze the effect of ministries on policymaking and the interrelation between the topical policy agenda and institutional organization. Furthermore, the project is also relevant for society given the importance of ministries and public interest in the process of coalition formation.