The Politics of Portfolio Design in Germany

政府各部在现代民主国家中无处不在，例如，作为政府组建的核心收益，作为决策的核心行为者，作为有组织利益集团的最重要接入点。政治学文献通常将部委视为具有固定管辖权的稳定单位。这一假设在经验上很难成立：设立新的部委（德国的情况是，例如1986年环境部），旧的机构被废除（例如1998年的邮政部），各部合并（例如，2002年经济事务部和劳动部），它们的管辖权发生了重大变化（例如，2013年经济事务和能源部将以前分散的能源政策管辖权捆绑在一起）。尽管这些改革引起了公众的广泛关注，但其原因和后果却很少被政治学家研究。本项目对1949年以来德国联邦政府的投资组合设计进行了系统的分析。核心问题是，政府各部的设计多久进行一次改革，改革的范围有多大，改革对谁有利，我们如何解释这些改革？该项目借鉴了联盟研究和公共行政研究的论点，以制定理论答案，并得出经验验证的假设。从经验上讲，它系统地衡量和描述了联邦政府内部部门一级的管辖权分配。这个新的面板数据集是用来统计检验假设来自两个竞争的解释模型的改革（基于权力的考虑联盟和组织效率的问题，分别）。此外，在访谈的基础上重建了相关行为者的动机。此外，该项目还通过与各部委和利益集团中受影响的行为者进行访谈，以及对各部委之间管辖权大规模转移之前和之后的政策进程进行产生假设的个案研究，探讨这种改革如何影响政策进程和产出的问题。这一归纳得出的解释改革后果的理论框架将在随后的研究项目中得到检验。（将在项目结束后公开）允许（1）未来的研究更充分地模拟德国的投资组合配置，（2）为公共管理学者提供了关于德国联邦部官僚机构组织的分类面板数据;（3）为政策研究分析部对政策制定的影响以及主题政策议程与机构组织之间的相互关系提供了可能。此外，鉴于各部委的重要性和公众在联盟组建过程中的利益，该项目也与社会有关。

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.