Public Administration in Germany: Problems and Potential of a Fragmented Community

ABSTRACT

What is the discipline of Public Administration (PA) ultimately for? The German community has recently entered new deliberations on this recurrent question, with several papers and workshops addressing the present and future of their national discipline. This article uses original survey data to introduce the views of the German community at large and analyzes intellectual commonalities against a background of institutional fragmentation. It scrutinizes preferences for epistemological positions, research aims, and publication strategies, while also investigating potentials for cooperation through interdisciplinary exchange and theoretical or thematic concordance. The results show a community in intellectual crisis. Faced with fears of decreasing reputation and influence, German PA is still divided about its purpose and separated by disciplinary borders.

KEYWORDS:

• Public Administration
• academic disciplines
• scholarly community
• Germany

Notes

1. Every discipline or community faces such debates eventually, and PA is no exception. For some recent contributions on the US community, see Perry (2016) and Durant and Rosenbloom (2017). A still classical text is Ostrom (2008, 1974)); for a more forward-looking contribution, see Peters and Pierre (2018).

2. “Verwaltungswissenschaft – eine neue Eröffnungsbilanz” at the Helmut-Schmidt-Universität Hamburg (July 2015), “Perspektiven der Verwaltungswissenschaft” at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München (November 2016), and the 2016 annual meeting of the German Section of the International Institute of Administrative Sciences, titled “Verwaltungspraxis und Verwaltungswissenschaft” at the German University of Administrative Sciences Speyer (November 2016).

3. It was first mostly a “science of democracy and democratization”’ and later an empirical social science focused on public institutions and collective decision making.

4. We identified potential participants in four areas: (1) evidently relevant research institutes and faculties, e.g., the Lorenz-von-Stein-Institut for Public Management and Administrative Sciences at the University of Kiel, the German University of Administrative Sciences and the German Research Institute for Public Administration (both in Speyer), the Hertie School of Governance in Berlin, the Department of Politics and Public Administration at the University of Konstanz, and the Section Political and Administrative Sciences at the University of Potsdam; (2) the twenty largest German universities (in terms of students), as long as potential participant’s chair or research context made reference to public administration, management, or organization; (3) universities of applied sciences for the civil service, as long as the potential participant’s chair or research context made reference to public administration; and (4) mailing lists of relevant research networks, e.g., the German section of the International Institute for Administrative Sciences, the section Policy Analysis and Public Administration of the German Political Science Association, and the Association of German Scholars of Public Law. In addition, individuals could apply to take part in the survey; however, only eleven additional participants were recruited this way.

5. A smaller load of questions would probably have increased the completion rate; however, we were specifically interested in the relationship of several disciplinary dimensions, thus rendering much shorter questionnaires impossible. With this response rate, we are confident that we have struck a good balance between the survey’s thoroughness and its appeal to potential participants.

6. A table with the detailed distributions of these demographic variables in each disciplinary group can be found in Table A1 in the Annex.

7. This and the other three scales are based on mean scores, which have only been calculated if the participants have answered at least two out of three items.