Research programme
Governing Polarized Societies (GPS)
Having encountered a series of shocks that pose an existential threat to our livelihoods, our societies have become increasingly polarized. Shortly after two years of lockdowns due to the pandemic, the war in Ukraine boosted at a global scale a polycrisis that intersects energy shortages, refugees, increases social inequalities, and security concerns. Climate change is making itself heard much more loudly in various parts of the world through a combination of flooding, extreme heat, and drought. And all this happens in a time where liberal democracies are challenged by emerging populist and authoritarian leaders who undermine societal stability and the rule of law.
- Duration
- 2022 - 2026
- Contact
- Brendan Carroll
- Funding
-
NWO
-
European Commission (H2020)
- Research Council of Norway (RCN)
- Partners
- Part of the research programme will be conducted in close collaboration with our long-standing colleagues from the Structure of Organisation of Government Project (SOG-PRO). In SOG-PRO we developed a novel framework that systematically mapped and explained organisational change within central government organisations.
- The Ministry of Interior Affairs and Kingdom Relations supports the research project States in Shock by advising the research team on matters related to and insights into the organisational issues within central government ministries.
About
The aggravation of political and ideological polarisation within national states further exposes the vulnerabilities our societies, polities, and the organisation of our public sectors. We witness a deepening of social inequalities between citizens that in turn is used to further deepen social cleavages among groups of citizens. Under these polarised circumstances politicians and policymakers are increasingly forced to make difficult choices regarding the redistribution of wealth and allocation of natural resources within polarized societies.
Governing Polarized Societies (GPS) is a joint research programme of public administration and crisis governance scholars at Leiden University’s Faculty of Governance and Global Affairs that addresses how states and policymakers can govern under contested conditions. The ultimate aim of the programme is to gain an understanding of the political hurdles to successful state adaptation and to develop a framework that guides policymakers to balance legitimacy and effectiveness when devising policies that are directed at mitigating the effects of shocks.
The programme is subdivided into three interrelated projects. The first project studies the extent in which national states can successfully adapt their administrative and policymaking capacities in the light of transboundary. The second project studies the conditions under which national states can effectively address these shocks without losing their legitimacy. And the final project, which integrally runs through the other projects, focuses on the interactions between political and administrative systems under the threat of populist politics and authoritarianism.
Research Projects
The project pursues three objectives: (1) examine whether and how different transboundary crises affect the administrative systems of different national states; (2) comparatively analyze the effects of national political institutions and conditions on national states’ capacity to respond to transboundary crises; and (3) examine to what extent the changes within the state administrative systems in the wake of transboundary crises are substantial or symbolic.
More information can be found on the research project page.
LEGITIMULT assesses the impact of the measures taken by various international, national and subnational governments on multilevel institutions and intergovernmental relations in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic.
More information can be found on the research project page.
The project 'INFLUEX: Influence of experts on public policy’ tackles the question of expert influence in policy-making head-on. The project aims to define, measure and explain the policy influence of different expert actors, such as expert advisory bodies and national and international expert bureaucracies. To measure expert influence, the project draws on unique data on policy-making processes and uses creative new methods such as citation analysis and ‘plagiarism’ analysis. It also examines the normative question of how much influence experts ought to have in a democracy and how the involvement of experts in policy-making should be organised.
More information can be found on the research project page.
Publications
Bauer, M.W., Peters, B.G., Pierre, J., Yesilkagit, A.K. & Becker, S. (eds.) (2021), Democratic backsliding and public administration : how populists in government transform state bureaucracies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
Boin, A., Kofman, C., Kuilman, J., Kuipers, S.L. and Van Witteloostuijn, A. (2017), Does Organizational Adaptation Really Matter? How Mission Change Affects the Survival of US Federal Independent Agencies, 1933-2011, Governance, 30 (4): 663-686.
Carroll, B.J., Bertels, J., Froio, C. Kuipers, S.L., Schulze-Gabrechten, L. and Viallet-Thevenin, S. (2020) Between Life and Death: Organizational Change in Central State Bureaucracies In Cross-National Comparison, International Review of Administrative Sciences.
Fleischer, J., Bezes, P., James, O., & Yesilkagit, K. (2022) 'The Politics of Government Reorganization in Western Europe.' Governance. Online first available here
Kuipers, S.L. and Wolbers, J.J. (2021) Organizational and Institutional Crisis Management, online scholarly refereed article in Oxford Encyclopedia of Crisis Analysis. Oxford University Press (Stern et al, eds.).
Kuipers, S., Yesilkagit, K., & Carroll, B. (2021). Ministerial influence on the machinery of government: insights on the inside. West European Politics, 44(4), 897–920.
Kuipers, S.L., Yesilkagit, A.K. and Carroll, B.J. (2017), Coming to Terms with Termination of Public Organizations, Public Organization Review, 18(2), 263-278.
Kuipers, S.L., Yesilkagit, A.K. and Carroll, B.J. (2017) Organizational Demography. In: Farazmand, A. (ed.) Global Encyclopedia of Public Administration, Public Policy, and Governance. Springer International Publishing
Toshkov, D., Carroll, B., & Yesilkagit, K. (2021). Government capacity, societal trust or party preferences: what accounts for the variety of national policy responses to the COVID-19 pandemic in Europe? Journal of European Public Policy, 1–20.
Yesilkagit, A.K. (2020) Termination, aggregation, or replacement? A competing risks approach to agency transitions. Governance 34(3), 803-819
Yesilkagit, A.K., Bezes, P., Fleischer, J. (2022) What’s in a name? The politics of name changes inside bureaucracy. Public Administration. First published 7 January 2022.
Yesilkagit, A.K, & Christensen, J. (2010). Institutional Design and Formal Autonomy: Political versus Historical and Cultural Explanations. Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, 20(1), 53–74
Christensen, J. (2022). When bureaucratic expertise comes under attack. Public Administration (early view).
Christensen, J., Holst, C. & Molander, A. (2022). Expertise, Policy-making and Democracy. Abingdon: Routledge.