Research project
SOG Pro
The research project SOG Pro (Structure of Government project) studies the changes in the structure and organization of central government in four parliamentary democracies: France, Germany, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom and aims to explain the changes within and across each country. Why are some administrative organizations successfully created, frequently reorganized, merged, or terminated, whereas others are seemingly ‘immortal’ and become more powerful than the elected politicians that created and control them?
- Contact
- Sanneke Kuipers
- Funding
- SOG-Pro started in 2014 with an Open Research Area grant from the national science foundations of the four participating countries
- Partners
The National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) (France)The Wirtschafts- und Sozialwissenschaftliche Fakultät of the University of Potsdam (Germany)The Department of Politics, University of Exeter (UK)
The research team develops and applies a novel framework to systematically map and explain organizational changes over the last three decades, the period following the initiation of New Public Management reforms in certain advanced economies. The project builds upon the influential “theory of the politics of structural choice” and creates a comparative quantitative dataset of organizational changes within the central governments of these four countries. It will also examine changes in the structure and organization of government across four selected policy areas in these countries.
SOG-Pro is a project conducted by teams from four excellent research institutes in the participating countries (France, Germany, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom). Leiden is one of the four institutes, the structure and organization of government in the Netherlands (between 1980-2012) is one of the comparative cases in the project. The Leiden University team co-designed the comparative research framework, covers the research on the Dutch government and contributes to the comparative deliverables of the project.
SOG Pro members present(ed) their work and preliminary findings at the following academic conferences:
- EGPA, Toulouse, August 2015
- PSA, Brighton, March 2016
- PMRC, Arhus, June 2016
- IPSA, Istanbul, July 2016