Studying Bureaucratic Behaviour: Experiments in Public Administration Research - Einzelansicht

The seminar is taught based on a blended learning format. It consists of in-class sessions and self-study phases that are accompanied by take-home tests and out-of-class assignments.

In the past years, experiments have become increasingly prominent in public administration research. That is becasue they allow for precisely identifying causal relations between the individual behaviour of bureaucrats and its manifold causes and consequences. By this, they may deliver profound empirical insights on various important topics and phenomena, such as whether and why some groups of citizens experience systematic disdvantages in the delivery of public services, why public policies often fail to live up to their promises when being implemented, or how public administration may prevent well-established democracies from eroding from within due to recent authoritarian tendencies in governments all over the world. 

In the first part of the seminar, the students will learn about the theoretical and methodological foundations of social science experiments in public administration. Further, they will become familiar with the different forms of experiments and how they can be used to answer research questions in public administration. This includes reviewing selected examples from the extant literature. The second part of the seminar is even more exciting: We will jointly design and implement a field experiment on bureaucratic discrimination in public healthcare.

The final grade is based on in-class presentations, the take-home assignments as well as a term paper that will be written in groups of two or three students. In-class presentations have to be in English, the term paper may be written in English or German.