Christian Adam

Crises often call for swift and far-reaching government action that depends on broad public acceptance to be effective. While political disagreement is commonly seen as undermining support, its actual impact on public attitudes remains contested. This study examines public opinion during the COVID-19 pandemic in Germany – a context that shifted from early cross-party unity to later politicization. Combining original media data on partisan messaging and panel survey data from 2020, we assess how the emergence of partisan criticism shaped public acceptance of pandemic response policies. Although increasing partisan politicization was associated with declining public acceptance of pandemic measures, we find no evidence that this relationship was driven by partisan cue-taking. Instead, citizens adjusted their party preferences rather than their policy views in response to disagreement with their preferred party. These findings highlight the limits of partisan persuasion, and the growing importance of citizens’ own evaluations as elite consensus erodes.

Perspective‐taking reduces discrimination, but research has taken a one‐size‐fits‐all approach, focusing on single attributes triggering discrimination, particularly ethnic origin, and has paid insufficient attention to heterogeneous treatment effects. Our study asks: How effective is perspective‐taking across different traits triggering discrimination, including gender, age, and profession, and how effective is it among individuals with strongly principled attitudes? We develop a conjoint experiment for a sample in Germany to measure discrimination through participants assessing the allocation of administrative help to non‐national EU citizens seeking social benefits. We apply a perspective‐taking treatment, randomly allocating participants to envision relocating abroad and needing to deal with local bureaucracies. Our results confirm that perspective‐taking is less effective for principled individuals, such as respondents with strong anti‐immigrant attitudes. Additionally, while the treatment reduced discrimination based on nationality, it inadvertently increased bias for attributes such as gender and profession. Further analysis suggests that these side effects are tied to the associations participants have when undertaking the task. Researchers should consider the associations respondents report after engaging with treatments as a source of heterogeneous treatment effects.

Research on policy accumulation established the hypothesis about a creeping divergence between implementation burdens and implementation capacity. This paper revisits this hypothesis using improved measures of implementation burden. Using official data on administration and enforcement costs, it finds that policy accumulation does raise implementation stress within the German Statutory Pension Insurance, analyzed as a least‐likely case to do so. This finding supports the “implementation‐gap hypothesis.” More generally, however, the paper serves as a “prove of concept” of how to adopt an epidemiological perspective within implementation research. This perspective is characterized by systematically capturing the changing prevalence of implementation stress within administrative organizations. It enables future research on how to deal with policy growth more effectively by raising awareness for whether and where implementation burden and capacity diverges strongly, and by helping to identify “best practice” cases able to cope with this divergence successfully.

This chapter discusses how the Court of Justice of the European Union influences the European Administrative Space. In the absence of a codified body of administrative law, the Court plays an important role in developing a case-law-based administrative law. This is a complex and ongoing process. The chapter provides orientation by briefly discussing some key institutional features of the Court as well as by pointing towards different relevant strands of research. Specifically, it discusses the Court’s role in shaping legal protection from supranational executive acts, its role in the process of agencification, and its ability to influence member states’ administrative reactions to case-law. To obtain an understanding of the Court’s role within this administrative space, it is important to assess case-law developments. Moreover, research needs to consider why certain conflicts reach the Court while others don’t and why national administrations contain the implications and effects of certain judgments.

EU citizens have rights when living in a member state other than their own. Bureaucratic discrimination undermines the operation of these rights. We go beyond extant research on bureaucratic discrimination in two ways. First, we move beyond considering mobile EU citizens as homogenous immigrant minority to assess whether EU citizens from certain countries face greater discrimination than others. Second, we analyse whether discrimination patterns vary between the general population and public administrators regarding attributes triggering discrimination and whether accountability prevents discrimination. In a pre-registered design, we conduct a population-based conjoint experiment in Germany including a sub-sample of public administrators. We find that (1) Dutch and fluent German speakers are preferred, i.e., positively discriminated, over Romanians and EU citizens with broken language skills, that (2) our way of holding people accountable was ineffective, and that (3) in all these regards discriminatory behaviour of public administrators is similar to behaviour of the general population.

The vice and virtue of incrementalism have been the subject of a long‐standing academic debate. This debate, however, lacks a dynamic perspective that analyzes how the transformation of politics—mainly in the form of increasing levels of political fragmentation within decision‐making arenas and increasing complexity of policy‐mixes—affects the role of incrementalism. We argue that both of these trends make the virtues of incrementalism politically even more valuable than they have always been. At the same time, this proliferation of incrementalism comes at the costs of overlooked second‐order effects. Since the empirical reality of incrementalism is primarily one that results in incremental policy accumulation, it continuously adds implementation burdens, enhances the demandingness of substantive policy debate, and makes effective science communication more difficult. Thereby, accumulative incrementalism becomes one source of pressure on three cornerstones of legitimate governance: effective policy implementation, sophisticated policy debate, and evidence‐based policymaking.