# Jenny Rademann

# On Track or Off The Rails?

Intra-ministerial decision-making in transport infrastructure planning

Jenny Rademann On Track or Off The Rails?

I

respective results in this respect.

that is relevant beyond the German case.

well-funded bureaucracy is indispensable.

n order to achieve a transition from a transport system centred on the individual car to one centred on (electrifi ed) rail a new focus in infrastructure planning is needed. The preparation of project proposals for the Federal Transport Infrastructure Plan 2030 on the sub-national level in Germany provides an opportunity to study decision-making processes in ministries and compare their

Using document analysis, expert interviews, qualitative content analysis as well as QCA, this thesis in political science analyses how decision-making processes within bureaucracies impact the decision output in transport infrastructure planning. It contributes to the discussion on bureaucracy-politics interactions

One result is that ministries tend to use complex decision-making processes for topics deemed salient as long as the available capacity permits it. Consequently, in order to conduct legitimacy-enhancing steps – such as public participation – a

ISBN: 978-3-86395-534-2 Göttingen University Press Göttingen University Press

Jenny Rademann On Track or Off The Rails?

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Jenny Rademann

# On Track or Off The Rails?

Intra-ministerial decision-making in transport infrastructure planning

Göttingen University Press 2022

Bibliographic information The German National Library lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de.

Zugleich Dissertation an der Sozialwissenschaftlichen Fakultät der Georg-August-Universität zu Göttingen.

This work is protected by German Intellectual Property Right Law. It is also available as an Open Access version through the publisher's homepage and the Göttingen University Catalogue (GUK) at the Göttingen State and University Library (http://www. sub.uni-goettingen.de).

The license terms of the online version apply.

Setting and layout: Jenny Rademann Cover design: Hannah Böhlke Cover picture: Jan Haas/Shutterstock.com

© 2022 Universitätsverlag Göttingen https://univerlag.uni-goettingen.de ISBN: 978-3-86395-534-2 DOI: https://doi.org/10.17875/gup2022-1906

# **Acknowledgements**

There are quite a few people without whom this dissertation would never have seen the light of day or without whom the whole process would have been so much harder.

First of all, I thank my thesis committee: Prof. Dr. Simon Fink (University of Göttingen), Prof. Dr. Eva Ruffing (University of Osnabrück), and Prof. Dr. Jale Tosun (University of Heidelberg). Thank you for valuable feedback in all stages of the process, for challenging me to think deeper, broader, or different, and for continuously creating opportunities for exchange and a generally supportive work environment. I know that this is not to be taken for granted.

I am indebted to all those members of ministries and authorities that have granted me some of their time and answered my questions, provided me with background knowledge, and without whom the research underlying this thesis would not have been possible.

During the years of research and writing I had the pleasure and privilege to have outstanding colleagues and friends by my side. The greatest thanks go to (order is alphabetical only) Jan-Eric Bartels, Julia Bleckmann, Tobias Jakobi, and Besmira Sinanaj: Your feedback and wisdom as well as your humour and support have been more important to me than I can put into words. Thank you with all my heart!

I am also grateful to everyone else at the Institute of Political Science at the University of Göttingen – some of them have moved on in the meantime – who contributed to keeping alive a spirit of collegiality and mutual support. This cannot be valued enough. Thank you, Stefan Lindow and Lavinia Zinser, for solidarity among PhD students. Thank you, Carola Klöck, for hosting me during my south-west interview trip.

Outside the Göttingen sphere, I am especially grateful to Audrey Gagnon, Lene Guercke, Amalie Trangbæk, and Larissa Versloot: Reading and discussing your work as well as receiving feedback on mine was immensely helpful and opened my eyes, oh, so many times. I thank Anna Görg and Mirja Schoderer for fruitful discussions on QCA. My QCA chapter also profited from a discussion at a research seminar at the University of Osnabrück – many thanks to all participants, and especially to Viktoria Brendler.

Finally, I thank my parents and my sister for always being there, for cheering me up, for enduring my rants about science, academia as well as life in general, and for always being rock-solidly convinced that I could do this.

# **Contents**

# **List of Tables**

# **List of Figures**

# **Abbreviations**

Germany as composed by its sub-national units, the *Länder* (geo data from ©GeoBasis-DE / BKG 2020 [labels added])

# **Software and data availability**

This thesis has been typeset in LATEX using Texmaker (Brachet 2018). Figures have been created with Inkscape (Inkscape Developer Team 2020). For the map on page 20 QGIS was used (QGIS Development Team 2021). Content analysis was done using MAXQDA (VERBI Software 2018). Transcription of the interviews was aided by easytranscript (E. John 2014). The QCA and graphs were done with R (R Core Team 2020) in R-Studio (RStudio Team 2020) using the following packages:

For the preparation of tables, MS Excel was used.

For reference management, I relied on JabRef (JabRef Development Team 2020).

Data and code for the QCA can be accessed under the following link: https://data.goettingen-research-online.de/dataverse/rademann\_bvwp2030

Please note, that for reasons of confidentiality interview audios, transcripts, and notes are not made public.

# **1 Introduction**

Ministries are hubs of policy-making. Many political decisions either originate in ministries or are shaped by policy bureaucrats within ministries before they enter the more visible stages of the policy process, where they are debated by parliament and discussed in the media. Typically, ministries have large bureaucracies with long tenure and a more or less elaborate division of competences. Thus, policy bureaucrats in ministries accumulate field-specific expert knowledge as well as being part of the respective policy networks.

Still, much of what happens inside ministries remains in a black-box state. We know something about how and why ministers are chosen and ministries allocated among coalition parties (e. g. Carroll and G. W. Cox 2007; Bäck, Debus and Dumont 2011; Ecker and T. M. Meyer 2019). We also know a few things about those working within ministries (e. g. Vedder and Veit 2017; Bach and Veit 2018; Peters 2018, ch. 4) as well as about the interaction between bureaucrats and ministers (e. g. Peters and Pierre 2004; Schnapp 2004a; Hustedt and Salomonsen 2014). And certainly, there is a wealth of discussion on determinants of policy outputs as the result of policy processes (as e. g. bespeaks the comparison of policy-process theories in Heikkila and Cairney 2018).

Remarkably little is known about processes unfolding within ministries. Ethnographic work by Rhodes (2011) and Trangbæk (2021) has opened up the black box and provides insights into British (Rhodes) and Danish (Trangbæk) ministerial life with a focus on toplevel personnel. These studies distil internal narratives and sense-making on the side of top-level bureaucrats as well as ministers.

What remains absent in the study of ministries so far is a look into the founding steps of decisions prepared within ministries. This is what this study will turn to. I study the lower-level working units, the sections, where most work at draft laws and proposals is happening (*Referate* in German; I adopt the translation by Mayntz and Scharpf 1975, p. 64). These early processes form the basis, on which all subsequent steps build. In order to understand more comprehensively how political decisions come into being, this intraministerial part of the process deserves just as much scrutiny as cabinet or parliamentary bargaining. In this thesis, I study the following questions:

What determines the procedural set-up of intra-ministerial decision-making? How does that in turn influence intra-ministerial policy output?

I will use an example from national transport infrastructure planning to empirically grasp the realities of intra-ministerial decision-making. Specifically, cases will be drawn from German sub-national ministries of transport and their contributions to the latest national transport infrastructure master plan. Expert interviews as well as a collection of documents serve as a basis to reconstruct decision-making processes using qualitative content analysis and identify recurring patterns by means of Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA).

In this introductory chapter, I outline the existing research on ministerial decisionmaking and summarise my theoretical approach. I then introduce transport infrastructure policy as the empirical field used and the methods employed to grasp it. A third section delineates the contribution of this thesis. Finally, the outline of the thesis will be presented with brief summaries of the single chapters.

## **1.1 Studying ministerial decision-making ...**

Ministerial decision-making unfolds within the hierarchical relationship between political top and bureaucratic working level (Bach and Wegrich 2020). It can involve draft laws, the preparation of executive orders, the preparation of bargaining positions, or the preparation of input for other levels of decision-making (what would be termed a 'production policy job' by Page and Jenkins 2005, p. 60). At the top of a ministry, usually an elected politician fulfils the position of minister, at times aided by other officials chosen not only for professional but also political criteria (Hustedt and Salomonsen 2014, p. 749; Christiansen et al. 2016, p. 1232). Depending on the administrative tradition (Kuhlmann and Wollmann 2013, pp. 38–39), the ministerial working level is dominated by those parts of the bureaucracy whose careers are usually not directly linked to electoral cycles (Dunleavy 1991, p. 201; Alesina and Tabellini 2008, p. 427; Peters 2015, p. 150). Bureaucrats who are tasked with drafting and re-working policies are also referred to as 'policy bureaucrats' (Page and Jenkins 2005, p. 55).

Ministers and their subordinate bureaucracies have been studied as agenda setters as well as negotiators. The potential for agenda setting by ministers is drawn from the powerful role that ministers possess as government actors formally responsible for a specific portfolio (Laver and Shepsle 1990, p. 874; Andeweg 2014, p. 542). Agenda-setting potential of bureaucrats follows from the information advantage of hierarchically lower levels as well as their longer tenure (e. g. Schnapp 2004a, p. 84; Workman 2015). In the inter-sectoral negotiation phase, ministers' roles as members of policy networks or as 'policy entrepreneurs' (Herweg et al. 2018, p. 26) come into focus. Bureaucrats take part in negotiations e. g. by coordinating with other ministries (Hegele 2018a).

What is left understudied are the early, intra-ministerial decision-making steps after an agenda has been set but before negotiations with extra-ministerial actors take place (exceptions are the studies by Mayntz and Scharpf 1975; Page and Jenkins 2005). This concerns internal position-formation as well as deriving drafts for policies. These steps usually unfold in the middle level of hierarchies rather than at the top levels (Mayntz and Scharpf 1975, p. 67; Page and Jenkins 2005, pp. 2–3). In contrast to inter-ministerial coordination and cross-party negotiations, this founding step of political decision-making so far remains in the shadows.

In this thesis, I address this gap and thereby follow the call by Bach and Wegrich (2020) to turn 'towards one of the field's core topics by investigating what is happening inside the "machine room" of government' (Bach and Wegrich 2020, p. 540). Using an empirical example from transport policy, I reconstruct intra-ministerial decision-making processes unfolding between sections and the political top of the ministry. By relying on a specifically executive-dominated policy, I study a very clear-cut case where ministerial decision-making is little likely to be confounded with other influences. The influence of potentially confounding factors – like e. g. size, settlement structure, topography – setting the cases apart from each other is minimised by using a time-series approach to measuring the policy output, thus the output for every case is determined in comparison to this same case's earlier output. This allows isolating intra-ministerial decision-making as the influential concept. Thus, this thesis broadens the existing knowledge on ministerial decision-making by integrating the very early stages of policy formulation.

I base my analysis on the framework of actor-centred institutionalism (Scharpf 1997) and draw on neighbouring theories and literature to derive hypotheses. To that end, the theoretical frame draws on research strands focussing on the partisan hypothesis, on multi-level policy-making, on consultations, as well as on policy bureaucrats and administrative capacity. I briefly introduce each of these strands below.

My research interest is twofold: On the one hand, I seek to explain how topic salience and administrative capacity influence the set-up of the intra-ministerial decision-making process and how this affects the output produced. On the other hand, I study in what respect policy preferences and relations between different state levels contribute to the production of ministerial policy outputs.

From actor-centred institutionalism as put forward by Scharpf (1997) I adopt a focus on boundedly rational actors and their interactions unfolding in specific constellations. The actor groups at the heart of this study are ministerial bureaucrats and their political superiors. The dominant mode of interaction between politicians and bureaucrats is prescribed by their hierarchical relationship with the default assumption being, that the position of the hierarchically higher actor, thus of the politician, dominates the decisionmaking process among the two (Scharpf 1997, p. 197; Bach and Wegrich 2020, see also). Still, the work of policy bureaucrats is much more than filling in the details (Page and Jenkins 2005, p. 2). The figure of a 'shadow of hierarchy' (Scharpf 1997, p. 197) captures this more subtle working of hierarchies: Rather than simply translating political preferences into policy outputs, bureaucrats anticipate which courses of action among those considered will be acceptable to their superiors (Scharpf 1997, pp. 197–200). This taking into account of political preferences and feasibilities has been discussed in the literature as 'functional politicisation' (e. g. Mayntz and Derlien 1989, p. 401; Hustedt and Salomonsen 2014).

The partisan hypothesis forecasts ministerial outputs to be aligned with policy preferences formulated by the respective minister's party. In trying to appeal to their respective electorates parties pursue different policy lines (Hibbs Jr. 1977, 1992; Schmidt 1996). Ministers as the politically responsible figures in their respective departments are the ones best positioned to oversee the translation of party policy preferences into policy outputs (Laver and Shepsle 1990, p. 874). Even in coalition governments, ministers retain the ability to shape policies in their respective portfolio (Andeweg 2014, p. 542). A congruence between ministerial policy outputs and a minister's party's policy preferences is thus the default expectation for ministerial policy production (Laver and Shepsle 1990, p. 874).

Multi-level relations among national and sub-national units have the potential to influence ministerial policy-making on the lower levels. The presence of a national level of decision-making constitutes a 'shadow of hierarchy' under which decision-making on sub-national levels unfolds (Scharpf 1997, pp. 197–200). Thus, by taking into account positions and expectations prevalent on the higher level, decision-making on lower levels might be adapted to avoid conflicts between the levels. From another perspective, the opposite might be true and lower levels exploit the multi-level game for purposes of blame-shifting (Benz 2007, p. 508; Heinkelmann-Wild and Zangl 2020, p. 964).

Consultations or other forms of public participation are an increasingly common part of decision-making processes (Wesselink et al. 2011, p. 2688; Rasmussen 2015, p. 271). Public participation might serve several purposes. The ones most discussed are collection of additional information, legitimacy-enhancement, and avoidance of problems in implementation (Wesselink et al. 2011, p. 2690; Fink and Ruffing 2019b, pp. 220–221). Unless consultation or participation is only set up to fulfil formal requirements – or formally conforming to normative expectations (Fink and Ruffing 2015) – they provide another source of input for ministerial decision-making that can impact the resulting output.

Policy bureaucrats are characterised by their role in policy formulation and therefore by their close cooperation with political actors, notably their respective ministers (Bach and Wegrich 2020). Their role is problematised mostly with regard to information differences between the political top-level and the bureaucratic working level (Bach and Wegrich 2020). As is usual – and functional – in hierarchical systems, information density is much higher on the lower levels than on the upper ones, which is referred to as 'informational asymmetry' (Gailmard and Patty 2012, p. 375; Huber and Shipan 2013). In combination with a certain degree of 'bureaucratic discretion' (Calvert et al. 1989, p. 588), this might lead to 'bureaucratic drift' (e. g. Epstein and O'Halloran 1994, p. 699) or 'delegation problems' more broadly (Bendor et al. 2001, p. 240), thus a potential misrepresentation of political wishes on the working level. This is especially relevant when the policy preferences of bureaucrats and politicians differ. Empirically, it could be shown that bureaucrats indeed might find it acceptable to deviate from their political superior's positions (for the example of Germany even increasingly so: Schwanke and Ebinger 2006, pp. 244–245; Ebinger, Lux et al. 2018, pp. 402–403; Veit et al. 2018, p. 417). As one consequence of such uncertainty about bureaucrats' actions, it is argued that politicians tend to keep a tighter grip on topics that are salient to them (Gormley Jr. 1986, p. 603), while bureaucrats are more prominently involved in deciding less salient topics (Bækgaard, Blom-Hansen et al. 2015).

I challenge the view that salient topics are the domain of politicians, while bureaucrats are left to decide less salient affairs only. Especially for salient topics, it is crucial that agreement in cabinet as well as with relevant outside actors is secured. The same logic is known from negotiations in international relations, where actors are more ready to compromise when a topic is salient in order to reach a decision at all (G. Schneider et al. 2010, p. 96; Warntjen 2012, p. 169). Consequently, a careful validation of policy proposals seems advisable. Such careful validation, however, needs the information and competences from the working level and might lead to a deviation from the initial political idea (for a similar idea compare Gormley Jr. 1986, p. 606).

Administrative capacity is an indispensable prerequisite for any form of public sector activity. It relates to the ability of the executive to fulfil its tasks and comprises staff level as well as financial and organisational resources, thus having 'the right resources in the right place at the right time' (Ingraham and Donahue 2000, p. 294). In the context of public administration, a lack of administrative capacity has been found to decrease responsiveness (Huber and McCarty 2004, pp. 490–491) and also works as a restraint on the implementation of governance innovations (Lodge and Wegrich 2014). In general, the capacity perspective implies that the scope for bureaucratic activities is limited by the degree of capacity the respective sections enjoy (Scharpf 1997, p. 51; Wegrich and Hammerschmid 2017, p. 36).

Taking all these perspectives together, I hypothesise the following:

The next section illuminates, on which empirical basis the analysis will unfold.

## **1.2 ... based on cases from transport infrastructure policy**

*What was planned then [in Germany] for the years between 2015 and 2030, was a project like the world had not seen since the Apollo project by the USA: Investments in road infrastructure came to a complete halt and were reduced to a minimum of maintenance measures. Financial means were re-channelled into a master plan for the construction of rail infrastructure, into research for transport-related information technology, into the integration of energy and transport systems, and into pre-competitive development of products for micro-mobility, [...].* (own translation of Rammler 2011, p. 24)

This quote on transport infrastructure planning in Germany is no account of real events. It presents a fictional review of mobility policy from the perspective of the year 2050, thereby delineating a positive vision of a transport strategy geared towards a transport transition from a mobility based on the private car to other – presumably more sustainable – forms of mobility.

The real master plan for transport infrastructure in Germany for the years 2015 to 2030, the Federal Transport Infrastructure Plan (*Bundesverkehrswegeplan*, BVWP) 2030, turned out somewhat different from Rammler's vision. Despite an increase in funds for rail infrastructure, it has drawn criticism from environmental organisations and agencies: The BVWP 2030 is seen as stabilising the road-oriented status quo of German infrastructure planning, as being entirely unrealistic given the huge amount of projects, and as under-representing environmental damages (BUND 2016; Landesbüro der Naturschutzverbände NRW 2016; UBA 2016).

On the surface, this outcome is rather surprising. The goals formulated for the BVWP 2030 included reductions of emissions and of soil sealing – besides the usual suspects 'smoothing transport flows' and 'enhanced competitiveness' among others (BMVI 2014a, p. 27). Furthermore, especially for road projects, there was emphasis put on well-founded proposals that would have to go through a rigorous assessment framework (BMVI 2018a). Still, the result was received rather critically from a sustainability perspective. Mediawise, the blame for this is directed at the Federal Ministry for Transport (now BMVI, formerly BMVBS) which has been led by ministers from the Bavarian Christian Social Union since 2009 (Balser and Bauchmüller 2019). While this view might have merit in the case of individual projects, it disregards the bottom-up process behind the BVWP. Even though the BVWP is a federal strategy document informing federal law, it is to a large degree based on proposals made by the transport ministries on the level of the 16 sub-national units, the German *Länder*.

Rather than adding another assessment of the BVWP and the process leading up to it on the federal level (Heuser and Reh 2007, 2016; C. Fischer 2018), this thesis focusses on the preparatory stage set on the sub-national level, that of the *Länder*. The *Länder* were asked to provide proposals of transport infrastructure projects that they would like the federal level to finance throughout the coming fifteen years. This proposal process is firmly in the hands of the respective sub-national transport ministries with one decision-making process per ministry and transport mode. This offers an opportunity for a medium-n comparative study of intra-ministerial decision-making.

The proposal stage for the BVWP 2030 thus delivers the cases for analysis. All 16 *Länder* were asked by the BMVI to provide project proposals for the road, the rail, and the waterway sector that they wished to see included in the BVWP. Thus, decision-making processes in 16 transport ministries are available for comparison.

Studying this proposal process on the *Länder* level has several advantages: First, comparing entities on the sub-national level allows holding many potentially influential factors – e. g. national laws and regulations – constant. Second, analysing the BVWP proposal stage offers the opportunity to study policy outputs that react to a clearly given task. Third, this process is firmly in the hands of the transport ministries, so that it is especially suited to study intra-ministerial decision-making. Lastly, the proposal stage of the BVWP is yet unstudied, so the analysis also contributes to a more comprehensive understanding of the BVWP process.

Besides being a suitable opportunity for studying intra-ministerial decision-making, scrutinising the proposal stage of the BVWP 2030 is also a contribution to research about a proclaimed transport transition. The striving for a more sustainable and especially more climate-friendly energy system is subsumed under the term of *Energiewende* in Germany (mostly translated as 'energy transition', see Czada and Radtke 2018, p. 45). Besides heating and electricity, transport is one of the main pillars under discussion in this respect (Radtke, Canzler et al. 2018, pp. 17–18). As in the other pillars, the discussion does not only revolve around forms of technological progress (sustainability as efficiency), renewable forms of energy (sustainability as consistency) but also touches upon necessary changes in infrastructure and in consumption – or in the case of transport: changes in mobility (sustainability as sufficiency) (Schwedes 2018b, pp. 14–16).

The discussion about a transport transition reflects the role of the transport sector in overall CO<sup>2</sup> emissions (Knie 2014, pp. 140–141) as well as in discussions of land use, noise and health issues (Engartner 2008, p. 213). In Germany, the transport sector causes 20 % of all CO<sup>2</sup> emissions (BMWi 2021, p. 122). Worldwide, 23 % of energy-related CO<sup>2</sup> emissions can be traced back to the transport sector which is a 'high-carbon economic sector' (Glover and Low 2020, pp. 18–19). In a differentiation between transport as a means and mobility as an end, it has been posited that 'mobility needs' ought to be addressed with as little transport as possible (U. Becker 2018, p. 76). In the face of growing mobility demands, public and especially rail-based transport has been heralded as a solution to the negative accompanying symptoms of transport – like congestions, noise, and pollution (Libbe et al. 2018).

There is a strong consensus, that car-centred transport planning needs to give way to a new orientation if sustainable mobility is to be achieved. This is well-established in the sustainability literature (Banister 2008, pp. 73–74; Gather et al. 2008, pp. 62–64; Schiller and Kenworthy 2010, ch. 1), where the 'car-dependent society' (Jeekel 2016) is at the heart of the criticism, and a shift to other modes of transport has been called for (Rye 2020, pp. 12–13). Railway transport is regarded as one such more sustainable mode, even though there are also voices calling for a more nuanced assessment (e. g. Wee et al. 2005; Givoni et al. 2009). Beyond the academic discourse, demands for a shift from road transport to a more railway-centred transport system have found their place in sustainability strategies on the national as well as on the EU level (Die Bundesregierung 2021, pp. 62–63; European Commission 2020, p. 3). The literature differs on whether failures to achieve sustainability transitions are foremost rooted in the institutions (Rietveld and Stough 2004, p. 1; Karl 2014, p. 74) or in a shortcoming of public discourse and public acceptance (Banister 2008, pp. 79–80; Rammler 2014, pp. 28–29).

When analysing decision-making in transport policy, transport infrastructure is a useful proxy. It is one of the remaining fields, where state planning is publicly accepted (Fraunholz and Hascher 2018, p. 161) and is also regarded as an indirect subsidy to the respective transport mode (Glover and Low 2020, p. 20). It is the very basis of the whole transport system – a change in the dominant mode of transport also requires a changed focus in infrastructure planning and construction for the respective transport mode, or, as U. Becker (2018) put it for the case of Germany: 'If a modal shift towards public transport – busses and railways – were the main aim [...], increasing the attractiveness of individual motorised road transport by [constructing] federal motorways and thousands of bypass roads would not be sensible.' (own translation of U. Becker 2018, p. 73) This makes master plans for transport infrastructure an interesting case in gauging developments in transport policy (Fichert 2017).

When discussing policy outputs, I will focus on outputs oriented towards a transporttransition, specifically towards more rail-based and less car-centred transport. This normative partiality follows from the consensus outlined above. This means, that the research undertaken here can also be read as answering a transition-oriented question, namely: What induces ministries to produce transition-oriented policy outputs? Notwithstanding this focus, the mechanisms discussed in this thesis can well be applied to other kinds of policies as well.

In order to empirically grasp decision-making in transport ministries, the analysis combines sources and methods. At the heart of the analysis are expert interviews with members of sub-national transport ministries. A rich collection of documents adds detail as well as serving as a control. The material from interviews and documents is structured and categorised in a qualitative content analysis. The categories derived are then used in a formalised qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) with the aim of identifying recurring patterns among the cases. The results allow to contribute to several discussions.

## **1.3 Results and contribution**

The analysis of intra-ministerial decision-making in the run-up to the BVWP 2030 enriches several discussions. It, of course, allows to say something about ministries producing transition-oriented outputs and about transport infrastructure planning in Germany. More importantly though, it also leads to some more general assessments about the handling of information differences between politicians and bureaucrats and about the use of public participation. I'll briefly sketch out each of these contributions, starting with the more policy-specific ones and then outlining the more general implications.

With the study of the preparatory phase of the BVWP 2030, I provide an update to the literature on German federal transport infrastructure planning (Garlichs 1980; Reh 1988; Heuser and Reh 2007, 2016; C. Fischer 2018). In many respects, prior findings about the BVWP process are confirmed, such as an executive and expert dominance (Heuser and Reh 2007, p. 226, 2016, p. 258; C. Fischer 2018, pp. 260–261). Furthermore, it becomes clear that despite a general trend of Europeanisation, transport infrastructure planning remains a predominantly national affair with little practical relevance of the Trans-European Networks (TEN) (van Exel et al. 2002, p. 310; Dyrhauge 2013, p. 116; C. Fischer 2018, pp. 254, 261). Overall, this study provides a more encompassing picture of the origin of large transport infrastructure projects in Germany – from highway bypasses around cities to motorway extensions.

Policies that strengthen transitions will likely remain on the research agenda for years to come. The transport transition is just one of them. The sustainability transition more broadly remains prominent on the national as well as the international level. Similar discussions aimed at fundamental changes of policy fields are e. g. resulting from the ongoing demographic change in many countries (Lodge and Wegrich 2014, pp. 1–5). Thus, there are plenty of fields where knowledge on what makes ministries produce transitionoriented outputs can be generalised to. I show that in multi-level systems the assertive or confrontational behaviour towards higher-level expectations is important and that transition-oriented outputs can at times be realised even without a minister's party preferences being aligned with this goal. The set-up of the decision-making process can help to overcome a status quo orientation. This is valuable input when trying to understand how ministries can change course from within their internal decision-making processes.

The interplay between politicians and bureaucrats is relevant beyond the question of transitions. Bureaucrats and politicians interact in a hierarchically structured way (Gailmard and Patty 2012, p. 355), that comes with an 'informational asymmetry' (Gailmard and Patty 2012, p. 375) to the advantage of the bureaucrats on the working level and also endows them with a certain degree of discretion (Pierre and Peters 2017, p. 159). There is a wide literature on the potential problems arising from such information differences (Niskanen 1975; Brehm and Gates 1997; Schnapp 2004a; Blom-Hansen et al. 2020). However, some also warn against too critical a view of bureaucratic autonomy (Bach and Wegrich 2020, p. 542).

The analysis presented in this thesis implies that bureaucrats and politicians interact in a by and large trusting way. It thereby confirms – at least for the German case – the dialogue model stipulated by Mayntz and Scharpf (1975). That means, that criteria for decision-making as well as decision proposals wander back and forth between the political and the bureaucratic level in ministries. Bureaucratic work is shaped by 'functional politicisation' so that political needs and wishes are already anticipated on the working level (Mayntz and Derlien 1989, p. 401; Hustedt and Salomonsen 2014, p. 750; Veit et al. 2018, p. 417).

The results presented call into question the assertion that bureaucrats are solely left to decide non-salient topics. Rather, loosening political control over policy outputs even for salient topics might be a strategic choice in order to arrive at solutions that are defensible vis-a-vis coalition partners as well as the public. This enriches the perspective on who – politicians or bureaucrats – gets to decide on what kind of topics and moves the discussion beyond considerations of bureaucrats deviating from ministers' wishes.

This study also contributes to the research field of public consultation and participation. Public participation has become a norm in infrastructure planning. Still, it is not yet clear when and to what effect participation ought to take place. The analysis corroborates critical stances on very early participation, as such undertakings are prone to suffering from a lack of information and will often not fulfil citizens' expectations about the effects of their participation (Fink and Ruffing 2019b, pp. 233, 235, 2019a, pp. 209– 210). In the same time, the analysis gives reason to believe that well-wrought participation schemes at the earliest possible stage after the brainstorming stage are more likely to produce input that is also meaningful for the ministerial actors and might therefore find its way into the policy.

From the analysis of process characteristics and administrative capacity a lesson can be learned for the discussion about the adequate size of the state apparatus. The analysis shows very clearly, that decision-making processes involving numerous actors, among them the broader public, very often are only set up given a certain level of bureaucratic capacity. Thus, there is an inherent paradox in striving for a small-sized as well as participation-oriented bureaucracy. If public participation is to be strengthened further and is supposed to be more than formal window-dressing, well-resourced administrations are needed to carry through these processes (for a general argument about a balance between state tasks and capacities compare Lodge and Wegrich 2014). Where bureaucracies have to be downsized for various reasons, meaningful participation processes can rather not be expected. This goal-conflict should be considered when studying public participation frameworks as well as when thinking about administrative resources.

## **1.4 Outline**

This thesis is structured as follows: Part I is dedicated to the research design including the theoretical framework and the methodological set-up. Part II introduces the policy under study and presents the analysis. Part III discusses the results and concludes. I briefly summarise each chapter below.

Chapter 2 delineates the theoretical framework and deduces hypotheses. Actor-centred institutionalism (Scharpf 1997) is used for its actor model based on bounded rationality and its general understanding of interactions among political and bureaucratic actors. As actor-centred institutionalism is a framework rather than a theory (Treib 2015, p. 277), further input from the literature is embedded in order to arrive at hypotheses. After presenting actor-centred institutionalism, the chapter discusses the role of politicians in intra-ministerial policy-making as well as that of bureaucrats. Furthermore, I develop an argument about the influence of topic salience and administrative capacity on the set-up of the decision-making process and its effect on ministerial outputs. The chapter results in the five hypotheses already stated.

Chapter 3 recapitulates the case selection, provides an overview over the empirical material used as well as the data collection process, and introduces the two methods of analysis that I rely on: qualitative content analysis loosely based on the framework by Gläser and Laudel (2010) and QCA (Ragin 1987; C. Q. Schneider and Wagemann 2012). As regards the empirical material, I collected documents from parliamentary databases, ministerial and other official web-pages, as well as from NGOs, and I conducted expert interviews with officials from sub-national transport ministries and their subordinate authorities. Overall, more than 150 documents were collected for the analysis and 40 persons provided information in the course of interviews or e-mail exchanges.

Chapter 4 introduces the policy field of transport infrastructure policy and provides background knowledge about infrastructure planning in Germany in general as well as about the BVWP in particular. Infrastructure policy is characterised by complexity, uncertainty, and ambiguity (Wegrich and Hammerschmid 2017, pp. 27–28), which has implications for the decision-making processes in this field. In Germany, transport infrastructure planning unfolds in a multi-level framework with some competences on the federal and some on the sub-national level. Further complexity has been introduced by increasing demands for public participation or at least consultation. The BVWP as a masterplan for the transport infrastructure to build during the coming ten to fifteen years has a history reaching back into the 1970s. It is continuously criticised for a lack of central planning and its over-ambition when it comes to road building (Heuser and Reh 2007, 2016). The BVWP 2030 was prepared in a renewed framework with higher standards for project proposals as well as a more sophisticated assessment procedure (BMVI 2018a).

Chapter 5 presents the content analysis. The aim of this chapter is to structure the rich material at hand and condense it into categories. Starting out from concepts identified in the theoretical discussion, codes and sub-codes are extracted from the material and illustrated with anchoring examples. As a result of the content analysis, five conditions are identified that are then used for the QCA.

Chapter 6 presents the second analytical step and searches for patterns among the cases. First, I analyse whether topic salience and administrative capacity combine to bring about complex decision-making processes. Second, ministerial policy preferences, multi-level anticipation, as well as process complexity are drawn together in an attempt to explain ministerial outputs. For each analytical step, robustness tests are provided and discussed.

Chapter 7 draws together the findings from the two analysis chapters and assesses the five hypotheses on these grounds. It shows that the proposal process for the BVWP shares traits typically observed in ministerial decision-making. On top of that, the discussion establishes the importance of process characteristics for understanding intra-ministerial decision-making, the role of administrative capacity in the striving for more inclusive decision-making processes, as well as the relation between salience and process complexity.

Chapter 8 summarises the whole research endeavour and concludes.

# Part I Research design

# **2 Theoretical frame**

In this chapter, I develop the theoretical framework for the ensuing analysis. It guides the analysis and allows ordering the empirical findings as well as arriving at potentially generalisable conclusions about settings where several policy bureaucracies are tasked with preparing regional input for a policy on a higher level within a multi-level framework. What I seek to explain are the policy outputs of ministries in a field dominated by the executive.

Before delineating the theoretical frame for the analysis, I briefly summarise the perspectives from which ministries have mostly been studied. Building on that, I explain the theoretical approach I take. Ministries have, among others, been studied from a coalition perspective, embedded in governance frameworks, and as hierarchical organisations. From this literature, several insights are gained:

From a coalition perspective, portfolio allocation is an important object of bargaining in coalition negotiations, as ministries are coupled with resources for policy preparation in the respective policy field (Laver and Shepsle 1990, 1996, pp. 30–33; L. W. Martin and Vanberg 2008; Bäck, Debus and Dumont 2011). This holds even though the potential for reaping the fruits of this advantage is limited by coalitional and legislative restraints (Warwick 1999, p. 390; L. W. Martin and Vanberg 2020, pp. 338–339). Ministers are thus understood as powerful figures in governments with respect to the policy fields covered by their respective portfolios. However, the degree of ministerial autonomy – and thus the potential to realise partisan rather than governmental goals – varies among countries (Bäck, Debus and Tosun 2015, p. 571). Additionally, a treatment of parties as effectively unitary actors has been criticised as unrealistic (Wiesendahl 2013, p. 41; Alexiadou 2016, ch. 1.2; S. Martin 2016, pp. 282, 292).

In a governance perspective, ministries represent the policy-field specific units of 'the state' that have to interact with non-state actors in order to solve public problems (Pierre and Peters 2019, p. 89). Little unified as the governance literature is (Peters 2014, pp. 301– 302), there is no coherent stance on the role for ministries. Still, from the perspective of advocacy coalitions, they are conceptualised as being part of networks within the respective policy sub-system (Jenkins-Smith et al. 2018, p. 139) and interact with various other actors with interests in the same field (Döhler 2020). The 'Neo-Weberian' view of public administration incorporates such a view in the study of bureaucracies (Bouckaert and Pollitt 2011, pp. 118–119). The governance perspective puts bureaucracies on an equal footing with other actors in society (Seibel 2019, p. 61). Such a perspective has however been challenged and a return to a more traditional understanding of bureaucracy advocated (Seibel 2019, p. 62; taking up a point by Olsen 2006).

Ministries as organisations are foremost studied with regard to potential delegation problems arising between the political top and the bureaucratic working level (Huber and Shipan 2013; Fleischer 2016; Bach, Hammerschmid et al. 2018). The political level is understood as following short-term considerations due to re-election concerns (Rhodes 2011, p. 129; Peters 2015, p. 150). In contrast, the bureaucracy is characterised by long tenure and relative independence from election cycles, it could thus potentially aim for goals that are more long-term and not necessarily related to the desires of the electorate (Dunleavy 1991, p. 201; Peters 2015, p. 150). The 'Neo-Weberian' view as well as discussions of the politicisation of bureaucrats would, however, contradict such a strict juxtaposition of the two levels (Bouckaert and Pollitt 2011, pp. 118–119; Hustedt and Salomonsen 2014; Ebinger, Veit et al. 2019).

Locating the literature with regard to the policy cycle, the focus is on ministries and their bureaucracy mainly when discussing agenda setting or the bargaining stages of policy formulation. In the former case, the long-term nature and specialisation of the bureaucracy become important assets (e. g. Schnapp 2004a, p. 84; Workman 2015). In the latter case, ministers might be studied as 'policy entrepreneurs' (Herweg et al. 2018, p. 26), or their bureaucracies can be taken in view for their role in coordinating activities with other ministries (Hegele 2018a).

Rather rarely are these perspectives drawn together to explain how ministries produce certain policy outputs internally. Little attention has so far been paid to the unfolding of the intra-ministerial decision-making process in-between agenda-setting and intersectoral bargaining (exceptions are the studies by Mayntz and Scharpf 1975; Page and Jenkins 2005). The bureaucratic-politics literature has set the target for itself to bring light to intra-governmental and intra-ministerial decision-making (Allison 1971; Allison and Halperin 1972; Allison and Zelikow 1999). In the same time, Allison and Zelikow (1999) admit, that this framework demands a wealth of detail that is hardly ever attainable (Allison and Zelikow 1999, p. 387). What is more, also the bureaucratic politics framework focusses very much on bargaining between 'large organizations and political actors [...] who compete in attempting to affect both governmental decisions and the actions of their government' (Allison and Halperin 1972, p. 42) rather than on within-unit decision-making processes.

The founding step of intra-ministerial decision-making is so far left understudied. Still, it is important, as it creates frames and anchors for the subsequent negotiations with other ministries as well as in the legislative arena. Understanding 'how policy is made' (Page and Jenkins 2005, p. 5) in intra-ministerial decision-making is even more salient for settings that are dominated by the executive so that extra-ministerial decisionmaking steps are severely limited or even missing. Such settings are frequently found in infrastructure governance, that is characterised by government and expert interaction (Wegrich, Hammerschmid and Kostka 2017, pp. 1–2).

In order to arrive at an insightful and in the same time manageable framework, I focus on the interaction between two actor groups within ministries, namely politicians and bureaucrats. Alongside those, I consider multi-level relations and third-party actors such as economic or societal interest groups. Actor-centred institutionalism serves as a framework for the conceptualisation of these actors and their interactions. Actorcentred institutionalism itself – being a framework and not a theory – does not allow deducing any hypotheses about policy outputs (Treib 2015, p. 277). Therefore, I draw on additional strands of literature to formulate expectations about the ministerial policy outputs produced and about the processes leading up to them. The argument I make addresses a political level of decision-making as well as the intra-ministerial decisionmaking process.

The argument starts out from the default expectation that ministerial outputs follow from the respective minister's policy preferences. In multi-level frameworks, this hinges on anticipated higher-level concerns being in favour of these policy preferences. Furthermore, third-party interests have both the potential to shift policy outputs away from initial policy preferences and the potential to strengthen initial policy preferences. Thirdparty interests gain entry to the decision-making process when the decision-making process is more complex than a simple translation of policy preferences into outputs by the ministerial bureaucracy.

Complex decision-making processes are understood as assembling a variety of information sources and spending more effort on the definition of decision-making criteria. Such processes enhance the information advantage of the bureaucracy and make a direct translation of the minister's policy preferences into ministerial outputs less secure. Such processes will be chosen when the topic under decision is salient, thus, successfully passing – as well as implementing – the respective policy is important. This latter point partly contradicts existing literature on the relationship between salience and political versus bureaucratic influence. However, I will argue that such an interpretation is plausible.

The chapter is structured as follows: In a first step, I present the main framework and spell out the actor model associated with it. Next, I outline the role of politicians as well as bureaucrats in their interaction relation. Building on that, I present an argument about the role of topic salience and process complexity for the output of decision-making processes in ministries. In a final section, I summarise the theoretical framework presented and delineate hypotheses.

## **2.1 Actor-centred institutionalism**

This section introduces the broader theoretical framework along the lines of which I develop the theoretical argument for the analysis. I briefly introduce actor-centred institutionalism and discuss its actor model. Furthermore, I summarise what actor-centred institutionalism has to say about ministers, bureaucrats, third-party actors and multilevel relations. These aspects are then developed further in subsequent sections.

This thesis focusses on intra-ministerial decision-making. Thus, the ministerial bureaucracy is at the heart of this study. Policy bureaucrats – as set apart e. g. from streetlevel bureaucrats – are central to political decision-making (Page and Jenkins 2005, p. 2; Döhler 2005, p. 218; Bækgaard, Mortensen et al. 2018, p. 240). Within the ministry, they interact with the political top of the ministry – the minister and politically appointed top-level staff – as the hierarchical superior level (Bach and Wegrich 2020). Outside the ministry, interactions involve citizens, economic actors, NGOs and other third-party actors as the ministerial bureaucracy is increasingly the addressee of interest-group activities (Döhler 2020; Fraussen and Halpin 2020). Additionally, I take into account multi-level relations.

I conceptualise the relations between these actor groups along the lines of actor-centred institutionalism as put forward by Scharpf (1997). The interaction modes as well as interaction orientations between the actors involved in a decision-making process are central to this approach (Scharpf 1997, p. 12). The framework acknowledges, that policies do address problems and are derived within a given environment. What the framework emphasises are, however, 'actors', their 'constellations' and 'modes of interaction', that influence how problems are translated into policies (Scharpf 1997, p. 44).

The basic tenet of actor-centred institutionalism is, that – as policy outcomes will rather not be the result of the decisions of one single actor (Scharpf 1997, p. 69) – decisions on policies are the results of interactions among actors that meet in certain constellations and institutional settings which in turn restrain what modes of interaction are available (Scharpf 1997, p. 39). Scharpf distinguishes between individual and corporate actors that are characterised by their capabilities and action orientations, both of which are influenced by the institutional setting (Scharpf 1997, pp. 43–44). Actor constellations circumscribe the plurality of actors involved, their strategy options and preferences (Scharpf 1997, pp. 44–45). Depending on the institutional settings, up to four different modes of interaction might be available to the actors: *unilateral action* is always possible, *negotiated decision* presupposes at least some institutional structuring e. g. in form of networks, *majority vote* depends on the existence of some formalised association, while *hierarchical direction* is the most demanding mode of interaction and presupposes an organisation like e. g. the state (Scharpf 1997, pp. 46–47).

Actor-centred institutionalism conceives of its actors as strategically acting – and in that sense rational – entities. The framework does, however, not pre-suppose any specific goals or levels of information for these actors, which Scharpf – following Ostrom et al. (1994) – points out as the defining difference between a 'rational-choice framework' and a 'rational-choice theory' (footnote 3 in Scharpf 1997, pp. 34–35). An assumption of 'private self-interest' as an all-explaining motivation of actors is rejected (Scharpf 1997, p. 181). Rather, actors' goals are treated as contingent on institutional structures and norms, that are in themselves variable (Scharpf 1997, p. 34).

By taking into account norms, orientations, and capacities, actor-centred institutionalism views its actors as 'boundedly rational' (Scharpf 1997, p. 195; for an overview on bounded rationality see Jakobi 2019, pp. 57–59). Thus, actors do try to achieve as-goodas-possible results but can only do so within the restraints of their environmental and cognitive limitations (Simon 1955, 1997; B. D. Jones 2017). As a result, the chosen solution is not the optimal one, but 'merely the best solution that is available under the circumstances' (Simon 1997, p. 5). Czada and Windhoff-Héritier (2019) subsumed Scharpf's framework under their broader label of 'political choice' (Czada and Windhoff-Héritier 2019, p. 9), which is essentially a framework of bounded rationality in public decisionmaking (Wegrich and Hammerschmid 2017, p. 23). Within such a framework, institutional, socio-economic, issue-specific network, as well as timing characteristics can be discussed (Jakobi 2019, p. 59) – institutional characteristics being the focus for actorcentred institutionalism.

The dominant institutional characteristic in the study of politicians and bureaucrats is their delegation relationship. In that relationship, politicians delegate tasks to bureaucrats. Thus, they interact in a hierarchical mode (Scharpf 1997, p. 197). Consequently, the default assumption is that the politician's position dominates in decision-making processes involving politicians and the bureaucrats they delegate to (Scharpf 1997, p. 198). However, the decision-making criteria for differentiating between better and worse policy options have been argued to be decided on in a 'dialogue model' between politicians and bureaucrats (Scharpf 1997, p. 178). Thus, the effect of hierarchy is not straight-forward. Rather than blindly fulfilling orders, bureaucrats act under a 'shadow of hierarchy' and anticipate what course of action will be deemed acceptable by their superiors (Scharpf 1997, pp. 197–200) – a trait that will re-appear under the label of 'functional politicisation' (Mayntz and Derlien 1989, p. 401) in the section on bureaucrats below.

Multi-level relations – where they exist – add another step in this delegation chain. Politicians on a lower level within a multi-level framework are themselves in a delegation relationship with higher-level politicians. This relationship can be differently shaped in various policy domains with diverse sets of competences attached to actors on each level. In a situation, where the higher level is in charge of the policy at hand and the lower level is asked to hand in proposals, politicians on the two levels are again in a hierarchical mode of interaction with the default assumption that the higher-level position will prevail. The 'shadow of hierarchy' (Scharpf 1997, p. 197) applies here as well, implying that lower-level decision-makers try to anticipate the reactions of the higher level when making their decisions.

Third-party actors are less easily positioned in Scharpf's framework – even though 'horizontal negotiations' between bureaucracies and organised interests are explicitly acknowledged as a part of policy formation (Scharpf 1997, p. 198). Third-party actors are a heterogeneous group with ties of different strengths to politicians and bureaucrats. Some third-party actors can be conceptualised as part of a more or less institutionalised subsystem network, that brings together specialised actors with expertise or at least interest in the policy field in question (Jenkins-Smith et al. 2018, p. 139). In that capacity, they then more or less regularly interact with politicians or bureaucrats. Their interaction can thus be framed as a network constellation, that creates at least 'weak trust' (Scharpf 1997, p. 137) and enables negotiations (Scharpf 1997, p. 46). Other third-party actors interact with ministries on a very sporadic, maybe even one-time basis only. With Scharpf, these latter interactions can be understood to take place within an anarchic field or under minimal institutions (Scharpf 1997, p. 46).

Both forms of interactions with third-party actors, in networks as well as in the anarchic field, bear traits of a negotiation. The goal sought is often a compromise between competing positions where no side can unilaterally impose its preferred solution. The latter is only true, when 'the problem of faithful implementation' (Scharpf 1997, p. 117) of the compromise can be solved – either because respect for the compromise is mandated by law and enforceable or because third-party actors are otherwise able and likely to hinder or block the implementation of unilaterally enforced alternatives.

The interaction relationships between these given groups – politicians and bureaucrats, politicians on different levels of multi-level settings, politicians, bureaucrats and third actors – need not be static. Rather they depend on the policy under decision and the decision-making process associated with it. Thus, actors' orientations in form of policy preferences and motivations, as well as the changeable structures, in that decisionmaking unfold, need to be taken into account when explaining ministerial policy outputs.

The next three sections will take a closer look at the role of politicians, bureaucrats, and the decision-making process in producing ministerial policy outputs. The final section will then draw everything together and present the theoretical framework used for analysis as well as spelling out hypotheses.

## **2.2 Politicians**

Politicians – here: ministers – can be expected to shape policy outputs of ministries for three reasons: They have policy preferences and are in a position to realise them, they are the addressees of accountability claims, and they are the receivers of delegation from higher levels in multi-level frameworks. I discuss these three points in turn.

First, ministers hold different policy preferences. In a representative democracy strongly shaped by parties, the most intuitive guess about political output is that partymembership of ministers should make a difference for their area of responsibility, and that this output should somehow reflect the respective party's programmatic stance on the respective issue. After all, if not, what sense would there be in electing parties (or party members) and allocating portfolios among parties, that have agreed to form a coalition government, in the first place? (Sack and Töller 2018, p. 606) This intuition found its theoretical backup in partisan-influence hypothesis insofar, that the latter argues that different parties will carry out different policies when in government in order to please their respective electorate and secure re-election (Hibbs Jr. 1977, 1992; Schmidt 1996).

There is some dispute whether this holds under coalition governments, as the coalition treaty – and not the individual party or election programme – is supposed to be the defining programmatic document for all government actors under such circumstances (Ganghof and Schulze 2015, pp. 118, 121). While Laver and Shepsle (1990) argue 'that jurisdiction-specific policy outputs will tend toward those preferred by the party of the relevant minister' (Laver and Shepsle 1990, p. 874), others find that ministers and their party membership make little difference for overall government policy (Müller-Rommel 1994, pp. 165–167) and that coalition treaties function as an effective constraint (Moury 2011, p. 400). From a literature review on ministerial roles in cabinet government Andeweg (2014) concludes that, while a minister's autonomy is indeed constrained by cabinet hierarchies and collective decision-making, ministers nevertheless do enjoy autonomy with regard to policies connected to their portfolio (Andeweg 2014, pp. 539– 542).

Second, ministers are the addressees of calls for legitimacy and accountability from extra-ministerial actors including the public at large. Political programmes are usually not directly translated into policy outputs without further deliberation, consultation and information of third parties with vested interests in the respective issues. Indeed, failing to do so risks alienating parts of the public even when there is broad agreement among parliamentary parties (Tosun et al. 2015, p. 166). A continuing trend of increasing use of public participation in national states as well as the EU reinforces that (Wesselink et al. 2011; Fink and Ruffing 2019b). This might happen for instrumental reasons thus as avoiding trouble later, normative reasons, or substantive search for additional information (Devine-Wright 2011, p. 20; Wesselink et al. 2011, p. 2690). The latter rationale echoes exchange theory which posits that lobbying groups provide decision-makers with expertise in exchange for access to the decision-making process (Bouwen 2002, 2004). In either case, interest representation has the potential to be a co-driver of policy variance (Klüver 2012, 2013).

Failing to react positively to represented interests needs legitimation. In hierarchical systems, political accountability is called on in such cases (Scharpf 1997, p. 183). Depending on the overall institutional set-up, there are options available to refer such calls to other levels of government and thus shift the blame for presumably unresponsive behaviour elsewhere (Milio 2014, pp. 386, 388, 395; Heinkelmann-Wild and Zangl 2020). Shifting blame to another level is an option for enacting unpopular policies as well as for not enacting popular policies. This is done the easier, when the relations between the levels are poorly understood by the public (or even by other administrative actors) in a given policy field.

Third, in multi-level frameworks, government politicians on lower levels interact with those on higher levels. The aforementioned blame-shifting is just one instrument out of the toolbox of multi-level governance (Benz 2007, p. 508). More prominent, especially in the context of Germany, is the discussion of interdependence in decision-making (Scharpf et al. 1976; Kropp 2010; Benz et al. 2016). In this context, aspects of voluntary coordination between the levels have gained attention as well (Hegele and Behnke 2013).

The hindrances in multi-level policy-making follow – besides organisational and substantive complexity – from non-homogeneous interests across levels (T. Fischer and Pennekamp 2018, p. 446). Often enough, the interests of lower-level units do not cluster (only) around party membership of their governments, but around e. g. similar economic situations (Kropp 2010, p. 75; Heinemann et al. 2015, pp. 680–681; Fink, Bartels et al. 2019, pp. 149, 153). While the higher level takes into consideration more encompassing interests, the lower-level units have a more restrained focus, geographically speaking.

The motivation for the respective level to take the other level's interest seriously depends on the mode and orientation of their interaction. In circumstances where the two levels act by and large independently of each other, anticipation might be reduced to adherence to higher-level legal frameworks. In circumstances where a lower level might propose but not decide a certain policy for the higher level, the interaction unfolds in the shadow of hierarchy (Scharpf 1997, pp. 197–200). Here, the lower level is required to deliver input to the upper level with the explicit possibility that the upper level might reject it or demand additional information. This resembles a signalling model of delegation, where the delegating principal decides on the basis of reports from its agents (Bendor et al. 2001, pp. 241, 249–251).

Summing up what has been said so far, three aspects are to be considered. The default assumption for ministerial output is a realisation of the minister's party's position on the issue at hand. Third-party interests can be taken into account in decision-making for various reasons, especially when failing to do so might result in legitimacy concerns. In multi-level frameworks, lower-level politicians will anticipate higher-level expectations, however, high degrees of interdependence between the levels might lead to more consensual decisions.

The next section looks at ministerial decision-making from the bureaucratic perspective.

## **2.3 Bureaucrats**

Bureaucrats are expected to behave responsively towards their superiors but are nevertheless equipped with ample opportunity for interpretation and avenues for agenda setting (Andeweg 2014, p. 540). Proponents of ministerial influence generally agree that the ministerial bureaucracy plays a crucial role (Müller-Rommel 1994, p. 158; Rhodes 2011; Kempf et al. 2015, pp. 38–39). Be it, that the preparation of law proposals is firmly in the hand of the ministerial bureaucracy (Döhler 2005, p. 218), be it that bureaucrats are prominent in coordinating positions across subnational units (Hegele 2018b, p. 262). From Weber ([1921] 1976) onward, at the latest, the fundamental importance of a wellfunctioning bureaucracy remains undisputed, even though not always at the forefront of awareness, as Rhodes (2011) put it: 'It all may seem very predictable and boring. There are times when I think we forget that bureaucracy is a clever invention.' (Rhodes 2011, p. 308)

There is reason to believe that the bureaucracy has some effect on the policy output of ministries. The main concern regarding the interplay of politics and administration is the latter's potential for independent action and the question to what extent this potential is realised to the detriment of politicians' preferences. Potential for independent action involves agenda-setting, strategic interaction – i. e. deliberate and potentially biased use of negotiations and information flows – , and bureaucratic drift (Schnapp 2004a, p. 82). The scope of this potential problem has been discussed in the literature with respect to bureaucrats' motivations, their politicisation, as well as administrative capacity. I will take up these three considerations in this section.

First, the motivation of bureaucrats has been discussed from a variety of angles. As Scharpf noted, even though hierarchical systems might be highly effective if properly instituted, there is no guarantee for their members' welfare-enhancing motivation (Scharpf 1997, p. 178). The literature suggests different approaches to the motives of bureaucratic agents. The bottom-line is a mix of self-interest and altruistic orientations with an instrumental competition for staff, resources and competences (Downs 1967). Niskanen (1971) narrowed this down to the point, that bureaucrats strive to maximise their budget, even though it remains unclear which benefits they gain from this – additional staff or higher salaries are possible explanations (Blais and Dion 1990, pp. 663, 673). Dunleavy (1991) integrated these views into a theory of bureau shaping, stating that bureaucrats have qualitative preferences about their work environment, they prefer working in small elite bureaus close to power centres (Dunleavy 1991, p. 202). This was later qualified insofar that 'policy jobs' are viewed favourably by those exercising them (Gains and P. John 2010, p. 461; Page and Jenkins 2005, p. 77).

The principal-agent model assumes rational actors undertaking cost-benefit calculations for their actions. Despite its straightforward modelling of relations between politicians and bureaucrats, the application remains unsatisfactory, when it comes to the details (Scharpf 1997, p. 179). A central tenet of the model, namely that agents would engage in 'shirking', thus work avoidance, whenever possible, has not found empirical support in the context of bureaucracy (Brehm and Gates 1997, p. 107; Pierre and Peters 2017, p. 157). Rather, bureaucrats care about which outputs they produce and therefore might fulfil some tasks more eagerly than others (Brehm and Gates 1997, pp. 43–44). For the German context, Döhler (2005) argues that incentives for shirking are greatly stifled already by the institutional framework (Döhler 2005, p. 217).

To the question of which (policy) contents bureaucrats would strive to further, the study of the concept of Public Service Motivation (PSM) has brought some – though for the present purpose severely limited – insight. Given the impression that egoist motivations as assumed by economic theories of bureaucracy could be satisfied much better in other work environments, a growing literature has tried to assemble an alternative explanation for why people choose to work in the public bureaucracy in the first place. This literature emphasises that '[p]ublic service motivation is most commonly associated with particular normative orientations – a desire to serve the public interest, loyalty to duty and to the government as a whole, and social equity.' (Perry and Wise 1990, p. 369; building on that among others: Perry and Hondeghem 2008; Vandenabeele 2008; Hammerschmid et al. 2009; Ritz et al. 2016; Vandenabeele et al. 2018). In comparisons between public and non-public employees, it has been found that public-service officials are on average less rewards-oriented than private-sector employees and more likely to be motivated to contribute to the public good (Crewson 1997, p. 505; Houston 2000, pp. 716–717). Critiques concern the equation of values with sectors rather than job types and side-lining preferences about the respective work-life balance (Buelens and Van den Broeck 2007, pp. 69–70; R. K. Christensen and Wright 2011, pp. 724–725) as well as quality of concept formation more broadly (Bozeman and Su 2015).

It is in no way clear, whether the existing research on PSM can be taken to mean, that public officials in general are motivated to 'contribute to society' (Vandenabeele et al. 2018, p. 261) or just more likely to be thus motivated than private-sector ones. In the former case, the motivation problem as raised by Scharpf (1997, p. 178) would indeed be solved, as then the hierarchical settings of the ministerial bureaucracy would be populated by individuals, whose behaviour is strongly norm-oriented towards the welfare of society (as is also implied by the notion of 'principled agents': Brehm and Gates 1997, p. 202). In the latter case, nothing much can be said about the size of the potential problem that Scharpf raises.

Even well-meaning bureaucrats could find themselves in contrast to their political superiors, thus a second concern addresses the degree to that bureaucrats are guided by political considerations. The most direct form of securing responsiveness by the bureaucracy to the political leadership is 'the substitution of political criteria for merit-based criteria' in recruitment (quoted from: Peters and Pierre 2004, p. 2; similar: Kopecký et al. 2012; Vedder and Veit 2017; Dahlstrøm and Holmgren 2019). This 'formal politicisation' (Hustedt and Salomonsen 2014, pp. 749–750) – as opposed to patronage – is a formal, legally enshrined mechanism (Hustedt and Salomonsen 2014, p. 749) that is – if at all – used for the top levels of public bureaucracy (Christiansen et al. 2016, p. 1232). However, functional politicisation, i. e. the voluntary awareness for and the consideration of political wishes and necessities by the bureaucracy, is more widespread (Mayntz and Derlien 1989, p. 401; Hustedt and Salomonsen 2014, p. 760; Veit et al. 2018, p. 417). Functional politicisation extends to the involvement of bureaucratic actors in negotiations with relevant third-parties as well as to the interaction with the media and the public on behalf of political superiors (Christiansen et al. 2016, p. 1233).

Thus, the prevailing view in the strand of administration research literature that I lean on here is one of a largely unproblematic cooperation between politicians and their bureaucracies. Rather than stipulating discordances, it is argued that bureaucracy fills the void left by political inactivity, when problems are not salient enough to draw political attention (C. M. Jones 2010; Bækgaard, Blom-Hansen et al. 2015, p. 460) – a notion I will partly challenge below – or takes care of routine tasks that are only brought to the attention of the political level, when conflicts arise (Schnabel 1980; Hegele 2018b, p. 263). This implies, that whenever there are political programmes to execute, the bureaucracy will in general compliantly do so.

An exception to this rule arises when bureaucrats perceive the solutions preferred by their superiors as illegal or grossly inadequate. For bureaucrats, there is a balance to strike between pure political responsiveness, offering 'frank advice' and preserving 'public integrity' (Mulgan 2008, p. 350). In studies for Denmark and Germany, especially higher-rank and formally politicised bureaucrats have been found to be especially ready to criticise dubious decisions of their superiors and place more weight on legal correctness than on political responsiveness (J. G. Christensen and Opstrup 2018, p. 491; Veit et al. 2018, p. 432). Bureaucrats are in fact expected to prominently consider legal and technical criteria when preparing input for their political superiors (J. G. Christensen and Opstrup 2018, p. 488). Delegation theorists hold, that this influence of bureaucrats furthermore increases in highly technical policy fields, as these fields are characterised by higher levels of uncertainty which induces politicians to grant bureaucrats wider discretion (Gormley Jr. 1986, pp. 603, 605–606; Huber and Shipan 2013, p. 854; for a corresponding empirical finding: Veit et al. 2018, p. 424)

Third, bureaucratic work is shaped by the material and immaterial resources available. Besides actors' orientations, actor-centred institutionalism addresses their capabilities. For bureaucratic actors, this matches the Weberian approach (Olsen 2006, p. 4). Administrative capacity is seen as a necessary condition for any bureaucratic action to take place, even though Scharpf claims in the same breath, that little generalisable knowledge could be attained from such discussions (Scharpf 1997, p. 51). Conceptually, administrative capacity relates to the bureaucratic system as a whole, rather than individuals working in it (Addison 2009, p. 10). Capacity is a requirement for bureaucratic action and the extent to that it is available will necessarily limit the scope of the output (Scharpf 1997, p. 51; Wegrich and Hammerschmid 2017, p. 36). It is closely tied to the availability of resources as well as their timing (Ingraham and Donahue 2000, p. 294).

Even though Scharpf is hesitant about the analytical value of actors' capabilities, I argue that they ought to be included in the analysis insofar as they might enable or restrain other explanatory factors. Huber and McCarty (2004) e. g. argue on the basis of a formal model that low-capacity bureaucracies tend to be less responsive to political goal definitions (Huber and McCarty 2004, pp. 490–491). One key consequence of bureaucratic capability, given the centrality of expertise and information, is the bureaucracy's ability to collect knowledge about the policy question under decision. Especially a public-service motivated bureaucracy would need a sound knowledge base to produce public-good enhancing decisions. While Drolc and Keiser (2020) find, that the capacity of oversightinstitutions is crucial for good policy implementation (Drolc and Keiser 2020, pp. 13–14), the same logic applies to administrative capacity in ministries for policy-making.

Summarising the account on the bureaucratic actor group, two main messages can be formulated: First, outright conflict between politicians and bureaucrats seems unlikely, rather are policy-specific variations to be expected in this relationship. Second, any potential for independent bureaucratic action can only be realised in the presence of sufficient resources, thus, sufficient administrative capacity.

The following section focusses on the interaction between politicians and bureaucrats in the decision-making process on ministerial outputs.

## **2.4 Decision-making process**

The interaction between politicians and bureaucrats is a constitutive feature of any intraministerial decision-making process. I argue that the transposition of a minister's policy preferences into outputs is eased by non-complex decision-making processes, and that the complexity of a decision-making process is influenced by whether the issue under discussion is a salient one or not. In order to develop this argument, I first take a look at information flows within ministries, then I discuss the topic of salience, and finally bring both aspects together in discussing them as reasons and consequences of process complexity.

Ministries are large, hierarchically structured organisations. A major reason why bureaucratic influence is discussed at all is the information advantage that lower-level bureaucrats enjoy, when it comes to technical information in their area of expertise – be it from their longer tenure or from contact with experts (Peters 2010, pp. 198–199). Indeed, the whole concept of hierarchy would be pointless, if all information were concentrated at the top and inundated the upper levels of the hierarchy. Instead, bureaucratic systems combine hierarchy with an elaborate division of labour (Simon 1997, pp. 7–9), that allows treatment of information from more policy areas than a single unit ever could process. In the opposite direction, information on political preferences is concentrated at the top of the ministry. Hence, a certain degree of information asymmetry is inevitable – and desirable – in hierarchical settings (Huber and Shipan 2013, p. 850).

This begs the question of information flows between the levels (Scharpf 1997, pp. 174– 175). According to Downs (1965), bureaucrats pass on information in a biased manner, both upwards to their superiors and downwards to subordinates (Downs 1965, p. 434). Blom-Hansen et al. (2020) could demonstrate, that bureaucrats do also use policy information strategically and there is at least a plausible potential that politicians could thus be influenced by biased information flows (Blom-Hansen et al. 2020, pp. 16–17).

Even in the absence of ill-will on the bureaucrats' side, biased information flows might occur. Bureaucrats are understood as valuing their own field of expertise more than others and ascribing higher importance to this field (Halperin 1971, p. 75; Wegrich and Hammerschmid 2017, p. 29). This is also plausible from a psychological perspective, that suggests, that humans tend to mistake readily available information – thus, the own field of expertise – for all relevant information (Kahneman 2011, pp. 85–88). Bureaucratic perception is thus biased towards the own department (Dearborn and Simon 1958, p. 140).

Bureaucratic influence might thus move policy outputs away from the minister's policy preferences. The information asymmetry between politicians and bureaucrats is the root cause for assumptions about 'bureaucratic drift' in policy implementation (e. g. Epstein and O'Halloran 1994, pp. 699–701) and 'delegation problems' more broadly (Bendor et al. 2001, p. 240). Given the biases just mentioned above, this remains plausible even in the absence of shirking or intentional deviation. With higher degrees of bureaucratic discretion and higher information loads, this potential problem is exacerbated – inversely, limiting discretion is supposed to decrease bureaucratic drift at the cost of decreasing the usefulness of delegation as such (Epstein and O'Halloran 1994, pp. 699–701).

Bureaucratic influence might even be desirable in some case. Given existing norms of legality and technical adequacy, some deviation from pre-formulated policy preferences might at times even be implicitly expected (Veit et al. 2018, p. 418). Furthermore, granting discretion to bureaucracies might even serve to insulate decision-making against (too much) political interference from either the minister's own party or from coalition partners. Bureaucrats then become 'delegate-trustee[s]' (Majone 2001, p. 105) of more general commitments.

Not all topics are equally important for ministers and they have no problem with ceding control over those that are less important to them (Gormley Jr. 1986, p. 603). The term of salience captures how important a given topic is for an actor (Warntjen 2012, p. 169). In other words, bureaucrats are 'regular' participants in decision-making processes on all kinds of topics, while politicians will focus on only relatively few topics that they deem important (Gormley Jr. 1986, p. 603; for an empirical test: Eshbaugh-Soha 2006).

Following this line of thought, the salience of a given topic influences to what extent political or bureaucratic actors shape a policy output. The literature concludes that more salient topics are dealt with by politicians, while less salient topics are the realm of bureaucratic decision-making (Häge 2007, p. 322; Bækgaard, Blom-Hansen et al. 2015, p. 469). The empirical evidence produced is, however, narrowly focussed on budget decisions (Bækgaard, Blom-Hansen et al. 2015) or rather related to the bargaining stage than to that of policy formulation (Häge 2007). A study for independent agencies finds that agencies dealing with more salient topics are more likely to be held politically accountable, thus underscoring the nexus between salience and politicisation (Koop 2011, p. 228).

I argue that this equation of salient topics with high political influence is not plausible when specific policy solutions are concerned. It is not plausible that political actors should simply try and push through their policy preferences on salient topics. Borrowing an idea from International Relations, salient topics are those, where the adoption – and, one might add, faithful implementation – of a policy is most valued (G. Schneider et al. 2010, p. 96). This can be inferred from actors' increased readiness to compromise in order to reach a decision in negotiations about topics salient to them (G. Schneider et al. 2010, p. 96; Warntjen 2012, p. 169) as long as a 'basic benefit' is secured, i. e. the compromise is not so extreme as to offset all benefits (Moravcsik and Vachudova 2003, p. 49).

Warntjen (2012) sees salience as being derived among other things from the '(estimated) policy impact, the political sensitivity of an issue or the attention it receives from core constituencies' (Warntjen 2012, p. 169). Thus, given the interaction relations that politicians find themselves in – most notably with coalition governments, but also members of the respective subsystem network –, simply pushing an agenda does not appear a likely way to ensure that a policy is adopted. What is more, where third-party interests might hinder implementation, a successful policy strategy has to take these interests into account – at the very least to scout ways for their circumvention.

Thus, when an issue is salient, it is important for the respective ministry to have this issue addressed in a manner that will likely result in the adoption of a corresponding policy. The default assumption for a good solution is the respective policy position of the minister's party. Still, feasibility and acceptability of such a solution have to be ensured – both in the decision-making process and for the implementation stage. Thus, incorporating other voices in the decision-making process might help to mitigate potential conflicts between the coalition partners or with external actors (Blom-Hansen et al. 2020, p. 17). In order to ensure adequacy of the solution for a complex problem, additional information gathering might be essential (Blom-Hansen et al. 2020, p. 17). The resulting decision-making process will consequently be more complex than for nonsalient issues.

It is important to note here, that salience in this argument solely relates to the importance of the policy at hand as perceived by the minister responsible for the respective portfolio. In other words, 'it is primarily relevant how political actors perceived a proposal contemporaneously, that is, while adopting (or implementing) it.' (Warntjen 2012, p. 169) Their view on salience might be but does not have to be in line with the importance of a topic as perceived by the broader public, i. e. the 'public salience' (Kollman 1998, p. 11). For the example for EU online consultations, it has been established in the literature that interest organisations' readiness to participate in consultations is higher for topics with high public salience (Rasmussen et al. 2014, p. 265; Røed and Wøien Hansen 2018, p. 1457), thus increasing the supply of external input. The argument made here adds a different perspective and posits that salience as understood from a ministerial perspective raises ministerial readiness to consult third-party actors in the first place, thus increasing the demand for input.

Process complexity is understood as the amount of steps that a decision-making process encompasses. Additional steps, that are not obligatory, might among others involve pre-studies, the development of concepts, voluntary inter-ministerial coordination or consultations with third parties. Hence, complexity is a plausible path for addressing the challenges outlined above: Additional steps taken might address possible reservations from coalition partners, anticipate implementation problems, or pre-empt legitimacy concerns. Furthermore, steps might be added that explicitly focus on defining and defending decision-making criteria, thus preparing the ground for successful arguments later in the process.

Additional decision-making steps involving third parties can, however, only be taken when the administrative capacity available permits it. These additional steps increase the information load that has to be handled by the ministerial bureaucracy. This concerns both the administrative work involved in setting these steps up and the work involved in interpreting the incoming information.

The information disadvantage of the minister vis-a-vis the bureaucracy increases with growing complexity. Intra-ministerial processes have been found to be decided on in a dialogue model between minister and bureaucracy (Scharpf 1997, p. 178). In a similar vein, the horizontal negotiations between bureaucrats and other actors below the ministerial level are accompanied by a 'vertical dialogue' between minister and bureaucracy (Mayntz and Scharpf 1975, pp. 100–102; Scharpf 1997, p. 198). Still, each additional step in the decision-making process implies a wealth of additional information. Only some of this information will be directly available to the minister – most notably that from cabinet meetings or coalition committees. All other information will pass through the hands of the bureaucracy first and will only be passed on in a condensed – possibly biased (Blom-Hansen et al. 2020, pp. 16–17) – selective way. Without such selection, hierarchical systems would cease to work (Scharpf 1997, p. 198). Hence, more complex processes increase the information advantage of the bureaucracy.

Various degrees of process complexity are conceivable and influence the predictability of the resulting policy output. The policy preference of the minister is the default condition to explain ministry outputs. In the most simple model, the minister's party programme explains what kind of policy the ministry will produce. This presupposes that little else influences the decision-making process. The task for the bureaucracy would thus be a translation of a political programme into a mirroring policy output without much additional consideration.

In a more complex process the result is less predictable. When considerations and interests enter the decision-making process that are unrelated to the minister and the respective party, it is not clear from the outset to what extent the output will mirror the initial political position. Ministers might try to engage in strategical 'deck-stacking' (Lupia and McCubbins 2000, p. 302) so that only such input is sought that reinforces their initial position, still, there remains an element of uncertainty regarding the resulting input. It is thus not clear, whether the additional input sought will be in favour of the minister's policy preferences, nor how far it might lead the bureaucracy to adapt the policy proposal away from the minister's initial position.

Even though such complexity might at first glance seem risky for the minister, there are at least three reasons conceivable why it might nevertheless be attractive: First, it might make the decision reached more convincing. Second, the overall policy-goal might be more important to the minister than the technical details. Third, the additional procedural steps might serve as a warning system against upcoming opposition. I spell out each of these points below.

First, the additional evidence produced – regardless whether informants are strategically pre-selected or not – might be used to convince coalition partners, the broader public, or critics of any kind of the advisability of the proposed solution. This might be done by explicitly invoking that the decision is informed by evidence (even though that would be '"policy-driven" evidence': Head 2016, p. 475), or implicitly by generating the impression that the process was rational and fair (McCubbins, Noll et al. 1987, p. 253).

Second, the policy goal might be much clearer to the political level than the exact technical way how to achieve it (McCubbins, Noll et al. 1987, p. 244). Under such circumstances, a process that would 'enfranchise important constituents', ensures that the political goal is more likely to be heeded (McCubbins, Noll et al. 1987, p. 244). In other words, subjecting decision-making to a more complex process serves as a credible commitment to the respective policy goal. This principle is well-established for trustee relationships that are deliberately insulated against political determination of details (for the two delegation types compare Majone 2001, p. 104; Fink and Koch 2016, pp. 282–283). In consequence, the preferences held by political actors about specific policy contents become less relevant.

Third, the additional steps serve as a kind of 'fire alarm' – even though not strictly in the sense of principal-agent theory. Instead of warning the minister against unwanted deviations by the bureaucracy, as would be the objective of a fire alarm as conceived of by principal-agent theory (McCubbins and Schwartz 1984, p. 166), both minister and bureaucracy learn whether their intended policy solutions are likely to meet opposition from other relevant actors. Due to the higher capacity for information processing of the bureaucracy, most of this learning will happen there, while the minister is more likely to be informed in a more summarising manner that rather resembles a report about activities undertaken by the bureaucracy in this complex process than a direct fire alarm – in the word of Lupia and McCubbins (2000) the minister would be 'relying on the agent's selfreport' rather than receiving 'testimony of a third party' (Lupia and McCubbins 2000, p. 295).

In consequence, ministers can be expected to give up control over a decision-making process when that promises a defensible solution to a salient problem. That means that such a solution will also be acceptable to such third actors that might otherwise hinder the policy's approval or cause problems during the implementation phase. This contradicts to some extent the existing literature on the effect of salience on the division of labour between politicians and bureaucrats. It does, however, fit the notion that bureaucrats usually know very well which topics are important to their ministers and have a very good sense of what kind of solution might therefore be acceptable, which makes information differences less of a problem (Scharpf 1997, p. 198). It is also consistent with arguments of strategic process design and of credible commitments achieved by establishing trustee relationships.

The next section summarises the overall line of argument and deduces hypotheses.

# **2.5 Overall framework**

The theoretical argument put forward here can be summed up as follows: By and large, ministerial policy outputs follow the political lines defined in the respective minister's party's election programme with changes made for multi-level or third-party acceptance. When a topic is salient, the political costs for decision-making failure rise and it is especially important to produce a defensible solution. In order to help the latter along, more complex decision-making processes are set up for salient topics whenever the administrative capacity available permits it. Complex processes, however, entail that their result is less predictable. Figure 2.1 on the facing page illustrates the reasoning delineated in the previous sections.

Figure 2.1: Theoretical framework

Following these lines of thought, five hypotheses are put forward:

Hypothesis 1: *Ministerial policy output follows the policy preferences of the respective minister when those are in line with higher-level preferences in multi-level settings.* This hypothesis follows from considerations of ministers' abilities to influence policies within their portfolio, the largely unproblematic interaction between ministers and bureaucrats, as well as the shadow of hierarchy imposed by multi-level relations.

Hypothesis 2: *Ministerial policy output is influenced by the interaction with third-party actors.* This hypothesis follows from the notion that intra-ministerial decision-making does not take place in a political and societal vacuum, but takes into account interests from other actors within the respective subsystem. The direction of such influence cannot generally be predicted beforehand.

Hypothesis 3: *In complex decision-making processes, the policy output produced does not necessarily conform to the minister's policy preferences.* This is to say that in a complex decisionmaking process the result is less predictable than in simple processes. The complexity might just strengthen the case for realising the minister's policy preferences, or it might just as well assemble enough evidence and critical voices to move the output in another direction.

Hypothesis 4: *When the topic under decision is salient, a complex decision-making process is set up.* The argument behind this hypothesis relies on the assumption that for salient topics an adequate and feasible solution is desired. Consequently, other actors' stances on the topics as well as available evidence have to be taken into account.

Hypothesis 5: *High administrative capacity is a necessary prerequisite for a complex decisionmaking process.* This hypothesis follows from the consideration that complex processes increase the workload for the ministerial bureaucracy. Therefore, administrative capacity is crucial for the realisation of such processes.

These hypotheses will guide the analysis. The next chapter will introduce the methods and data employed.

# **3 Methods**

This chapter outlines the methods used for this thesis. After a brief introduction of the considerations behind the selection of cases, it describes the process of data collection from documents and interviews as well as the kinds of analysis performed by way of content analysis and qualitative comparative analysis (QCA).

In this thesis, I study decision-making in the ministerial bureaucracies of the German *Länder*. This limits the number of cases to 16 or – if referring to the decision-making processes for both road and rail proposals – to 32. Thus, methodologically, the study is situated within the realm of medium-n research. As Hall (2003) put it, the term methodology refers to 'the means scholars employ to increase confidence that the inferences they make about the social and political world are valid' (Hall 2003, p. 373). My analysis is grounded in Critical Rationalism in that I start from deductively derived propositions (Blatter and Haverland 2012, p. 10). It also has leanings towards Critical Realism in that I look into process and configurations instead of inferring causality from regular association only<sup>1</sup> (Blatter and Haverland 2012, pp. 12–13). Thus, I adopt an approach that assumes an objectively existing reality independent from the researcher's mind (Jackson 2016, pp. 40, 86).

As befits non-large-n research, I will look at a variety of observations for each case, building on some theoretically derived categories but also having an eye out for the new and unexpected within the cases. For the term 'observation' I rely on the definition put forward by Blatter and Haverland (2012): 'those pieces of information that are located on the lowest level of abstraction' or 'information that we find "out there"' (Blatter and Haverland 2012, p. 21). For adequate measurement in qualitative contexts, usually 'a plurality of observations' will underlie each individual 'variable score' (Blatter and Haverland 2012, p. 22) – or in the case of QCA: the calibration of each condition. Thus, causal inference can never follow from one observation only (Blatter and Haverland 2012, p. 22; for a somewhat different understanding of observations but a similar conclusion compare King et al. 1994, p. 208). Section 3.2 will provide insight, how I collected observations from documents and interviews.

The analytical strategy is that of Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA), which casts its shadow over the prior analytical step of content analysis. While already informative in its own right, the content analysis is a vital precursor to QCA in this case, as it enables me to calibrate my data with the rigour that is necessary to arrive at valid results using QCA (or, indeed, any other medium- or large-n analysis) – calibration being the QCA-specific term for the link between operationalisation and measurement. The more fine-grained derivation of the explanatory conditions thus takes place in the first part of the analysis chapter. In this chapter here, the main outcome transition-oriented ministerial output, that does not rely on the content analysis, is operationalised and all other conditions are briefly presented. Coding schemes are provided for all conditions and outcomes.

This chapter makes transparent the methodological choices underlying the research process and discusses the implications for the analysis. It starts with a reflection on case selection both in a geographical sense as with respect to the policy field. The second section delves into the processes of collecting documents and interview material. Section 3.3 covers the two modes of analysis employed: qualitative content analysis and QCA. The final section presents thoughts on operationalisation and introduces the lines along which the cases are calibrated for the QCA.

<sup>1</sup> Jackson (2016) would contradict this, noting that QCA – which is my main research strategy here – would 'press the boundaries of a neopositivist methodology' without however moving beyond them, thus lacking the element of 'transfactualism' characteristic of Critical Realism (Jackson 2016, pp. 78–79, 88–89).

## **3.1 Case selection**

The research interest of this thesis centres on determinants of intra-ministerial decisionmaking. I want to find out, how decision-making processes can be structured and what difference that makes for the output. In order to have a group of ministries that are as similar as possible in everything except their decision-making processes, I analyse decision-making in German sub-national ministries, more specifically in the *Länder* ministries of transport on projects to propose for the BVWP 2030. This choice of decisionmaking cases fulfils three criteria: highly comparable in-country cases, practical feasibility, availability of a fitting policy for analysis.

Germany lends itself for analysis for conceptual reasons. The federal structure entails the availability of sub-national decision-making units that are very similar in a multitude of regards due to their embeddedness in a larger national framework (Hegele 2020, p. 8). Relevant for the study at hand, the basic institutional structure of the *Länder* is very much the same – parliamentary democracy, working parliaments, strong executive underpinned by a ministerial bureaucracy – even though they differ with regard to institutional details like their electoral systems or the use of direct democracy (Freitag and Vatter 2009). While the *Länder* do also differ with regard to demography, economic standing, settlement structure, and the like (Jeffery et al. 2016, p. 168), they are still impacted by the same national political discussions – e. g. on public participation – and are subject to the same higher-level rules and regulations – e. g. on transport planning. This makes instances of ministerial decision-making in the *Länder* valuable cases of comparison as many potentially relevant factors of influence will be constant or very much limited in their variability, so that the influence of marked differences between the *Länder* stands out more clearly (Freitag and Vatter 2009, p. 412).

Practical concerns arise as the research question demands a qualitative approach which involves expert interviews. Consequently, profound knowledge of the language spoken within the ministries is a must – administrative jargon at times being intricate enough anyway (Helfferich 2014, p. 561). So, being a mother-tongue speaker certainly helps. The language requirements thus greatly reduce the cases I could have studied for the research interest outlined.

The policy I study is the *Länder* proposals for the federal infrastructure master plan passed in 2016, the BVWP 2030. For analysis, the BVWP proposals have the advantage of being the answer to a uniform policy task set by the federal level. This means that all *Länder* ministries of transport had to react to the same task within about the same time. Thus, differences in time and policy circumscription are ruled out. Still, there is no formal prescription on how the decision-making process within the *Länder* ought to be organised (Landtag Brandenburg 2012, p. 3). Furthermore, the policy output is easily discernible and narrowly defined as the output consists in lists of project proposals for different transport modes among which I study decision-making for road and for rail projects.<sup>2</sup> The periodical nature of the BVWP also allows comparison with earlier versions and thus an assessment of changes per *Land* holding many *Land* specific characteristics nearly constant (which would be a classical argument from panel data analysis, e. g. Giesselmann and Windzio 2013, p. 10).

I choose the BVWP 2030 for analysis, rather than earlier BVWPs, due to its recency. The construction of decision-making processes depends on the availability of published information as well as the accessibility of potential interviewees who have a memory of the respective process. As will be seen below, this second criterion was already strained to some extent under the present circumstances with some of those actively involved in BVWP preparation no longer holding a position in the respective ministry. Going farther back would just exacerbate the problem. In terms of document availability, the study of more recent processes profits from high levels of digitalisation allowing easy access to publicly available official documents as well as to websites set up by the ministries studied, which are not always archived. Additionally, the comparison with the predecessor BVWP of 2003 is relatively unproblematic, there is no reason to assume any particular bias – unlike with the BVWP 1992 before that, which was heavily influenced by the effects of German re-unification in 1990 (Heuser and Reh 2016, pp. 247–248).

In consequence, studying intra-ministerial decision-making in German *Länder* ministries of transport about projects to propose for the BVWP 2030 makes use of wellcomparable cases as well as being feasible from language and accessibility perspectives. Given that I study two decision-making processes for each of the 16 *Länder* – one for road projects and one for rail projects – this results in 32 decision-making cases used for analysis.

Thus, I study instances from the universe of cases of intra-ministerial decision-making processes. The broadest-possible potential of generalisation would therefore be to all other instances of intra-ministerial decision-making. This optimistic perspective has to be qualified to a certain extent, and this is a clear downside of my case selection: I study a very specific policy within a particular polity. Both require particular attention to differentiating which findings might be specific to content, time and place of the cases studies, and which address more general patterns that can plausibly be expected to also hold under different circumstances. Policy-wise, the choice of cases makes generalisability most likely for other instances of ministerial decision-making in the context of infrastructure planning. Geographically, generalisability seems most adequate to decision-making instances in Germany as well as other countries with similar administrative profiles. I will come back to the generalisability of the analysis in the discussion in chapter 7.

<sup>2</sup> The BVWP also includes projects for waterways. These are disregarded here as I explain in chapter 4. Neither air transport nor bicycle lanes are part of the BVWP.

Data on the decision-making processes about road and railway projects to be proposed for the BVWP 2030 has been collected in form of documents and expert interviews and then analysed by ways of content analysis and QCA. The remainder of this chapter describes how this was done and introduces the fundamentals of the respective methods.

## **3.2 Data collection**

Diverse sources in the form of published and unpublished documents, websites, as well as expert interviews have been collected for this study. They were used to reconstruct the decision-making processes for the derivation of lists of proposals for road and rail projects by the *Länder*, to grasp political positions towards infrastructure planning, and to understand the overall framework. The material thus provides a rich stock of observations on the cases of intra-ministerial decision-making. One piece of material can in principle contain observations on more than one case as well as containing several observations. Table 3.1 lists the various kinds of sources with some examples of questions the respective material was used to answer. These answers can then be understood as observations made from the respective material.

For each *Land* a number of documents has been considered in addition to at least one instance of communication with officials from the respective transport ministry. A minimum of four documents was assembled for the Saarland, the maximum of twelve documents was collected for Hamburg and Nordrhein-Westfalen. I will elaborate on that in the next section. A list of all 159 documents considered is put together in appendix A.

In addition to these documents, 40 persons from *Land* ministries and subordinate bodies have provided me with verbal or written information. There were 23 face-to-face interviews, four long telephone calls, and three more contacts have responded via e-mail. Most interviews have been audio-recorded, for a few, a written record was prepared. Table B.1 in appendix B differentiates the numbers according to interview mode and form of documentation. Audio-recorded interviews have been transcribed using the softwares *easytranscript* and *Dragon Professional* (E. John 2014; Nuance Communications 2016).

In order to ensure the anonymity of those interviewed – or otherwise contacted –, statements will either be referenced according to the respective *Land* and with a number – e. g. BY-02 for an interview from Bayern – or with a random number from 1 to 40 assigned to each interview. Thus, for each interview there are two codes available that can be used interchangeably relative to the sensitivity of the respective quote. I will use the second approach – number from 1 to 40 – especially when discussing relations between the federal and the *Land* level. Here, it is usually not relevant for the argument, in which exact *Land* the respondent is situated, and these were also the issues where the importance of anonymity was emphasised the strongest by the interviewees. Thus,

Table 3.1: Source types and possible questions to the material

allowing those cited to 'hide' in a bigger group seems advisable, as the identity of some of my respondents would otherwise be easily guessable for anyone in the field especially when it comes to the smaller *Länder*. In case of doubt as to whether a quote was sensitive or not, I opted for the second approach as well.

The following two sections explain the collection process of documents and reflect on the conduct of expert interviews.

#### 3.2.1 Documents

Documents are a valuable source for reconstructing processes as they are storable as well as non-reactive. While a prospective interviewee might be unavailable or have a bad day, a committee protocol neither has conflicting meetings nor will its content be dependent on the day of reading it. What is more, unlike the human mind, document content will also not change over time – hence the importance of official documentation in administrations.

Documents, in the context of this thesis, will be understood as containers of information using some visual type of representation (Grant 2018, p. 11), usually text (Salheiser 2014, p. 813). This is not to deny the existence of audio documents and haptic documents, of course, which just happen to be not relevant for this research undertaking. From each document one or several observations can be gained. Usually these relate to one case of ministerial decision-making but might also relate to the two cases from the same *Land*, or to instances of ministerial decision-making in more than one *Land*.

The documents used for this study are 'found' documents (Grant 2018, pp. 16–17), thus a subset of the group of 'natural data' that is 'process-produced' (Salheiser 2014, p. 813). Thus, they were not exclusively prepared for the aims of scientific research (Salheiser 2014, pp. 813–814). Instead, they had been produced as parts of parliamentary processes, as working material within ministries, or as information material for third actors. In the context of this research endeavour this grants them special credibility as any bias in the content induced by the data collection process is precluded from the outset (Salheiser 2014, p. 816). This is certainly not to say that documents were neutral presenters of the world, they were of course shaped by the roles and understandings of those producing them.

Documents might confront the researcher with a couple of problems, that can however be mitigated. As Grant (2018) points out, found – and especially official – documents as a source might suffer from uncertainty about who exactly wrote them, tight coupling to norms and values present at the respective time, misleading language, as well as restricted access (Grant 2018, p. 62; similar: Salheiser 2014, pp. 816–822). Authorship is unproblematic in my case as I am not interested in individual-level data, so that a broad organisational authorship – or at least ownership – is sufficient. Norms and values as well as language are counterbalanced by using expert interviews as a second type of source, so that misunderstandings can be revealed (Salheiser 2014, p. 817). The same interviews also served as a door-opener to some unpublished documents. Overall, there is no reason to assume systematic misrepresentation in the documents studied with regard to the BVWP process.

To an overwhelming extent the documents considered are official documents from ministries and parliaments. Additional documents from ministries are working documents and therefore process-produced. Documents by parties form another important sub-group. Further documents are reports by NGOs and expert assessments by engineering firms or research centres. The analytical focus clearly lies on the ministerial and parliamentary documents. Party documents are used to assess parties' positions. The remaining documents are auxiliary only. Thus, the reconstruction of the BVWP process is undertaken on the basis of documents that were produced within the process of choosing the projects for the BVWP or in the political process accompanying this stage of decision-making. In the former case, credibility of these documents can be ranked very high. In the latter case, some consideration of eventual political window dressing on the one hand or intentional doom-mongering on the other hand is advisable. However, as the collected material suggests, especially in the relations between parliaments and ministries, the more frequent tactic employed by the latter is answering questions as briefly as possible, giving away the absolute minimum of information required. Consequently, what information is provided can be supposed to be correct as of the time of production of the respective document. As the process in question lasted several years, not all statements from the earlier years will hold true through the entire process. Therefore, cross-checking with later sources is required for documents that have been produced early-on in the process.

Most documents collected have been obtained via targeted online searches. Ministry websites, parliamentary databases, as well as the database of the Conference of *Länder* Ministers of Transport (*Verkehrsministerkonferenz*, VMK) have been scrutinised for the search terms *Bundesverkehrswegeplan* and *BVWP*. The resulting pages and documents have been scanned for their relevance. Relevant documents and websites have then been saved for later analysis – e. g. from the initially more than 40 search results in the database of the VMK only two have been used for further analysis.

A further source of documents have been interviews and e-mail communication with the *Länder* ministries of transport. At times, interviewees did mention documents that had been relevant in the process of BVWP preparation. Some of these documents were publicly available online, so I could retrieve them – often these were analyses or expert assessments. In other cases, interviewees were kind enough to provide me also with unpublished documents under the condition of their confidential treatment. The latter ranged from slides used in meetings to internal schedules. In cases where no lists of proposed projects were available on the respective ministry's website, I contacted the ministry via e-mail and asked which projects had been proposed. In all cases, I received the respective lists – often kindly supplemented by additional explanatory material.

A small but still relevant third part of the document collection added a few miscellaneous sources. On the one hand, I followed a snowball approach from hints in the literature or other documents. On the other hand, at some points I did a general web search with various search terms added to *Bundesverkehrswegeplan* or *BVWP* plus the name of the respective *Land* to ascertain a particular information for one *Land* or the other – e. g. in the case of Sachsen, interviews and parliamentary documents were contradictory about the use of public participation, and so it was reassuring to actually find a document by an association who claims to indeed have taken part in public participation for BVWP project choice (IHK Chemnitz 2014).

The timing of document collection was coupled to the conduct and analysis of the interviews. Parliamentary documents were usually collected and studied before the interview in the respective *Land* took place, the same holds for material that interviewees sent me in advance or pointed out when agreeing to be interviewed. These materials formed part of the preparation process of the interviews that I will explain below in the section on interviews. Other documents, as mentioned above, have been retrieved as result of the interviews. Further documents have been collected when transcribing the interviews or during a first round of analysis, when gaps or inconsistencies appeared in the knowledge so far attained. During later stages of the analysis, new documents were added when crucial points would so far only come up in the interviews and official documentation of that point – confirming or disconfirming it – was likely to exist. The collection process thus spans a period from mid-2018 to end-2020.

The amount of documents collected differs for the *Länder*. This is mainly due to differences in document availability by ministries and parliaments. On the side of ministries, some *Länder* have published a range of documents related to the BVWP process on their websites (e. g. Baden-Württemberg) and also produced more documents during the process e. g. by holding presentations for the public (e. g. in Brandenburg) or by providing minutes from public consultation meetings (e. g. in Niedersachsen). On the parliamentary side, the *Länder* parliaments asked about the BVWP to varying extents. The number of parliamentary questions ranges from one (e. g. in the Saarland) to four (e. g. in Thüringen). What is more, parliamentary documents are not equally publicly available in the *Länder*. While questions and plenary protocols are generally available, this is not equally true for minutes from committees. In *Länder* where the latter are available in the respective database, they add to the number of documents (e. g. in Nordrhein-Westfalen). Finally, only few plenaries discussed the BVWP proposal stage thereby adding another document to the list (e. g. in Rheinland-Pfalz).

These different numbers of documents, even though striking, are no source of concern for the analysis. These numbers alone allow no conclusion about how informative these documents are. Thus, the diverging numbers do not represent different levels of information on the *Länder*. By combining interviews and documents, an at least satisfactory level of information saturation could be reached for all *Länder*.

#### 3.2.2 Expert interviews

Interviews are a valuable source for reconstructing processes as they are able to open up information that has not been written down or where such documentation is not publicly available. While a parliamentary document might sum up proceedings in hindsight, an interviewee might also recall the back-and-forth that led up to it. What is more, unlike a written protocol, a person can answer follow-up questions and therefore provide context – hence the importance of far-sighted human resource planning with settling-in periods in organisations.

In order to reconstruct the decision-making process about project proposals by the *Länder*, I supplemented the collection of documents with expert interviews in all 16 *Länder* about both the project choice for road as well as for railway projects. I spoke to members of the respective ministerial bureaucracy and of subordinate authorities. This approach followed from the dominance of the executive in preparing the BVWP and the lack of general public documentation of the process. Each interview is a source of a multitude of observations on the respective ministerial decision-making process or on several decision-making processes.

I conducted semi-structured interviews. This means that the interviewer pre-defines certain areas of interest with a topic guide but leaves plenty of room for the interviewees to expand on these topics or also point to other relevant aspects (Meuser and Nagel 2002, p. 77; Helfferich 2014, p. 560). This is the usual interview form for expert interviews, as it allows a certain thematic guidance of the interview while still granting sufficient opportunity for unexpected input (Gläser and Laudel 2010, pp. 111, 116).

In my case, the topic guide foresaw four thematic blocks plus an introductory and a concluding part. Table 3.2 on the next page gives a brief overview. The complete topic guide in German language is reproduced in appendix B.2. In the introductory part I introduced myself and my research topic, and I ascertained that the formal information I had about the respective interviewee's affiliation and position were correct. At this point I also asked whether they had personally been involved in the decision-making process about the project proposals. At the heart of the main part of the interview was a relatively wide first question (Helfferich 2014, p. 566). Here, I simply asked for a description of the entire process as it had been carried through in the respective *Land*. This type of question is referred to as 'grand tour question' in the literature (Leech 2002, p. 667). Depending on the depth and detail of the answer, many other questions could already be obsolete by then. Much of the remainder of the interview built upon this first (and usually long) answer (Helfferich 2014, p. 566). Prompts served to deepen aspects that had been touched upon before (Leech 2002, pp. 667–668), e. g. 'How was that with [the aforementioned] online participation [...]? What did that look like [...]?' (question in interview 29). I adapted the order of the questions flexibly to the communication flow, it was therefore not the same in all interviews, even though the topic guide followed a certain chronology (Gläser and Laudel 2010, pp. 42, 146). I would address yet untouched parts of the topic guide only after that in order not to disrupt the communicative flow (Helfferich 2014, p. 566). Hence, the interview had the quite common structure of expert interviews in combining simply asking for facts with narrative episodes (Blatter, Janning et al. 2007, p. 62). The concluding part asked for an overall assessment as well as leaving room for additional aspects.

Table 3.2: Overview over the structure of the topic guide

Good preparation is emphasised as a prerequisite for insightful interviews. The interviewer ought to gain as much knowledge as possible about the topic of the interview beforehand in order to avoid asking questions whose answers could have been known from other sources (Leech 2002, p. 666; Helfferich 2014, p. 572). Accordingly, I did the document collection for the respective *Land* in preparation for the expert interview in that *Land*. In consequence, I would often change some questions and adapt them to *Land*-specific aspects – e. g. using projects as examples that had been the subject of parliamentary inquiries, or asking for details when a public participation process had been set up, thus tailoring the topic guide to the specific interview (Gläser and Laudel 2010, pp. 150–151). Where e-mail contact existed, i. e. in most cases, I sent out a list of my main questions beforehand, which proved very valuable as some interviewees apparently used these questions to specifically dig into documents and material in preparation. Sometimes interviewees also requested a list of my questions beforehand which is not unusual for expert interviews (Helfferich 2014, p. 572).

Expert interviews are set apart from other interview forms by their interviewees (Helfferich 2014, p. 559; Przyborski and Wohlrab-Sahr 2014, p. 118; Kruse 2015, p. 166; however, for a divergent reflection see Pfadenhauer 2009). Expert interviews are conducted with persons that are ascribed the role of someone with specialised – insider – knowledge with regard to a certain topic (Meuser and Nagel 2002, pp. 73–74; Kaiser 2014, pp. 35–41; Przyborski and Wohlrab-Sahr 2014, p. 119). As a result, the expert is not interviewed with regard to their overall personality, but only in their capacity of fulfilling a certain role, usually in an organisation (Meuser and Nagel 2002, pp. 72–73; Helfferich 2014, p. 570; Kruse 2015, p. 166). It is the aim of an expert interview to collect and understand otherwise not available knowledge (Helfferich 2014; Kaiser 2014, p. 31), especially when targeted at procedural knowledge that is usually not documented (Przyborski and Wohlrab-Sahr 2014, pp. 119–120). In my specific case, the interviews correspond to the type of 'systematizing expert interview', that aims at accessing the special knowledge of the expert along largely pre-defined topics (Bogner and Menz 2009, p. 46).