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Although street-level bureaucrats, such as teachers, social workers, police officers, or case managers in welfare offices, have only little formal authority within the state apparatus, with their daily actions and decisions they shape the factual outcomes of public policies. Operating at the intersection of state and society they apply abstract laws and regulations to the individual cases of citizens. As a result, they have substantial discretion over the delivery of public services. They consequently determine the extent and quality of the governmental benefits and sanctions eventually experienced by citizens and thus fundamentally shape their relationship with the state.
One of the key questions in the street-level bureaucracy literature is which factors influence how street-level bureaucrats use their discretion. Meanwhile, comparative public administration seeks to understand the impact of country-specific characteristics on administrative acting. Applying this perspective to research on street-level bureaucracies, the overarching aim of the seminar is to understand why street-level discretion use might systematically vary across different countries in Europe. Comparative public administration offers typologies that structure states along certain administrative profiles. Based thereupon, the seminar seeks to identify different features of such profiles that affect how street-level bureaucrats use their discretion.
For this, the students will firstly become familiar with the approaches put forth in comparative public administration as well as the theoretical foundations of the street-level bureaucracy literature. Afterwards, we will establish a concept and operationalization for systematizing and measuring street-level discretion use across European countries as dependent variable. As another step, we will determine factors that might cause country-level variation in frontline administrative acting and how to empirically assess them. The students’ presentations will then try to answer how these factors as independent variables shape street-level bureaucrats’ discretion use within a country of a given administrative profile. Moreover, building on these insights one presentation is supposed to perform a final comparison to establish which country-level factors matter for street-level bureaucrats’ discretionary actions and decisions.
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