Structure and Organisation of Government Project – SOG-PRO

Why are some administrative organizations successfully created, frequently reorganized, merged, or terminated, whereas others are seemingly
‘immortal’ and become more powerful than the elected politicians that created and control them? This question has become pertinent, especially in past three decades, within European parliamentary democracies. By the end of the 1970s, when the golden era of welfare state expansion and state growth came to an end, a new generation of political leaders such as President Ronald Reagan of the United States and Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher of the United Kingdom initiated a series of administrative reform trajectories – privatization, deregulation, agencification, liberalization, decentralization, and New Public Management – with the aim to fundamentally alter the scope and scale of central government and sparked off several reform trajectories across the developed and developing economies.
This project develops and applies a novel framework that will systematically map and explain organizational changes within central government crossnationally in four European parliamentary democracies, France, Germany