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Daniel Schamburek

This work is based on Daniel Schamburek's doctoral thesis. Using immigration and integration policy between 1990 and ca. 2015 as a case study, this book demonstrates that German regional (L?nder) governments vary greatly in the way they allocate policy jurisdictions to ministers and in the way they are organized below the ministerial level. German federal states have significant competences not only in the implementation of federal immigration and integration legislation, but also in setting their own priorities. State minister presidents and the government parties may create new ministries in salient policy areas, or allocate specific jurisdictions to particular ministries and ministers. This work seeks to chart and explain cross-state and diachronic variations in these patterns. Empirically, the allocations of policy jurisdictions in the areas of immigration and integration policies can, for example, be located in ministries of social affairs; justice; the interior; or in specific ministries for integration. They can be attached to the head of government's office - or there may be no ministry with responsibility for immigration and integration at all. In the latter case, governments may appoint a commissioner for immigrant affairs. Responsibilities may be dispersed across a number of ministries or concentrated in a single one. Within departmental hierarchies, policy responsibilities may be located at a relatively high level of, say, a directorate or lower levels such groups or units. Not only do such organizational decisions affect policy co-ordination, they may affect the content of policy depending on the minister's main departmental responsibility (e.g., interior versus justice) and ideological orientation (e.g., conservative versus Green party). Based on a wealth of qualitative and quantitative evidence and a framework derived from actor-centred new institutionalism, Daniel Schamburek shows that such organizational decisions are patterned by the attention paid to the relevant policy areas in a particular state and at a particular point in time, the ideological orientations of the government parties and ministers and institutional factors. He concludes that organizational decisions of this type are strongly influenced by political rather than path-dependent or functional imperatives.

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