Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin - Politik und Verwaltung

European Regional Elite Survey

 

Contact & mailing list | Data protection | State of the art | Publications | Sample interview questions

 

Introduction

Welcome to our homepage supporting the European Regional Elite Survey. My name is Michael W. Bauer, I am Professor for Politics and Public Administration at the Humboldt University of Berlin, Germany. I am directing a research group together with Prof. Dr. Michaël Tatham and Phlipp Studinger that is funded by the German Science Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft). We are interested in regional elites in the EU.

 

We are conducting interviews with regional elites across Europe concerning their view of Europe and the European Union. In addition to the questions about the European Union we ask about the professional career of the interviewee and other standard demographic research questions. Our study aims at contributing to the field of comparative political sciences and to the understanding of the relationships between the Regions and the European Union.

 

The survey is aiming exclusively at scientific objectives. All information will be treated strictly confidentially and will be used neither for commercial, nor political nor journalistic purposes. The data protection laws of Germany – among the strictest world wide – apply to our project and are seriously followed. The information is serving only scientific purposes and will be treated completely anonymously.

If you are from one of the institutions we selected to be included in our survey I would appreciate very much your support of the research project and your permission to interview some of your employees. Please do not hesitate to contact me or my colleagues directly if you have any questions. Of course, we will be pleased to provide you with the results of our research.

 

Best regards,
Michael W. Bauer & Michaël Tatham

 


 

Contact and mailing list

 

Michael W. Bauer: mw.bauer[at]sowi.hu-berlin.de

Michaël Tatham: tatham.michael[at]gmail.com

If you want to be kept up-to-date about the survey and the results, you can join our mailing list by sending an email to bekerste[at]cms.hu-berlin.de (subject: ‘Regional Elite Survey’).

 


 

Data protection

German

Die von uns erhobenen Daten unterliegen dem Berliner Landesdatenschutzgesetz (BlnDSG). Wir verweisen dabei insbesondere auf § 8 (Datengeheimnis) und § 30 zum Umgang mit Daten bei der wissenschaftlichen Forschung.

Alle Angaben in der Befragung sind anonym. Namen und Kontaktdaten (z.B. die E-Mail-Adresse) sind nicht mit den Angaben aus der Befragung verknüpft. Es ist nicht möglich, Rückschlüsse von den Antworten auf die antwortende Person zu ziehen. Dies liegt ohnehin nicht in unserem wissenschaftlichen Interesse, da wir nicht an einzelnen Antworten, sondern an den Aggregatdaten, d.h. den zusammengefassten Individualdaten, interessiert sind.

Die Angaben zur Person werden weder in einer Form ausgewertet, dass es theoretisch Rückschlüsse zuließe, noch wird der Datensatz in solcher Form publiziert, dass dies möglich wäre.

 

English

All data is subject to the Berlin Data Protection Act (BlnDSG). We are in particular referring to § 8 (data secrecy) and § 30 (processing of data for research).

All information is anonymous. Names and contact data (e.g. email addresses) are not linked to other survey data. It is not possible to trace answers back to individual respondents. This is not in our scientific interest anyway, as we are looking for aggregate data, not individual responses.

Neither our analysis nor resulting publications will allow for such tracing of personal data.

 


 

State of the art

Regions and subnational authorities regularly come into focus when political scientists attempt to pinpoint changes in European political systems. Scholars have identified a longstanding trend of regionalization and decentralization as a contributing factor to current processes of western European state transformation (Keating 1998,2008). It has also been shown empirically that – in particular in the European Union – political authority has moved consistently downwards to subnational levels over the last five decades (Marks/Hooghe/Schakel 2008). In addition, the diminishing ability of national governments to comprehensively control subnational authorities’ involvement in European policy-making must also be taken as evidence that supports claims regarding the emergence of a multilevel governance system (Hooghe/Marks 2001).

Such research endeavours constitute the background for a lively academic debate about the reality and the relevance of changing patterns of subnational governance in the EU (Marks 1992; Hooghe 1995; Bauer/Börzel 2010). Moreover, the alleged significance of subnational actors and subnational politics goes far beyond purely academic interest. Several studies have pointed out that subnational authorities play a crucial role in the implementation of EU legislation (Maher 1996; Mols/Haslam 2008; Borghetto/Franchino 2009). According to estimates, between 70 percent and 80 percent of EU decisions and programmes require implementation by subnational authorities (Christiansen/Lintner 2005). Despite their apparent theoretical significance and practical relevance, however, we know little about regional elites, who they actually are and how they perceive the role of their political authorities in the emerging European multilevel system.

(Text and references are taken from the Chair's fourth Working Paper: Michael W. Bauer, Diana Pitschel & Philipp Studinger, Governance Preferences of Subnational Administrative Elites in the European Union - An Empirical Analysis)

 


 

Publications

Bauer, Michael W., Pitschel, Diana & Studinger, Philipp (2009). Regional Perceptions of the Subnational Dimension of Multilevel Governance. Insights from a Comparative Survey Project, in CoR (Ed.), The Cahiers of the Committee of the Regions. Volume I – 2009. Towards Multi-Level Governance in Europe?, Brussels,81-85.

 

Bauer, Michael W., Pitschel, Diana & Studinger, Philipp (2008). Subnationale Mobilisierung in den neuen EU-Mitgliedstaaten: Governance-Leitbilder subnationaler Verwaltungseliten in Polen und Ungarn, in Europäisches Zentrum für Föderalismus-Forschung (Ed.), Jahrbuch des Föderalismus 2008, Baden-Baden: Nomos, 599-611.

 

(Please also have a look at Chair's fourth Working Paper: Michael W. Bauer, Diana Pitschel & Philipp Studinger, Governance Preferences of Subnational Administrative Elites in the European Union - An Empirical Analysis)

 


Postanschrift

 

Sitz

Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
Kultur-, Sozial- und Bildungswissenschaftliche Fakultät
Institut für Sozialwissenschaften
Unter den Linden 6
10099 Berlin

 

 

Institut für Sozialwissenschaften
Universitätsstraße 3b
10117 Berlin

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