Steffen Eckhard
Biographic Data
| ID | 4379068 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Steffen Eckhard |
| GIVEN NAMES | Steffen |
| FAMILY NAME | Eckhard |
| SIGNATURE | ECKHARD S |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Konstanz |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-5320-0730 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 24 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 139 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 24 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2013 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 8 |
The Language of Public Encounters
Verbal communication between bureaucrats and citizens crucially determines the dynamics and outcomes of public encounters. However, so far, scholars have not sought to quantitively measure it, which limits our knowledge of the role language plays in shaping interactions between bureaucrats and clients. Addressing this gap, we develop and systematically validate computational linguistic measures of complexity and emotionality as two foundational d…
Equity and equality in street-level public service delivery
Street-level workers are crucial to promoting equity and equality in public service delivery. Their discretionary decisions can either perpetuate biases and stereotypes or enhance equity by acknowledging citizen-clients’ diverse social backgrounds. While current research often focuses on the micro-level behaviors of street-level bureaucrats (SLBs), there is limited exploration of how societal structures, historical patterns, and cultural beliefs …
Inequality in frontline communication
While gender biases in public service delivery are well-established, we still lack empirical insights on the underlying behavioral micro-mechanisms. This article contributes toward closing this perennial gap by investigating gender differences in the complexity and emotionality of verbal bureaucrat-client communication. We build on a dataset comprising 154 dialogs recorded across different local public services in Germany. Combining rule-based an…
Ready, set, crisis – transitioning to crisis mode in local public administration
Local public administrations are typically the first responders during disruptive crisis events. Building on literature on fast-response organizations, this study theorizes on their ability to transition effectively from routine bureaucracy to crisis mode. Empirically, we study early responses to COVID-19 in Germany with agency-level survey data. The findings suggest that an effective switch between practices cannot be explained by crisis severit…
Local Knowledges in International Peacebuilding
There is widespread consensus among peacebuilding practitioners and scholars on the importance of integrating local knowledge into the design, planning, and implementation of international peace interventions. However, the concept of local knowledge remains undertheorized, and the dynamics of local knowledge integration in international activities have not yet been fully explored. This paper reconceptualizes “local knowledge” in peacebuilding as …
Linguistic Features of Public Service Encounters
Spoken administrative language is a critical element in the relationship between citizens and the state, especially when it comes to face-to-face interactions between officials and citizens during the delivery of public services. But preceding work offers little insights into the verbal features of street-level bureaucracy. Drawing on communication studies, we argue that administrative language differs along both a relational and an informational…
Institutional design and biases in evaluation reports by international organizations
Governments spend hundreds of millions on evaluations to assess the performance of public organizations. In this article, we scrutinize whether variation in the institutional design of evaluation systems leads to biases in evaluation findings. Biases may emerge because influence over evaluation processes could enable the bureaucracy to present its work in a more positive way. We study evaluation reports published by nine international organizatio…
Conceptualizing and Explaining Flexibility in Administrative Crisis Management
Flexibility in administrative crisis management is a frequently reported determinant for a successful crisis response. But there is little agreement about how to conceptualize, measure, and explain flexibility. We use a three-dimensional measure of administrative flexibility, capturing employees’ decision leeway, staff mobility, and organizational innovation in a crisis response. We then develop and test an explanation of variation in flexibility…
International bureaucrats in the UN Security Council debates
Intergovernmental deliberations in the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) are typically considered the realm of sovereign nation states. We challenge this position by studying the role of the UN Secretariat in UNSC debates, focusing on the debates on Afghanistan (1995–2017). We combine natural language processing with a network theoretical perspective to observe speaker position, topic introduction, and topic evolution and we complement this …
Avoiding disciplinary garbage cans
In this article, we distinguish two approaches to studying international public administrations (IPAs). On the one hand, there is a line of research that is grounded in traditional Public Administration (PA) and seeks to understand IPAs through established disciplinary lenses. On the other hand, scholars conceive IPAs as posing new problems and questions and are trying to integrate the standpoints of their respective disciplines into a broader re…
International bureaucracy and the United Nations system
Built on the administrative system of the League of Nations, since the Second World War, the United Nations has grown into a sizeable, complex and multilevel system of several dozen international bureaucracies. Outside of a brief period in the 1980s, and despite growing scholarship on international public administrations over the past two decades, there have been few publications in the International Review of Administrative Sciences on the evolu…
Staff recruitment and geographical representation in international organizations
What explains geographical representation in the professional staff of intergovernmental organizations (IOs)? We address this question from an organizational perspective by considering IO recruitment processes. In the United Nations (UN) system, recruitment processes are designed to ensure bureaucratic merit, with experience and education being the relevant merit criteria. We develop and test a supply-side theory, postulating that differences in …
Latent Hybridity in Administrative Crisis Management
Studying the so-called refugee crisis in Germany, this article asks about the effectiveness of crisis management by a large number of local administrations, each acting upon the same crisis impulse of a high number of asylum seekers who entered the country in 2015 and 2016. Instead of theorizing the exact administrative design features fit for an effective crisis response, the focus is on the ability of administrations to adjust. We conceptualize…
Bridging the citizen gap
Bureaucratic representation theory holds that civil servants are not “neutral” in a Weberian sense. Bureaucrats are thought to “actively” represent their communities by trying to make them better off. This article proposes an alternative understanding of individual behavior in representation that emphasizes knowledge sharing instead of patronage, but leads to similar outcomes: Their societal background provides officials with advanced social know…
Policy Implementation by International Organizations
Strengths and weaknesses of IO staff Policy implementation in an intergovernmental organization (IGO) takes the form of co-implementation by two staff groups: international officials and national staffers recruited from the host state. This paper conceptualizes and empirically evaluates the relative strengths and weaknesses of the two groups. Based on an original staff survey, it finds as one distinct strength of international staff their imparti…
Explaining the political use of evaluation in international organizations
Despite a growing literature on the politics of evaluation in international organizations (IOs) and beyond, little is known about whether political or administrative stakeholders indeed realize ex-ante political interests through evaluations. This is, however, especially important considering the booming business of evaluation and the proliferation of institutional assessments both in domestic and international politics. We argue that formally in…
Reform efforts, synchronization failure, and international bureaucracy
International organizations (IOs) and their bureaucracies frequently face calls for reform. To express discontent and exert reform pressure, member states can withhold their budgetary contributions to IOs. In extreme cases, these cuts result in organizational crises during which reform efforts become unavoidable, as happened in UNESCO after 2011. Traditional IR research sees member states as being in the driver's seat when it comes to achieving –…
The politics of evaluation in international organizations
While the political nature of evaluation is widely recognized, few attempts exist to conceptualize and compare these politics. This article develops the concept of evaluation stakeholder influence potential, which builds on four political resources for influence (agenda-setting powers, staff and budgetary resources, access to evaluation results, and access to evaluators). These resources are measured for both member states and international publi…
Comparing how peace operations enable or restrict the influence of national staff
A large share of civilian staff working in international peace operations are nationals of the host state. Academic research has not yet investigated the effect of these locally recruited bureaucrats on peacebuilding. Theoretically, it is argued that to accomplish their missions in complex environments, peace operations require crucial knowledge about local perceptions, politics, and customs. Local staff can have a positive performance impact by …
International Assistance to Police Reform
This book compares police reform operations in Kosovo and Afghanistan, addressing the internal machinery that makes peace operations work—or not. Recognizing that the chances for effective peacebuildi
International bureaucracies and their influence on policy-making
Although we find considerable literature on international organizations and their bureaucratic interior, there has been little effort to systematically synthesize empirical research across the different academic disciplines examining how international bureaucracies affect policy-making at an international level. This contribution reviews existing research on the policy influence of international bureaucracies published during the past 50 years. A…
Political guidance or autonomy in peacebuilding? EU police reform in Afghanistan and Kosovo
Reviewing findings from the recent institutional turn in peacebuilding research, this article identifies two conflicting arguments with respect to institutional designs that affect the performance of peace operations. One perspective favours functional decentralization and mission latitude, while the other perspective argues that a lack of political guidance strips mission leadership of their authority vis-à-vis local power brokers and reduces th…
Administrative styles in the European Commission and the OSCE Secretariat
With the growing importance of international institutions for global governance, international bureaucracies gain increasing influence on policy-making. Whereas for national bureaucracies specific administrative styles have been identified, this contribution explores for the first time administrative styles of two international organizations. The European Union (EU) Commission and the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) re…
Bureaucratic Representation and Ethnic Bureaucratic Drift
The article combines research on postconflict management with public administration research by presenting a single case study on the United Nations interim administration in Kosovo. To investigate the reasons for the UN mission’s failure to implement its policies on minority relations, the study turns toward local municipal bureaucracies and offers a two-part causal argument that derives from principal–agent theory and bureaucratic representatio…
Bridging the citizen gap
Bureaucratic representation theory holds that civil servants are not “neutral” in a Weberian sense. Bureaucrats are thought to “actively” represent their communities by trying to make them better off. This article proposes an alternative understanding of individual behavior in representation that emphasizes knowledge sharing instead of patronage, but leads to similar outcomes: Their societal background provides officials with advanced social know…
Latent Hybridity in Administrative Crisis Management
Studying the so-called refugee crisis in Germany, this article asks about the effectiveness of crisis management by a large number of local administrations, each acting upon the same crisis impulse of a high number of asylum seekers who entered the country in 2015 and 2016. Instead of theorizing the exact administrative design features fit for an effective crisis response, the focus is on the ability of administrations to adjust. We conceptualize…
Administrative styles in the European Commission and the OSCE Secretariat
With the growing importance of international institutions for global governance, international bureaucracies gain increasing influence on policy-making. Whereas for national bureaucracies specific administrative styles have been identified, this contribution explores for the first time administrative styles of two international organizations. The European Union (EU) Commission and the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) re…
Linguistic Features of Public Service Encounters
Spoken administrative language is a critical element in the relationship between citizens and the state, especially when it comes to face-to-face interactions between officials and citizens during the delivery of public services. But preceding work offers little insights into the verbal features of street-level bureaucracy. Drawing on communication studies, we argue that administrative language differs along both a relational and an informational…
Conceptualizing and Explaining Flexibility in Administrative Crisis Management
Flexibility in administrative crisis management is a frequently reported determinant for a successful crisis response. But there is little agreement about how to conceptualize, measure, and explain flexibility. We use a three-dimensional measure of administrative flexibility, capturing employees’ decision leeway, staff mobility, and organizational innovation in a crisis response. We then develop and test an explanation of variation in flexibility…
Comparing how peace operations enable or restrict the influence of national staff
A large share of civilian staff working in international peace operations are nationals of the host state. Academic research has not yet investigated the effect of these locally recruited bureaucrats on peacebuilding. Theoretically, it is argued that to accomplish their missions in complex environments, peace operations require crucial knowledge about local perceptions, politics, and customs. Local staff can have a positive performance impact by …
Reform efforts, synchronization failure, and international bureaucracy
International organizations (IOs) and their bureaucracies frequently face calls for reform. To express discontent and exert reform pressure, member states can withhold their budgetary contributions to IOs. In extreme cases, these cuts result in organizational crises during which reform efforts become unavoidable, as happened in UNESCO after 2011. Traditional IR research sees member states as being in the driver's seat when it comes to achieving –…
Policy Implementation by International Organizations
Strengths and weaknesses of IO staff Policy implementation in an intergovernmental organization (IGO) takes the form of co-implementation by two staff groups: international officials and national staffers recruited from the host state. This paper conceptualizes and empirically evaluates the relative strengths and weaknesses of the two groups. Based on an original staff survey, it finds as one distinct strength of international staff their imparti…
International bureaucrats in the UN Security Council debates
Intergovernmental deliberations in the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) are typically considered the realm of sovereign nation states. We challenge this position by studying the role of the UN Secretariat in UNSC debates, focusing on the debates on Afghanistan (1995–2017). We combine natural language processing with a network theoretical perspective to observe speaker position, topic introduction, and topic evolution and we complement this …
Explaining the political use of evaluation in international organizations
Despite a growing literature on the politics of evaluation in international organizations (IOs) and beyond, little is known about whether political or administrative stakeholders indeed realize ex-ante political interests through evaluations. This is, however, especially important considering the booming business of evaluation and the proliferation of institutional assessments both in domestic and international politics. We argue that formally in…
The politics of evaluation in international organizations
While the political nature of evaluation is widely recognized, few attempts exist to conceptualize and compare these politics. This article develops the concept of evaluation stakeholder influence potential, which builds on four political resources for influence (agenda-setting powers, staff and budgetary resources, access to evaluation results, and access to evaluators). These resources are measured for both member states and international publi…
Bureaucratic Representation and Ethnic Bureaucratic Drift
The article combines research on postconflict management with public administration research by presenting a single case study on the United Nations interim administration in Kosovo. To investigate the reasons for the UN mission’s failure to implement its policies on minority relations, the study turns toward local municipal bureaucracies and offers a two-part causal argument that derives from principal–agent theory and bureaucratic representatio…
Staff recruitment and geographical representation in international organizations
What explains geographical representation in the professional staff of intergovernmental organizations (IOs)? We address this question from an organizational perspective by considering IO recruitment processes. In the United Nations (UN) system, recruitment processes are designed to ensure bureaucratic merit, with experience and education being the relevant merit criteria. We develop and test a supply-side theory, postulating that differences in …
Local Knowledges in International Peacebuilding
There is widespread consensus among peacebuilding practitioners and scholars on the importance of integrating local knowledge into the design, planning, and implementation of international peace interventions. However, the concept of local knowledge remains undertheorized, and the dynamics of local knowledge integration in international activities have not yet been fully explored. This paper reconceptualizes “local knowledge” in peacebuilding as …
International bureaucracy and the United Nations system
Built on the administrative system of the League of Nations, since the Second World War, the United Nations has grown into a sizeable, complex and multilevel system of several dozen international bureaucracies. Outside of a brief period in the 1980s, and despite growing scholarship on international public administrations over the past two decades, there have been few publications in the International Review of Administrative Sciences on the evolu…
Avoiding disciplinary garbage cans
In this article, we distinguish two approaches to studying international public administrations (IPAs). On the one hand, there is a line of research that is grounded in traditional Public Administration (PA) and seeks to understand IPAs through established disciplinary lenses. On the other hand, scholars conceive IPAs as posing new problems and questions and are trying to integrate the standpoints of their respective disciplines into a broader re…
Political guidance or autonomy in peacebuilding? EU police reform in Afghanistan and Kosovo
Reviewing findings from the recent institutional turn in peacebuilding research, this article identifies two conflicting arguments with respect to institutional designs that affect the performance of peace operations. One perspective favours functional decentralization and mission latitude, while the other perspective argues that a lack of political guidance strips mission leadership of their authority vis-à-vis local power brokers and reduces th…
Bureaucratic Representation and Ethnic Bureaucratic Drift
The article combines research on postconflict management with public administration research by presenting a single case study on the United Nations interim administration in Kosovo. To investigate the reasons for the UN mission’s failure to implement its policies on minority relations, the study turns toward local municipal bureaucracies and offers a two-part causal argument that derives from principal–agent theory and bureaucratic representatio…
International Assistance to Police Reform
This book compares police reform operations in Kosovo and Afghanistan, addressing the internal machinery that makes peace operations work—or not. Recognizing that the chances for effective peacebuildi
International bureaucracies and their influence on policy-making
Although we find considerable literature on international organizations and their bureaucratic interior, there has been little effort to systematically synthesize empirical research across the different academic disciplines examining how international bureaucracies affect policy-making at an international level. This contribution reviews existing research on the policy influence of international bureaucracies published during the past 50 years. A…
Political guidance or autonomy in peacebuilding? EU police reform in Afghanistan and Kosovo
Reviewing findings from the recent institutional turn in peacebuilding research, this article identifies two conflicting arguments with respect to institutional designs that affect the performance of peace operations. One perspective favours functional decentralization and mission latitude, while the other perspective argues that a lack of political guidance strips mission leadership of their authority vis-à-vis local power brokers and reduces th…
Administrative styles in the European Commission and the OSCE Secretariat
With the growing importance of international institutions for global governance, international bureaucracies gain increasing influence on policy-making. Whereas for national bureaucracies specific administrative styles have been identified, this contribution explores for the first time administrative styles of two international organizations. The European Union (EU) Commission and the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) re…
The politics of evaluation in international organizations
While the political nature of evaluation is widely recognized, few attempts exist to conceptualize and compare these politics. This article develops the concept of evaluation stakeholder influence potential, which builds on four political resources for influence (agenda-setting powers, staff and budgetary resources, access to evaluation results, and access to evaluators). These resources are measured for both member states and international publi…
Comparing how peace operations enable or restrict the influence of national staff
A large share of civilian staff working in international peace operations are nationals of the host state. Academic research has not yet investigated the effect of these locally recruited bureaucrats on peacebuilding. Theoretically, it is argued that to accomplish their missions in complex environments, peace operations require crucial knowledge about local perceptions, politics, and customs. Local staff can have a positive performance impact by …
Reform efforts, synchronization failure, and international bureaucracy
International organizations (IOs) and their bureaucracies frequently face calls for reform. To express discontent and exert reform pressure, member states can withhold their budgetary contributions to IOs. In extreme cases, these cuts result in organizational crises during which reform efforts become unavoidable, as happened in UNESCO after 2011. Traditional IR research sees member states as being in the driver's seat when it comes to achieving –…
Policy Implementation by International Organizations
Strengths and weaknesses of IO staff Policy implementation in an intergovernmental organization (IGO) takes the form of co-implementation by two staff groups: international officials and national staffers recruited from the host state. This paper conceptualizes and empirically evaluates the relative strengths and weaknesses of the two groups. Based on an original staff survey, it finds as one distinct strength of international staff their imparti…
Explaining the political use of evaluation in international organizations
Despite a growing literature on the politics of evaluation in international organizations (IOs) and beyond, little is known about whether political or administrative stakeholders indeed realize ex-ante political interests through evaluations. This is, however, especially important considering the booming business of evaluation and the proliferation of institutional assessments both in domestic and international politics. We argue that formally in…
Avoiding disciplinary garbage cans
In this article, we distinguish two approaches to studying international public administrations (IPAs). On the one hand, there is a line of research that is grounded in traditional Public Administration (PA) and seeks to understand IPAs through established disciplinary lenses. On the other hand, scholars conceive IPAs as posing new problems and questions and are trying to integrate the standpoints of their respective disciplines into a broader re…
International bureaucracy and the United Nations system
Built on the administrative system of the League of Nations, since the Second World War, the United Nations has grown into a sizeable, complex and multilevel system of several dozen international bureaucracies. Outside of a brief period in the 1980s, and despite growing scholarship on international public administrations over the past two decades, there have been few publications in the International Review of Administrative Sciences on the evolu…
Staff recruitment and geographical representation in international organizations
What explains geographical representation in the professional staff of intergovernmental organizations (IOs)? We address this question from an organizational perspective by considering IO recruitment processes. In the United Nations (UN) system, recruitment processes are designed to ensure bureaucratic merit, with experience and education being the relevant merit criteria. We develop and test a supply-side theory, postulating that differences in …
Latent Hybridity in Administrative Crisis Management
Studying the so-called refugee crisis in Germany, this article asks about the effectiveness of crisis management by a large number of local administrations, each acting upon the same crisis impulse of a high number of asylum seekers who entered the country in 2015 and 2016. Instead of theorizing the exact administrative design features fit for an effective crisis response, the focus is on the ability of administrations to adjust. We conceptualize…
Bridging the citizen gap
Bureaucratic representation theory holds that civil servants are not “neutral” in a Weberian sense. Bureaucrats are thought to “actively” represent their communities by trying to make them better off. This article proposes an alternative understanding of individual behavior in representation that emphasizes knowledge sharing instead of patronage, but leads to similar outcomes: Their societal background provides officials with advanced social know…
Institutional design and biases in evaluation reports by international organizations
Governments spend hundreds of millions on evaluations to assess the performance of public organizations. In this article, we scrutinize whether variation in the institutional design of evaluation systems leads to biases in evaluation findings. Biases may emerge because influence over evaluation processes could enable the bureaucracy to present its work in a more positive way. We study evaluation reports published by nine international organizatio…
Conceptualizing and Explaining Flexibility in Administrative Crisis Management
Flexibility in administrative crisis management is a frequently reported determinant for a successful crisis response. But there is little agreement about how to conceptualize, measure, and explain flexibility. We use a three-dimensional measure of administrative flexibility, capturing employees’ decision leeway, staff mobility, and organizational innovation in a crisis response. We then develop and test an explanation of variation in flexibility…
International bureaucrats in the UN Security Council debates
Intergovernmental deliberations in the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) are typically considered the realm of sovereign nation states. We challenge this position by studying the role of the UN Secretariat in UNSC debates, focusing on the debates on Afghanistan (1995–2017). We combine natural language processing with a network theoretical perspective to observe speaker position, topic introduction, and topic evolution and we complement this …
Ready, set, crisis – transitioning to crisis mode in local public administration
Local public administrations are typically the first responders during disruptive crisis events. Building on literature on fast-response organizations, this study theorizes on their ability to transition effectively from routine bureaucracy to crisis mode. Empirically, we study early responses to COVID-19 in Germany with agency-level survey data. The findings suggest that an effective switch between practices cannot be explained by crisis severit…
Local Knowledges in International Peacebuilding
There is widespread consensus among peacebuilding practitioners and scholars on the importance of integrating local knowledge into the design, planning, and implementation of international peace interventions. However, the concept of local knowledge remains undertheorized, and the dynamics of local knowledge integration in international activities have not yet been fully explored. This paper reconceptualizes “local knowledge” in peacebuilding as …
Linguistic Features of Public Service Encounters
Spoken administrative language is a critical element in the relationship between citizens and the state, especially when it comes to face-to-face interactions between officials and citizens during the delivery of public services. But preceding work offers little insights into the verbal features of street-level bureaucracy. Drawing on communication studies, we argue that administrative language differs along both a relational and an informational…
Equity and equality in street-level public service delivery
Street-level workers are crucial to promoting equity and equality in public service delivery. Their discretionary decisions can either perpetuate biases and stereotypes or enhance equity by acknowledging citizen-clients’ diverse social backgrounds. While current research often focuses on the micro-level behaviors of street-level bureaucrats (SLBs), there is limited exploration of how societal structures, historical patterns, and cultural beliefs …
Inequality in frontline communication
While gender biases in public service delivery are well-established, we still lack empirical insights on the underlying behavioral micro-mechanisms. This article contributes toward closing this perennial gap by investigating gender differences in the complexity and emotionality of verbal bureaucrat-client communication. We build on a dataset comprising 154 dialogs recorded across different local public services in Germany. Combining rule-based an…
The Language of Public Encounters
Verbal communication between bureaucrats and citizens crucially determines the dynamics and outcomes of public encounters. However, so far, scholars have not sought to quantitively measure it, which limits our knowledge of the role language plays in shaping interactions between bureaucrats and clients. Addressing this gap, we develop and systematically validate computational linguistic measures of complexity and emotionality as two foundational d…
Political science (21 works) · Law (16 works) · Public Administration (16 works) · Politics (15 works) · Law (14 works) · Public Administration (14 works) · Public Policy and Administration Research (14 works) · Bureaucracy (13 works) · Public relations (12 works) · Sociology (11 works)