Policy analysis today is not only one of the most important sub-disciplines of political science in Germany, but it is also an integral part of the discipline internationally and has contributed significantly to scientific debates, theory and methods developments. This introductory chapter gives a short overview of the discipline of policy analysis in Germany, its history and its main characteristics. An argument running as a common thread throughout the book is thereby developed, namely, that there is a typically German dualism between academic and applied policy analysis. Also focusing on this aspect, we discuss some of the main findings and arguments of the book chapters within this volume. Against that background, we then provide an outlook on German policy analysis on its way towards further professionalisation.

This book offers the first comprehensive review of policy analysis activities in Germany. This profound knowledge on the status quo is of high practical relevance for the future development of policy analysis in the different spheres where it is practised. Not least, the book aims to identify possible ways to extenuate the German divide between academic and applied policy analysis.

The past: policy analysis as a discipline in Germany

Establishment of the discipline

State-centred societies such as Germany often have a long tradition of political administration as well as internal and external education and advice to political administrators and decision-makers. So the forerunners of policy analysis in Germany – for example, studies on the ‘good policeyen’ – can be traced back well into the 18th and even the 17th centuries. In the early 19th century academically inspired, groundbreaking reforms of state and administrative structures, the Stein-Hardenberg Reforms, established Prussia as a role model of modern and efficient state administration, and helped push one of the poorest German countries into the first rank of the Deutsche Länder (see Chapter 2). On the other hand, policy analysis as a discipline and in its modern form has only developed since the 1970s, when it was first applied in the policy reforms of the social-liberal coalition governing Germany. While academic policy advice in the 1950s had been exclusively given by the legal professions and in the 1960s was accompanied by economists, social scientists then entered the field (Müller-Rommel, 1984).