How often, for what reasons, and with what effects do governments reallocate jurisdictions among ministries? These questions are essential for various subfields of political science and public administration. Among others, they help us understand coalition formation, political agenda-setting dynamics, policy-making processes, and the determinants of administrative reform. Despite this broad relevance, there has been surprisingly little systematic analysis of changes in government portfolios over time. Furthermore, existing research is limited in various ways. Its empirical reach is often selective by focusing on short time periods or specific portfolios (e.g. the core executive or new ministries like environmental affairs) and thus cannot provide an overall picture of change. Furthermore, changes are often measured rather crudely based on easily available indicators such as the name of the ministry that miss shifts of jurisdictions between ministries. Finally, many studies of changes in ministerial jurisdictions are descriptive and offer little theoretical insights into what factors drive these changes and what consequences they have.
This paper introduces a research project that studies the development of ministerial jurisdictions over the entire history of (West) Germany and presents first findings for the foundational period of the 1950s. Our main focus is on the first major cabinet reform in 1957, which according to Chancellor Adenauer was designed to improve government effectiveness and efficiency by restricting the size of ministries and by delimiting and rearranging their jurisdictions in a coherent way. While this explanation is in line with the predominant view of earlier public administration research, it is challenged by more recent scholarship that emphasizes the political logic of portfolio design. From this perspective, shifts in jurisdictions are part of a broader political deal that is based on politicians’ policy, office, and vote concerns rather than the search for an administratively efficient solution.
To adjudicate between these claims, we measure jurisdictions and their change at the level of working units (Referate) within ministries, which allows us to capture jurisdictional change on a more nuanced level than previous research. Our analysis first describes the amount of change and the jurisdictions that were moved between ministries in the 1957 reform and the years preceding it. We then analyze to what extent this reform led to a concentration of substantively related jurisdictions within specific ministries as predicted by the efficiency-oriented explanation. Afterwards, we discuss the relevance of political factors such as the political power of the minister, his relationship to the Chancellor, and the electoral salience of different jurisdictions. Beyond the empirical case covered, the paper develops a novel approach to measuring jurisdictional changes and competing theoretical explanations for such changes that are applicable beyond the German context.
