Varieties of Entrepreneurship Policy: Explaining Differences in Regional Entrepreneurship Policy. A Comparison of the 16 German Federal States.

Panel: Conceptualizing and theorizing the content of public policies. Entrepreneurship has been increasingly at the center of attention as the expectation of economic innovation and growth is associated with start-ups. Start-ups are founded in the context of start-up-related framework conditions, which can be political, economic and social factors. These framework conditions shape a national or regional start-up location and influence the number and chances of success of start-ups. Many of these factors can be influenced by national and regional policies. In recent years there has been extensive research on what entrepreneurship policies should look like in economic sciences. However, there is “a paucity of research on the actual policy practices of governments” (Stevenson/Lundström 2007:104). Public policy scholars have contributed very little to entrepreneurship research. The few studies that were conducted on the typologies of entrepreneurship policies mainly focused on the national level (Verheul et al. 2002; Lundström/Stevenson 2005). They show that entrepreneurship policies can differ and pursue different policy goals such as promoting innovative high-growth start-ups or implementing active labor market policies. Furthermore, entrepreneurship policy is characterized by a regionalization of economic policies, since start-ups are especially affected by sub-national and regional factors. In general, the literature lacks contributions on decision-making processes in this policy field. The stakeholder distribution is unclear as well as the determinants of policy direction and the choice of policy instruments, particularly at the sub-national level, which implements the majority of programs. This is especially true for Germany, which has mainly been the subject of some descriptive research on national entrepreneurship policies. In my paper I address the question, which entrepreneurship programs exist at the federal state level in Germany and which conditions explain the different entrepreneurship policies. For this purpose, I analyze 198 entrepreneurship programs (December 2018) of the 16 German federal states and categorize them according to a new typology of start-up programs which displays four different policy approaches. I intend to run two QCAs to test hypotheses on the determinants of different policy approaches in the federal states based on the level of expenditure for these programs. The first QCA aims to explain the total expenditure on start-up programs by the federal states. The second QCA has as objective to explain the share of spending for specific program types within the global expenditure for entrepreneurship programs. The afore-presented typology will be used to differentiate between programs. The theoretical framework and hypotheses are derived from five public policy theories: socioeconomics literature, comparative economic advantages, partisan theory, industrial relations literature and socialist heritage hypothesis. With my paper I contribute to the debate on theorizing the content of public policies by proposing a new categorization for policy instruments in the field of entrepreneurship policy. Furthermore, I will link the choice of policy programs with a set of political determinants and thus provide a first attempt to explain government action in the field of entrepreneurship policy. Hence, my paper represents one of the first theoretical and empirical contributions from the perspective of political science to entrepreneurship research.