Evolutionary Government: Origins and Consequences of Structural Change in Government

Why do government structures change? Traditionally, the answer refers to political parties exercising control over a state bureaucracy.

Yet government structures have been changing ever since they emerged alongside the modern state and thus already before parties existed.

The recent decline of party government worldwide also begs the question whether other actors and mechanisms matter that have been underestimated so far.

Meanwhile, it became a truism that structure shapes policy, but existing research focuses on other effects of structural change in government, such as democratic and economic outcomes or cabinet governance.

We lack systematic analyses of how structural change affects government policy.To address these gaps, STATE-DNA studies the change of units inside ministries and agencies as the building blocks of the modern state.

It submits a novel theory of evolutionary government that regards structural change in government as an interplay between a units structural features and its organizational and environmental environment.

This notion of multiple levels allows to study more than party-centric causes of change and, for the first time, to analyze the effects on government policy explicitly, as evolutionary consequences managed by distinct units.STATE-DNA breaks new ground by applying genetic measures to assess structural change in government, establishing the most comprehensive data set, which begins with the primordial soup of the early 19th century when government structures fragmented (~150,000 units, six countries, 18152025).

For the empirical analyses, existing (historical) data on legislative activity, organizational, and environmental features will be used and extended.

STATE-DNA will exploit methodological advancements in biology, such as data assimilation techniques, to analyze the origins and consequences of structural change in government and to forecast such change, thereby injecting a predictive notion into government studies.