SUPA: Sustaining Public Administration in Modern Democracies

Yves and Tuva met with the Norwegian Ministry of Digitalisation and Public Governance. Yves presented how AI-driven policy portfolios can help identify smart deregulation opportunities. Exciting conversation and promising next steps.

🚨 CfP 🚨
At ECPR @ecpr.bsky.social GC 2026 (Kraków, 8.-11. 9. 2026) Y. Steinebach and A. Lenz @alexalenz.bsky.social are convening a panel on "Overburdened Bureaucracies" - how public administrations cope with rising demands and limited capacity.

🚨 Submit your abstract by 17 Dec!
Details below ⬇️

Bürokratie: Brauchen wir das oder kann das weg? Panel Discussion with Prof. Dr. Martin Burgi (LMU), Prof. Dr. Florian Englmaier (LMU), Prof. Dr. Christoph Knill (LMU), Prof. Dr. Monika Schnitzer (LMU), Jens-Christian Rabe (SZ)

German speakers: don't miss Christoph Knill @cknill.bsky.social joining Monika Schnitzer, Martin Burgi, Florian Englmaier, and Jens-Christian Rabe to discuss who needs bureaucracy and whether it can be eliminated for a better future.
📅 Dec11, 18:30, Munich
🔔 Register: www.cas.lmu.de/en/events/ev...

A rare sight 🚨: the entire SUPA consortium gathered on one screen for a coordination meeting.
Big ideas, good vibes — and just a hint of technical drama 💻.

📢 CfP: Regulatory Growth in the EU

The 2026 SG-EU @ecprsgeu.bsky.social Biennial Conference
1–3 July | Università di Catania

Brigitte Pircher @brigittepircher.bsky.social and Nir Kosti invite papers on the drivers and consequences of EU rule growth.

📬 Submit by 8 Dec 2025 → nir.kosti@lmu.de

Wow 🤯 Rules keep on growing.
Thank you, Steffen Hurka @steffenhurka.bsky.social and the #EUPLEX team, for providing such valuable to demonstrate how rising legislative complexity imposes real challenges on public administration and governance in modern democracies.

The European Citizen Action Service @ecas-europe.bsky.social connects the project to citizens, helping us understand how rule growth affects everyday life.

Team: Giulia Sandri @giuliasandri.bsky.social, Claire Morot‑Sir, Nicolò Triacca.

At LMU Munich @lmumuenchen.bsky.social, the team identifies administrative “Achilles’ heels” and develop proposals for adaptive responses.

Team: C. Knill @cknill.bsky.social, A. Lenz @alexalenz.bsky.social, F. Findeisen, D. Zink @dionyszink.bsky.social .

At the University of Oslo @uio.no, we map how growing rule volumes reshape public administration: who implements what, and how responsibilities shift.

Team: Y. Steinebach, M. Nemčok @miroslavnemcok.bsky.social , M. Povitkina @mpovitkina.bsky.social, L. Gulli, M. Imran, T. Molde.

At the Hebrew University of Jerusalem @hebrewuniversity.bsky.social , the focus is on endogenous rule growth: legal design, linguistic and relational indicators, regulatory discretion — tracing first-, second-, and third-order rules.

Team: Nir Kosti.

Södertörn Uni. @sodertornshogskola.bsky.social studies how rule-offsetting schemes work, combining theory, coding, and interviews with policymakers & civil society. Goal: effective and legitimate rule design.

Team: Brigitte Pircher @brigittepircher.bsky.social , Miranda Thulin, Swapnil Vashishtha.

The University of Barcelona @ub.edu team turns archives, APIs, web-scraped material, and legal documents into machine-readable data using text-as-data and NLP — building a dataset on rule growth across the EU.
Team: Xavier Fernández-i-Marín, David García García @davidgg.bsky.social , Prachee Arora.

What brings the SUPA scholars together? Turning laws into data to ask why rules multiply, how to streamline without hurting democracy, and how to help policymakers make sense of it.

In the posts below ⬇️👇🔽 we show how each partner tackles a different angle. It really fits together, doesn’t it? 💡

Postdoctoral Fellow in Political Science (3-4 years) (288628) | University of Oslo Job title: Postdoctoral Fellow in Political Science (3-4 years) (288628), Employer: University of Oslo, Deadline: Monday, November 17, 2025

We are hiring PhDs and postdocs to work on the ERC project GETGOV, where I am the PI.

We will investigate governing elites since 1789. I am sure that it will be a lot of fun and result in great research!

Postdocs: www.jobbnorge.no/en/available...

PhDs: www.jobbnorge.no/en/available...

🏆 Slide of the Year 2025 goes to @steffenhurka.bsky.social — absolutely unbeatable!

Currently preparing a lecture on policy implementation. This slide's for you, @supaproject.bsky.social :-)

Disse 500 forskerne publiserer mest i Norge — Antall artikler er ikke så viktig, sier Ole Andreassen, Norges mest publiserende forsker.

Two SUPA @uio.no scholars made it into the TOP100 of #Khrono’s TOP500 list of Norway’s most productive researchers (2023–24)!
🏅 Yves Steinebach (40)
🏅 Miroslav Nemčok (82)
www.khrono.no/disse-500-fo...

Don’t forget to submit your paper proposals for our EPSS @epssnet.bsky.social 2026 panel 👇 and join us in Belfast to discuss why rules keep growing – and what the implications are when they do.
⏰ Deadline in two days!

🛑 The EU’s Better Regulation agenda risks cutting rules that protect workers, consumers & the environment.
A policy brief by Brigitte Pircher @brigittepircher.bsky.social calls for stronger oversight, transparency & reclaiming regulation: library.fes.de/pdf-files/bu...

We invite papers on:
🧩 Drivers and patterns of rule growth
⚙️ Implementation and administrative capacity
🔄 Deregulation and simplification efforts
📊 Methods for measuring complexity

📢 CfP | EPSS 2026 @epssnet.bsky.social (Belfast, 18–20 June 2026)
Why do rules keep growing—and what happens when they do?
Join our panel “Rules Growth: Dynamics, Drivers, and Implementation Challenges in Advanced Democracies”.

📅 Deadline: 5 November 2025
📧 Submit proposals to nir.kosti@lmu.de

After two great talks, Yves has two days off to immerse himself in Chinese culture and enjoy the wonderful hospitality of his hosts 🇨🇳

Next stop on Yves’s Beijing tour was Beijing Normal University! Great energy and thoughtful debate yesterday.

Yves Steinebach is bringing policy talk to #Beijing!
First stop: Tsinghua University @tsinghuauniversity.bsky.social
Topic: how to balance responsiveness and effectiveness in policymaking.

Congratulations to our consortium leader, Yves Steinebach, on his promotion to full professor! 🎉 Today he delivered his inaugural lecture, “The Balance Challenge: Navigating Policy Responsiveness and Effectiveness,” at the @statsvitenskap.bsky.social @uio.no

🧠 Are democracies trapped by their own complexity—or strengthened by it? New study from the SUPA team in @jeppjournal.bsky.social shows that openness builds resilience, not overload.
doi.org/10.1080/1350...

🎉 As a partner of the @supaproject.bsky.social
project, we’re proud to announce the launch of the official website!

ECAS’s role in this project is to support crowdsourcing efforts, organise events, & share project findings with CSOs and national partners.

🔗 Learn more: buff.ly/ZXqO1EJ

🌍 ANALYZING (CLIMATE) POLICY PORTFOLIOS
New paper in @jcpaicpa.bsky.social introduces an analytical approach to systematically map what governments do on (climate) policy along two dimensions:

🎯 Targets – goals governments address
🛠️ Instruments – how they pursue them

🔗 doi.org/10.1080/1387...

📜 One way governments try to cut regulatory burden is #offsetting: for every new rule, an old one (or more) must go.

🗺️ The map and table show which OECD countries have used these schemes.

👉 Can you spot your country?

(from Steinebach, Hinterleitner & Fernández-i-Marín doi.org/10.1111/puar...)

Bureaucratic burden lifted to speed up building in growth agenda The government has confirmed further reforms to overhaul the planning system and put growth at the heart of the statutory consultee system.

Tired of ‘red tape’? UK planning reforms echo past failures like the "one-in, three-out" scheme.

One of our rerearches in progress shows why they fail:
➡️ Narrow Focus
➡️ Weak Enforcement
➡️ Political Reality

Result? Rules keep growing. Lasting reform needs smarter governance for true growth.
#SUPA