Introduction

This chapter deals with the questions to what extent, in which way and why policy analysis has become part of programmes teaching political science at universities in Germany. The overall finding is that policy analysis has been established as part of most, but by far not of all, programmes, and also to strongly varying extents. While one third of Bachelor of Arts (BA) programmes do not contain policy analysis in an institutionalised way, two thirds of the programmes do contain modules on policy analysis. Eighteen per cent of all Master's (MA) programmes in political science entail a special focus on public policy or policy analysis.

As policy analysts, we are interested in identifying and explaining change, which means, for example, finding out whether the actual status quo of policy analysis as taught at German universities differs from the situation 10 or 25 years ago, and if so, why. The problem here is that comprehensive data on the respective study programmes are not available across time. For our analysis, we therefore complemented our data on study programmes with expert interviews with a number of people who have been involved in creating and changing programmes for teaching political science in general and policy analysis in particular since the middle of the 1980s.

This chapter proceeds as follows. If policy analysis as a sub-discipline is part of actual programmes, someone has to teach it. Thus, we first look at the personal aspect of policy analysis at German universities and evaluate the share of positions at ‘professor level’, with an explicit denomination for this sub-discipline. We then look at the study programmes, focusing on whether and how much policy analysis is part of German BA programmes and how many and which of the MA programmes have an explicit focus on policy analysis/public policy. Since up to this point we have only presented a snapshot of today's policy analysis at universities, in the next section we try to identify change over time (when policy analysis was established) and by doing so, develop an understanding of why policy analysis was established as part of teaching political science at universities. The conclusion follows.