Street-Level Bureaucrats' Impact on the Emergence of Local Governance Networks (Stadtforschung aktuell) 3658361522, 9783658361525

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Stadtforschung aktuell

Lisa Fischer

Street-Level Bureaucrats’ Impact on the Emergence of Local Governance Networks

Stadtforschung aktuell Reihe herausgegeben von Hellmut Wollmann, Institut für Sozialwissenschaften, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Berlin, Deutschland Sabine Kuhlmann, Wirtschafts- und Sozialwissenschaft, Universitat Potsdam, Potsdam, Deutschland Jörg Bogumil, Fakultät für Sozialwissenschaft, Ruhr-Universität Bochum, Bochum, Deutschland

Die den frühen 1980er Jahren begründete Schriftenreihe verfolgt das Ziel, als publizistisches Sprachrohr einer praxisnahen Kommunal- und Regionalforschung zu dienen und eine breite Leser*innenschaft in Wissenschaft, Lehre und Praxis anzusprechen. Angesichts der vielfältigen Herausforderungen und Krisen, mit denen („all politics is local“) lokale und regionale Politik zunehmend konfrontiert sind, wird die publizistische (und darüber hinaus politische) Aufgabe der Schriftenreihe wichtiger und dringlicher denn je.

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Lisa Fischer

Street-Level Bureaucrats’ Impact on the Emergence of Local Governance Networks

Lisa Fischer Waltenhofen, Germany Diese Arbeit wurde im Rahmen einer Inauguraldissertation an der Ludwig-MaximiliansUniversität München angefertigt.

ISSN 2629-6373 ISSN 2629-6381 (electronic) Stadtforschung aktuell ISBN 978-3-658-36152-5 ISBN 978-3-658-36153-2 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-36153-2 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2021 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Responsible Editor: Stefanie Eggert This Springer VS imprint is published by the registered company Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH part of Springer Nature. The registered company address is: Abraham-Lincoln-Str. 46, 65189 Wiesbaden, Germany

Danksagung

Ich möchte mich an dieser Stelle bei denjenigen bedanken, die mich bei der Anfertigung meiner Dissertation an der Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München unterstützt haben. Besonders danken möchte ich Herrn Prof. Dr. Christoph Knill für die Betreuung der Dissertation, seine stete Hilfsbereitschaft und seine wertvollen Anregungen. Ebenso gilt mein Dank Herrn Prof. Dr. Karsten Fischer für die Zweitbetreuung der Arbeit. Danke auch an das ganze Team des Lehrstuhls für Empirische Theorien der Politik von Prof. Dr. Christoph Knill. Insbesondere an Dr. Yves Steinebach, der als mein Bürokollege immer ein offenes Ohr für meine Fragen hatte, sowie an Dr. Eva-Maria Euchner und Olivia Mettang für die gute und freundschaftliche Zusammenarbeit. Bei Dr. Xavier Fernández-i-Marín möchte ich mich insbesondere für die Unterstützung bei Fragen zur Statistik bedanken. Für die Durchsicht der Arbeit und die konstruktive Kritik bedanke ich mich bei Dr. Yves Steinebach, Johanna Veth-Abinusawa und Andreas Mohr. Mein Dank gilt zuletzt meinen Eltern, Siegfried und Anita Riedel, und meinem Mann, David Fischer, für die stete Ermutigung und Unterstützung während der Arbeit an dieser Dissertation.

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Contents

1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.1 Governance Networks in Western Societies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.2 Research Question and Contributions to the Literature . . . . . . . . . 1.3 Empirical Setting and Methods . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.4 Results . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.5 Structure of the Thesis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 Welfare, Governance, and Street-level Bureaucracy: Links and Research Gaps . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.1 Welfare and the Engagement of Non-state Actors . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.1.1 Role of Non-state Actors in Welfare Delivery . . . . . . . . . . 2.1.2 Role of Churches and FBOs in the Welfare Sector . . . . . . 2.1.3 Welfare Patterns and the Engagement of Confessional Organizations in Germany . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.2 Governance Networks and their Emergence . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.2.1 Governance and Governance Networks – a Conceptual Clarification . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.2.2 Governance Networks and their Purpose . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.2.3 The Formation Process of Governance Networks . . . . . . . 2.3 Street-level Bureaucrats and their Role in the Emergence of Governance Networks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.3.1 Potential of SLBs for Divergent Behavior . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.3.2 Role of SLBs in Governance Networks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.4 Summary of the Literature Review . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

1 1 4 6 9 10 11 11 12 14 18 23 23 26 28 31 32 36 38

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Contents

3 Theory, Concept, and Research Design . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.1 Interest of SLBs in Building Local Governance Networks . . . . . . 3.2 Logics of SLBs that Shape their Cooperation Interest Toward Different Organizations During the Emergence of Governance Networks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.3 Operationalization of Logics that Determine SLBs’ Cooperation Interest . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.4 Research Design . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 Initial Position of SLBs and their Self-perception of Cooperation Interest . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.1 Methods I . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.2 Initial Position of SLBs: Civil-society Engagement and its State Steering in Germany . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.2.1 The Role of Volunteer Work in Germany . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.2.2 State Support for Civil Engagement . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.2.3 The Integrative Character of Germany’s Civil Society . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.3 Volunteer Managers as Campaigners of Civil Society: Self-perception and Logics that Shape their Cooperation Interest . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.3.1 Volunteer Managers’ Tasks, Role Perceptions, and Risks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.3.2 Volunteer Managers’ Cooperation Interest, Logics Affecting it, and Contextual Impacts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.4 Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

39 39

40 44 49 51 51 54 54 61 67

69 69 78 92

5 A Field Experiment: The Prevalence of Logics that Determine the Cooperation Interest of SLBs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.1 Methods II . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.2 General Empirical Results . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.3 Policy Field-specific Results . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.4 Summary of the Field Experiment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

95 95 102 110 111

6 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.1 Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.2 Theoretical Implications . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.3 Limitations of the Thesis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.4 Practical Implications . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

115 115 119 120 122

Literature . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Abbreviations

Abbr. 1:

BAMF

Bundesamt für Migration und Flüchtlinge; English translation: Federal Agency of Migration and Refugees

Abbr. 2:

BMFSFJ

Bundesministerium für Familie, Senioren, Frauen und Jugend; English translation: Federal Ministry for Family, Seniors, Women and Youth

Abbr. 3:

CSO

Civil society organization

Abbr. 4:

FBO

Faith-based organization

Abbr. 5:

Op.

Operationalization

Abbr. 6:

SLB

Street-level bureaucrat

Abbr. 7:

ZWST

Zentralwohlfahrtsstelle der Juden in Deutschland; English translation: Central Welfare Office of Jews in Germany

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List of Figures

Figure 4.1 Figure 5.1 Figure 5.2 Figure 5.3 Figure 5.4

Vacant positions for civil engagement in four German cities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Approach to identifying email contacts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Variable loading on the total index (continuous variables) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Variable loading on the total index (ordinal variables) . . . . . Average waiting period in days (excluding non-response cases) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

57 97 104 104 106

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List of Tables

Table 3.1 Table 3.2 Table Table Table Table

5.1 5.2 5.3 5.4

Table 5.5 Table 5.6 Table 5.7 Table 5.8 Table 5.9 Table 5.10 Table 5.11 Table 5.12

Logics determining SLBs’ cooperation interest . . . . . . . . . . . Summary of logics, operationalization, and explanations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Response coding scheme . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Descriptive statistics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Summary of email requests by stimulus . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Response rates compared to non-confessional organizations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . SLBs’ cooperation interest . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Average email length depending on characteristics of CSOs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . SLBs’ cooperation interest with Christian organizations in Christian municipalities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Administrative embedding and its effects on SLBs’ cooperation interest . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . SLBs’ cooperation interest by policy field . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . SLBs’ cooperation interest in the field of integration in comparison to the field of senior welfare . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Response speed by policy field . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Summary of logics, their operationalization, and the results . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

42 49 99 101 102 103 105 107 108 109 111 112 112 113

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1

Introduction

1.1

Governance Networks in Western Societies

“The high number of asylum seekers, fleeing from war, persecution and misery in their country of origin comprise a challenge for Germany and Europe for the coming years. […]. Due to the overwhelming engagement of thousands of volunteers and professionals, we took up this challenge and coped with it.” – Angela Merkel, German Federal Chancellor with the heads of the governments of the German federal states (Bundeskanzlerin und Regierungschefs der Länder, 2015)

At present, there are several societal challenges with which many European and other Western states seem not to be able to cope on their own. It is not just the much-discussed refugee crisis that is challenging the state’s ability to act. There are also miscellaneous policy problems like the fight against growing social inequalities in society, the enormous need for the care of the elderly, climate change, or the current COVID-19 crisis that are getting states into trouble (Grande, 2012; Capano et al., 2020). Some authors proclaim that a general decline in Western state activity has crippled the ability of states to respond adequately to new challenges (Heinemann, 2006; Gomes and Pouget, 2008; Jensen et al., 2014). For example, Adam and Knill (2018) focus on Germany and demonstrate how human resources in public service have been declining for the last two decades, despite a growing range of tasks and an increase in policy complexity. Generally, many states are less and less capable of solving current challenges alone. As the quotation at the beginning of this chapter illustrates, civil engagement—comprising voluntary work—contributes to solving current issues that states face and therefore fills, at least partially, the gap left by the declining

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2021 L. Fischer, Street-Level Bureaucrats’ Impact on the Emergence of Local Governance Networks, Stadtforschung aktuell, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-36153-2_1

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Introduction

state. According to Kendall and Knapp (2000), voluntary or third sector organizations are better able “to deliver public services that match user expectations and [that correspond to] diverse citizen aspirations” (p. 1). Particularly in the social field, civil engagement and voluntary work seem indispensable to maintain social cohesion and a basic level of social support (Garkisch et al., 2017; Salamon, 1994; Lowndes et al., 2006; Wilson, 2013; Mayblin and James, 2019; Cornforth et al., 2015; Klenk and Cohen, 2019; Timm-Arnold and Löffler, 2013; Larsson, 2019). Civil engagement and civil society organizations that are bundling this engagement not only have an external function as providers of highly needed services but also at the same time fulfill an internal function by strengthening societal coherence and serving as a “learning school for democracy” (Hooghe, 2008). Some authors even argue that the active engagement of their citizens is indispensable for strong democracies (Barber, 1984; Putnam and Goss, 2002). Thinking one step further, civil engagement and volunteering thus not only are integrative in a social manner but also are strongly connected to political participation and political trust. At least at the macro level, they facilitate comprehensive societal and political integration (Fennema and Tillie, 2008; More-Hollerweger, 2014; Dekker and van den Broek, 1998; Schöb, 1999; Newton, 2001). As a consequence of wide-ranging internal and external opportunities for civil engagement and its growing empirical relevance, Klie (2010) even speaks of its renaissance in Western societies. He focuses on the welfare sector and argues that care—a sector several decades ago located in the private sphere, later strongly filled by the state—somehow, is again no longer the responsibility of the state. The renaissance of civil engagement is especially visible at the local level. Many municipalities, where societal challenges are most prevalent, suffer from financial restrictions. This limitation hampers their ability to deliver public services autonomously in a comprehensive way (Bogumil and Holtkamp, 2010; Mustered, 1998; Humphris, 2018; Geddes, 2005). Nevertheless, to solve societal issues municipalities frequently build governance networks, integrating state actors, private stakeholders, and, in particular, civil society organizations including volunteer work (Sørensen and Torfing, 2009; Sørensen and Torfing, 2017). State actors expect those networks to respond to current challenges and to deliver required services. However, the growing relevance of governance networks raises concerns about their legitimacy. Although most scientific considerations concentrate on the legitimacy of global, transnational, as well as multi-level governance networks (Zürn, 2004; Mena and Palazzo, 2012; Risse, 2006; Skelcher and Torfing, 2010), comparable conclusions can likewise be drawn for regional and local networks (see, for

1.1 Governance Networks in Western Societies

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instance, Häikiö, 2007). Evaluating the legitimacy of a network requires differentiating between its output and input legitimacies, two categories initially applied to assess the legitimacy of European regulations and European decision-making structures (Scharpf, 1997; Scharpf, 1999). An evaluation of output legitimacy focuses on the capacity and ability of a network to achieve set goals or to solve specific problems (Scharpf, 1999). In contrast, input legitimacy refers to the design of a political decision-making process and the claim to integrate “the authentic preferences of citizens” (Scharpf, 1997: 19). Therefore, governance networks have a reduced input legitimacy as soon as representational inadequacies occur because not all societal groups tend to participate in the same manner or at the same level (Bogumil and Holtkamp, 2010; Zimmer, 2007; Voigtländer, 2015; Fennema and Tillie, 2008; Putnam, 2000). Handy and Greenspan (2009) demonstrated that in Germany, due to linguistic and cultural barriers as well as anxiety over being discriminated against, Muslims are less engaged as volunteers than people from other religious groups. Comparably, Voigtländer (2015) analyzed why people from lower social classes participate less in civil society organizations, identifying insufficient feelings of belonging as one reason. In a Swedish context, Larsson (2019) described how “weaker” groups such as immigrant groups, groups of ethnic minorities, or organizations of citizens with a low socio-economic status rarely engage in governance networks. Applying a global perspective, Narayan (2000) showed that poor people all over the world have difficulties integrating into civil society structures. Facing the issue of unequal representation and the resulting lack of input legitimacy for governance networks, there are national as well as regional and local political efforts in many Western democracies to facilitate access to social and political engagement for such underrepresented groups (Koikkalainen, 2011; Lowndes and Pratchett, 2008; Durlauf, 2008; Larsson, 2019). As the public need for services increases drastically, seeking the greatest possible societal capacities for volunteer engagement has not only legitimacy but also functional reasons. In many Western countries that strive for equal representation, the underrepresentation of certain groups in civil society and governance networks can be traced back primarily to the fact that those groups themselves are unwilling or unable to become more active (Papadopoulos, 2013). Little scientific attention has focused on the state’s potential aversion toward certain groups, which might especially occur at the local level, where administrative officials, so-called street-level bureaucrats (SLBs), shape the emergence of governance networks and cooperation with civil society organizations. Yang et al. (2019), for example, pointed to the fact that the attitude of public administrators significantly affects the success of governance structures. Therefore, a closer look at public administrators and

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Introduction

street-level bureaucrats, their preferences, and the logic of their actions, might produce new insights about factors that facilitate or bar certain groups from becoming part of existing governance networks.

1.2

Research Question and Contributions to the Literature

What the literature about civil society organizations and their integration into governance networks has neglected hitherto is a systematic analysis of how far the unequal representation of different groups results not only from the groups’ ability and willingness to participate but also from the state’s openness to let them participate (cf. Zimmer, 2007). Theoretically, the openness of governance networks to all citizens is a basic characteristic of democracies (Lowndes et al., 2006). In many democracies, national political regulations exist to integrate groups from varying social, confessional, and ethnic backgrounds into existing and new governance networks (Joppke, 2007; Narayan, 2000). However, the street-level bureaucrats at the local level who build governance networks may follow a different logic in deciding with whom they wish to cooperate. Thus, they might use their own discretion to favor some groups and to raise barriers for others (cf. Lowndes and Pratchett, 2008). Regional variances in the manner of state cooperation with civil society organizations indicate that individual bureaucrats indeed have an impact on local network building (Arvidson et al., 2018; Halm, 2015). This thesis seeks to answer the following questions: How does public bureaucracy influence the formation of governance networks and the integration of civil society organizations into them? More specifically, Are street-level bureaucrats more interested in cooperation with certain civil-society organizations than others due to different applied logics? To answer those questions, due to their innovative nature, an exploratory approach is necessary. This study offers four logics that, apart from a purely neutral logic, might shape the interest of SLBs in cooperating with different groups. The developed logics are (1) a representation logic and (2) a logic of cultural closeness that affect the input legitimacy of networks, as well as (3) a competency logic and (4) a logic of control that affect the governance network’s output legitimacy. If SLBs follow a representation logic, they prefer to cooperate with organizations that are underrepresented in current local governance networks. They follow a strategy of policy advocacy to act in accordance with the current aim of the state to foster equal representation. If SLBs follow a logic

1.2 Research Question and Contributions to the Literature

5

of cultural closeness, they favor working with organizations from a similar cultural background and are reluctant to work with organizations with a different ethical or religious background. The causes are a desire to prevent risks and a preference for easy and predictable processes. This logic can even lead to racist or discriminatory behavior by SLBs. In contrast to the representation logic, applying a logic of cultural closeness stems from a strategy of risk aversion. Among output legitimacy logics, if a competency logic is decisive, SLBs favor organizations with high expertise and long experience as cooperation partners. This approach toward policy advocacy ensures an optimum achievement of policy goals. Finally, if SLBs apply a logic of control, they would be more skeptical of organizations with strong core beliefs such as faith-based organizations or strong leftist organizations because such organizations are more difficult to control. This logic of control would also correspond with a strategy of risk aversion. By answering the research questions and verifying the conceptual considerations about the existence of different logics that shape the interest of SLBs in cooperating with different organizations, this study contributes to three strands of literature, those on the welfare state, governance, and street-level bureaucracy. In the literature on the welfare state, authors argue that non-state actors play an important role in the delivery of social services. Their role is by no means a new phenomenon. Among other groups, churches and faith-based organizations (FBOs) have served as essential players for decades (Bäckström et al., 2016; Manuel and Glatzer, 2019; Kortmann, 2019). Vranken (2013) goes one step further and states that churches and FBOs are the key actors that fill the gap created by “the supposed withdrawal of the welfare state” (p. 1). However, most authors have examined these issues at the national level. A glance at the regional level and how cooperation emerges at this level is largely missing from the literature (Grohs, 2010: 85). Governance literature classifies and analyzes cooperation modes between state actors and actors from the private sector or the civil society in a broader sense. This literature generally deals with the growing empirical relevance of state cooperation with private organizations and civil society organizations. It considers questions of how cooperation between state and non-state actors works, what challenges exist, under which circumstances it is successful, and how this mode of cooperation increasingly affects policy outcome (among others, see, Denters, 2011; Walk, 2014; Selsky and Parker, 2005; Warner, 2010; Weber and Khademian, 2008; Aschhoff and Vogel, 2019; Furneaux and Ryan, 2014; Lundin, 2007). However, a closer examination of the emergence of such networks is largely neglected (but see, Rhodes, 2007; McGuire, 2011). This study argues that street-level bureaucrats are central actors who exercise effective discretion

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Introduction

about the degree of support they provide toward different groups that want to be active. Their scope of action is high because no national statutory requirements clearly specify how governance formation processes should be regulated in detail (Cornforth et al., 2015), and previous research has already demonstrated that a large room for maneuver facilitates the impact of bureaucrats (van Leeuwen et al., 2018; Hupe and Hill, 2007; Van Parys, 2019). With a focus on street-level bureaucrats, who are responsible for local networking, and on their interests, this study also contributes to the literature on street-level bureaucracy. Hitherto, most research in SLB literature has focused on the attitude and behavior of social workers, teachers, policemen, and clerks in public administration. Focusing on SLBs in charge of governance building provides insights from a group of SLBs that has been neglected (Agger and Poulsen, 2017). Despite wide coverage and increasing relevance, scientific attention on publicly financed volunteer agencies and the people working in them remains scarce (More-Hollerweger, 2014; Studer and Schnurbein, 2013). Concentrating on the interest of SLBs in cooperating with different organizations makes two contributions. First, it considers the relationship between the bureaucrat and a client or client group. Doing so makes it possible to detect potential unequal treatment, which current SLB literature predominantly explores. Second, it applies a more far-reaching perspective. If the emergence of governance networks, which are themselves arenas of both decision-making and implementation, is shaped by SLB logics that might hamper the integration of underrepresented groups, it affects the whole field of action of a governance network itself. This phenomenon, in turn, has an impact on clients that seek social support. Thus, this thesis not only considers the effect of SLBs on how policies are implemented but also how SLBs affect politics.

1.3

Empirical Setting and Methods

To find out how street-level bureaucrats influence the formation of governance networks and the integration of civil society organizations, this study considers Germany as an empirical case and, in this context, takes a closer look at the work of volunteer managers; they are a group of SLBs who are primarily responsible for building relationships with civil society organizations in the social field. As civil engagement in general and in the social field in particular mostly takes place locally (Bundesnetzwerk Bürgerschaftliches Engagement, 2013), the municipal level is the most appropriate level of analysis for this study.

1.3 Empirical Setting and Methods

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Focusing on Germany as an empirical case study has several benefits. First, the German government clearly proclaims openness toward different kinds of groups (BMFSFJ, 2017), but little is known about how this policy operates on a practical level. Second, German society is getting more and more diverse, ethnically as well as religiously, making it an appropriate setting to test bureaucratic interest toward organizations with different characteristics and backgrounds (Hemker and Rink, 2017). Third, SLBs that are responsible for governance networking at the local level have different roles in German administration. Some are part of the public administration while others work in independent agencies totally or partly funded by public money (Speck et al., 2012). Prior research in administrative science and SLB literature has shown that the administrative roles and the organizational environment of SLBs might affect their attitudes and behavior (Oberfield, 2010; van Leeuwen et al., 2018). Therefore, the divergence of the German setting permits the identification of such impacts. Fourth, the ongoing processes of privatization and economizing in the German welfare sector leave space for civil engagement organizations with different characteristics (Kortmann, 2019; Grohs, 2010). This study tests the validity of the different logics by empirically searching for differences in the cooperation interest of SLBs toward confessional and non-confessional organizations, Christian and Muslim organizations, and experienced and inexperienced organizations. Germany is an appropriate country to study. Because of historical and legal factors, Germany displays a certain preference toward Catholic and Protestant churches and their welfare organizations Caritas and Diakonie (Hien, 2019; Manow, 2018). The relevant research question is whether this preference also appears during the emergence of governance networks at the local level. Concentrating on Germany makes a comparative analysis possible, as volunteer managers are broadly spread across the whole country. Although the social engagement of civil society organizations is broadly diversified, this study concentrates on two specific policy fields, integration and senior welfare, where civil society engagement is particularly common (Gesemann and Roth, 2016). The political sphere frequently discusses both fields, both need more resources than the state can provide, and the state actively promotes cooperation with non-state actors (Humphris, 2018; Mayblin and James, 2019; Karakayali and Kleist, 2016b; Wren, 2007; Kendall and Knapp, 2000; Grohs, 2010). First, the integration task has been a challenge for Germany. In the course of regular migration and the growing number of refugees that arrived in Germany in 2015 and 2016, the question emerged whether the state was still capable of

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Introduction

delivering a comprehensive and successful integration or if civil-society organizations need to fill the gap (BMFSFJ, 2016; Mattes, 2017). Integration issues are most visible at the local level (Strohmeier and Neu, 2011). Second, senior welfare is a controversial issue, as many Western countries— Germany in particular—are currently confronting the aging of their societies (Statistisches Bundesamt, 2019). The number of older people with or without dementia that need care and nursing has increased (Statistisches Bundesamt, 2018), but there are not enough professional caregivers to satisfy the needs (Bundesministerium für Gesundheit, 2017). Therefore, the demand for civil organizations and volunteers to help senior citizens has grown sharply (BMFSFJ, 2016). Again, this need is especially evident at the local level, as the German concept of municipal provision of basic services (cf. §28 II GG) determines that municipalities are responsible for certain essential tasks in senior welfare, including the coordination of support networks or the provision of counseling offers (Naegele, 2011; Grohs, 2010). To gain empirical clarity on the organization-specific cooperation interest of street-level bureaucrats in the two policy fields, this study employs a mixedmethods design, including interviews as well as an innovative field experiment. First, semi-structured qualitative interviews with local volunteer managers in different German cities were conducted including questions asking them about their role perception, work challenges, and their cooperation interest toward groups with different characteristics. The latter question tested the plausibility of the four developed logics. Qualitative interviews with experts in Muslim welfare and representatives of Muslim organizations integrated the perspective of underrepresented groups in local governance networks. By carrying out an innovative field experiment with mail vignettes, the study added a quantitative approach to review the results from the qualitative interviews, which might be biased due to social desirability (Skinner, 2012). Moreover, quantitative analyses help identify the prevalence of the developed logics, facilitate statistical calculations, and make better generalizations of the results possible. Data collection includes mailing fictive requests for cooperation (in integration/senior welfare) from varying organizations (non-confessional/Christian/Muslim; experienced/inexperienced) to all larger and middle-size German municipalities. The next step involved coding the received responses according to response speed, response quality, and support possibilities, the three together representing the cooperation interest of SLBs. This approach permits the identification of the logics that SLBs follow in their interest in cooperation apart from a purely neutral logic. Overall, the study combines an explorative with a deductive approach.

1.4 Results

1.4

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Results

The results of the qualitative interviews demonstrated that volunteer managers perceived their role as that of active networkers, which confirms the central presumption of the thesis that volunteer managers are SLBs with leeway and autonomy during the emergence of governance networks. Volunteer managers also face several challenges including a lack of resources. As a result, they cannot support all organizations in the same way and must apply selection criteria. On the core question of the thesis—the divergent interest of volunteer managers in cooperating with different civil society organizations—the qualitative interviews indicate that volunteer managers aspire to cooperate with different partners with absolute neutrality and equality. They also reported a desire to apply this logic of neutrality toward organizations that are apparently more difficult to control, including religious organizations. However, there was also evidence in the qualitative interviews of the four developed logics that are assumed to shape the interest of SLBs in cooperation—a representation logic, a logic of cultural closeness, a competency logic, and a control logic. The plausibility of the representation logic is evident when volunteer managers actively reach out to Muslim organizations to integrate these groups that are underrepresented at the moment. Interviews with a focus on Muslim engagement show that Muslim organizations frequently report positive relations with state actors. However, Muslim organizations also speak of discrimination from local bureaucrats. From the perspective of Muslim organizations, a certain degree of the logic of cultural closeness is indeed apparent. A competency logic becomes evident when volunteer managers favor cooperation with organizations they already know and who have already demonstrated their ability in a certain area. Finally, some volunteer managers also confirmed that under some circumstances, they reject cooperation, for example, with organizations that espouse subversive ideologies. Thus, when cooperation involves a certain risk, volunteer managers employ a logic of control. To determine the distribution of the developed logics, a field experiment was conducted. The results of the experiment demonstrated that a civil society organization’s previous experience in a certain field did not influence the interest of SLBs in cooperation. However, their expected expertise did shape the interest of SLBs, as they preferred Muslim groups as partners for integration tasks, but favored Christian organizations as partners for services related to senior welfare. The results also indicated that SLBs are generally more skeptical of confessional than non-confessional organizations. When focusing on confessional groups, SLBs expressed a preference for Muslim over Christian organizations.

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Introduction

These empirical findings suggest that logics that deviate from a pure neutrality logic are indeed relevant. Logics related to the input legitimacy of a governance network can be partially validated. A representation logic seems to have some explanatory potential because SLBs had a greater interest in cooperating with Muslim than with Christian organizations. SLBs might recognize that organizations are underrepresented and actively try to integrate them into governance networks. A logic of cultural closeness became evident because SLBs’ cooperation interest was lower for Muslim organizations than for non-confessional organizations. Regarding the output legitimacy of the governance network, a competency logic partially appeared. The expected expertise of groups increased their chance to become a state partner, but their experience did not play a role. Finally, a control logic that influenced SLBs’ cooperation interest could be explicitly documented. Organizations with strong core beliefs, in that case, religious organizations, met with aversion from SLBs. This aversion likely emerges because religious organizations are more difficult to control. Overall, while the qualitative interviews confirmed the plausibility of different logics that shape SLBs’ cooperation interest, the field experiment validated their empirical relevance.

1.5

Structure of the Thesis

Chapter 2 of this thesis provides a brief overview of the current literature on welfare states, governance, and street-level bureaucracy and describes how this thesis closes research gaps in all three branches of literature, arguing that the formation of social governance networks and the role of SLBs has been neglected. Chapter 3 presents the theoretical expectations for four logics that, apart from a pure neutrality logic, might shape street-level bureaucrats’ cooperation interest. From those conceptual considerations, this study develops the individual logics into specific SLB cooperation interests toward the confessional and competencyrelated characteristics of organizations, using a deductive approach. Chapter 4 describes the historical and contextual situations of volunteer managers. It concentrates on the civil engagement of volunteers and organizations in Germany in the fields of integration and senior welfare. In addition, it describes the specific tasks that volunteer managers perform, outlining the way they serve as important actors during the emergence of governance networks and what challenges they confront. It also identifies the factors and logics that shape the interest of SLBs in cooperation. These results largely stem from the qualitative interviews. Chapter 5 presents the methods of the field experiment and reports its results. Chapter 6 summarizes the main findings, identifies their theoretical implications, and indicates the limitations of the thesis as well as its practical implications.

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Welfare, Governance, and Street-level Bureaucracy: Links and Research Gaps

This chapter offers a detailed review of the literature about branches of research that are associated with questions of how the state cooperates with non-state partners and who influences those processes. Thus, this literature review will help identify the basic conceptual considerations presented in Chapter 3 and explores the current state of research in the respective fields, identifying research gaps, which this thesis attempts to fill.

2.1

Welfare and the Engagement of Non-state Actors

Considering the welfare sector of many Western states, state cooperation with non-state actors and governance networks that include non-state actors are not new phenomena (Sørensen and Torfing, 2007: 4). Cooperation between the state and private as well as third-sector organizations has been established practice for decades. With those different actors in mind, the term “welfare governance” describes structures in many Western welfare states quite well (Nullmeier, 2011). Historically, those non-state actors have even shaped certain social policies before the state itself entered the arena (cf. Goetz, 2008: 273). The social engagement of churches or charitable organizations in poor relief or education, for example, began hundreds of years ago, while the state was more or less absent (Sachße, 2011). This section explains why non-state actors became important providers of welfare services in some states, while their role remained minor in others. To answer this question, this study first focuses on state cooperation with social trustees and private organizations for welfare delivery and shows how varied national contexts shape different degrees of cooperation. It then describes the role of churches and faith-based organizations as important state partners in the social sector, providing © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2021 L. Fischer, Street-Level Bureaucrats’ Impact on the Emergence of Local Governance Networks, Stadtforschung aktuell, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-36153-2_2

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insights on state preferences toward different organizations. It also includes the scientific debate on the interplay between state and non-state actors during welfare delivery in Germany as well as the role religious organizations play. On the one hand, the latter focus provides a better understanding of the empirical case of this thesis. On the other hand, Germany is a particularly interesting case for scientific considerations as churches, or rather their welfare organizations, play a dominant role in welfare delivery. State preferences toward different religious organizations have been treated frequently, but mostly as macro factors at the national level when explaining the role of non-state actors in the welfare sector. Factors at the meso or micro level that explain the role of non-state actors at the regional or local levels have largely been ignored.

2.1.1 Role of Non-state Actors in Welfare Delivery Before concentrating on what factors enable a strong role for non-state actors in welfare systems, it is important to clarify who those non-state actors might be. In addition to private actors following their self-interest, the third sector also plays an important role. The third sector is a heterogeneous group unified by the claim of altruism. Small associations, large welfare organizations, and noninstitutionalized groups of volunteers are all part of it (Merchel, 2011). When examining the question of how strongly non-state actors can be involved in welfare delivery, the work of Gøsta Esping-Andersen (1990) on welfare states should be mentioned. He classified Western welfare states in three different worlds of welfare capitalism: (1) liberal regimes, (2) conservative regimes, and (3) social democratic regimes, each of which lead to other conditions and requirements for state and non-state social activity. According to his classification, liberal regimes are characterized by modest state intervention in the social field, market solutions are a common method for solving social issues. In those liberal systems, private actors play a significant role in the delivery of social services. Typical countries of this type are the United States and Great Britain. EspingAndersen (1990) argues that states with a conservative regime strongly uphold family values. Compared to state intervention in the social field, this type favors family boundaries, and the state only becomes active if it is essential. However, upholding the principle of subsidiarity, non-state trustees from a religious or civil society background deliver social services, and those from the third sector are favored and more widely spread in this regime (Schmid, 2011). Germany and Switzerland are good examples of the conservative regime. Finally, in sociodemocratic welfare regimes, the state is the general provider of social services

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ensuring a high level of social security for all of its citizens. Private or civil society engagement in the social field is minimal because the need for engagement is low. The welfare regimes of most Scandinavian countries, including Sweden and Denmark, belong to this group. Some authors have developed Esping-Andersen’s classification further and have included, for example, a Southern European welfare type (Rhodes, 1997; Leibfried, 1993). In this type, the social system provided by the state is rather rudimentary, and family boundaries and church welfare organizations fulfill important welfare services. Other scholars have doubted the unambiguous allocation of countries to one of Esping-Andersen (1990) and criticized his classification as no longer empirically valid (Bambra, 2006; Scruggs and Allan, 2008). For example, Hemerijck (2013) illustrated how fiscal problems and resulting austerity policies as well as changing family boundaries, aging societies, globalization, and altered workplace environments challenge welfare states and have led to encompassing transitions in most Western welfare states independent of their original welfare system (also see Pierson, 1994; Steinebach et al., 2019; Wren, 2013). Evers (2005) argued that those changes led to hybrid models of social service delivery, integrating actors from the state, the private sphere, and civil society organizations. This transition indicates a more significant role for non-state actors within all three classical welfare regimes described by EspingAndersen (1990) (also see hereto Schmid, 2011). Rothstein (2001) generally contradicted the assumption of Esping-Andersen (1990) that social-democratic welfare systems, due to their all-encompassing state activity, weaken the engagement of the civil society. Focusing on Sweden, he argued that the universal character of social programs by no means makes civil engagement obsolete. Thus, neither lower rates of volunteer engagement nor the declining importance of civil society organizations are remarkable (Rothstein, 2001; for an overview of the debate, cf. Dionne, 1997). Despite empirical challenges to the different ideal types of Esping-Andersen (1990), convergence tendencies, and some empirical inconsistencies, different national contexts allow private actors as well as third-sector actors to play a more or less relevant role in social service delivery (Bambra, 2006; Jeppsson Grassman, 2010). Thus, welfare state literature has explained why non-state actors play a varying but large role in the delivery of national welfare services and has analyzed how current trends have changed their roles. However, it has not captured sufficiently how organizations are selected as state partners, particularly at the regional or local level, and who makes those decisions.

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2.1.2 Role of Churches and FBOs in the Welfare Sector A closer look at the literature on the role of churches and FBOs in the welfare sector makes clear that not all religious groups become state partners. This literature discusses the circumstances under which a church or FBO realistically becomes a state partner. Among other factors, the literature also considers organizational characteristics to explain the state’s interest in cooperation. In many Western and European states, churches and FBOs are a frequent or even dominant group for the delivery of welfare services. Therefore, there is also an empirical reason to focus on them. The term “faith-based organizations” describes organizations that are connected to a certain church (Deardorff Miller, 2015). Clarke and Jennings (2008) define FBOs as organizations that have a reference point in faith, encompassing a wider range of organizations than the term “religious organization.”1 For many years, secularization theory dominated the welfare state literature, leading to the systematic neglect of the role of FBOs in civil society (Clarke and Jennings, 2008; Manuel and Glatzer, 2019). However, over the last few years, scholars have rediscovered the importance of religious social engagement and started to focus on the way such organizations affect the social sphere (Davie, 2012; Hien, 2013; Bäckström et al., 2016; Fix and Fix, 2005; Johnsen, 2014; Markkola and Naumann, 2014; Ferris, 2005; Davie, 2006; Manuel and Glatzer, 2019). In that sense, Hien (2013) underlined the increasing importance of churches and faith-based organizations in the delivery of social care (also see Hien, 2019). A central question in the current literature about religious social engagement concerns how the engagement of churches and FBOs differs from that of other civil groups. In what way does this difference make them more likely to become state partners? The literature has identified several factors. First, churches and FBOs bring a higher quantity of engagement and a stronger provision of social capital compared to non-religious organizations (Traunmüller, 2011; Putnam, 2002; Yeung, 2004; Hodgson, 2004; Jawad, 2012; Offe and Fuchs, 2002). The specific motivations of religious people help explain this higher level of engagement. Their faith encourages them to help people in need (Könemann et al., 2015; Wilson and Janoski, 1995; Stark, 2001). The Christian faith promotes the principle of “love thy neighbor” and demands social engagement to help the poor and needy, and Judaism and Islam also embrace the principle of brotherly love (Sahan, 1

Despite slightly different understandings of the terms “religious organization” and “FBOs,” this thesis uses both terms to describe organizations with a clear link to religious ideologies.

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2012; Wilson and Janoski, 1995). The Bible and the Koran include passages that make social claims on their adherents (Banfi, 2015). Results from a German survey of volunteers reported that 7.6 percent of people who volunteer do so in the framework of a religious organization (BMFSFJ, 2014). Compared to other civil society organizations, more people from lower social classes also volunteer within religious organizations, which makes them more inclusive (Traunmüller, 2011). Religious individuals not only engage in church-associated organizations but also in secular organizations (Yeung, 2004). In Sweden, for example, almost 50 percent of social engagement is religiously motivated (Traunmüller, 2011). Religious organizations become partners with the state in providing social services because they tap highly motivated volunteers who work at no charge, saving public money (Könemann et al., 2015; Yeung, 2004). Second, beyond purely quantitative differences in the social engagement of religious actors compared to non-religious ones, several authors have identified qualitative differences in the engagement of FBOs and churches (Deardorff Miller, 2015). Kettell (2019) examined the UK and argued that the state often seeks cooperation with FBOs because it perceives them as being aware of the specific social needs in society. Because of their comprehensive claim to care about all marginalized groups, “FBOs may have the potential to fill gaps unaddressed by other organizations.” (Deardorff Miller, 2015: 3131). Könemann et al. (2015: 113) added that the intrinsic motivation of religious groups leads to better results. Additionally, frugality, higher degrees of responsibility, responsiveness, and flexibility are core characteristics of such organizations (Smith and Sosin, 2001). However, due to their strong belief systems, religious organizations may also bring problems during welfare delivery. While Deardorff Miller (2015) argued that religious engagement is all-encompassing, Kettell (2019) insisted that the engagement of religious organizations might in some cases be restricted to their own clientele and neglect societal minorities who adhere to other faiths (Kettell, 2019). To clarify the peculiarity of faith-based organizations compared to other organizations in their review of the literature, Bielefeld and Cleveland (2013: 446) identified additional differences, including their organizational control, their expressions of religion, and their program implementation. Those particular traits of religious organizations can make them either partners for the state or not, depending on the state’s interests. Religious engagement in a certain country can vary denominationally and nationally, depending on the welfare system, the church-state regime, and religious legislation (Esping-Andersen, 1990; Fox, 2015; Fox and Flores, 2009; Jeppsson Grassman, 2010). An associated unresolved issue is whether faith-based organizations in Europe and the Western world count as part of civil society at

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all (Albrecht, 2016; Van der Ploeg, 2017; Strachwitz, 2014). Typically, civil society is “understood as the space in society where collective citizen action takes place” (Malena and Heinrich, 2007: 338). Whereas Casanova (1994) viewed religious organizations as part of the heart of civil society, Liedhegener and Werkner (2011) argued that the state-church regime highly influences the role that a religious organization can take within a society. The closer the connection to the state, the less religious organizations act like every other civil organization. This theory suggests that churches sometimes take on a particular role within the classical trinomial structure of the market, the state, and civil society, and cannot be summed up simply under the latter category. Likewise, religious organizations and churches themselves often deny a clear affiliation to the broad concept of civil society because they fear losing their particular status (Liedhegener and Werkner, 2011). Van der Ploeg (2017) stated that, due to ongoing secularization and the general trend of declining membership, many churches move steadily from a particular position within the state to a typical organization within civil society. Additionally, the role of FBOs at the local level—and whether they are perceived as “normal” CSO—is likewise determined by how strongly they are connected to national religious institutions or churches (cf. Smith and Sosin, 2001). Therefore, the perspective one takes is decisive. If groups act at the local level and independently of the institutional setting of a church but in the name of a certain faith, they can be perceived as “typical” civil society organizations. The placement of a religious group would differ only if one considers a national state church. In addition, the evaluation of religious organizations as part of civil society depends on the organization one views. For example, most European countries classify Muslim organizations as civil society organizations because they are far from the official or recognized status that Catholic or Protestant churches have in some of those countries (Strachwitz, 2014). This debate further illustrates the fact that the role a church or FBO can play within a society and in particular within the social sector depends on the prevailing church-state regime. Several authors have demonstrated how concrete church-state relations affect policy formulation and implementation in the social sector (Minkenberg, 2003; Markkola and Naumann, 2014). It is important to note that the classical distinction between a church-state regime (as in Great Britain), a corporatist regime (as in Germany), and a secular regime (as in France) does not automatically determine the role that national churches or religious organizations play within a society (Fox, 2015). Empirical studies have demonstrated that even within the same type of regime, different national manifestations of the impact of religious organizations in public life and the welfare system are

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possible (Loobuyck et al., 2013; Minkenberg, 2012). In Argentina, for example, where an official state religion exists, the church plays a significantly smaller role than in Germany, where there is no official state religion (Fox, 2015: 6). Hence, a more nuanced consideration of national church-state patterns is necessary to assess the impact of religious groups on a national welfare regime (Minkenberg, 2003). This consideration is necessary not only when considering the position of religious actors in a national setting but also in explaining the role of specific churches or FBOs within society. In many countries, historical factors explain the dominance of specific religious organizations in the provision of social care (Evers, 2010). Historical state-church regimes influence the role of individual religious organizations and churches in the welfare sector. In his analysis, Traunmüller (2011) illustrated that while the professionalization of churches and religious organizations and their social functions increased with growing financial support from and influence in the state, membership declined, reducing their faith-based social capital. Roßteutscher (2009) came to different conclusions. She was able to prove that public subsidies have a positive effect on the creation of social capital for churches. Further research seems to be necessary to settle the question. Both authors concentrated on Christian churches and did not discuss the role of Muslim organizations that gained relevance in most Western countries during the last few decades. Few authors have considered the integration of Muslim organizations into welfare state patterns (Banfi, 2015; Kortmann, 2019). Fetzer and Soper (2005), for example, compared the relationship between Muslim organizations and the state in Germany, France, and Great Britain. They argued that the resources of Muslim FBOs, political opportunity structures, political ideologies that persist in a country, and the prevailing church-state regime highly affect the interplay between these FBOs and the state. Focusing on Islamic welfare delivery, Kortmann (2019) compared the discourses about Islam in the Netherlands and Germany. He concluded that in both countries Islamic welfare plays a limited role. A restrained position toward all religions in the Netherlands and favoritism toward Christian churches in Germany can partially explain this result. The literature on the role of churches and FBOs in the delivery of welfare services can explain their general role and some particularities in national welfare systems while identifying which churches or FBOs act as important state partners. Authors generally focus on legal and institutional factors at the macro level. What is missing is a closer look at the micro level and factors that influence at a regional or local level whether individual FBOs become state partners.

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2.1.3 Welfare Patterns and the Engagement of Confessional Organizations in Germany A focus on Germany and the German welfare system can clarify the role of nonstate actors during welfare service delivery and what specific non-state actors are attractive as state partners, including confessional and non-confessional organizations. This study particularly focuses on Muslim organizations and their role in the German welfare system. It concentrates on two fields of interest—integration and senior welfare—and demonstrates what role religious organizations and FBOs play in those fields. This chapter clarifies how different historical, legal, and institutional circumstances shape the participation of different organizations in delivering German welfare services and in doing so, comes closer to answering the question of who gets the chance to become a state partner or part of a governance network dealing with social issues. In Esping-Andersen’s classification of welfare states (see Section 2.1.1), Germany is a corporatist welfare state regime (Esping-Andersen, 1990; Göçmen, 2013). Therefore, the provision of many welfare services happens through corporatist actors. Historical patterns beginning in the nineteenth century of a dual structure with both state and non-state actors delivering welfare services is one central explanation for the welfare patterns of today (Sachße, 2011). In Germany, six primary welfare organizations dominate the German welfare system: Caritas, Diakonie, the “Deutscher Paritätischer Wohlfahrtsverband,” the “Arbeiterwohlfahrt,” the German red cross, and the “Zentralwohlfahrtsstelle der Juden in Deutschland (ZWST)” (Schroeder, 2017: 117). Three of them have a clear religious connection: Caritas and Diakonie are Christian organizations and the ZWST is a Jewish one. Because of the legal principles of subsidiarity and parity, private welfare associations have priority over state service providers (Ceylan and Kiefer, 2017; Gabriel and Reuter, 2013). The prominent position of welfare associations stems from the political goal of fostering the integration of different value systems into welfare delivery structures (Grohs, 2010). There is also a legal factor that promotes the engagement of denominational organizations: their recognition as public corporations. Although there is no state church in Germany, religious organizations can be recognized as public corporations, which provides tax advantages and the possibility of collecting church taxes (cf. § 140 of the German constitution). Christian churches and Jewish organizations benefit from this legal status, for both their ecclesiastical and social engagement. Although some confessional organizations act independently of their

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church—like Caritas for the Catholic church—the church co-finances its affiliated welfare organizations and, therefore, legal financial benefits for churches also affect the social engagement of their welfare organizations. Many studies have explored the social work of Catholic or Protestant welfare organizations in Germany (see, for instance, Schroeder, 2017; Hien, 2018; Strachwitz, 2014). Their prominent status and their involvement for decades serve as central reasons for such scholarly attention. However, it has rarely considered the quantifiability of religious engagement in comparison to non-religious engagement (see, for instance, Liedhegener, 2016). Liedhegener (2016) found that 20 percent of the engagement done by the German third sector, stemmed from religious or church organizations. In total, Caritas and Diakonie employ 62.5 percent of the professionals working for the six central associations of non-statutory welfare organizations, including school teachers, caregivers, social workers, hospital nurses, and many more. Behind the state itself, Caritas is the largest employer in Germany (Schroeder, 2017). Although thousands of professionals work for Caritas and Diakonie, volunteers provide a large portion of the social services delivered in Germany (Evers, 2010). Hence, Caritas and Diakonie are very important actors in the delivery of social welfare and healthcare services. Nevertheless, Liedhegener (2016: 353) found that while the services of nonstatutory welfare organizations have steadily increased during the last decades, Caritas and Diakonie barely expanded their services, and Caritas in particular recorded below-average growth rates. To explain this development, some authors argued that due to marketization and privatization in the German welfare sector, established actors, including the six associations of non-statutory welfare organizations, are losing power in a pluralization in welfare delivery (Backhaus-Maul and Olk, 1994). Focusing on the regional and local levels, Grohs (2010) examined whether the modernization of German public administration relating to NPM objectives affected the welfare structures in municipalities and districts. Has there been a pluralization of welfare providers? Merchel (2011), for example, argued that the price-performance ratio plays an increasingly important role when state actors decide with whom to cooperate. With a focus on local youth welfare services, Grohs (2010) made clear that the six leading associations in German social welfare continue to dominate local youth welfare committees as well as the implementation of many youth policies. In contrast, smaller or newer associations have difficulty becoming established members (also see Bogumil and Holtkamp, 2006). Grohs (2010) concluded that path dependency leads to a stabilization of the established structures in the German welfare system. Thus, despite current

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societal developments and administrative changes, well-known state-partners persist at the local level. Thus, the local level in Germany has not experienced the proclaimed “end of corporatism” and a clear tendency toward pluralization (Merchel, 2011). Scholarly attention has focused not only on the role of welfare organizations in policy implementation and the delivery of social services but also on their role in policy formulation. On one side, welfare organizations get the opportunity to shape new policies with their own experiences and interests in mind. On the other, the state profits from the professional expertise of such organizations by making the policy formulation process more praxis-oriented (Merchel, 2011). While there is extensive research on the delivery of welfare services by the Catholic and Protestant churches and their welfare organizations in Germany, research interest in the social engagement of Muslim organizations has only recently begun to grow (Kortmann, 2019). This gap is surprising because, after Catholicism and Protestantism, Islam is the third largest religion in Germany. From a historical perspective of the arrival of Muslims and the development of Muslim organizations in Germany, the period shortly after the Second World War is critical. There was a high demand for workers during that time, and Germany hired temporary workers from many countries, including Turkey (Oltmer, 2018). Initially, the German government planned to send the temporary workers back to their countries of origin, the reality looked remarkably different; many guest workers stayed and even brought their families (Münz et al., 1999), creating the first Muslim community in Germany. A second reason for the increase of Muslims in Germany was the influx of refugees. The number of asylum seekers increased strongly for the first time in the 1990s due to the Kosovo conflict; a second rise took place more recently due to the refugee crises starting in 2015. Muslims with roots in Turkey remain the largest group in Germany, but Muslims from the Near East are the second largest group, pushing Muslims from Southern and Eastern Europe to third place (Rohe and Jaraba, 2018). Despite the increasing number of Muslims in Germany, the development of Muslim organizations started slowly. Beginning in the 1970s and 1980s, more and more Muslim cultural associations and religious organizations were founded. At first, they were primarily located in larger cities. Due to financial restrictions, their situation remains precarious. The term “backyard mosque” was coined during that time, indicating unfavorable situations of many Muslim organizations, mosques, and prayer rooms. In addition to serving religious functions, many Muslim organizations perceive themselves as a cultural and social contact point for Muslims. Therefore, social work is a central aspect of the Muslim community (Rohe and Jaraba, 2018).

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Despite the decentralized structure of Muslims in Germany and the fact that one cannot speak of “Islam in Germany” as a homogeneous religious group, in the last few decades several German umbrella organizations have brought together different Muslim factions. Those organizations include DITIB Germany, VIKZ, Milli Görüs, and ZMD (Rohe and Jaraba, 2018; Escudier, 2003). Those organizations, which are also members of the German Islamic Conference, have discussed the implementation of a national Muslim welfare organization without leading to any concrete solutions thus far (Charchira, 2016). Previous scholarly literature regarding the underrepresentation of Muslim organizations in German civil society has focused on macro-political factors or organization-specific circumstances. For example, Rohe and Jaraba (2018) noted that in some larger German cities the relationship between state authorities and Muslim organizations is more or less well established and some Muslim projects obtain state funding. However, in many smaller municipalities, the administration and the Muslim organizations lack the capacity to foster the integration of Muslim organizations. Although the German government supports the formation and work of regional migrant umbrella associations and organizations, empirical studies have emphasized that migrant organizations, including Muslim ones, are still far from equal representation (Özer, 2009; BMFSFJ, 2017). As volunteers perform most of the social as well as ecclesiastical work of Muslim organizations, state demands for stronger professionalism and a more institutionalized and transparent organizational structure are difficult to implement (Özer, 2009). Moreover, the fragmentation of Muslim organizations leads to low participation rates in local civil engagement networks (Blätte, 2011; Chbib, 2011; Schaarschmidt, 2014). Their high degree of fragmentation and low degree of professionalization make it difficult for Muslim organizations to achieve the status of a public corporation, further hampering the appearance of Muslim organizations in public life (Kortmann, 2019; Joppke and Torpey, 2013). The next section focuses on religious engagement in the fields of integration and senior welfare to demonstrate the relevance of religious organizations for these two fields. Especially in the field of integration, churches and FBOs have been and are important state partners; their role in migration and integration has even intensified during the refugee crisis that began in 2015 (Aumüller et al., 2015). A statement by the chairmen of the Catholic and the Protestant churches in Germany demonstrates the level of engagement: “The engagement of state actors, civil society groups, companies and individuals deserve our recognition. There are even 200,000 volunteers coming from the two churches that help and support in the current situation” (Bedford-Strohm and Marx, 2015). A declaration by the

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migration commission of the German Bishops illustrated the scope of engagement of the Catholic Church. It includes counseling for refugees and volunteers working with refugees and support for people who are threatened by deportation (Die deutschen Bischöfe Migrationskommission, 2017). The two largest churches in Germany were not the only organizations that became active during the refugee crisis. Many mosques started to offer help and support for arriving refugees as well (Rohe and Jaraba, 2018). A large part of this help happened on a non-institutional basis and was, therefore, more spontaneous and need-dependent. Muslim engagement often takes place without public attention and receives less support from the state. For example, the number of obligatory integration courses provided by Muslim organizations remains marginal. Of 7,920 German institutions that cooperate with the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees to offer such courses, at least one hundred have a Christian trusteeship, whereas only five are Muslim organizations (BAMF, 2019b). Besides religiously motivated engagement in the field of integration, a commitment to senior welfare is widespread. The Catholic and Protestant churches are particularly active in that field, serving as trustees of nursing homes or providing mobile care services. Not only professionals but also volunteers who care about seniors are integrated into the delivery of such services. Caritas and Diakonie also organize several low-threshold opportunities for volunteers, such as counseling for caregiving relatives or self-aid groups for seniors with dementia or their caregivers. In both organizations, close interaction between professionals and volunteers is widespread (Hanussek, 2012). In contrast to the Christian churches, Muslim organizations are far less active in senior welfare. In the 1980s and 1990s, it was unusual for Muslim families to send an elderly family member to a nursing home because they viewed their care as a family task (talking about migrant groups per se, cf. Klie, 2010). Although Muslims rarely use professional support for their elder family members (Volkert and Risch, 2017), a cultural transformation process has led to more Muslim seniors in nursing homes. However, few care homes are prepared to care for the specific religious needs of elderly Muslims, such as Muslim food rules or prayer times. When scholars have considered the factors that enable non-confessional CSOs, churches, or FBOs to play an important role in the delivery of social service, they generally focus on the international (Ferris, 2005; Deardorff Miller, 2015) or national level (Könemann et al., 2015; Hien, 2019). Although some research has explored religious engagement at the local level (see, for instance, Humphris, 2018; Wren, 2007), it has mostly considered the specific activities and challenges

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of local CSOs. It has rarely included reflections upon which criteria make certain organizations appropriate as local state partners (but see Grohs, 2010). This thesis aims to reduce that gap by delivering relevant decision-making criteria for local authorities to cooperate with confessional as well as non-confessional organizations.

2.2

Governance Networks and their Emergence

Focusing not only on the cooperation between state and non-state actors in the welfare sector, governance literature also deals with such arrangements in a broader sense. It has identified changes in steering mechanisms away from purely hierarchical structure—with the state on top—toward new and other modes of governance, in which non-state actors play a significant role. Several scholars have dealt with the phenomenon of civil or private contributions to society (Klijn, 2008: 512), applying different perspectives from implementation studies, organizational science, public administration research, sociology, and volunteer research (see, for instance, Andeßner, 2016; Arvidson et al., 2018; Bode, 2006; Wilson and Musick, 1998; van Kersbergen and van Waarden, 2004). The next section clarifies the focus by defining governance and governance networks and analyzing different definitions of and perspectives on both terms. The following section summarizes well-known reasons for the emergence of governance structures and governance networks. The final section considers under which circumstances governance networks emerge and who participates in governance networks and who decides, particularly at the local level. The focus is on the micro-level perspective, which the current literature largely neglects.

2.2.1 Governance and Governance Networks – a Conceptual Clarification For the last quarter of a century, the term governance has gained popularity (Grande, 2012). It is used in multiple contexts as, for example, when researchers describe how international organizations work, when political scientists describe the multi-level governance structures of the European Union, or when organizational theorists talk about new-public management in public administration. But what does governance exactly mean? There is no clear definition for the term

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“governance,” as various perceptions exist (Ansell and Torfing, 2016: 3; Klijn, 2008: 507f.)2 . Despite terminological inconsistencies, most authors dealing with governance would agree that the concept of governance considers the development of cooperation between economic enterprises, state actors, and organizations from the third sector like civil society organizations. Those relationships appear during both policy formulation and implementation (Enroth, 2011; Seibel, 2015). Arguing from a more abstract perspective and drawing upon the widely used definition by Benz and Papadopoulos (2006: 2 f.), governance not only incorporates nonstate actors in regulation processes but also encompasses a strengthened plurality 2

Perceptions of “governance” can be outlined on two dimensions. First, the inclusiveness of the term. Knill and Tosun (2012) differentiate between two distinct understandings: (1) One group of scholars defines governance very broadly and includes all forms of interaction that aims to achieve a certain policy goal, including hierarchical as well as non-hierarchical modes of coordination between the state, the market, and the civil society. Those definitions often consider developments in the transition from hierarchical to non-hierarchical governance (Pierre and Peters, 2000). (2) In contrast, the more narrow scholarly perspective on governance largely focuses on non-hierarchical coordination often reflecting empirically upon international governance structures where hierarchical relations are less common (Behrens, 2010). In addition to different understandings of the inclusiveness of the term, there is a second dimension of “normativity” that classifies understandings of governance (Knill and Tosun, 2012). Along this dimension, some researchers implicitly include a normative view when they discuss governance. Within this definition, there is the assumption that governance is a positive concept that allows diverse groups and actors to participate in the allocation of public goods and thereby create an additional democratic benefit and enhance the legitimation of political action (Skogstad, 2003; Enroth, 2011; Considine and Afzal, 2011; McLaverty, 2011). Scholars often attach the term “good governance,” originally introduced by the World Bank to describe creditworthy states, to this perspective (Graham et al., 2003; Ansell and Torfing, 2016; van Kersbergen and van Waarden, 2004). On the other hand, some authors consider the “spreading” of governance structures as a threat to representative democracies (Klijn and Skelcher, 2007). They argue that by delegating decision-making and the delivery of public services to non-state actors or governance networks, the state shirks its core responsibilities and permits growing privatization (Dingwerth, 2008). Additionally, a lack of public transparency might lower the governance structure’s legitimacy (Papadopoulos, 2013). In contrast to those essentially normative perceptions, many authors offered a more objective description of governance. They typically tried to capture and describe the existence of certain public-private or public-third-sector structures in decision-making processes and the provision of public goods. Moreover, discussing its effects and efficacy was essential for those authors (Abbott et al., 2015; Goetz, 2008; Sager, 2009).

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of decision-making, less hierarchical structures, and the increased relevance of networks. Governance networks may operate on different levels, including the local, regional, national and international level (Grande, 2012; van Kersbergen and van Waarden, 2004). A governance network forms as soon as (1) a relation between more than two cooperation partners occurs that (2) includes at least two of the three actor groups (the state, economic enterprises, and third-sector actors) and (3) becomes more or less stable around a specific topic (cf. Blomgren Bingham, 2011). Common problem-solving is the key reason for cooperation, and the state is just one member among others (Haus, 2010). McGuire (2008) “use[s] the term [governance] network […] to refer to an actual structure (as opposed to a metaphor or an analytical tool) involving multiple nodes—agencies and organizations—with multiple linkages, ordinarily working on cross-boundary collaborative activities. It constitutes one form of collaborative activity for facilitating and operating multiorganizational arrangements to solve problems that cannot be solved, or solved easily, by using single organizations” (p. 438). In a similar way, Sørensen and Torfing (2009) defined governance networks as “stable articulation[s] of mutually dependent, but operationally autonomous actors from state, market and civil society, who interact through conflict-ridden negotiations that take place within an institutionalized framework of rules, norms, shared knowledge and social imaginaries; facilitate self-regulated policy making in the shadow of hierarchy; and contribute to the production of ‘public value’ in a broad sense of problem definitions, visions, ideas, plans and concrete regulations that are deemed relevant to broad sections of the population” (p. 236). Rhodes (2007) claimed that networks are inherent to understanding governance, arguing that “governance refers to governing with and through networks” (p. 1246). The potential field of action for those governance networks is large. The definition of Sørensen and Torfing (2009) clarifies that governance networks originate in the debate around policy formulation and continue to policy implementation, covering the whole policy cycle (also see hereto, Skelcher and Torfing, 2010: 77; Rhodes, 2007: 1244). The very broad term of “governance networks” suits best the engagement of CSOs in cooperation with state authorities to deliver social services. For example, one can speak of a governance network, when a round table on integration takes place in a municipality, including members of the local administration, political actors as well as representatives of local initiatives and social trustees. The term “governance network” must be differentiated from several related terms that

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are used in governance literature with slightly different meanings, among them, “public-private partnership”3 or “co-production”4 .

2.2.2 Governance Networks and their Purpose Why has governance become more important over the last 25 years? The demand for state activity has greatly increased during the last decades (Adam and Knill, 2018; Klijn, 2008). In times of financial peril and reduced administrative capacities in many Western countries, addressing those demands purely through state activity has become more and more difficult (Burden et al., 2012; Steen et al., 2019; Sørensen and Torfing, 2017). It is not simply just a lack of administrative capacity that restricts the state’s ability to cope with contemporary challenges, but it is also the characteristics of such challenges themselves. Due to growing economic, international as well as societal interdependences in modern societies and the resulting complex demands on the state, states lose their ability and capacity to meet them without integrating non-state actors. Knill and Lehmkuhl (2002) defined governance capacity as “the formal and factual capability of public or private actors to define the content of public goods and to shape the social, economic, and political processes by which these goods are provided” (p. 43). They 3

Scholarly contributions have demonstrated how such public-private partnerships look in detail, specifying the mode of collaboration and the challenges and risks they face (see, for instance, Forrer et al., 2010; Schuppert, 2011; Bovaird, 2004). Empirically, there has been a substantial focus on policy fields like infrastructure delivery, transportation, or electricity and water supply (Schuppert, 2011; Wolff, 2014). Furthermore, the term permits a clear focus on the cooperation between state actors and private firms. Therefore, it does not adequately capture the interaction between state actors and civil society organizations, which is the focus of this thesis. 4 The concept of “co-production” describes very well how citizens and groups of citizens instead of private firms actively participate in the organization and delivery of public services (Benjamin and Brudney, 2018; Steen et al., 2019). Authors using this term have pointed out that “co-production” does not describe the engagement of institutional organizations but subsumes only loose relations. The term “co-production” is restricted to the activities of citizens who are strongly related to the services for themselves (Brandsen and Honingh, 2016). Hence, with increasing austerity and the increasing importance of New Public Management mechanisms, “co-production” has the same triggers as the term “governance networks” (Osborne and Strokosch, 2013). Moreover, there might be cases of individual and informal volunteer engagement for which the concept would be appropriate. However, it cannot capture the whole range of civil society engagement one sees in practice. The same limitations apply to the term “co-creation,” which is very close to “co-production,” but focuses “on co-creation as value” (Voorberg et al., 2015: 1340).

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assumed that private or civil society actors might have capacities the state did not have. Those capacities appear in the form of knowledge, resources, or accessibility to certain goods. To be able to provide certain demanded services or goods, the state and state administrators have an interest in cooperating with non-state actors to meet the needs (Selsky and Parker, 2005). On the other side, non-state actors might be interested in such cooperation, for example, to gain influence or to receive a financial reward (see, for example, Lowndes et al., 2006). Among possible stakeholders, civil society organizations are attractive to state actors as partners with whom to cooperate because they often bring volunteer engagement and therefore require less financial support (Humphris, 2018). Generally, governance structures—including state and non-state actor—do not fully replace hierarchical structures with the state on the top but complement collective steering and fill gaps left by the state (Grande, 2012; Knill and Lehmkuhl, 2002). In explaining the emergence of governance networks with a macro-level perspective, Sørensen and Torfing (2009) argued that “in response to the growing discrepancy between the steadily rising steering ambitions and the increasing fragmentation of social and political life, governance networks are mushrooming” (p. 234). This perception is well in line with Goetz (2008), who presumed that the growth of governance structures was not only the result of intensifying intervention in state tasks by non-state actors but also a consequence of the state’s enforcing its interference in more and more societal fields due to the ever-growing demand for public engagement. At the regional, local, and urban levels, governance networks and the integration of civil society organizations and religious organizations are particularly common. Here, the need for state activity becomes concrete, especially when social needs are concerned (Sellers and Lidström, 2007). Governance networks exist in many policy fields. For example, in the areas of child care or geriatric nursing, private actors and civil society organizations are indispensable partners for the state to deliver the necessary services (Keevers et al., 2008; Ferlie et al., 2011). Despite the growing role of non-state actors, the claim of an “activating state” often prevails. That term means that state actors trigger the provision of services through private or third-sector organizations (Jann, 2002). Because of their desire to perform deeds of charity and help people in need, faith-based organizations can be found among those civil society organizations (Clarke and Jennings, 2008; Johnsen, 2014; Yeung, 2004; Campbell, 2016). Despite several empirical studies, it is still not clear whether those new governance structures—including state and non-state actors—are indeed more successful than pure hierarchical structures and if they can fulfill the expectations (Grande, 2012: 575). Results show that different circumstances can enhance or

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lower the probability of success. Contributing to this branch of research, Johnston et al. (2010), for example, illustrated how recurring trust, commitment, understanding, communication, and outcomes promote the success of urban governance structures. Focusing on local governance networks that supported asylum seekers and refugees in Glasgow, Wren (2007) argued that conflicts between different stakeholders within one network are common. Among other things, restricted funding and resulting competition serve as triggers. Those problems can lower the success of a governance network. Geddes (2006) studied the effectiveness and capacity of local governance structures in England in general. He concluded that local partnerships including private and civil society actors were less powerful than expected. Their low capacity provided one reason. As an interim conclusion, the literature on the reason governance networks exist largely concentrated on the general macro or meso trends that explained their emergence. Profound changes in modern societies, together with the inability of national states to meet increasing demands, served as the primary triggers of new modes of governance (Grande, 2012). However, the process of forming networks at the local level has still not been researched sufficiently (Hertting, 2007). The following section summarizes the few existing studies with a strong focus on the specific circumstances that contribute to the emergence of governance networks.

2.2.3 The Formation Process of Governance Networks This section clarifies how the emergence process looks at the micro level, and under which circumstances do governance networks emerge? Who becomes part of governance networks and who decides? Answering the first question, some authors explored the question of when states seek support from societal actors (Boxmeer and Beckhoven, 2005). With a focus on Europe, Johnson (2005), for example, clarified under which conditions supranational governance structures emerge in the social field. She found that the diversity of national welfare regimes and the ideology of governments are important factors. Le Galès (2001), in a French case, demonstrated how power constellations among political elites drive the emergence of strong local governance networks. He further found that mayors are guiding actors in the emergence of networks and that political considerations are often more important than policy-specific expertise. Cornforth et al. (2015) analyzed the circumstances under which public-non-profit collaborations arise. They found that the development of collaborations is affected by shifts in collaborative windows as well as

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by the ability of central actors to react to internal tensions. Several different circumstances, including the ideological and political goals of political actors, seem decisive in the emergence of new governance networks. Considering the question of who becomes part of governance networks and who decides, the first step is to clarify whether governance networks are a product of conscious decisions or if they emerge unintentionally (Grande, 2012). Grande (2012: 582) supported the theory that a conscious emergence is possible in simple and manageable governance structures. In contrast, in complex governance structures—such as within the EU or at the international level—intentionality does not play a prominent role. Following this perspective and that of other authors (Scharpf, 1994; Enroth, 2011), this thesis expects that the state serves as a decisive authority in the formation of governance networks, at least for those with simple governance structures at the local level. How state actors affect the integration of different stakeholders into governance networks must be examined more extensively. This role accords with the central assumption of authors who write of “meta-governance” (Jessop, 2011). They have argued that concerns of network efficiency, effectiveness, and legitimacy can only be regarded under the strategic planning of single supervising actors, network managers, including representatives of public authorities or political actors (Sørensen and Torfing, 2017; McGuire, 2011). A network manager is “the person […] who assume[s] a network-level perspective, act[s] strategically to effect interactions within the network, and undertake[s] tasks and behaviors designed to achieve network-level goals, be they process- or outcome-oriented goals” (McGuire, 2011: 441). Brandtner et al. (2017), for example, demonstrated how city administrators and street-level bureaucrats acting as network managers actively shape the municipal governance structure. Thus, SLBs working as network managers influence the emergence of governance networks and therefore, in addition to politicians and government ministers, decide who will be the members of governance networks. However, knowledge about what criteria influence the willingness of SLBs to cooperate with a private or third-sector organization is still lacking. It also remains unclear under which circumstances state actors will support private or civil society organizations. Assuming that the capacity of the state to support civil societies, financially as well as personally, is limited, it must apply selective criteria. However, it remains unclear, who participates and who does not. Several authors have attempted to answer this question but have largely focused on the national level. Zhang (2005), for example, identified different characteristics that make organizations attractive state partners at the national level. In his cross-national analysis, he found that criteria concerning safety and

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health as well as financial, technical, and managerial criteria are important for the state’s decision on partners. In their contribution about the governor’s dilemma in finding suitable partners, Abbott et al. (2019) argued that competent partners should have expertise, credibility, and capacity. However, such competencies enhance organizations’ leeway and make state control more difficult. Therefore, governors have to decide between competence and control and actively seek a balance of both. Sørensen and Torfing (2017: 831 f.) argued that to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of a network, it is a promising strategy to integrate actors with sufficient resources and competence. Moreover, to improve the innovation potential of a network, open-minded actors and actors with different social and professional backgrounds should be included. In her cross-national study, Euchner (2019) focused on the role of private and civil society actors in prostitution policy and identified shared policy goals as a further central criterion for state actors. In the same vein, Rhodes (2007) argued that “shared values and norms are the glue which holds the complex set of relationships together; trust is essential for […] the existence of the network” (p. 1246). In a Swiss context, Ruflin (2006: 243) argued that existing relations and trust are even more important than pure market characteristics like cost or quality when local authorities select their cooperation partners. Besides the characteristics of organizations that have a strong impact on the output legitimacy of networks, some authors have also considered the input legitimacy of networks (Cohen and Eimicke, 2011; Considine and Afzal, 2011). In that sense, from a normative angle, many authors have argued that to make a governance network legitimate, all stakeholders related to a certain topic should have the opportunity to participate (Sørensen and Torfing, 2017). Without this presumption, networks can also be very exclusive (Larsson, 2019; Johnston et al., 2010; Skogstad, 2003; Papadopoulos, 2013; McPherson et al., 2001). With a focus on the urban context, Larsson (2019) found that national legislation, a lack of trust, and the dominance of elite stakeholders hamper the integration of “weaker groups.” Likewise, Parry and Moyser (1994) illustrated an unequal integration of different social groups in the policy-making cycle. They claimed that such disparities bring about democratic deficits, as only “well-equipped” societal groups are capable of formulating their interests and successfully asserting them during policy-making processes. However, this literature has largely focused on theoretical considerations but lacks empirical evidence on specific strategies or processes to enhance the input legitimacy of governance networks. While some studies have identified general context factors that enable the emergence of networks, including meta-governance strategies, few authors have identified characteristics that make organizations attractive for certain networks.

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They have identified both “hard” factors like competency or capacity and “soft” factors like shared policy goals or common values as crucial factors that make a civil society organization attractive as a state partner. What is missing is an empirical analysis of how strongly those decisionmaking criteria influence the interest of network managers in cooperating and their concrete support toward individual civil society organizations. Koikkalainen (2011) argued that “networks—or whatever we call those relatively stable patterns of social interaction that people engage in because of mutual interest and trust—are ‘organic’ social formations. Even in pure market situations or under rigid hierarchies, people generate relationships of exchange, trust and affection that go beyond the logic of the market or the bureaucracy” (p. 459). Thus, it makes sense to treat network managers—many of them street-level bureaucrats—as individuals with their own preferences and logics to learn about their cooperation interests toward different groups and organizations.

2.3

Street-level Bureaucrats and their Role in the Emergence of Governance Networks

[T]he practice of governance is every bit as tricky as the traditional implementation of policy through public administration (Larsson, 2019: 1).

Often during the implementation process, a policy dramatically changes from what policymakers intended to what it finally looks like in practice (Fixsen et al., 2005; Hupe and Hill, 2016). As the quotation at the beginning of this section illustrates, this trend applies to policies implemented by public administration and through governance structures. Pressman and Wildavsky (1973) were some of the first researchers to argue that what happens in national parliaments and what is decided by political elites sometimes has little to do with what in the end can be seen in practice. To consider political contexts, managerial structures, administrative specifications, and bureaucratic behavior can bring clarity in understanding the discrepancy between the intention of a policy and how it is delivered in practice. More emphasis on considering policy implementation processes has emerged during the last decades. Some authors have asserted that the implementation phase of a policy requires more scholarly attention than policy formulation (Steen et al., 2019). When policies fail, it is often worth examining the implementation phase and considering how various administrative levels practically dealt with single policy components.

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Within policy implementation literature, two conflicting perspectives predominate: (1) the top-down and (2) the bottom-up views (Sabatier, 1986). The former has close connections to evaluation research. Authors adopting this perspective often perform a target-performance comparison. They assume that there are strict and clear requirements for public administrations and deviations are unlikely. Thus, implementation is “separate [and] identifiable” (Hupe and Hill, 2016: 105). If policy targets are not reached, adapting the policy design is the logical consequence. In this perspective, actors, including SLBs, and their preferences do not play a major role. In contrast, the bottom-up perspective perceives the implementation process as complex and, to a certain degree, impenetrable. Referring to this perspective, Hupe and Hill (2016) added that national requirements might be unspecified and ambiguous, leaving a certain amount of administrative room for maneuver that needs further scholarly attention. Street-level bureaucracy literature, with its focus on the bureaucrats who implement policies, is one subfield of this bottom-up approach (Brodkin, 2012). The following section theoretically consolidates the central presumption of this thesis that SLBs are able actively to shape the implementation of local governance networks. It describes core insights from the SLB literature and shows how previous contributions have theoretically and empirically demonstrated how a different scope of action allows SLBs to diverge from given policy instructions. These divergences might lead to various situations, including favoritism or opposition toward all clients or only toward certain clients. An overview of the still-emerging literature on the connection between governance and SLB literature shows how SLBs can and do shape the emergence of governance networks or cooperation with non-state partners.

2.3.1 Potential of SLBs for Divergent Behavior This section outlines theoretical as well as empirical knowledge about factors that enable divergent behavior by SLBs and what this divergent behavior looks like. Those findings, in a later step, help to show why SLBs might diverge from the behavior the state intended and follow personal interest instead in the formation of governance networks. In his seminal work Street-Level Bureaucracy: Dilemmas of the Individual in Public Services, Lipsky (1980) laid the foundation for growing research on street-level bureaucracy (Brodkin, 2012; Meyers and Lehmann Nielsen, 2012). He argued that street-level bureaucrats, defined as “public service workers who

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interact directly with citizens in the course of their jobs” (Lipsky, 1980: 3), including police officers, social workers, or teachers, work under conditions of high pressure and work overload. They have more tasks to fulfill than they can actually manage. To cope with this unsatisfactory situation, SLBs employ coping strategies, which considerably shape the appearance of policies on the ground. In a study of the bureaucratic impact on policies, Lipsky (1980) argued that street-level bureaucrats have room for maneuver and autonomy in their daily work and do not hesitate to use it. For example, bureaucrats working in job centers can decide how much time they spend with one client to find a job, teachers can adapt their grading with subjective assessments, and police in many cases decide how strictly to interpret regulations. Accordingly, street-level bureaucrats have a huge impact on the way a policy looks when it meets policy clients on the ground. In general, one can assume that the more leeway the SLB has, the more probable it is that a divergence will occur (for empirical evidence, see, for example, Bastien, 2009). This room for maneuver was either deliberately left by policy-makers or exists without intention. The former is the case when policy-makers rely on the assessment of bureaucrats because they cannot set regulations for every individual case. The latter emerges when policy-makers decide upon conflicting policies and are unable to define precisely a compromise (Matland, 1995). Following this interpretation, Eaton Baier et al. (1986) argued that policy inconsistencies primarily result from complicated policy formulation processes and not from the incompetence of political actors. Because several actors with diverging interests are involved in the decision-making process, sometimes consensus can only be reached by an agreement that includes ambiguous objectives and ambiguous implementation rules. Zahariadis (2003) focused on the ambiguity of political issues and analyzed the effect of ambiguous issues on the emergence of ambiguous policies. As a result, vague and ambiguous policy goals and their instruments often leave space for individual bureaucratic interpretation (Keiser, 2010; Bastien, 2009). In a recent overview article, van Leeuwen et al. (2018) explained specific divergent behaviors of street-level bureaucrats by differentiating among three causes: (1) bureaucrat-specific, (2) client-specific, and (3) context-specific. First, bureaucrat-specific reasons explain divergent behavior because their characteristics and attitudes, their role perception, and their competency affect their actions and might lead to unequal treatment of clients (see e.g. Keulemans and Van de Walle, 2018; May and Winter, 2009; Porter and Rogowski, 2018; Winter, 2002). Harrits and Møller (2014) showed that home nurses, teachers, and social workers have different identities, which makes consistent actions difficult and complex. Often, they see themselves more as professionals than as

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state bureaucrats; thus, they act more as agents of the citizen than as agents of the state. Jensen and Pedersen (2017) focused on the personal characteristics of bureaucrats as well and demonstrated that individual empathic abilities influence the way they use their discretion. Second, client-specific factors can have an impact on how bureaucrats use their room for maneuver, including the behavior of clients, their personal situation, or their ethnic background (Fischer and Miller, 1973; Kroeger, 1975; Roth, 1972). In their contribution, Jilke and Tummers (2018) found that US teachers prioritized needy students for their attention and devoted less attention to students who worked the hardest or had the highest probability of success. Raaphorst et al. (2018) tried to answer the question, “Do tax officials use double standards in evaluating citizen-clients?” (p. 134) and concluded that clients’ characteristics like their level of education influence the decisions of SLBs. Third, context-specific determinants might also affect bureaucratic behavior, including institutional settings, organizational control mechanisms, political impacts, and legal ambiguities or work overload, induced by a lack of resources or case congestion (see e.g. Clark-Daniels and Daniels, 1995; Brodkin, 1997; Scott, 1997; Burden et al., 2012; Rice, 2012; Traindafyllidou, 2003; Oberfield, 2010). Maynard-Moody and Musheno (2012) for example identified institutional norms and practices as factors that determined individual administrative decisionmaking. Andersen and Jakobsen (2017) demonstrated that how a new policy or rule was framed and presented to public administrators had an impact on the attitude of SLBs toward the policy. Their attitude in turn affected their behavior. Additionally, the inconsistent expectations of political actors, the public, and clients and the associated role conflicts hampered consistent administrative functioning. Ellermann (2006) argued that bureaucrats who controlled migration frequently suffered from conflicting signals from national public opinion and current state regulations. With the help of a field experiment conducted in Germany, Adam et al. (2020) demonstrated that the local prevalence of Catholicism and the role of conservative parties in a municipality affected the reaction of SLBs to a request for a political rally in support of gay marriage. By focusing on the impact of local political actors, Winter (2003) identified the impact of the preferences and signals of municipal politicians on the daily routines of SLBs and concluded that their qualitative influence, though rather low, primarily affected process times and organizational schedules. With a focus on the political environment, Pandey and Wright (2006) analyzed how diverging political interests increased the ambiguity of organizational goals, which in turn, enhanced the role ambiguity of bureaucrats. Moreover, they found that control mechanisms do not diminish but even intensify role ambiguity, in particular when goals are complex

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and not clearly communicated. Howlett et al. (2015) even argued that uncertainty and conflicting goals might lead to policy failure. Vakkuri (2010) focused on problem-solving and within the framework of New Public Management analyzed how management instruments help to reduce ambiguity problems in public administration. He found that management instruments do not always lead to a reduction of ambiguity, but due to their own complexity might even intensify it. Legal inconsistencies can also bring uncertainty for bureaucrats and affect their strategies and behavior. In her contribution with a focus on German SLBs in the migration field, Dörrenbächer (2017a) showed that the application of EU law instead of national law is probable when the national law is ambiguous, and subjective moral norms contradict the national regulations. Two different kinds of unequal bureaucratic behavior can be detected. First, SLBs can selectively implement tasks, meaning that they subjectively prioritize their varied official duties. Bureaucrats might finish some sorts of tasks with great care and integrity while ignoring tasks they dislike or find pointless. In their literature review, van Leeuwen et al. (2018), differentiated among three types of selective task implementation: client-facing, client-distanced, and clientopposing. These types identify the application of rules in favor of, neutral toward, or against all clients, respectively. Tummers and Rocco (2015) demonstrated, for example, that public bureaucrats faced with challenges in the implementation of e-government instruments tend to move toward clients. They intensify their support of clients, work more purposefully, and interpret rules in the clients’ favor. In an earlier study, this author pointed out how street-level bureaucrats act in a client-facing manner in crises (Riedel, 2019). During the refugee crisis in Germany, bureaucrats in job centers, alien departments, and administrative courts prioritized tasks that helped the clients and did not execute tasks that harmed a client’s situation. Second, unequal bureaucratic behavior can lead to selective implementation toward specific clients. This category includes administrative behavior that favors certain clients over others without any formal reason. Lipsky (1980) identified coping strategies called “creaming” or “cherry-picking.” That strategy means that bureaucrats tend to prioritize cases or clients that are easier to handle or cases with a higher probability of success. Several scholarly studies have illustrated discrimination by SLBs because of clients’ religion, race, or social status as unequal treatment of clients (see, for instance, Harrits and Møller, 2014; Scott, 1997; Grohs et al., 2015). In this context, Distelhorst and Hou (2014) found that the likelihood of support by the Chinese administration is 33 percent lower for the Muslim population than for non-religious citizens. In a Swedish context, Schütze and Johansson (2019) demonstrated that the perception of a high workload for

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SLBs working in the welfare sector leads to a negative assessment of cooperation with migrants as clients. When considering the consequences of divergent behavior by SLBs, Gofen (2013) not only focused on clients that are attached but went one step further. By arguing that the divergent behavior of street-level bureaucrats can trigger policy changes, she brought the whole policy cycle dynamic back into the SLB literature. Her empirical analysis showed that a policy shift is likely if the divergent behavior of bureaucrats happens transparently and collectively, forcing policy-makers to react (also see Gofen, 2015). If bureaucratic behavior diverges systematically from the intention of policymakers, it is useful to examine the implementation phase. As Gofen (2013) aptly formulates it, SLBs are often “policymakers rather than policytakers.” (p. 473). Lipsky’s (1980) perception of bureaucrats as important players during policy implementation strongly disagreed with the Weberian ideal of public administration, which characterizes bureaucrats as professionals who are not influenced by personal preferences or client-specific variables (Goodsell, 1981). Thus, it is a consolidated understanding in SLB literature that “street-level bureaucrats, by implication, have inherent discretion while functioning as policy co-makers” (Hupe and Buffat, 2014: 551). However, Lipsky (1980) as one of the central authors of this literature was far from disparaging SLBs or normatively condemning their divergent behavior. Instead, he took a neutral perspective and aimed to explain the character of everyday routines in public agencies. He focused on the dilemmas SLBs confront and attempted to find practical solutions (Brodkin, 2012). Empirical studies of SLBs and how they use their leeway often concentrate on social policy implementation. However, Winter (2002) demonstrated that the application of coping strategies is also relevant for regulatory policies. During the last few years, many authors likewise have explored how bureaucrats deal with migration policy (Dörrenbächer, 2017b; Borrelli, 2018; Bastien, 2009), but there has been no closer consideration of the implementation of engagement policy or governance network policy (Klein et al., 2010a). This thesis helps to fill that research gap.

2.3.2 Role of SLBs in Governance Networks Public administrators and SLBs are “boundary spanners,” “planners,” or “network managers” within governance networks, meaning that they indeed have a leading role (cf. Le Galès, 2001; Frederickson, 1999; van Meerkerk and Edelenbos, 2018;

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Sørensen and Torfing, 2017; Ferlie et al., 2011). However, few studies have combined insights from street-level bureaucracy literature and governance research (Klenk and Cohen, 2019; Agger and Poulsen, 2017). Only a few have dealt with connecting factors. From a theoretical perspective, Hupe and Hill (2007) elaborated on how governance structures produce multiple accountabilities. These relationships lead to a situation where “street-level bureaucrats are held accountable in different ways and to varying degrees, but certainly in more ways than strictly from the political center alone” (p. 296). Likewise, Brodkin (2012: 944) argued that due to NPM movements, street-level bureaucracy concepts should be applied more broadly. Not only state bureaucracies but also private actors or organizations from the third sector implement public policies, and SLB literature should also focus on them. In that regard and with a stronger empirical focus, Thomann et al. (2018) investigated how hybrid forms of policy implementation, including private and public bureaucrats in food safety inspection in Switzerland, yield different perceptions of accountability. They discovered that private implementers are confronted with accountability dilemmas more often than public administrators (also see Lieberherr and Thomann, 2018). Jilke et al. (2018) looked at the potential for discrimination by street-level actors in nursing homes toward foreign elderly people and compared public and private institutions. While the authors did not identify any form of discrimination within public institutions, they did identify some in private ones. Hence, if there is any literature that combines governance and street-level bureaucracy, it is primarily in the form of a comparison between state and nonstate policy implementers. These studies also consider how typical phenomena of street-level bureaucracy in public administration, such as rule divergences, a lack of resources, and the unequal treatment of clients also occur in private or public-private policy implementation settings. Very few authors have examined SLBs that are directly active within the field of governance network management (Björkdahl and Strömbom, 2015). Agger and Poulsen (2017) made an important contribution by illustrating qualitatively which conflicts SLBs working with areabased initiatives in Malmö and Copenhagen face and how they cope with their situation. Their results showed that SLBs working in network management often suffer from role ambiguity as their tasks are not clearly specified. The authors identified “learning by doing” as one coping strategy SLBs used. Because previous research has largely failed to consider the role, preferences, and logics of SLBs during the formation phase of governance networks, this thesis addresses this research gap. Hupe (2019) claimed not just to examine the

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attitudes and behavior of “classical” SLBs like teachers or social workers, but also to apply the SLB-concept to new policy fields.

2.4

Summary of the Literature Review

Welfare state literature has explained why and how non-state actors, including churches and FBOs, have become important partners of the state. Different national conditions, such as the prevailing welfare system, have an impact on the strength of the involvement of civil society organizations and FBOs in social service delivery. Additionally, varying church-state regimes can explain the different degrees of inclusion of churches or religious organizations in one country (Fox, 2015). However, studies that consider the relation between local bureaucracies and religious organizations are still missing. Focusing not only on implementation and on the welfare sector, the literature on governance and governance networks is much broader, covering the whole policy process. Authors contributing to this literature have explained, among other things, how and why actors from the private sphere and the third sector cooperate with the state to fulfill public needs. This research branch considers the general formation of governance networks and what factors—apart from purely institutional settings—affect the cooperation interest of state actors toward certain potential partners (Abbott et al., 2019; Zhang, 2005; Sørensen and Torfing, 2017). However, what is still missing is a closer reflection on those bureaucrats that manage governance networks. There are multiple studies of street-level bureaucracies that explore how SLBs integrate their own preferences and reflections into their daily routines (Jensen and Pedersen, 2017; Keulemans and Van de Walle, 2018; Winter, 2002; Porter and Rogowski, 2018). It is probable that during the formation of governance networks, in which bureaucrats play a crucial role, SLBs apply different logics that diverge from national state interests. Therefore, it is worth examining them.

3

Theory, Concept, and Research Design

This chapter clarifies why SLBs and public administrators might be interested in building local governance networks and what makes their emergence more probable. Second, it argues that SLBs have the possibility as well as the interest to affect considerably the integration of certain partners into local governance networks. Capturing the way SLBs influence the emergence process leads to a conceptualization of four logics that might shape their cooperation interest toward groups with different characteristics. The next step operationalizes the four logics regarding the cooperation interest of SLBs toward organizations with varying experiences, confessional backgrounds, and social fields. The final part of this chapter presents the research design of the thesis.

3.1

Interest of SLBs in Building Local Governance Networks

An important prerequisite to the assumption that SLBs shape the emergence of governance networks is the belief that building cooperation with CSOs and other non-state actors is in the interest of the SLBs. Doing so brings important benefits by helping to deliver services in demand, especially social services, more rapidly and better, thereby lowering the pressure on SLBs and local public administrators. This relation is based on the assumption that the resources of SLBs and public administrators are insufficient to deliver such services (Bogumil and Holtkamp, 2010). Furthermore, governments hire several SLBs explicitly to find state partners to help deliver public services (Le Galès, 2001; Brandtner et al., 2017; McGuire, 2011). Thus, cooperating with CSOs, social welfare agencies, and private firms and building networks with them is not only in the interest of the state at the national © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2021 L. Fischer, Street-Level Bureaucrats’ Impact on the Emergence of Local Governance Networks, Stadtforschung aktuell, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-36153-2_3

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level, with the idea of an “activating state” in mind (cf. Section 2.2.2), but also at the local level, where SLBs and local political decision-makers are in charge of delivering needed services. However, it is not a one-sided transaction, with only the state receiving services such as neighborhood assistance for elderly people, care for children from unfortunate backgrounds, or support for the integration of refugees. The CSOs, agencies, and private actors that participate in a local governance network often receive ideal, organizational, or financial support in return. Specifically, regional authorities can transfer monetary payments to agencies that operate a nursing home, municipalities can provide a room for initiatives that offer care options for persons with dementia, or public administrators can promote and ideally support the engagement of a self-help group for parents of children with mental disabilities. In each of these examples, SLBs located in the local social welfare office, the local city office, or a volunteer agency are normally the first contact point for CSOs, social agencies, or private actors in the field. SLBs consult the non-state actors, organize support possibilities, and are often the connecting link to local decision-making bodies. It is important to understand that such cooperation between state and nonstate actors and the resulting governance networks do not automatically lower but can even enhance the potential for state steering and control (Mayntz, 2004). Because of state support, non-state actors that engage become dependent to a certain degree. Often, they need to be a part of a local governance network to deliver their services successfully. Additionally, contract management and target agreements become hierarchical instruments for state actors (Grohs, 2010: 70).

3.2

Logics of SLBs that Shape their Cooperation Interest Toward Different Organizations During the Emergence of Governance Networks

For SLBs to have an impact on the emergence of local governance networks by applying different logics—the central argument of this thesis—two important conditions must be fulfilled: First, SLBs need to have general room for maneuver to make an impact possible. Second, SLBs must use this room for maneuver, meaning that they must follow certain subjective interests. Considering the first prerequisite, explanations in Section 2.3.2 made clear that SLBs frequently serve as “network managers” (see, for instance, Brandtner et al., 2017). In the social field, those are SLBs that work in volunteer management or SLBs that work in the social welfare office with responsibility for seniors,

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refugees, children, or other target. They are the ones that make contact with CSOs and organize roundtables about specific topics like elder care or the situation of children. Additionally, they are the ones who deliver concrete support for CSOs that need help concerning infrastructure, information, or financing options. Formal legal guidelines are largely absent leading to considerable leeway for how SLBs fulfill their tasks (see, for instance, Agger and Poulsen, 2017; Andeßner, 2016). Assuming that SLBs have a certain degree of leeway, do they have an interest in using this leeway in their interest? There are two distinct answers. Authors following the principal-agent model with pure rational choice considerations would say “yes.” Niskanen (1968), for example, argued that power, recognition, salary, and security are central to bureaucrats and that they are interested in maximizing all of those attributes. Following policy-related aims are a means to an end. Applying this perspective to SLBs that are in charge of building governance networks, one can assume that they would prefer to cooperate with organizations that bring about safe, easy, and predictable forms of cooperation. In contrast to pure rational-choice analysts, other authors would answer the question “Do SLBs use their leeway in their interest?” with “It depends” (see, for instance, Knill et al., 2019). In his “theory of bureaucracy,” Downs (1965) argued that two different kinds of bureaucrats exist: those who follow pure self-interest and those with mixed-motives, who in addition to personal interests also keep narrow policies, broader policies, or even the national interest in mind and act accordingly. In accordance, contributions in SLB literature show how bureaucrats are guided by different interests and logics, among other things, induced by their “role perception” (van Leeuwen et al., 2018). An SLB working as a “network manager” and following mixed-motives would, for example, also tend to work with organizations that are underrepresented to follow national goals of equal participation and representation. They might prefer such cooperation even though cooperating with such organizations might be more complex and require more time. In its theoretical conceptualization of bureaucratic impact on the emergence of governance networks, this study inter alia builds upon Downs’s (1965) and Lipsky’s (1980) considerations and argues that different types of SLBs apply different logics that shape their behavior. The relevance of logics that differ from a pure neutrality logic is reinforced by the fact that cooperation resources are limited and therefore not every civil society organization can be supported in the same way. Therefore, the decision of with whom to work might often be a question of allocating resources to these organizations. Thus, SLBs must evaluate and decide one central question: With whom shall we finally cooperate?

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This study differentiates among four logics that might determine the answer to this question: input legitimacy logics, including (1) a representation logic and (2) a logic of cultural closeness, and output legitimacy logics, including (3) a competency logic and (4) a control logic. While the representation logic and the competency logic largely follow a policy-advocacy strategy, a logic of cultural closeness and a control logic follow a strategy of risk aversion. Table 3.1 provides an overview. Table 3.1 Logics determining SLBs’ cooperation interest Policy advocacy

Risk aversion

[1] Input legitimacy logics

Representation logic Logic of cultural closeness Cooperation partner enhances Cooperation partner fits societal representation in a majoritarian cultural patterns network

[2] Output legitimacy logics

Competency logic Cooperation partner suggests best ability for task completion

Control logic Cooperation partner is easy to control, brings smooth cooperation and probable task completion

Logics with an effect on the input legitimacy of governance networks include a representation logic and a logic of cultural closeness. To increase the input legitimacy of the entire governance network, bureaucratic actors might favor cooperation with organizations that have been underrepresented. This approach can satisfy national claims to integrate diverse members of society into publicthird-sector partnerships (Considine and Afzal, 2011; Klein et al., 2010b; Koikkalainen, 2011). Therefore, this logic follows a policy advocacy strategy. With a focus on international bureaucracies, Knill et al. (2019) identified four different administrative styles with different impacts on policies. They identified “servants” who do not influence policies, “advocates” who affect policy positions, “consolidators” who have a functional orientation and focus on effectiveness as a central goal, and “entrepreneurs” who influence both policy positions and functional parameters. Whereas Knill et al. (2019) assumed that those administrative styles apply to the entire bureaucracies of international organizations, this study transfers their categories to the local level. Thus, different styles are possible among individual SLBs, even if they are part of the same organization, have the same task, or are comparably administratively embedded. This is the case, for

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example, when some SLBs prefer to work with underrepresented groups to further national goals of equal representation, while others do not. The former SLBs act as “advocates” by applying a policy advocacy strategy. On the other hand, “consolidators” who apply strategies of risk aversion might also be evident. For those SLBs functional considerations are important and they are interested in easy, effective, and predictable cooperative arrangements. They want to prevent risks to maintain their status and function (cf. Knill et al., 2019). This strategy could lead to a logic of cultural closeness, which avoids collaborations with organizations that are culturally unfamiliar or a part of minority groups. In that sense, Fennema and Tillie (2008) argued that people tend to engage in groups where closeness toward other group members is strong. McPherson et al. (2001) also illustrated how conformity in socio-demographic, behavioral, and individual characteristics facilitate personal relationships and group formation. This phenomenon holds not only for intra-group dynamics but also for inter-organizational cooperation. Moreover, cooperation with familiar groups reduces information and material costs (Johnson et al., 1998: 317). Cooperation with culturally close organizations is frequently maintained through path dependency, where cooperation continues for the sake of convenience. Although some SLBs themselves are part of minority groups, Watkins-Hayes (2011) found that they do not automatically act in favor of their or other minority groups. Bureaucratic constraints, complex inter-organizational dynamics, and concern for professional legitimacy hamper the chances of racially representative bureaucracy. Section 2.2.1 explained that street-level bureaucrats, in general, can behave in a discriminatory manner. Lotta and Pires (2019) also emphasized this fact, when they argued that “street-level implementation becomes a locus for the reproduction of social inequalities—via racial, gender or other forms of prejudice, bias and favoritism—that have become crystalized over time in local, regional and national cultures” (p. 93). Previous research has demonstrated that public administrations often use stereotypes to cluster minority groups, leading to eventual discrimination (Raaphorst and Groeneveld, 2019). In contrast to the previously presented logics that affect the input-legitimacy of governance networks, SLBs might also apply different logics that affect the output legitimacy. Output legitimacy refers to the capacity and ability of a network or a network actor to achieve certain goals or to solve specific problems (Scharpf, 1999). Adopting an advocacy strategy can lead to the competency logic. SLBs applying this logic are interested in cooperation with partners that are best suited to fulfill a given task to reach a certain policy goal.

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Another logic that affects the output legitimacy of a network, coming from a strategy of risk aversion, is a control logic. Abbott et al. (2019), for example, argued that besides the expertise of organizations, control options play a decisive role when national states decide with whom to cooperate. Monitoring whether civil society organizations engage in the way the state intends can be a timeconsuming task not only for national states but also for bureaucrats at the local level that deal with those groups. Therefore, organizations that are easier to control and have less incentive to deviate from cooperative agreements might benefit during the selection process. Abbott et al. (2019) focused on the national and international levels and identified competency and control as endpoints of one dimension because competent partners bring extraordinary expertise that state actors do not have, making control very difficult. In contrast to this perspective, this study views the two factors as complementary. The higher competency of a local civil society group does not necessarily lead to fewer control options. This two-dimensional perspective is valid because at the local level, as compared to the national and international levels that Abbott et al. (2019) considered, the tasks of CSOs are more clear-cut and less complex. Therefore, local bureaucrats should have the expertise to control such organizations in any case.

3.3

Operationalization of Logics that Determine SLBs’ Cooperation Interest

To measure the existence of the logics presented in Section 3.1 empirically requires transferring them to the concrete setting of the thesis. The operationalization permits the assignment of specific expectations for how the SLBs’ application of each of the four logics leads to different cooperation interests toward CSOs with specific characteristics in a German context. This study examines SLBs’ cooperation interest with organizations of different (1) experience (experience/no experience) and (2) confessional backgrounds (non-confessional/Christian/Muslim). First, the representation logic, indicating SLBs’ interest in enhancing societal representation in governance networks, would be evident if an SLB preferred Muslim organizations over Christian organizations as partners in local governance networks. In many Western societies, Muslim organizations are still considerably underrepresented in civil society and local governance networks compared to

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Christian organizations, although the proportion of Muslims in the total population has increased (Hien, 2013; Van der Ploeg, 2017). Handy and Greenspan (2009) found this effect in Germany and identified linguistic and cultural barriers as well as fear of discrimination as reasons for lower Muslim engagement compared to other religious groups. Comparing civil engagement in the field of integration in Austria, Germany and Switzerland, Mattes (2017) demonstrated that Christian organizations dominate, whereas other religious organizations are rarely involved. To overcome such inequalities, SLBs might act in favor of Muslim organizations to produce more social equality in existing networks and thereby serve as policy advocates (cf. Op. 1). Op. 1:

SLBs are more interested in cooperation with Muslim organizations than with Christian organizations (representation logic).

However, several empirical studies have proven that, as a minority group, Muslim organizations are particularly affected by administrative uncertainties. Focusing on Germany, Rohe and Jaraba (2018) found that many civil servants feel uncertain about how strongly they should adjust internal processes toward the cultural peculiarities of Muslim organizations. This insecurity might hamper their general willingness to cooperate with Muslims and in turn strengthen their interest in cooperating with Christian or non-confessional organizations, which are already familiar as state partners (Hien, 2013). Likewise, Ceylan and Kiefer (2016) highlighted that, at the municipal level, Muslim applicants for children and youth projects are often subject to longer and more intense tests than other applicants. In their qualitative analysis in Switzerland, Farman and Merz (2017) found that state cooperation with Muslim organizations that focus on preventing extremism varies among regional public agencies. Among other things, a lack of trust and communication challenges prevent state agents from cooperating with Muslim organizations. Thus, in this case, functional considerations played a role when communication barriers made coordination processes ineffective. Banfi (2015: 305) even recorded the ignorance of public authorities toward Muslim organizations. Likewise, with the help of discourse analysis, Kortmann (2019) showed that negative discourse about Islam makes cooperation with state actors difficult. To sum it up, Muslim organizations are often confronted with a “climate of suspicion” (Translation) (Thränhardt, 2010; but also see Kortmann, 2019). In the Western world, not only Muslim organizations but also Muslim individuals frequently confront prejudices, stereotypes, and rejections. A field

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experiment by King and Ahmad (2010) verified that Muslims have a lower chance of finding a job, even with comparable qualifications to those of other applicants. In their cross-country analysis, Bansak et al. (2016) found that Islamophobia is widespread in Europe and occurs across all education and income levels as well as political ideologies (cf. also Banfi, 2018). Thus, it is plausible that the rejection of Muslims also occurs within public administration. Based on the assumption that values, norms, and other cultural elements determine bureaucratic behavior (Brodkin, 2012; Harrits and Møller, 2014; Lipsky, 2010; Scott, 1997; Grohs et al., 2015; Lotta and Pires, 2019; Raaphorst and Groeneveld, 2019; Maynard-Moody and Musheno, 2012) and that there is some diffuse skepticism toward individual Muslims and Muslim organizations (see for instance Farman and Merz, 2017; Raaphorst et al., 2018), state cooperation with them might be less desirable than with Christian and non-confessional organizations (cf. Op. 2), and a strategy of risk aversion is closely connected. Op. 2:

SLBs’ cooperation interest is higher for Christian and non-confessional organizations than for Muslim organizations (logic of cultural closeness).

The next section focuses on the two output legitimacy logics. First, if SLBs follow a competency logic, they would assess a groups’ strategic fit regarding a specific task. Therefore, an organization with experience in the relevant field has a higher probability of becoming a state partner than an inexperienced one, as the former should be well-equipped to fulfill a pressing public need. Additionally, Sørensen and Torfing (2017) have identified the competency and knowledge of stakeholders as important factors that make them appropriate for cooperation to enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of governance networks. Abbott et al. (2019) also argued that appropriate state partners should have expertise (also see Yang et al., 2019; Häikiö, 2007). Thus, the interest of SLBs in cooperation is determined not only by the experience of a CSO but also by its expected expertise in fulfilling a certain task. Applying a competency logic accords with the policy advocacy strategy because SLBs who aim to promote a certain policy turn to partners from civil society that seem to be best equipped to fulfill given tasks (cf. Op. 3a, Op. 3b). Op. 3a: Op. 3b:

SLBs’ cooperation interest is higher for organizations that have experience in the field in which they want to engage (competency logic). SLBs’ cooperation interest is higher for organizations that have an expected expertise in the field in which they want to engage (competency logic).

3.3 Operationalization of Logics that Determine …

47

Finally, when SLBs apply a control logic, which leads to a preference for organizations that are easier to control, this logic also affects the output legitimacy of local governance networks. Organizations are difficult to control when they include strong core beliefs or dogmatic ideals. Their internal convictions might diverge from state or bureaucratic interests and thus their behavior might also differ from what the state intends. Controlling them, therefore, is more important and more difficult. FBOs are an example of organizations with strong core beliefs. SLBs assume that FBOs, due to their religious orientation, might provoke conflicts on moral or ethical decisions more often than would non-confessional groups (cf. Campbell, 2016). As a result, their engagement might also be influenced more by religious values. Whether this assumption is true or not matters less than whether SLBs believe it or not and act accordingly. However, there is some theoretical as well as empirical evidence that FBOs as state partners are indeed more difficult. For theoretical explanation, the principalagent theory is useful. In general, this theory argues that agents, those actors working on the ground, might diverge from their principals’ goals; the agents’ information advantage compared to that of their principals enables such behavior (Braun and Guston, 2003; Eisenhardt, 1989). Transferring this theory to the behavior of organizations with strong core beliefs, such as FBOs, those organizations see not only the national state or the general public interest as their principal, but also their internal doctrine, ideology, or religious leader, or to formulate it more abstractly, God. As the imperatives of those two principals—the state and God—might in some situations diverge, deviations by organizations with strong core beliefs from state expectations are even more probable than deviations by civil society organizations without such strong core beliefs. Chaves (1993), for example, argued that “the heart of religious organizations is not religion, but religious authority” (p. 148). This quotation emphasizes the relevance of religious ideologies. Moreover, there is also some empirical evidence emphasizing this assumption. In his study of FBOs in the UK, Kettell (2019) found that a significant proportion of volunteers that engage through their religious community hope to promote their own faith during the engagement, and they often include their conservative positions. In their study of the role of FBOs in migration policy, Deardorff Miller (2015) argued that “churches may use their voice of moral authority to highlight certain issues or even push for social change. […]. Some FBOs, particularly those on the more extreme end of the spectrum, may view ‘evangelism’ and ‘salvation’ as more

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important than the provision of medical supplies” (p. 3125 f.). Concentrating on church asylum in a European context, Mitchell (2017) illustrated how faith-based actors’ beliefs might strongly differ from state regulations, leading to behavior not intended by the state authorities. For example in Germany, in January 2017, there were 323 cases of church asylum that directly challenged state regulations and state authority (Mitchell, 2017: 270).1 With this pattern in mind, SLBs might prioritize non-confessional groups for cooperation, assuming that future processes and agreements are easier to handle, control is less essential and network targets are better reached. Lipsky (1980) identified the application of such simplified procedures as a typical coping strategy for street-level bureaucrats called “creaming” (for empirical illustration also see van Leeuwen et al., 2018; Nielsen, 2006; Lotta and Pires, 2019). Thus, if SLBs apply a control logic, they simultaneously follow a strategy of risk aversion based on functional considerations (cf. Op. 4). Op. 4:

SLBs’ cooperation interest is higher for organizations with a nonconfessional than for those with a confessional character (logic of control).

The basic theoretical assumption of this thesis is that apart from a pure neutrality logic, four different logics might shape SLBs’ cooperation interest. While SLBs that apply a representation logic or a competency logic follow a strategy of policy advocacy, SLBs that apply a logic of cultural closeness or a control logic act more from a policy of risk aversion and have functional considerations in mind. Thereby, the input legitimacy and the output legitimacy of a governance network are affected. Table 3.2 summarizes the central logics, their operationalizations, and their explanations.

1

A summary of the German church-state conflict due to the provision of church asylum is also provided by Traulsen S (2017) Kirchenasyl in Geschichte und Gegenwart. Kirche & Recht 2: 128–139.

3.4 Research Design

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Table 3.2 Summary of logics, operationalization, and explanations Logic

Operationalization

Explanation

SLBs’ cooperation interest is higher for Muslim organizations than for Christian organizations.

To reach equal representation of different societal groups in governance networks, there might be a preference to cooperate with Muslim groups that are hitherto underrepresented. Christian groups are already well-established actors in such networks.

Logic of cultural closeness SLBs’ cooperation interest is higher for Christian and non-confessional organizations than for Muslim organizations.

Stereotypes about organizations with a different cultural background and possible communication challenges might prevent SLBs from cooperating with such groups. Several empirical studies have confirmed the existence of negative stereotypes about Muslim groups.

Input legitimacy logics Representation logic

Output legitimacy logics Competency logic

Control logic

3.4

SLBs’ cooperation interest is higher for SLBs might favor groups that have organizations that have experience in experience in a certain field, as this the field in which they want to engage. experience might help the group to fulfill a given task efficiently. SLBs’ cooperation interest is higher for organizations that have an expected expertise in the field in which they want to engage.

The expected experience of a group might enhance SLBs’ cooperation interest to work with them because they assume the tasks will be handled properly.

SLBs’ cooperation interest is higher for organizations with a non-confessional than for those with a confessional character.

As confessional organizations bring strong belief systems with their engagement, deviations from state-intended behavior might be more likely. To avoid such deviations, working with non-confessional organizations might be more reliable and requires less control by the SLBs.

Research Design

To answer the research questions of with whom the state is interested in cooperating in the social field at the local level and what role do the logics of SLBs play, this study applies an explorative design because theoretical and empirical knowledge on this question is still uncommon. Specifically, it employs a mixed-methods

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design, combining qualitative and quantitative research methods. This two-fold approach is rarely applied in administrative research and street-level bureaucracy literature. However, some scholars have called for its broader application due to the advantage of compensating for the weaknesses of exclusively qualitative or quantitative research designs (Schott and van Kleef, 2019; Creswell and Plano Clark, 2007). Because of their focus on single cases, qualitative methods suffer from the difficulties of generalizing, maintaining objectivity, and external validation. Additionally, interviews—a frequently used method in qualitative studies—might hinder obtaining valid results as soon as social desirability distorts correct response behavior (Skinner, 2012). On the other hand, quantitative methods are inadequate when considering new phenomena and unknown relations (Creswell and Plano Clark, 2007). Hupe and Buffat (2014: 566) argued that mixed-method research designs are very useful, whenever the characteristics of individual SLBs and institutional context factors combine in one research question, which is true of this thesis. The research strategy uses an exploratory sequential design, starting with a qualitative approach followed by a quantitative approach (Creswell and Plano Clark, 2007), both focused on Germany. Applying this two-phase approach allows the researcher in the first step—with the help of semi-structured interviews—to obtain more detailed information about a hitherto insufficiently considered group of street-level bureaucrats, namely volunteer managers. They are usually jointly responsible for building governance networks in the social field. As such positions in public administration have often emerged only during recent years (for a European context, see GHK, 2010), scholarly attention on them has just begun to grow. The qualitative portion aims to clarify the initial situation of volunteer managers and to understand the general situation of volunteering in Germany, and the role perceptions, tasks, and challenges of volunteer managers. Additionally, this part examines the general plausibility of the developed logics. Can the researcher, for example, identify a representation logic during the interviews with the volunteer managers? What role does a control logic play according to their statements? This approach delivers a first proof of concept. A second quantitative step tests statistically for the existence and prevalence of the four logics deduced and presented in this chapter and considered qualitatively in Chapter 4. It also identifies some first causal relationships between certain logics and contextual factors. Generally, central methodological elements of the field experiment are based on knowledge derived from the qualitative first part.

4

Initial Position of SLBs and their Self-perception of Cooperation Interest

To clarify the initial position of SLBs, their operating environment, and how this context might lead to different logics that shaping the cooperation interest of SLBs toward different organizations, this chapter summarizes the applied qualitative methods and provides an overview of the importance of civil engagement and volunteer work in Germany, showing how the German state actively promotes such engagement. Employing volunteer managers at the local level, who directly support civil society organizations, is a primary method of encouraging the engagement of its citizens. Drawing from qualitative interviews and existing literature, the second section illustrates how such volunteer managers work, what role perceptions they have, and what challenges they face. Identifying those aspects makes clear that varying cooperation interests toward different organizations is indeed probable. The following section focuses on the four logics developed in Section 3.2 and presents in detail how such logics are identifiable in the self-description of SLBs. These details provide important evidence for the central research question of this thesis, whether SLBs preferentially cooperate with certain organizations rather than others.

4.1

Methods I

The qualitative portion of this research delivers useful background information as well as a first proof of concept about a group of street-level bureaucrats that has rarely been the focus of scholarly research, volunteer managers. It offers Supplementary Information The online version contains supplementary material available at (https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-36153-2_4). © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2021 L. Fischer, Street-Level Bureaucrats’ Impact on the Emergence of Local Governance Networks, Stadtforschung aktuell, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-36153-2_4

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details on how they take on the role of network managers. It also provides first impressions of how characteristics of civil society organizations, administrative embedding, and contextual factors affect the cooperation interest of SLBs. The research includes interviews conducted with two different groups: (1) volunteer managers and federal state representatives of volunteer managers, and (2) experts for Muslim welfare and representatives of Muslim organizations. Muslim organizations are underrepresented in local German governance networks, and focusing on Muslim groups seems to be useful to learn about possible barriers to a more comprehensive engagement. With the help of interviews with volunteer managers and representatives of this group of SLBs, this study considers in detail how volunteer managers perceive their own role, what tasks they have, and how they support the engagement of civil society organizations and faith-based organizations in particular. In general, street-level bureaucracy literature has frequently used interviews to study SLB’s tasks, behaviors, and attitudes. The semi-structured nature of the interview, on the one hand, helps to make the interviews comparable and structures the whole interview process. On the other hand, the openness of the questions and the possibility of deviating from the given order allows interviews to bring out information and details about volunteer manager’s work that have not been considered before (Misoch, 2019). The qualitative research included a total of eleven semi-structured interviews with volunteer managers at different regional levels: the local level (7), the Länder level (3), and the national level (1). Volunteer managers working at higher levels than the local level represent the umbrella organizations of volunteer agencies and therefore have a broader overview of volunteer agencies in their territory. To obtain an overall picture of volunteer managers at the local level, the researcher contacted managers in two municipalities with fewer than 100,000 inhabitants, two in cities with between 100,000 and 200,000 inhabitants, and three in large cities with more than 200,000 inhabitants. Five of the interviewed volunteer managers at the local level work directly within the public administration, and two work in independent agencies under social or free trusteeship. Most interviews were conducted by phone, with only two interviews carried out face-to-face. The interviews ranged from twenty to sixty minutes in length, and all of them were audio-taped and transcribed. The transcriptions had a clear focus on the main research topics, viewing the interviewees as officeholders and not as private individuals (Meuser and Nagel, 2009). Therefore, the research did not capture paralinguistic features. The interview phase began in mid-2018 and ended in mid-2019.

4.1 Methods I

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To learn as much as possible about SLBs in the field of volunteer coordination, the interviews first focus, rather broadly, on (1) general tasks of volunteer managers, including questions about their role perception, daily routines, and their target groups, and (2) current challenges and risks they face, including the fields of integration and senior welfare. The interviews helped to clarify whether volunteer managers indeed act as network managers and whether unfavorable conditions and situations might reinforce an unequal treatment of different groups. Second, the interviews include questions about (3) which organizations they are interested in cooperating with, and (4) what role religious organizations play as state partners. It is the purpose of the interviews to detect the interests of SLBs and their patterns of behavior and to find out which mechanisms might explain the unequal treatment of different civil society organizations. For a detailed interview guideline, see Appendix 1. In a second step, the research included nine interviews that focused on Muslim organizations and Muslim social engagement in civil society. Among them, interviews with project managers and directors of nursing homes that aim to strengthen Muslim engagement as well as interviews with representatives of Muslim organizations. Following Farman and Merz (2017), the interviews included questions for the representatives of Muslim organizations about their experiences with local administrations and how they perceive state support and encouragement. They also included questions about how Muslim organizations are motivated to seek cooperation with state actors. The interviews were partly conducted by phone and partly face-to-face; some of those interviews were part of a broader project and included questions about other topics as well.1 Appendix 2 provides the interview guide for Muslim organizations for this study. The interviews lasted from thirty minutes to one hour and fifty minutes, including portions devoted to the broader project. They were conducted from the latter part of 2018 to the early part of 2019. Appendix 3 provides the detailed interview list, including the interviews with volunteer managers and those with a Muslim focus, the position of the interviewee, and the interview date. The decision not to name the specific municipality of the SLB is deliberate to avoid drawing conclusions about single interviewees and to protect their identity. In addition to interview data, to make the empirical results as comprehensive as possible, the research comprises document analysis 1

The broader project that included interview questions for this dissertation is “Religion and morality policy” and is domiciled at the Chair of Empirical Theory of Politics (LMU Munich, Prof. Knill). The project seeks to detect the role of religious organizations in the implementation of morality policy. It focuses on their engagement in questions involving prostitution, abortion, same-sex marriage, assisted dying, and education.

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of government advice and decisions on volunteer management and state cooperation with civil society organizations and also included results from previous studies and contributions on civil engagement in Germany.

4.2

Initial Position of SLBs: Civil-society Engagement and its State Steering in Germany

Understanding the initial position of volunteer managers, the group of SLBs on which the empirical part of this thesis focuses, is the central aim of this section. It clarifies the general role and importance of civil society engagement in Germany and how the state actively strengthens its position. The following sections consider current developments in volunteer engagement, collective engagement through civil society organizations, and individual volunteers and their dedication. The chapter pays special attention to the contribution of civil society within the policy fields of integration and senior welfare. The second and third sections concentrate on political measures by the German government to strengthen civil engagement and particularly illustrate how those state efforts are oriented toward an integrative and all-encompassing character of civil engagement subsidy.

4.2.1 The Role of Volunteer Work in Germany As in many Western democracies, the German engagement of civil society organizations seems indispensable for social cohesion and the delivery of important social services (see, for instance, Newton, 2001; Cornforth et al., 2015; Evers, 2010; Simonson and Tesch-Römer, 2014). For decades, volunteering has been a central part of German society and, in particular, in social welfare delivery (Erlinghagen, 2002). This section first provides information about volunteer engagement in Germany in general, its distribution, and changes. It then concentrates on integration and senior welfare separately and describes the role of civil engagement in those two fields. More than 30 million people in Germany currently volunteer and are active in associations (BMFSFJ, 2017). The German survey on volunteers, which has existed since 1999 and is repeated every fifth year, provides information about the number of people that volunteer, their socioeconomic status, and areas where the engagement takes place (BMFSFJ, 2014). The newest report available (from 2014) confirms that more than 43 percent of the German population volunteer. Compared to other European countries, volunteer engagement is widespread in

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Germany (Roth, 2010). In Belgium, Ireland, Poland, or Spain, for example, only 10 to 20 percent of the adult population carry out volunteer work (GHK, 2010). However, among younger people, there is a general trend of declining interest in volunteer work in most Western societies (Dekker and van den Broek, 1998). This trend is also remarkable in Germany (BMFSFJ, 2016). While the total number of volunteers is still increasing, the time individuals spend has diminished during the last few years (BMFSFJ, 2014). Instead of formal, continuous, and longer-term volunteering, people prefer more flexible and less time-intensive activities (Andeßner, 2016; Keupp, 2010). Although most engagement still happens within the framework of associations, this form of engagement is also steadily declining; instead, non-institutionalized engagement is gaining relevance (BMFSFJ, 2016). In the whole of Europe, people prefer shorter projects instead of becoming members of groups; a trend that is likewise reflected in the decline of political party memberships in the whole of the Western world (Andeßner, 2016). Thus, traditional and longstanding bonds of individuals with one association are becoming more infrequent (Alscher et al., 2009). Therefore, finding volunteers for single projects is still feasible, but more time-consuming and responsible volunteer positions, like being a member of a board of an association, are difficult to staff (Wolf and Zimmer, 2012). The following quotation from a volunteer manager highlights the current situation. There is a change at the moment concerning the volunteers themselves. They are less willing to engage long-lasting and regularly; instead, they prefer more flexible modes of engagement. (Interview_1)

Not only the quantity and organizational embedding of civil engagement has changed but also the motivation of volunteers. Besides the desire to help others, reasons of self-interest are becoming more important (More-Hollerweger, 2014). Particularly younger volunteers are looking for a community and exchange with other people; in particular, gaining social competencies is an important motivational factor for them (BMFSFJ, 2014). Concerning the amount and motivation of engagement, large discrepancies exist among different social groups, depending on their gender, age, and social and ethnical background. Current numbers about the time volunteers spend for their engagement show that men and women are almost equally engaged (BMFSFJ, 2014). However, gender-specific tendencies emerge in the areas in which people are engaged. While women predominate in the fields of education and social work, men are more likely to participate in the political sphere

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and practically oriented fields (Gensicke and Geiss, 2006; BMFSFJ, 2016; Kausmann et al., 2017). Regarding the age of volunteers, the cohort between 14 and 49 is most active (BMFSFJ, 2014). Furthermore, people with a higher level of education are more involved in civil engagement (BMFSFJ, 2016). People with less education or with a migrant background are underrepresented. People with a migrant history are around 15 percentage points less engaged than people without such a background (BMFSFJ, 2014). However, this difference does not apply to people with a migrant background who simultaneously hold German Citizenship (BMFSFJ, 2014). Many migrants complain that information about German associations and organizations is difficult to obtain, making their participation less probable (Ilgün-Birhimeo˘glu, 2014). Focusing on geographical divergences in Germany, civil engagement is more common in rural areas than in urban areas. However, current developments like urbanization and the demographic changes that primarily affect rural areas challenge the engagement structures there (BMFSFJ, 2014). To get a picture of the specific fields where volunteer engagement is in demand, Figure 4.1 gives an overview of opportunities for social engagement in Germany in 2019. It illustrates that, despite local discrepancies, there is a large local need for civil engagement in the fields of migration and elder care. Vacant positions for volunteers in those two fields constitute from 15 percent to 21 percent of all positions in the social area. Integration To illustrate integration policy in Germany and the role of CSOs therein, this section provides a short historical review of German integration policy, the current status of state cooperation with non-state actors, and the role of volunteers in this field. The German Federal Agency of Migration and Refugees defines the term integration as a long-term process that intends to include all people that permanently and legally live in Germany in society. Additionally, integration also means that those people should have the same rights in participating in all fields of society (BAMF, 2019a). The state had no integration goals when the first large groups of foreigners, guest workers from Italy, Spain, Turkey, and other countries, came to Germany in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. During that time, a political will to pass and implement integration plans rarely existed (Oltmer, 2018). There was, for example, no specific policy instrument to facilitate language learning. A change in perception about the necessity of integration measures came later with the influx of refugees. The number of asylum seekers strongly increased for the first time

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Munich

Cologne Disability / Participation

Disability / Participation

Children / Youth / Family

12% 34% 16%

Migration / Living together

Children / Youth / Family

14%

Migration / Living together

29% 16%

Elderly people 8% 8%

Education

8%

7%

9% 12%

15%

Poverty / Social justice

12%

Other

Berlin

Hamburg Disability / Participation

Disability / Participation

Children / Youth / Family

8%

24%

Education Poverty / Social justice

Other

30%

Elderly people

Migration / Living together

Children / Youth / Family

7% 18%

38%

Elderly people

Migration / Living together Elderly people

11% 6%

Education 12% 14%

6%

Education 7%

Poverty / Social justice

8% 11%

Other

Poverty / Social justice Other

Own illustration Source: Aktion Mensch “Finde dein Ehrenamt”; available under: https://www.aktion-mensch.de/was-du-tunkannst/deine-moeglichkeiten/ehrenamt-finden.html Annotation: To obtain a generalizable and valid impression of fields of engagement and their distribution, a search of the online platform of Aktion Mensch identified possibilities for engagement in different fields in four German metropolises with a radius of 100 km to cover more rural areas and not just the city centers. Data were collected in April 2019. This database is the largest German database for volunteer engagement with listings by more than 80 volunteer agencies (Interview_7).

Figure 4.1 Vacant positions for civil engagement in four German cities

in the 1990s due to the Kosovo conflict, and a second surge took place recently due to the refugee crisis beginning in 2015. After having learned of the problems caused by missing integration efforts when guest workers arrived a few decades earlier, it has become a political aim now to integrate approved refugees (Bundesregierung, 2016a). National integration objectives include cultural education

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as well as linguistic skills. Those goals should be attainable with the help of services like integration and language courses and programs promoting professional development. However, with the growing number of refugees that arrived in Germany in 2015 and 2016 and regular migration from other EU countries, the state was incapable of delivering a comprehensive and successful integration program. Without the help of civil engagement, the integration of so many people could not be guaranteed. Particularly during the initial reception of asylum seekers, the engagement of volunteers was indispensable in 2015 and 2016 for their accommodation and primary care (BMFSFJ, 2016). The need for civil support and its actual performance vary regionally. In their empirical analysis of integration structures in four German cities, Aumüller and Bretl (2008) identified a regional variance as far as the integration of civil society organizations is concerned. They argue that the need for local integration management and formal social integration is larger in smaller cities than in bigger ones, as in the latter different ethnic communities often reside in close vicinity. This strengthens informal integration of people arriving. In contrast, in smaller cities less informal contact persons for migrants are available making municipal contact points indispensable. In their online survey of civil engagement in support of asylum seekers, Karakayali and Kleist (2016a) found that approximately 75 percent of these volunteers in Germany are women. Additionally, they found that Muslim engagement is still underrepresented, although the proportion of migrants that engages in the refugee sectors is higher than in other social fields. Engagement does not happen only in larger cities, but also in smaller municipalities. Despite ethnic, regional, and gender variances, the general willingness of the German population to volunteer during the refugee crisis was high, as the following statements by volunteer managers illustrate. At the beginning [of the refugee crisis] there was a very, very high willingness [of people to engage]; and I think it is normal that [this willingness] decreases after a while. (Interview_7) At the beginning of the refugee crisis, there were so many volunteers. And very often new initiatives were founded. Not only older associations or church communities were active. We had an oversupply, but this changed somehow because the need decreased. (Interview_10)

Due to the gradual decline of civil engagement in integration, there has been a process of normalization in that field (Huth, 2017).

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Focusing on what volunteers can practically do now within the whole field of integration, there are several specific tasks and services they can offer. In addition to the substantial services volunteers can deliver to migrants, mere contact between volunteers and asylum seekers and foreigners has an integrative effect. In their cross-national literature review about the role of third sector organizations in migration policy, Garkisch et al. (2017) demonstrated that volunteers are dealing with central integration tasks like delivering social goods and basic health and welfare services. Volunteer managers also reflected on what volunteers can do. [Within the field of refugee support,] volunteers can assist during language learning processes. There were language courses from volunteers long time before public integration courses started. Helping [refugees] through the red tape, clarifying different kinds of sponsorships, accompanying them. Today, we also have a bit of employment services and [supporting them in the] housing market. (Interview_4) In the beginning it was spontaneous and concrete help [for refugees], extending to all areas of everyday life. Now, it is more that people are sought-after that are getting active in specific fields. It is about looking for flats, helping with the relocation, still language learning is very important, and then also accompanying refugees, when they need to go to authorities; and children are an important topic. So, helping them with their homework. (Interview_5) It was not so clear what the volunteers can do. We needed clothes, toys and then it went on with language; all topics around “arriving.” What do they do in their free time? In the next step then: How can we help people with administrative staff? (Interview_1)

In summary, at the beginning of the refugee crisis, services focused on supporting refugees with concrete help, such as delivering clothes, dominated civil engagement. At a later point, volunteers accompanied asylum seekers to public authorities or doctors, organized common leisure time activities, and helped refugees to learn German (also see Aumüller et al., 2015; Karakayali and Kleist, 2016a; Han-Broich, 2012). Volunteers participating in such latter activities are often called mentors or pilots (Huth, 2017). Senior welfare Compared to integration, volunteer work in care for the elderly is a topic that has received little scholarly attention. Most contributions to the field are studies of regional practical projects. Brijoux and Kricheldorff (2015), for example, demonstrated how the project FABEL, funded by the German Ministry of Health, helps to improve the qualification of volunteers who are active in rural family support.

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Their engagement improves the health-related quality of life of the elderly and their caregivers. Eggenberger et al. (2013) complemented a pilot project about volunteer support for dementia patients in hospitals with a scholarly study. Their results showed that structural framework conditions are necessary to integrate professional and volunteer work successfully. Very few authors deal with volunteering in elder care on a macro level and independent of practical projects, despite the fact that current challenges make it an important topic. Woitha et al. (2015), who compared the work of volunteers in palliative care in seven European countries, is an exception to the general lack of scholarly attention. The aging of society in many Western countries including Germany increases the number of elderly people who need care and nursing (Statistisches Bundesamt, 2018; Statistisches Bundesamt, 2019). However, weaker family ties and the increasing mobility of people lead to situations in which adult children are unwilling or unable to function as primary caregivers. Despite political goals and respective policy instruments to make providing care services for elderly people more attractive, there are still not enough people working in that sector to meet the current needs (Bundesregierung, 2016b; Osterloh, 2018; Alisch et al., 2017). Therefore, the demand for volunteers to help senior citizens has been increasing continuously (BMFSFJ, 2016). Klie (2010) wrote from a welfare perspective when considering the delivery of welfare services in elder care in Germany, consisting of services provided by the state, social trustees, the private sector, and volunteers. The following quotation from a volunteer manager underlines the high demand for civil engagement as a necessary complement to state engagement. [Concerning engagement in senior welfare], we get many requests from facilities and also from professional caretakers, legal caretakers. Those legal caretakers perceive that they cannot fulfill all tasks. Therefore, they search for volunteers that fulfill lowthreshold tasks. So, for instance, going out for a walk, accompanying seniors when they go shopping and so on. (Interview_5) With the topic of flight and asylum it was enormous, because people came to us we’ve never seen before. For the nursing crisis it was less intense; here it is less obvious that we need a solution based on volunteer work. (Interview_1)

However, as this quotation shows, volunteering in the sector of elder care is less attractive for many volunteers compared to other social sectors. Higher qualitative and quantitative requirements are discouraging (Fringer et al., 2016). As in the field of integration, tasks that can be undertaken by volunteers are manifold, as the quotations from volunteer managers show.

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Elder care means accompanying elder people, visiting people to talk to them, to offer a conversation, to activate them to go out. Supporting them, when they need to go shopping. (Interview_4) There are many services about accompanying and looking after the elderly people. Also in the field of dementia there is something volunteers can do. There are so-called dementia accompanying courses, where people learn to disburden relatives that care for a dementia patient so that those caring relatives get some free time. (Interview_1)

As many professionals in the care sector do not have time for comprehensive social care, volunteers are necessary. For example, they accompany elderly people, organize visits to retirement homes, or regularly visit elderly people that live at home alone and are pleased to have an opportunity for personal conversation (also see Klie, 2010). When discussing elder care, it is important to remember that elderly people are themselves important providers in Germany as in other national contexts (Klie, 2010; Butler and Eckart, 2007). Many retirees are still very active and capable of offering social support themselves. In 2014, 6.1 percent of Germans 65 years and older were taking care of a person with health problems living outside their own household (BMFSFJ, 2014). This age cohort has the highest level of engagement in that specific field (BMFSFJ, 2014).

4.2.2 State Support for Civil Engagement As in many other Western countries, there is in Germany substantial political support for strengthening civil engagement, both verbally and functionally (Lowndes and Pratchett, 2008; Kendall and Knapp, 2000). Therefore, several policies and instruments have already been passed and implemented to promote the active engagement of volunteers and third-sector organizations that encourage such volunteer work (More-Hollerweger, 2014; Roth, 2010; Merchel, 2011). This section summarizes the main policy decisions and resolutions affecting volunteer management in Germany. It also shows how these measures were implemented in practice at the national and particularly at the local level and presents specific policies in the fields of integration and senior welfare. At the national level in 2000, Germany established an Enquete Commission to assess the status of civil engagement and to give recommendations for political actions to promote it (Enquete-Kommission d. Dt. Bundestags, 2002). The foundation of this commission has served as a stimulus for a stronger focus on that topic not only at the national but also at the local level (Speck et al., 2012). The

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commission published its final report in 2002. This report included several legislative proposals and guidelines for the national level, including sufficient insurance protection for volunteers, more financial resources to foster civil engagement, and the implementation of a national, inter-ministerial network for civil engagement (Enquete-Kommission d. Dt. Bundestags, 2002). As a result of the report of the Enquete Commission and in the same year, the Bundesnetzwerk Bürgerschaftliches Engagement was founded. As a national association supporting civil engagement and coordinating more than 266 member organizations today, it serves as a professional exchange platform and center for competency for German civil engagement (Bundesnetzwerk Bürgerschaftliches Engagement, 2018). One subdivision of this organization is the working group on migration and participation, which, among other things, deals with the engagement of Muslim organizations (Schaarschmidt, 2014). To foster civil engagement and make it more comprehensive, the German government started the initiative ZivilEngagement “Miteinander—Füreinander” in 2007.2 Strengthening interdepartmental cooperation, appreciating the engagement of volunteers in public, and intensifying the support of the engagement of migrants are just three of the initiative’s objectives (BMFSFJ, 2007). Even though the support of civil engagement is an interdepartmental task, the Federal Ministry for Families, Senior Citizens, Women and Youth (BMFSFJ) is the central ministry that deals with that topic, calling itself the “ministry for engagement.” (Translation) (BMFSFJ, 2016: 3). Thus, it is the main national state actor when consolidating and developing engagement policies (BMFSFJ, 2016). In October 2010, Germany adopted a national strategy to foster civil engagement further and implemented a renewal of this strategy in 2016 (BMFSFJ, 2016). One important aspect of this newer version is that through the help of model projects, the German government supports the implementation of single local programs that empower civil engagement (Wolf and Zimmer, 2012). Additionally, the BMFSFJ aims to strengthen the Bundesnetzwerk Bürgerschaftliches Engagement and solve the problem that many successful projects are state-funded and therefore financing is time-restricted, which can result in the abandonment of those projects (BMFSFJ, 2016). The following quotation from a volunteer manager describes the current unsatisfactory situation. I sometimes do have the impression that [political actors] think in the way of “out of sight, out of mind.” Many projects [in refugee aid] are ending now. We had a great project on the strengthening of refugees in their civil engagement; that they themselves engage. Here we got the signal that financing will be diminished. I think this is 2

English translation: Civil Engagement “With each other-for each other”

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negligent and stupid. Because refugees still arrive in Germany and, additionally, the whole integration work just starts. (Interview_7)

Besides the national level, the German Länder 3 also have some power in engagement policy. However, how strongly each sustains the development of civil engagement varies widely depending on contextual factors like socio-economic circumstances or the engagement of individual political actors (Wolf and Zimmer, 2012). Besides national and sub-national state strategies to foster civil society engagement, the heart of support lies at the local level, within the individual German municipalities. This level is where most engagement takes place, and therefore, it is the place where support for engagement is most commonly required and also offered. For example, Thomas de Maizière, a former German Federal Minister of the Interior, declared that to strengthen Muslim social engagement, cooperation with Muslim initiatives at the local level is even more important than the creation of national Muslim welfare organizations (Kortmann, 2019). To promote civil engagement at the local level, many cities and municipalities have established volunteer agencies from the mid-1990s onward (Jakob, 2010; Wolf and Zimmer, 2012; Speck et al., 2012). Cities founded these agencies under the assumption that successful volunteer work requires effective volunteer management techniques, including regular supervision, the establishment of communication channels, and the provision of insurance for volunteers (Hager and Brudney, 2004). Focusing on volunteer engagement in integration, Huth (2017) accordingly underlined how important the continuous support of professionals and the financial and non-material support of municipalities are to make this engagement sustainable. In practice, different names for comparable agencies are common; however, this thesis uses the term “volunteer agency” for all specialized entities dealing with the support of civil society organizations and/or volunteers. A volunteer manager provided an overview of the different labels that exist. We are called coordination center for civil engagement, and those centers exist in different cities. But sometimes they are also called volunteer agency or volunteer center. (Interview_11)

As there are only a few national programs that promote the activities of volunteer agencies, it is primarily the municipality itself that decides whether such an institution exists and how many resources it receives (BMFSFJ, 2017; Wolf and 3

Germany is subdivided into 16 federal states, called “Länder” or “Bundesländer.”

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Zimmer, 2012). Approximately 41 percent of the funding for volunteer agencies in Germany comes from municipal sources, 9 percent from the “Länder”-level, and only 3 percent from national sources. Further resources come from the equity capital of the trustees and internal contributions by the agencies themselves (Speck et al., 2012). However, as several municipalities, many of them in East German federal states, suffer from bad financial situations, some agencies had to close when additional national or federal project funding ended (Jakob, 2010). Thus, for project-based volunteer agencies, there is always a certain degree of insecurity about whether the agency can provide its services in the long term (Wolf and Zimmer, 2012; Speck et al., 2012). There are three organizational forms for volunteer agencies in Germany. First, there is municipal volunteer management domiciled directly within the public administration, meaning that municipal employees manage local volunteers. Second, there are volunteer agencies under social trusteeship led, for example, by Caritas, Diakonie, or other welfare organizations. Third, there are separate associations, founded explicitly to provide volunteer coordination. In all three forms, the state serves fully or partially as a donor (Wolf and Zimmer, 2012). In their survey of volunteer agencies, Speck et al. (2012) determined that 21 percent of German agencies belong to the first group, 26 percent are part of social trusteeships, and 28 percent act as separate associations. The remaining agencies operate under a combination of several trusteeships. In some municipalities, there are not just one but several volunteer agencies assigned to support civil engagement. In such a case, to avoid major overlaps, tasks might be separated. For example, an agency located directly within the municipal administration focuses on the support of organizations and associations, while an agency under free trusteeship concentrates on the placement of individuals who are engaging. One volunteer manager explained the situation. In our municipality [besides our center for civil engagement, which is part of the local administration], there also is a volunteer agency, which belongs to a free trustee. (Interview_11)

The presence of these different types of administrative embedding and the local responsibility varies among the federal states. Quotations from volunteer managers working in different federal states illustrate the differences. In North-Rhine Westphalia there are no volunteer agencies at the level of the districts, which is different from Bavaria, where one additionally finds agencies at the district level. (Interview_4)

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In our federal state there are no volunteer agencies, which are part of the municipality. They are all project-funded. (Interview_8) All agencies do have the task to convey civil engagement and to sensitize for the topic. But the trusteeships are very, very colorful. Some are under municipal trusteeship, partly they belong to welfare organizations, but we also have free trusteeships. (Interview_4)

Scholarly literature and statistical analysis that evaluate the specific distribution of contact points for volunteers in Germany and the specific regional needs for such institutions are rare (Wolf and Zimmer, 2012; Jakob, 2010). In 2010, Jakob (2010) counted about 300 such agencies in Germany. In their empirical project on local civil engagement infrastructure lasting from 2008 to 2010, Wolf and Zimmer (2012) and Speck et al. (2012) surmised that there are approximately 360 volunteer agencies in Germany. According to rough estimates by the representative of all German volunteer agencies, 400 to 450 such agencies existed in 2019 (Interview_7). In many smaller cities, financial restrictions do not permit the formation of municipal volunteer agencies, either through integration into the public administration or through co-financing an independent agency (Jakob, 2010). Therefore, smaller municipalities often assign tasks involving volunteer work and honorary positions to public servants based in the social welfare office, giving them an additional area of responsibility. Besides volunteer agencies formed on no specific topic, integration offices, senior offices, multigenerational households, and citizens offices have been established to strengthen civil engagement at the local level, with a narrower subject area (Wolf and Zimmer, 2012; Schaarschmidt, 2014). Senior citizens’ offices, for example, support the engagement of and for elderly people (Jakob, 2010; Wolf and Zimmer, 2012). Because senior citizens do have a high potential for civil engagement, the BMFSFJ argues that the civil engagement of elderly people for elderly people should be encouraged further (BMFSFJ, 2016). Specific national support to foster engagement for seniors happened, for example, in 2013, when the German Federal Ministry of Transport, Building, and Urban Development initiated a model project in 21 German regions to help rural municipalities cope with challenges due to demographic changes. Supporting civil engagement in elder care was one objective of this project. To ensure the proper functioning of this initiative, the Ministry recommended the hiring of a professional, full-time coordinator in each region (Alisch and Strube, 2016). Nationally, the German social security statute book states that volunteer work supporting people in need of care and their caregivers is to be supported financially by health and long-term care insurance (cf. §45 SGB XI). Empirically, this

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regulation largely relates to work with elderly people. Services that are part of that funding include the mentoring of people with care dependency, family-relieving services, and housing-related services. Through these measures, legislators hope to allow people in need of care to stay at home as long as possible and maintain their social contacts. At the local level, competence centers for caregiving relatives often organize volunteer work. Besides specific positions dealing with senior citizens and volunteering by and for this age cohort, many cities and municipalities founded integration offices, which are responsible for the coordination of local integration tasks (BMVBS, 2012). Integration and migration are separate topics. There are many volunteers engaged in that field, but we have an integration commissioner in our city, and he is the one who manages that kind of volunteer work. (Interview_9) In our federal state, we also have so-called integration agencies that coordinate the engagement of volunteers in the field of refugees; several positions were established. [So the state actors] systematically supported the implementation of new positions that coordinate volunteer engagement in the field of refugees. But unfortunately, dual structures emerged and many of those who were employed did not know how volunteer management works. (Interview_4)

In their empirical analysis of local support for refugees, Aumüller et al. (2015) found that transparency within local asylum policy and solution-oriented communication strategies enhance the support and active engagement of the local population. Additionally, much volunteer engagement during the refugee crisis happened on a spontaneous, individual, and non-institutional basis; to make this engagement successful, coordination through municipal actors seemed indispensable (Aumüller et al., 2015; Karakayali and Kleist, 2016a). Most volunteer associations and initiatives that are active in the field of asylum received municipal support to reimburse their expenses for rooms, furnishings, or writing and learning materials (Han-Broich, 2012). Additionally, state-funded programs to foster volunteer engagement were launched in the integration field, as the following statement of the German government illustrates. The large volunteer engagement of the citizens is further strengthened. We want to create 10,000 new jobs within the scope of the German Bundesfreiwilligendienst.4 And also asylum seekers with prospects of permanent residence in Germany will have the chance to participate (Bundeskanzlerin und Regierungschefs der Länder, 2015). 4

English translation: national voluntary service.

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The statement not only demonstrates the government’s willingness to foster civil engagement but likewise its commitment to making participation open to refugees themselves. Besides national instructions to support civil engagement, there are several additional potential resources at the local level to support civil organizations, such as financial aid, the provision of a specific piece of infrastructure, counseling, and networking (Han-Broich, 2012). In some municipalities, topic-specific volunteer management emerged especially in the fields of integration and senior welfare. However, proposals to municipalities about how to collaborate and with which civil society organizations are simply directive and not binding, allowing municipalities to act independently based on local situations and needs (Gesemann, 2016; Jakob, 2010). The scope of action at the local level is rather wide. Therefore, the discretion of local bureaucrats, who serve as key actors in the organization and implementation of local governance structures, is accordingly high (Andeßner, 2016; Wewer, 1997).

4.2.3 The Integrative Character of Germany’s Civil Society Most Western democracies support the integrative character of their civil society and Germany has supported civil engagement by taking into account migrant and Muslim organizations. This section offers more detail and a chronological account of how national resolutions in Germany indicate the political goal of integrating previously underrepresented social groups into civil society and governance networks (Halm, 2015; Klein et al., 2010a; Winterhagen, 2015; BMFSFJ, 2016). It also presents the effects of national decisions on subnational levels and regional rulings. Applying an integrated approach to realize stronger diversity in German civil society is not the task of just one area. Rather, such decisions must be implemented across several policy-fields (Klein et al., 2010a). Several declarations and resolutions from the German government and individual ministries have actively fostered the engagement of underrepresented parts of society. The report of the German Enquete Commission in 2002 reflected upon the integrative character of German civil society: “the mission statement of a civil society demands equal opportunities—including the guarantee of equal access to civil engagement. If some parts of the society are only weakly or not at all represented in civil engagement and also disadvantaged in other ways (education, income, citizenship), this needs activating action –civil society should not be an elitist democracy, but a society of all members of the political community” (Translation) (Enquete-Kommission d. Dt. Bundestags, 2002: 48). It continues:

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“Strategies to overcome inequality in urban space not only include concepts of better material equipment for ‘underprivileged’ groups but approaches that give the concerned groups more individual and collective self-confidence” (Translation) (Enquete-Kommission d. Dt. Bundestags, 2002: 49). Turning from an abstract to a more practical claim, the national integration plan of the German government in 2007 instructed municipalities to help migration organizations become part of local civil organization networks. Local public authorities should provide information about civil engagement in different languages to facilitate access for non-German-speaking residents (Bundesregierung, 2007). A report of the BMFSFJ clarified the responsibility: “Civil engagement is not just voluntary; it is a right to participate in society, which holds for all people living in Germany. And it is the duty of the state to make this right possible also materially by providing the necessary framework conditions.” (BMFSFJ, 2016: 3 f.). The National Plan of Action against Racism published by the German government in 2017 highlights past demands by holding the German Day for Civil Engagement under the heading of diversity: “The German Day for Civil Engagement was first implemented in 2016. The successful format will continue to exist in 2017. Due to current societal developments, the topic of this year’s event is ‘Democracy and Diversity’. The event is planned and implemented together with the Bundesnetzwerk Bürgerschaftliches Engagement to cooperate with civil society here as well” (Translation) (Bundesregierung, 2017: 44). An example of national support for local projects to strengthen the diversity of civil engagement is the program “Willkommen bei Freunden”5 funded by the BMFSFJ. This program supports municipalities by training and qualifying bureaucrats in local public agencies to establish local networks that integrate refugee children and youth. Within these networks, local groups, public authorities, and facilities for refugees are expected to work together (BMFSFJ, 2016). However, although it has been already more than a decade since the Enquete Commission sought to foster the diversity of German civil society, the Bundesnetzwerk Bürgerschaftliches Engagement (2018) states that better resources are necessary to “integrate groups more strongly that are far from civil engagement. It needs to find new answers to the consequences of social inequality in the support of engagement” (p. 2). Thus, despite the political desire for a more integrated civil engagement, expressed nearly twenty years ago, several societal groups remain not fully integrated into civil society networks. The following sections explore

5

English translation: Welcome to friends.

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how volunteer managers working in local volunteer agencies support or prevent the stated desire for a fully integrated German civil society.

4.3

Volunteer Managers as Campaigners of Civil Society: Self-perception and Logics that Shape their Cooperation Interest

Volunteer managers as a group of street-level bureaucrats have received little scholarly attention. Since their influence seems to be significant and they are important actors in the formation of governance networks, especially in the social field, this neglect is surprising. This section describes their tasks and role perceptions as well as the challenges and risks they face. All of those factors serve as preconditions for the impact of specific SLB logics. The developed logics are only realistic if volunteer managers build governance networks and they have some leeway for independent action. Additionally, restrictions of time or money make the application of different logics more probable. This section includes examples from volunteering in integration and senior welfare for illustration. It continues by considering volunteer managers’ cooperation interest with specific groups, especially their willingness to work with religious organizations. It offers some insights regarding how administrative embedding might influence such varying cooperation interest. Most of the results of this section are based on findings from qualitative interviews with volunteer managers. When the subject is cooperation with Muslim organizations, it includes findings from the interviews with experts on Muslim welfare as well as representatives of Muslim organizations to integrate their perspectives.

4.3.1 Volunteer Managers’ Tasks, Role Perceptions, and Risks The responsibilities of volunteer agencies and the volunteer managers working there are broadly based. Tasks and target groups might vary, depending on the administrative embedding and the local volunteer management structure. In general, there are two central target groups or clients for volunteer managers: individuals and organizations. For individuals, volunteer managers help and support potential volunteers in finding a suitable engagement by providing information and collecting requests for volunteer services (Wolf and Zimmer, 2012). Volunteer managers also accompany, supervise, and encourage volunteers in their engagement.

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At the moment I offer training for volunteers to professionalize them. (Interview_2) My task is to consult, mediate and provide support for volunteers. (Interview_3)

This thesis focuses on the second target group, civil society organizations and associations. Civil society organizations and associations can contact volunteer agencies and volunteer managers if they need volunteers, help with an application for municipal funding, infrastructure, or want to become part of local governance networks in specific fields (Bundesnetzwerk Bürgerschaftliches Engagement, 2013; Jakob, 2010; Merchel, 2011). Volunteer agencies also offer qualification measures and training for these organizations (Schaarschmidt, 2014). Quotations of volunteer managers describe their activities for organizations. We offer rooms for engagement. We try to support associations and organizations. [Additionally], we coordinate regular network meetings with organizations. […]. We also offer intercultural training. (Interview_3; see also Interview_5 and Interview_10)

Volunteer agencies also provide recognition for volunteer work. We offer training for associations and organizations. We try to bring associations together, so that they know each other, that they can exchange information and build their own network. […]. Then, a culture of recognition is very important. Once a year, we do have a great evening for volunteers, where we appreciate the engagement of the volunteers. Our main tasks [within the coordination center for civil engagement] are delivering information, counseling, and networking between the relevant actors of societal-public engagement. If associations are newly founded and come to us, what do they have to consider? […]. If someone is searching for a room, then we try to help. We offer training and we are also responsible for the Volunteer Card. (Interview_11)

Volunteer agencies and other public authorities support civil society organizations in several ways. Besides specific financial support, municipal public authorities can deliver rooms and infrastructure or conduct public relations work for local volunteer management. A further important service is ideational support through political decision-makers at the local or regional level (Speck et al., 2012). Occasionally, volunteer managers focus on only one of the two main target groups: some support volunteers, individual citizens who want to engage, while some assist organizations and associations that are interested in engaging in a certain field. The majority of German volunteer managers fulfill both duties, working with individual volunteers and with associations. The following quotation illustrates the two areas of responsibility.

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We [in the city administration] are the contact point for people that want to engage but also for associations and organizations. (Interview_9)

The interviews with German volunteer managers made clear that there are substantial differences in how volunteer managers perceive their role as networkers. In general, the qualitative interviews helped to identify two different types of volunteer managers: (1) active networkers and (2) service providers. The active networkers, including almost all of the interviewed volunteer managers, view themselves as multiple coordinators who bring different organizations and individual volunteers together. They also proactively contact organizations that may fit into an existing network. The following quotations are from volunteer managers, who are active networkers. I see myself as a networker. I work cross-generationally and across interests. As I am very much interconnected, I can bring people together. (Interview_2) We try to bring associations together, so that they know each other, can exchange information, and build their own network. (Interview 11)

Furthermore, many volunteer managers see searching for suitable partners for specific networks as part of their job duties. We try to bring together all partners that are relevant for a certain topic and then we consider, how a current social problem – an aging society or whatever – can be solved. Who can make the different offerings? And a municipality is predestined to moderate that and to bring all relevant trustees together. Then we find a good solution for a specific topic in our municipality. And it is also always good to have some money, so to give financial support. (Interview_6)

Searching for areas where there is a need for the creation of a new network is one characteristic of active networkers. Integration is a very, very large field of action at the moment. But it changes also. […]. When we see that it has been a while since we had a project in the field of environment, then we directly contact associations that engage in that area. But very often, they come to us. […]. We also help to get the projects funded. (Interview_10)

The quotations above show that active networkers decide which local issues to treat as priorities and which organizations to contact as potential network members (cf. also Interview_3). In such cases, volunteer managers are not only service

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providers but they also actively reach out to other public administrators, established organizations, and private actors to initiate cooperation and build a local governance network (also see Schaarschmidt, 2014). Such wide leeway is part of their work. We do have a large scope of action. We can decide freely, which topics we aim to focus on. We are sitting in city hall and are part of the office of the mayor. […]. We can work quite autonomously here. (Interview_10) Yes, [we have quite a large leeway]. And this is a risk and an opportunity at the same time. Civil engagement is a cross-sectoral issue, and therefore, ministries can easily pass responsibilities that are theoretically theirs. […]. But, on the other hand, we can be quite flexible. (Interview_8)

In contrast, the second group of volunteer managers, pure service providers, appeared only rarely in the interviews. The service providers see themselves in a rather passive position, primarily responding to the specific requests of volunteers or volunteer organizations. Interview results showed that those volunteer managers have a fairly narrow scope of action. The following quotation gives an example. The work is coming to me [...]. I just help, if there are problems. In that sense, I do not have much scope of action. […]. We are not the ones who provide the initial impetus. […]. We do the organizational stuff. I do not build a network. (Interview_9)

Few volunteer managers describe their position as rather passive, while the majority of volunteer managers assumes that they have networking responsibilities and, therefore, proactively operate at the interface of individual volunteers, civil society organizations, companies, and politicians and public authorities (also see Wolf and Zimmer, 2012; Speck et al., 2012). This common self-perception fulfills the first precondition for the impact of SLBs on the emergence of local governance networks. The qualitative interviews also asked volunteer managers about challenges and risks in their job and about conflict situations they have faced. Such complicated situations are most likely to provoke the divergent behavior of SLBs (Brodkin, 2012). Conflicts between professionals and volunteers are a concern for volunteer managers. This quotation from a volunteer manager illustrates the dilemma that sometimes emerges.

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There are huge tensions between professionals and volunteers. For instance, volunteers felt passed over and not taken seriously. (Interview_5) Where there is tension [between professionals and volunteers], is because they do have a different access to their work. […]. A typical case occurs in the care sector; here, volunteers are coming that are allowed to read to the old people and make nice things with them, which likewise the professionals would like to do, but they do not have the time. And here tensions emerge. (Interview_7)

The following quotations illustrate instances of conflict that emerge due to the overload of public administrations making the engagement of volunteer organizations necessary or even indispensable. Accordingly, volunteers fulfill tasks for which they are neither qualified nor responsible. This situation occurred frequently during the refugee crisis. There is a challenge or a tension in the cooperation between full-time employees in public authorities and volunteers. And very often, we stand in between, because we are the mediators. […]. It is because volunteers fulfilled tasks that are part of the responsibility of public authorities. But the public authorities could not fulfill the tasks, because they did not have enough people. This situation was difficult, because normally there are strict rules about who is responsible for what. […]. When for instance [during the refugee crisis] people arrived at night and no social support by the municipality was available, volunteers helped them. Theoretically the task of “receiving refugees” is a clear task of municipal social support. Another example is the field of searching for places in kindergartens; normally, this is a task for the municipal welfare service. But during the refugee crisis, volunteers were largely engaged in that field. (Interview_3).

Often the lack of professional resources leads to the engagement of volunteers, which is also highlighted by the following quotation. Many professionals in public administrations do have a lot of work to do and therefore transfer tasks to volunteers, which sometimes is not appropriate. For some tasks you need professional training. […]. Not every volunteer can do everything; the responsibility would be too large. And the professionals do not have the impression to do something wrong, when they transfer such tasks. And, first of all, many volunteers feel honored. […]. On the other hand, there are volunteers who say: “No one realized what I am doing, no one honors my engagement” or, in contrast, argue: “I do everything on my own anyway, so the professionals should not intervene.” (Interview_10)

The next quotation about work with refugees explains that the strategies of volunteers and professionals during task fulfillment might diverge.

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We had the situation that volunteers wanted the children of refugees to go to certain facilities, which they thought would be best. I mean facilities like kindergartens, day nurseries, schools. Whereas the professionals had the task to ensure that the children go to the responsible school, which is closest to the place, where the children live. There were volunteers, often with a confessional background, that wanted the children to go to specific schools, free schools for instance. (Interview_5)

Additional quotations show that many volunteers speak of situations of conflict, in particular, in the course of volunteer work with refugees. Thus, conflicts between volunteers and public service employees and between volunteers and political decision-makers emerge. Of course, the [volunteers] are bringing their personalities and that might be uncomfortable. That was the case also during the refugee crisis. In the beginning, one really needed the first-aid workers. Today, one needs different things. At that time, people engaged and today one often perceives them as troublesome, because they likewise engage against deportation processes. If the state says: “We have a gap, we need someone to fill it but who stays calm.” That does not work. (Interview_2)

Some volunteer managers describe how conflicts between state actors and volunteers increased during the refugee crisis. Somehow the atmosphere changed concerning the refugee crisis – in the media but likewise in politics. [Volunteers that were engaged in refugee aid] sometimes felt discredited by political actors. We had the situation in Bavaria, where volunteers did not want to go to the reception [of the government]. (Interview_7) The municipality itself can support civil engagement by allowing more participation within the committees and political decisions. That is a huge challenge. But people that started to engage in 2015 in the refugee crisis and still go on, they also want to have a say, they want to participate with their experiences. This form of participation “to be heard” that is important and that is what can happen at the local level. (Interview_4)

One volunteer manager working for a federal authority in former East Germany mentioned how conflicts between volunteers and the local population hampered the promotion of civil engagement in the refugee sector. To solve such conflicts the volunteer manager tried to frame the engagement for refugees more broadly to make it less vulnerable to attack from right-wing or racist tendencies within the local population. In the sector of refugee aid we had the problem that this form of engagement was no longer accepted. The state wants that sort of engagement but the societal actors in our

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federal state no longer accept that we engage for refugees. The huge societal debate [that we have in Germany] also reflects on the local level. We have lots of volunteers that work with refugees that say: “We do not want anyone to know that we work with refugees, because hostilities from our neighbors would emerge”. […]. It was still different in 2015, when we had a very high willingness for engagement. Somehow, this willingness is still there, but people do not want to make it public. […]. That is why we want to frame the engagement as cross-sectoral engagement, for instance, doing something for the neighborhoods, and not as engagement for refugees. And in our sense, refugees are also part of our neighborhood. (Interview_8)

Although volunteer managers might see themselves as mediators between state actors and volunteer organizations, some quotations show that many volunteer managers see themselves more as agents of the volunteers than as agents of the state. Thus, when the interests of volunteers come into conflict with state interests, such volunteer managers tend to act in the interest of the volunteers. This division occurs, for example, in situations where the volunteer managers have the impression that the volunteers are being exploited by the state. Volunteer engagement should not become a guarantor, whenever the state fails. And therefore, it is important to consider what the volunteers want, in which topics they want to engage. For this position we fight. In particular within the scope of strategy processes and in confrontation with politics. (Interview_4)

This issue is specifically relevant for the field of senior welfare, as the following quotations illustrate. [We also have this challenge] with the topic of seniors. The demographic change is coming and, therefore, we really take care that volunteer engagement is not exploited. Volunteers cannot accomplish what professional care is not able to do. But that is the danger, that they are exploited. […]. Volunteers should not have the feeling they are gap fillers […]. It is a problem, when volunteers do have the feeling that they should do something because no one else would do it; often, what they do then, would theoretically be a state task. (Interview_6) Volunteer engagement does not provide state services, but can just complement them. This is a discussion within asylum and refugee aid but also, when we think about low-threshold engagement; for instance, supporting elderly people, which is a huge challenge here in Eastern Germany. There is a large pressure in the sense of “we have that need, the volunteers can do it”; and there we try to counteract by explaining what volunteer engagement is and what it can achieve. (Interview_8)

When volunteer managers have the impression that volunteers and volunteer organizations are exploited by the state and fulfill tasks that, from a legal perspective,

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should be fulfilled by the state itself, they advocate for the rights of the volunteers. Generally, the German government recognizes the gray area between the tasks of professionals and volunteers and insists that civil engagement cannot and should not replace the state’s duty to provide necessary services (Bundesnetzwerk Bürgerschaftliches Engagement, 2018; BMFSFJ, 2016). However, as the interviews demonstrated, volunteer managers still have the impression that volunteers are sometimes exploited, fulfilling tasks that should be delivered by professionals who get paid for it, either by the state or privately (also see Klie, 2010). A second development in the volunteer sector is a growing monetization. This development strengthens the commitment of volunteer managers toward volunteers, allowing them to act as their agents. One volunteer manager describes the problem. What there is sometimes – what we see critical – is a monetization or a functionalization of engagement. We see it very critical, what happens sometimes in care or neighborhood assistance, that the volunteers receive money for their expenses. Civil engagement should be free of charge. (Interview_7)

In addition to the challenges for volunteer managers that emerge from conflicts between professionals and volunteers, there are also contextual factors that hamper their work. Volunteer managers mention administrative, structural, and economic circumstances. Several volunteer managers brought up the small financial resources available for volunteer management. Volunteer work needs a certain professional framework. And those frameworks are not free of charge. (Interview_8)

This limitation of administrative capacity became especially clear during the refugee crisis starting in 2015. During that time a large number of citizens were motivated and willing to engage. However, state capacity was not large enough to receive and direct the volunteer capacities. The following quotations illustrate the situation. There were enough [volunteers during the refugee crisis]. It was the administration itself, who was overburdened. (Interview_2) During the peak phase [of the refugee crisis] we had too many volunteers. It was in autumn 2015. We did not even know what to do with all these volunteers. […]. It took some time until the structures were implemented. Structures that help to organize the engagement of volunteers. (Interview_6; see also Interview_1, Interview_11)

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Some volunteer managers not only mentioned the insufficient administrative capacity but also its structural immaturity, as well as its delayed implementation. The problem during the refugee crisis was – other than it is within senior welfare – that volunteers took tasks long before there would have been full-time employees/professionals accompanying their engagement. It is definite that double structures emerged. (Interview_4) The topic was very complex because all areas of life were attached somehow. So doing things in parallel did not really work very well. Those tasks now were given back to the regional administration, because one did not want to let the free trustees do everything. They installed so-called integration pilots that help circle of helpers with recent questions. Now, it is more about recognition, job placement and so on. (Interview_1; see also Interview_6)

Another challenge for volunteer managers is that, in contrast to the field of refugee aid, in other sectors, it is difficult to find enough volunteers or volunteer organizations willing to engage. As volunteer managers are directly confronted with the demand for civil engagement, a lack of volunteers brings about pressure and stress. The need to find volunteers is quite high for all sectors in our federal state. (Interview_8) In many areas the need [for engagement] is very, very high, but, in particular in the field of senior welfare, we need to ask the question, what the volunteers can actually do. And volunteer engagement needs to be managed. Those are huge challenges. […]. And you cannot assume that the volunteers manage everything. (Interview_4)

Thus, whereas in the field of integration, many volunteer organizations are available and willing to engage, in the field of senior welfare the interest in civil engagement is lower, even though the need for engagement is high and even increasing (also see Interview_ 5 and Interview_7). Volunteer managers mention a lack of public interest and unattractive forms of engagement as reasons for lower engagement rates in senior welfare. Volunteer managers describe the situation as follows. Within senior welfare, so-called dementia attendants are often requested. […]. In some municipalities it works quite well and we have enough volunteers. In others it does not. In particular, it does not work when we see classical one-sided engagement – so if someone needs help for shopping – there, it is difficult to find someone. (Interview_6).

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Political actors and the municipality see a huge need in the field of senior welfare. This need really exists. But citizens that want to engage in that field are missing. We have a dichotomy here. (Interview_2)

Some volunteer managers identify the poor lobby for senior welfare and low media attention as reasons for the low levels of engagement. Senior welfare is less in the focus [compared to integration work]. A lot is happening in that field, but it is rather a “silent engagement,” they do not really have a good lobby that is sad. So, we see the topic, different things are happening but the public attention is not so high in that area. (Interview_10) I think the topic with the refugees was highly discussed in the media; one could not ignore it. With care for elderly it is different. If you are not directly concerned, you do not necessarily have to deal with it. (Interview_2)

SLBs working in volunteer agencies face several challenges and risks. On the one hand, conflicts and ambiguous situations emerge in the interplay among individuals, organizations, and state actors, as in the exchange between volunteers and public authorities. Consequently, volunteer managers often align with one side; frequently with the volunteers. On the other hand, volunteers must cope with structural deficiencies, including insufficient administrative capacities and a lack of volunteers who are willing to engage in fields with high needs like senior welfare. Those challenges and risks make the application of the logics developed in Section 3.2 more probable because organizations with certain characteristics might intensify these problems and insufficient resources make selection criteria for the decision of with whom to cooperate more relevant.

4.3.2 Volunteer Managers’ Cooperation Interest, Logics Affecting it, and Contextual Impacts After having illustrated the general tasks of volunteer managers, their role perception, and what challenges and risks they face, this thesis continues to its central question: How does cooperation interest of SLBs toward certain organizations differ and what characteristics make civil society organizations attractive as state partners? Beginning with a concentration on civil society organizations in general, it proceeds to focus on religious organizations and specifically on Muslim organizations as a group that has been underrepresented within German civil engagement. It is worth considering the cooperation interest of SLBs with Muslim organizations separately because previous scholarly studies have reported an

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inhibition by public administrations toward Muslim organizations (see hereto, for instance, Rohe and Jaraba, 2018; Ceylan and Kiefer, 2016; Farman and Merz, 2017; Banfi, 2018). The end of this chapter also includes some impressions about organizational and contextual impacts on the cooperation interest of SLBs. Cooperation with CSOs in general During the semi-structured interviews, the volunteer managers were asked about their attitudes toward different groups. Relatively consistently through all interviews, the interviewees stated that they were open toward every group. We treat every organization equally; that is part of our principle of equality. […]. As long as an engagement is in the sense of the common good or open towards all citizens, we want to support it. (Interview_11)

They would refuse cooperation under specific conditions to avoid risk. Administrative rejections mainly apply to anti-democratic organizations like extreme right groups. The following quotations further describe such situations. [We do not work with organizations] when they are part of antidemocratic movements. That is a no-go. (Interview_4) First of all, everyone is welcome. And not only associations but also initiatives. And if there are organizations like the “Völkische”6 or others, then we clearly say: “[…]. Those are not our values, that is why we do not want to cooperate.” We are quite sensitized, in particular within the field of nature protection and homeland security; we have a close look at the internal statutes here. (Interview_8)

Additionally, volunteer managers generally treat with skepticism organizations that do not follow the common good but have their own commercial interests. It is very rare that we do not want to cooperate with a certain organization. […]. Extreme right groups are one example. But also organizations, for which we have the impression that commercial interests dominate. (Interview_10)

Thus, a certain logic of control leads to the exclusion of organizations that are difficult to supervise due to their strong core beliefs or their interests that diverge from the state’s interest. The volunteer managers mentioned other factors that hamper cooperation, including local, contextual, and interpersonal factors. Local 6

The “Völkische” is a movement with nationalist, anti-Semitic, and racist beliefs, which operates in Germany.

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administrative capacities or topic-specific needs in a certain municipality, for example, affect SLBs’ cooperation interest. Theoretically, we are open toward all organizations that want to engage. We are a service delivery institution. However, we represent the municipality and if someone is deported, we cannot chain ourselves to the door. There are organizations that want to prevent deportations. Apart from that, there are always sympathies and antipathies [toward different groups], but we try to avoid those playing a huge role. (Interview_3) Sometimes the idea [of an organization] does not fit, sometimes the time, the capacities of the volunteer agencies. Or it is the topic [of a group] itself. And of course [the organization] needs to be oriented towards the common good and they should have a democratic understanding. (Interview_6)

Due to time restrictions, volunteer managers tend to contact already well-known organizations. Applying this indeed hampers the integration of new and so far underrepresented groups. Lipsky (1980) presumed that a lack of time would lead to unfavorable behavior by SLBs. Very often, when we have a new topic, we reach out to someone we already know. Sometimes we try to find new partners, but if time resources are scarce, we have to fall back to what we know. (Interview_8)

Nevertheless, one volunteer manager points out that transparency is important, whenever volunteer agencies choose between different organizations. [When we prioritize one group over another], we try to make our decision processes transparent. (Interview_8)

Organizational characteristics that hamper the willingness of volunteer managers to cooperate to avoid risks include extremist orientations or interests that diverge from state interests. The quotations above show that empathy and former familiarity encourage partnerships as well. The application of such strategies indicates the existence of a logic of cultural closeness because knowing each other is more common in equal cultural settings. One quotation above also expresses the competency logic, because well-known organizations might have already proven that they are competent to fulfill a certain task. Cooperating with them enhances the chance of a successful outcome. SLBs would act as policy advocates in this case.

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Cooperation with religious organizations Across the country, 72 percent of all German volunteer agencies work with religious organizations. Only cooperation with social trustees, schools, and other public administrations is more widespread. Larger volunteer agencies with a higher financial budget and more personnel have a wide variety of partners (Speck et al., 2012), whereas smaller volunteer agencies with low financial and personal capacities are limited in the development of a broad array of partnerships (Schaarschmidt, 2014). The qualitative interviews also inquired about previous experiences with religious organizations, differences compared to non-confessional groups, and whether the volunteer managers were open toward cooperating with them. Whereas some volunteer managers argued that religious organizations follow different logics and require a different approach than non-confessional organizations, others did not see that distinction. Diakonie, Caritas and other religious organizations have their own logics; very often their logics of engagement are internally directed. (Interview_8) Of course, we are very close with Diakonie, Protestant, and Caritas, Catholic. A lot is happening. Additionally, there are some free churches as well. But there is not really a difference in cooperation. (Interview_10)

Several interviewed volunteer managers mentioned a challenge or risk in cooperating with religious organizations is that religious and social services, delivered by FBOs, might not always be clearly separated. A project leader dealing with Muslim civil engagement explains the situation. It is very important that social offerings are clearly separated from religious offerings. So we say to Muslim organizations that they have to find a way to structurally separate between those two things. Otherwise, it will never be possible to become an established member of the welfare network. Because the state, Germany, but also the municipalities, do not financially support religious work, they just support social engagement. (Interview_M3)

The following quotation emphasizes the claim of volunteer managers to be independent of pure confessional engagement. For us, it is very important that we are independent of any confessions. So we do not become active, whenever a Muslim community or a Catholic community asks us to do something specific. Then, we say that we cannot support them, because our work

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is not bound to any confession. […]. But, whenever the work of a confessional organization is related to a specific social project and the project aim is independent from the confession, then we respond and we would not reject the request. To give an example, when the Muslim community organizes a Ramadan-Day and they need volunteers and ask us whether we would help them to find those, we could maybe help them with their search, but we would not give financial support or use our own resources. They have to do that by themselves. But if they would offer extra tuitions for pupils, then this engagement would be in the common interest. This is a purpose, which we evaluate as non-confessional. Therefore, it would be absolutely correct to support them. (Interview_11)

Volunteer managers see cooperation with religious organizations as risky whenever social and religious services are not clearly separated. While state actors would non-materially, personally, and financially support social services, they want to stay neutral concerning inherently religious practices. Thus, cooperation with religious organizations as compared to non-confessional groups always includes a certain risk concerning the claim of neutrality. Consequently, if cooperation emerges, stronger control mechanisms are necessary to determine whether the state-supported engagement of religious organizations indeed focuses on social concerns. Here a logic of control is evident once more. Cooperation with Muslim organizations It is also the duty of the established civil society to better integrate Muslim organizations into our structures. (Interview_M3)

Muslim volunteers are underrepresented in Germany, and Muslim organizations rarely act as state partners, compared to those of other religious groups (Vogel and Hameister, 2016). The underrepresentation of Muslim organizations in German civil society is mostly a result of macro-political factors and organization-specific characteristics. Few authors have mentioned the role of local administrations as an activating and supporting factor in this context (but see Keupp, 2010). Thus, taking a microperspective and considering volunteer managers’ experiences and assessments of cooperation with Muslim organizations delivers new insights. A survey of volunteer agencies by Speck et al. (2012) found that 29 percent of all volunteer agencies claim actively to recruit migrants as volunteers. However, their study did not collect specific data about the willingness to select Muslim organizations as cooperation partners. The qualitative findings of this thesis provide first impressions about the experiences of volunteer agencies with Muslim organizations and their potential willingness to cooperate with them.

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The interviewed volunteer managers mentioned four main factors that hamper their cooperation with Muslim organizations: (1) higher effort, (2) lack of resonance, (3) inappropriate organizational structures, and (4) uncertainties as to the radical nature of the religious community. They provided several justifications for the higher effort required including communication hurdles and the necessity of cultural competencies on the side of the volunteer managers. The following quotations illustrate those aspects and Interview_8 offers further validation. For instance, if we invite [Muslim organizations] we need to label the buffet. Just very simple things. In general, it is more difficult to contact them. We also had a roundtable with Muslims, and here one needed to remind the Muslim organizations much more. And they preferred to communicate with WhatsApp, which is difficult from a data protection perspective. For us it is: “First the topic, then the relation”; for many migration groups – and also for Muslims – it is: “First the relation, then the topic”. First of all, one needs to know each other. […]. Cooperation needs more time, because, first of all, trust needs to be built. (Interview_2) Of course, we also search for migrant organizations as partners. And we saw that this is easier, if you already have a multiplier from that group. And it is good to have linguistic, religious and cultural competencies. (Interview_7)

Volunteer managers also mentioned a lack of resonance with Muslim organizations as an additional barrier to cooperation. Muslim organizations are often difficult to contact and not very interested in cooperation with state actors. Volunteer managers assume that their lack of interest in cooperation partly stems from a lack of the need to be supported by the state, as internally organized social services work quite well. Several volunteer managers described this circumstance (also in Interview_5 and Interview_6). We realized that those Muslim communities live very much their own life. That is comparable to free churches or to the Old Catholic Church. They do not come to us. Those are small religious organizations that offer social services internally. They really do a lot but they do it within their own structures; they do not engage on a level, where we would interact with them. (Interview_1) For quite some time, we have tried to reach out to [Muslim organizations] to tell them that we would offer training to them and that we would cooperate with them. But actually, it is a very challenging topic, because they often do not see the need. […]. And very often it becomes clear that they are not interested. Active cooperation is difficult. In the scope of the refugee crisis it worked quite well, because they had the knowledge about religious practices. For instance, they allowed us to use their pig-free grill for our barbecue. And they gave us information about main celebrations and traditions. (Interview_4)

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Of course, we are also in contact with Muslim organizations. We also try to organize meetings, but sometimes, we have the impression that their interest to cooperate is not so big. […]. They do a lot themselves, but there are reservations to cooperate with the city. One does not see us as a cooperation partner. But they do important work. […]. We had different discussions about how to intensify [our relationship with Muslim organizations], but it is not so easy. (Interview_3)

One volunteer manager understood well why Muslims are less interested in cooperation with state actors (cf. the following quote). They have enough volunteers and their internal social structures work well. Thus, the need for state support is less compared to that of other organizations. There is no political pressure [to foster cooperation with Muslim organizations]. We are quite free. But the BAMF, for instance, finances partnerships between German and “new” migrant organizations. And within this scope, we had lots of cooperation with Turkish communities. And it also depends on the openness of the migrant organization itself. And if a Muslim organization is capable to run its own volunteer engagement and there are enough volunteers, then the question emerges whether they really need the cooperation with other organizations. […]. I have the impression that Muslim organizations do not have worries about finding volunteers; for them, it works quite well compared to our structures. (Interview_7)

In general, these quotations not only reveal challenges that might emerge in cooperation with Muslim organizations, but they also illustrate that volunteer managers have reached out to Muslim organizations with a desire to cooperate with them; thus, a representation logic is partially evident. Thereby, the SLBs act as policy advocates to strengthen national efforts to enhance equal representation in state support for civil society. One volunteer manager argued that easily accessible offers for Muslims and Muslim organizations are needed to integrate them into networks. The following quotation illustrates such an approach by a specific volunteer agency: We mainly work with Catholic and Protestant organizations. Only once we had a project with a Muslim organization. It was a computer project. […]. A project especially for Muslim women. We did it in the rooms of the Mosque, because we knew: They do not dare to register at the VHS, so one tried like this, and it worked. (Interview_1)

Inappropriate organizational structures also act as an impeding factor. Whereas the Catholic and the Protestant church have differentiated between their social and their ecclesiastical services for decades, Muslim organizations have just begun this process (also see Halm and Sauer, 2015).

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Some Muslim communities started to found new associations. So one for the religious work and one for the social work to have this structural separation. Comparable to the Catholic Church and Caritas. (Interview_M3)

It is not just the undifferentiated organizational structure that hampers state funding though, but also the focus of Muslim engagement, which is their own community (Kortmann, 2019). The following quotation of a leader of a pilot project fostering the qualification of Muslim welfare and identifying types of support Muslim organizations need illustrates the clear focus of Muslim engagement. [Normally, the Muslim programs or projects] are restricted to a Muslim target group. There is a tentative rapprochement [to other target groups], but at the moment that is still largely the focus. (Interview_M3)

The interviewed volunteer managers identified a final inhibiting factor as uncertainties regarding the radical nature of the religious community when reflecting on cooperation with Muslim organizations. They also do counseling and they are active in the refugee field. But we have this first impression “What are they doing?”; we have this negative feeling. In fact, in our city there is a group which has to be seen critically. (Interview_2)

The report of the independent commission about migration implemented by the former German minister of the interior Otto Schily prescribed a certain degree of skepticism toward Muslim organizations. It argued that “municipalities can serve as points of contact for Muslim associations and organizations that are willing to be integrated. However, offers for a dialogue should be stopped, if the values of the German constitution are questioned or if a political instrumentalization is intended.” (Translation) (Unabhängige Kommission “Zuwanderung”, 2001: 236). The experience of volunteer managers with Muslim organizations indicates that cooperation requires higher effort and there is a lack of resonance and sometimes inappropriate organizational structures on the Muslim side. Those aggravating circumstances and risks might reduce volunteer managers’ cooperation interest. Additionally, uncertainties and prejudice concerning the potentially radical nature of the religious community can discourage volunteer managers to seek out cooperation with Muslim organizations. All of those aspects can be summarized under the strategy of risk aversion, as they make the cooperation process more complex and control mechanisms more essential.

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The interviews with the volunteer managers also revealed that, although religious social engagement is generally broadly based, state cooperation with Muslim organizations often focuses on specific topics. Even if some volunteer managers are open to cooperation with Muslim organizations in several fields, many specifically mentioned social engagement regarding refugees and integration as connecting factors with Muslim engagement. When we work with Muslims, we, [within the office of migration and integration], do not focus on one specific topic. Women topics are important, but we are quite open towards different topics. (Interview_3). When we work with Muslim organizations there is a focus on integration. For sure. (Interview_10)

Ilgün-Birhimeo˘glu (2014) argued that national as well as regional and local state actors often consult migration organizations for integration tasks. Topical restrictions derive either from functional reasons or from the orientation of Muslim groups themselves. We clearly see that [Christian organizations engage broader, whereas] Muslims concentrate on specific topics. (Interview_4) In many cases, the Muslim organizations – apart from religious topics – did a lot of cultural and identity building work. And that is important, very important for refugees, because they have been confronted with very difficult situations and they were faced with an uprootedness. (Interview_5) Within the field of integration, cooperation with Muslims is very important. Muslims in established communities here in Germany. They know the language and they know the structure of the municipality – culturally but also organizationally. And we try to profit from the potential to use it for the integration of newly arrived Muslim asylum seekers. The office for migration and integration uses the potential for language partnerships. Together with Muslim communities they go to the shared accommodations of the refugees and tell them, that in the afternoons, they can go to the Mosque. The refugees know this from their own cultural environment and so it makes sense to offer this possibility to them, to strengthen them. (Interview_11)

SLBs employ a certain competency logic, when expected expertise is associated with certain organizational characteristics. In that case, SLBs would apply a strategy of policy advocacy to implement a policy in the best possible manner. Changing the perspective and asking Muslim organizations about their willingness to cooperate with state actors and previous experiences they have had with

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local or regional public administrators revealed that most interviewed Muslim organizations indicated good cooperation (cf. also Interview_M5). There is very active support for the youth work of migrants in this federal state. […]. They support us very actively; there is even a commission for integration – an association for young people with a migration background. And they offer a separate conference for them. There is a real participation. (Interview_M4) Within our municipality, there are many contact points. For instance, there is a roundtable for Muslims. Additionally, there is a Migrants Advisory Board, where we participate. (Interview_M7)

One representative of a Muslim organization described how both state actors and his organization initiate cooperation. There is cooperation with state authorities. But it is rather new. We have close relations to the local administration. The local administration realized that Muslims can participate and want to participate. So they do not neglect us but see us as a serious group and ask us about our needs and how they can support us. But also the other way around: “How can we shape our local society?” We are a Muslim organization that seeks for cooperation with others. And we are quite optimistic, because also from the state’s side, requests are increasing. For instance, the municipal administration asked us about how to deal with Muslim bus drivers that want to pray during their working time. (Interview_M6)

However, some Muslim organizations also claim that due to prejudice stemming from Islamic terrorism, public officials’ cooperation interest is low or has diminished during the last decade. Several Muslim organizations criticized the prevalence of security and risk aversion strategies (also see Interview_M8). Muslim organizations notice that SLBs display a certain control logic and a logic of cultural closeness. All kinds of professional fields are vulnerable for everyday racism, you do not always realize; but we often see this everyday racism in our everyday lives. (Interview_M7) There is a roundtable for Muslims. Twice a year. In earlier times, cooperation was more intense, we worked together with the welfare committee, we regularly communicated with political actors and representatives from other religious communities; but with 9/11 the situation changed, people were less interested in cooperation. […]. For the state, the topic of security is the most important. No matter what we are talking about, we always end up with the topic of security. Also for Muslims security is an important topic. […]. But it is also our security that is important, but very often the debate is about security issues induced by Muslims. (Interview_M9)

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One Muslim representative mentioned a focus on security aspects in media reporting as a reason for skepticism toward Muslims. From time to time, there are local public bureaucrats that are not very well informed and they have prejudices toward Muslim organizations. They have the impression that, if you are a practicing Muslim, you are already quite extreme. But for Muslims it is normal to pray five times a day. For non-practicing believers that seems a lot, but it isn’t. But such prejudices exist. And I think the reason is that direct communication is not good and many bureaucrats are influenced by public debates about extreme Islamists or terrorists. There are not many of them, but the debate is huge. And most Muslims that have nothing to do with those extremists are affected by those debates. They have to pay for it. (Interview_M4)

To explain the logic of cultural closeness or rather discriminatory behavior, one interviewed Muslim representative cited a lack of personal contact between bureaucrats and Muslims. I think discrimination toward Muslims happens, when bureaucrats do not know any Muslims. As soon as they have Muslim friends, prejudices about Muslims diminish. So, in more rural areas, discrimination happens more often, because there are fewer Muslims and personal relationships exist less. (Interview_M4)

Consistent with these perceptions, one interviewed volunteer manager reported that Muslim organizations often complain about missing integration and communication. Very often one talks about [Muslim organizations], but not with them. And that is what we get as feedback also from these groups. I think the most important thing is communication, communication, communication (Interview_2).

Moreover, many Muslim organizations suffer from a lack of financial and professional human resources that hamper stronger integration into local governance networks. The following quotations address this issue: [The public administration] is contacting us. They see the potential of cooperation and participation. But we often have difficulties with women- and with manpower, because most work is done voluntarily. (Interview_M5) Sometimes it is too much for young people. They organize a Muslim youth group that meets weekly and they want to do something together, go bowling, and have fun. And often these groups are discovered by existing local networks and they then say: “Wow, a Muslim group, please come to this meeting, to that event, here is a further meeting.” And then, that is too much for the young people, because what they originally wanted

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to do is organize activities for their group. So, there are many local networks and they are also quite open and want us to participate, but we have to see that our young people need time. At the beginning, they do not understand the whole context and have difficulties to actively participate in those networks. (Interview_M4) So we are the right ones to engage then. But at the moment, there is a lack of resources, a lack of money and of skilled workers (Interview_M8)

Representatives of Muslim organizations stated that cooperation with state actors mostly focuses on specific topics, especially integration; this perception is consistent with the views of some volunteer managers presented earlier and enforces the idea of a competency logic. In our city, we are a very welcomed member. Also the major was very friendly and happy that we are active now. And they always invite us. […]. We also cooperate with Diakonie and also with mosques, in particular, within the field of refugee work. (Interview_M8) We also have a youth organization, and one year ago, I remember, we started a project and collected clothes and toiletries and gave it to refugees. They were really happy about that. So we really try to do something and contact people. (Interview_M5)

Besides integration tasks, Muslim organizations are also welcome as partners on women’s issues. Integration is a huge topic, but also the support and empowerment of women. We often get calls from the municipal administration, if we could support whenever they hear from domestic violence in Muslim families. And we try to support, but we cannot do everything. And the demand is really huge. Local bureaucrats are desperate sometimes, because they do not know our culture and our religion. (Interview_M8)

As an interim result, volunteer managers and Muslim organizations are seeing some success stories as far as Muslim welfare engagement is concerned, but there are also many difficulties. Volunteer managers mentioned higher effort requirements, a lack of resonance, inappropriate organizational structures, and uncertainties regarding the radical nature of the religious community as barriers and risks that indicate the existence of a logic of cultural closeness and a logic of control. In return, Muslim organizations identified the general skepticism of state actors toward them as well as a lack of human and financial resources to build a more professional organizational structure. Overall, many Muslim organizations would prefer a “normalization” of their relationship with state actors. Additionally, they desire less focus on security aspects when cooperation emerges (also see

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hereto Rohe and Jaraba, 2018; Farman and Merz, 2017). From their perspective, a logic of control as well as a logic of cultural closeness—to their disadvantage— is discouraging. All in all, the qualitative interviews have revealed the four logics developed in Section 3.2. Cooperation interest and contextual factors Besides the individual assessments and experiences of SLBs, contextual factors, including organizational characteristics and regional peculiarities, might have an impact on their attitudes and behavior, as several studies have already shown (see, for instance, Brodkin, 1997; Oberfield, 2010; Rice, 2012; van Leeuwen et al., 2018). The interviews with the volunteer managers made clear that the local working environment has an influence on volunteer managers’ general cooperation interest and on their willingness to work with specific organizations to offer specific services. The following quotations make it clear that the administrative embedding of a volunteer agency shapes the working routines and individual leeway of SLBs. Volunteer managers working outside the municipal public administration emphasize that free agencies are more flexible and more independent in their decision-making than agencies located within the public administration. We are more independent than volunteer managers that are directly located at the city administration or the public administration of the regions. Because we are under free trusteeship. The money comes from the same source, but due to the trusteeship we have more freedom than those who are embedded in the public administration. (Interview_1)

Furthermore, they argued that the hierarchical structures and political aims of public administrations restrict bureaucrats’ room for maneuver. A volunteer agency, which is located in a district administration or in a municipal administration, is part of a public administration. And public administrations are normally quite hierarchical; it is an administrative apparatus and it is just part of the public administration. And there, they are less free, compared to an agency which belongs to a private trustee. […]. An embedding in public administration means that processes take longer time and that they are less free in their processes and in their decisions. In total, we have three different forms of trusteeships. We have the municipalities and district administrations, we have free trustees like Caritas or AWO, and finally, we have independent associations. They are most flexible. (Interview_6) A volunteer agency, which is part of a public administration, would never do something the district chief executive does not want. That is clear. Political willingness

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matters here. And that might be counterproductive sometimes. It is better, if volunteer agencies are independent. (Interview_6)

In contrast, street-level bureaucrats working in public administration argued that they are closer to decision-making bodies, which they perceive as a great advantage. Their perceptions differ strongly from those of bureaucrats who work in independent agencies. I think working in a volunteer agency, which is part of the public administration, has the advantage that you know very well the municipal processes and challenges. A disadvantage is that structures are very hierarchical and compartmentalized. That makes it difficult to properly fulfill this cross-sectoral task. (Interview_8)

Volunteer managers working as part of the public administration mentioned neutrality as a great advantage. In our center, [which is part of the public administration,] the mayor would not say: “Do this or do that.” We are completely free. We work for the ones that need our help. So we strongly orientate ourselves towards the concrete need. (Interview_11) Colleagues who work in volunteer agencies under free trusteeship always say that they also facilitate volunteers towards organizations outside their own structure. But in practice, we see that they very often try to procure people for their own organizational units. The Diakonie, for instance, has institutions for children and young people, but also for elderly people and everywhere volunteer work is needed. So, when they talk to people interested in volunteer work, they would try to bring them to their places. (Interview_10)

Both sets of quotations, from bureaucrats working inside and outside the public administration, illustrate that a certain administrative embedding has specific advantages and disadvantages. Whereas volunteer managers working in a nonpublic administration setting see themselves as more flexible and freer in their decision-making, managers in the public administration are convinced they can be more neutral in the counseling of individuals and organizations and have a closer connection to political decision-makers and other public authorities. Besides the administrative embedding of the SLBs, specific regional circumstances might affect their willingness to cooperate with civil society organizations in general or to cooperate with specific ones. The preferences of regional political decision-makers, for example, influence volunteer managers as the following quotation illustrates.

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The state government keeps up regional heritage associations, there are many connections. So, these associations also come to us and say: “Our state supports us and wants us to be active.” And then, we also help them to get funds. (Interview_10)

Regional socio-demographic particularities lead to varying cooperation interests of volunteer managers toward different organizations offering services for certain target groups. Compared to other municipalities, more than half of the people that came to us [during the refugee crisis] were younger than 18 years. So we have a larger need in offers that have to do with child or youth work. But there is also an interest in working with associations that do something for pregnant women. (Interview_3)

Contextual factors have the potential to influence the general cooperation interest of volunteer managers toward civil society organizations. Moreover, the administrative embedding of the volunteer managers, regional and local political directions, local particularities are also important determinants.

4.4

Summary

This chapter makes clear that volunteer work plays a crucial role within German society. A large part of the population is voluntarily engaged in different societal fields. Engagement within the scope of religious organizations is very common, particularly in the social field. To strengthen the volunteer engagement of secular and confessional CSOs, the state actively supports their work. This support is located at the national, regional, and local levels. At the local level, volunteer agencies coordinate volunteer work and support organizations and groups with their specific concerns. Because in the fields of integration and senior welfare, the need for civil engagement has been and remains high, volunteer work in those two fields is particularly important. The state attempts to integrate different groups into civil society to address concerns about equal representation. Consequently, the state encourages migrant groups, among others, to become active in civil society. In fostering civil engagement at the local level, volunteer managers that work in local volunteer agencies play a key role. They advise individuals who want to become volunteers, help volunteer organizations find rooms for their engagement, provide equipment or financial support, and organize meetings and roundtables for different organizations and groups that are engaged in the same field. As part of the latter task, most of the interviewed volunteer managers see themselves as

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active networkers. In their everyday work life, volunteer managers face different challenges and risks, including conflicts between volunteers and professionals, which forces them to act as mediators between those two groups. During the interviews with the volunteer managers, it became clear that this group of SLBs is open to working with all organizations that are interested in cooperation. However, they reject cooperation with anti-democratic organizations, extreme right-wing groups, or organizations that do not contribute to the common good. Familiarity facilitates cooperation, which indicates that a logic of cultural closeness is sometimes in place. However, preferring to work with wellknown groups could at the same time indicate the existence of a competency logic because groups that are well-known have already frequently fulfilled certain tasks successfully and therefore are desirable as partners. For confessional groups, it is important to volunteer managers that their religious engagement and their social engagement are clearly separated. The state only supports and promotes social engagement. This circumstance affects Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, and Muslim groups. Consequently, the qualitative results indicate that religious organizations indeed require more control due to their dual character. This conclusion supports the existence of a logic of control. Volunteer managers spoke of several challenges and risks when cooperating with Muslim groups. Due to their previous experience, volunteer managers argued that cooperation with Muslim organizations comes with higher effort, a lack of resonance, inappropriate organizational structures, and uncertainties regarding the radical nature of the religious community. Those experiences might subliminally lead to the application of a logic of cultural closeness. However, despite those potential difficulties, interviewed volunteer managers confirmed that they are generally open toward all groups, including Muslim groups. From time to time, they reported actively seeking such cooperation. This declaration supports the assumption that SLBs also apply a representation logic. All in all, although the interviewed SLBs state that neutrality is the central paradigm that directs their behavior, the interviews also revealed evidence of the influence of all four potential logics in shaping their cooperation interest—a representation logic, a logic of cultural closeness, a competency logic, and a control logic.

5

A Field Experiment: The Prevalence of Logics that Determine the Cooperation Interest of SLBs

The results of the qualitative interviews indicate that the four logics that can shape SLBs’ cooperation interest are evident empirically. To verify quantitatively whether SLBs treat religious and non-confessional organizations and experienced and inexperienced organization differently in different contexts and to measure the prevalence of the developed logics, this study also included a field experiment with vignettes (for an illustration of the benefits of this method, see Sommer Harrits, 2019). Such a field experiment can neutralize the effect of social desirability that might skew the findings of interviews (Skinner, 2012). In general, field experiments are a promising methodological tool to gain innovative perspectives in public administration research (see, for instance, Grimmelikhuijsen et al., 2017; James et al., 2017a; Aguinis and Bradley, 2014; Headley et al., 2017; Adam and Bauer, 2018; Neggers, 2018). Compared to interviews, field experiments reveal actual bureaucratic behavior rather than reported attitudes or preferences (Sommer Harrits, 2019).

5.1

Methods II

The quantitative field experiment consisted of fictive requests from civil society organizations with varying characteristics seeking cooperation. The requests were sent to all large and middle-size German municipalities. This experimental approach provides insights on a broader basis into the specific decision-making

Supplementary Information The online version contains supplementary material available at (https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-36153-2_5).

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2021 L. Fischer, Street-Level Bureaucrats’ Impact on the Emergence of Local Governance Networks, Stadtforschung aktuell, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-36153-2_5

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criteria of SLBs in a real-life environment. This method is one of the best for detecting possible discriminatory behavior toward certain groups. To evaluate how the characteristics of organizations and the working environment of SLBs influenced their cooperation interest, this study applied a 3 × 2 × 2 experimental design. Specifically, emails with fictive requests for possible cooperation were sent to responsible local administrations or volunteer agencies. These emails included specific questions about their general interest in cooperation, the conditions and possibilities of cooperation, and specific measures of support. Such inquiries can be considered authentic, as the following quotations from interviewed volunteer managers emphasize: Sometimes new groups or initiatives come to us and have concrete questions, so, for instance, “Which ways do we have to go?” “Do we get financial support?” Or new associations are coming to us and present their ideas. And then, we come together, talk about their plans and tell them how we are able to support them. (Interview_10) When new volunteer organizations emerge, they often immediately get in touch with us; they say that they are newly founded or that they want to found an association. Then, money is one of the main questions. They want to know how to receive grant funds, how to find companies that would support their social project. […]. And we react and give them information about the founding process of associations; additionally, we try to find grant funds or companies that would be a good fit. (Interview_11)

Conducting a field experiment rather than a laboratory experiment and the authenticity of the email strengthens the external validity of the experiment, and the results should also hold outside of the experimental setting (Cook and Campbell, 1979). The experimental design and the high number of cases reinforce the internal validity by making biases through confounding variables less powerful. Jiménez-Buedo and Miller (2010) argued that “threats to internal or external validity depend on the particularities of the design and on problems with the operationalization of crucial variables, and there seems to be no grounds to posit a general trade-off between the internal and external validity of experiments” (p. 318). The imaginary senders of the emails vary in their confessional orientation (non-confessional/Christian/Muslim) and their ethnicity (German/Arab), which the names indicate (cf. comparable approaches in Bertrand and Mullainathan, 2004; Grohs et al., 2015; Jilke et al., 2018; Sommer Harrits, 2019). The name Thomas Schneider represented German non-confessional and German Christian senders. Ahmed Saleh was the sender name for Muslim Arab requests. Although Turks are the largest Muslim group in Germany, this study used an Arab name because the refugee crisis greatly increased the number of people with an Arab background in Germany (Statistisches Bundesamt, 2017). Individual email

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addresses were configured to include the last names of the senders. The organizations were described as being newly founded, and the Christian organizations were not linked with Caritas or other well-known Christian welfare organizations to avoid intervening effects that prior cooperation experiences might cause. Moreover, the email messages varied with respect to the previous experience of the group in social work (experience/no experience) and between two social policy fields in which the need for volunteer work is high (senior welfare/integration). For further details concerning the email content, see Appendix 4. Emails were sent to volunteer managers in each German city with more than 20,000 inhabitants (N = 694) in May 2019. Each municipality received one randomly assigned mail. The random assignment was carried out with the help of a random number generator in Microsoft Excel. Figure 5.1 illustrates the process of finding a suitable email contact for all 694 cities.

official city website Contact for volunteer management (internal / external)

utilized

official city website Contact for volunteer management in integration / elderly people

utilized

official city website Contact for volunteer management at the district level

utilized

official city website Contact of the social welfare office

utilized

official city website General contact of the municipal administration

Figure 5.1 Approach to identifying email contacts

utilized

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First, if a search of the official city website for the terms “Ehrenamt”1 or “Freiwilligenkoordination”2 returned an appropriate contact, the experiment used that contact. In many municipalities, the local public administration itself is not the provider of volunteer work. Instead, the task is outsourced to independent agencies under free or social trusteeships totally or partially financed by the municipality. In those cases, the experiment used the email address of the external volunteer agency. Often, the cities did not have a general contact person for volunteer work but offered specific contact persons for the topics of integration and/or elder care (cf. Section 4.2.2). Many cities have integration pilots, who are responsible for volunteer coordination in the framework of the refugee crisis. The same situation applies to senior representatives, who coordinate volunteer work for and by elderly people. In these cases, the experiment used that contact information. Sometimes the city webpage included a link to the volunteer coordinator for the related larger district. If so, the experiment used the contact for the district. There was no case where two municipalities with more than 20,000 inhabitants located in the same district had no separate contact for volunteer management, so a single district contact was never used twice. If the city website had no information about volunteer coordination at all, the search continued for the contact information of the municipal social welfare office, the public authority usually responsible for senior citizens and integration. If there was no email address for the social welfare office on the homepage, the general contact information of the city administration was used. This approach to finding a suitable contact is expedient, as it follows an intuitive process that a newly founded civil society organization would apply to search for cooperation opportunities with their municipality. To evaluate the single responses and to get an overall picture of bureaucratic cooperation interest, this experiment modified the coding scheme of Grohs et al. (2015) and recorded three dimensions of the response: 1) response speed, 2) response quality, and 3) support possibilities. The first dimension counted the number of working days to receive a response (Monday to Friday, minus one national public holiday). The experiment set a maximum of 22 working days for a response time from the assumption that public administrations or independent volunteer agencies should be able to give at least a short answer within three weeks; after 22 working days, responses were deemed to be a non-response. Two attributes, information content and email length, served as measures of response quality. The first attribute measured whether the respondents answered all of the 1 2

English translation: Honorary Office English translation: Volunteer coordination

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questions in the original email message. The attribute had a value of 0 points if the response included no information up to a maximum of 3 points if it answered all questions. The second attribute of email length recorded the number of words in the response. Email length serves as an appropriate measurement for quality because a qualitative analysis of the email responses did not indicate that they used standard answers. Finally, to capture support possibilities, the experiment allocated 0 to 3 points, where 0 points meant the absence of information on support possibilities and/or interest in giving support, 1 point indicated a response of vague support, 2 points indicated offers of non-material support like networking or counseling, and 3 points indicated offers of both non-material and material support through the provision of rooms or project funding. Responses that received 3 points did not confirm project funding but rather an agreement to support the organization in the application process for such funding. Specific and overall financial support by the municipality often requires the approval of local political decision-makers, which cannot be granted without a better knowledge of the organization. Table 5.1 summarizes the respective dimensions. For illustration purposes, Appendix 5 provides several specific email examples and their coding results. Table 5.1 Response coding scheme Description

Scores

Response Speed

Response duration in workdays incl. non-response

Per workday, -1 point (max. 22); inverse value used

Response Quality

Information content

Up to 3 points

Email length

Amount of characters

Support Possibilities

Degree of encouragement

Up to 3 points

Sub-indexes

Total index: Cooperation interest

Using this multidimensional measurement approach to detect unequal treatment of different groups is consistent with Hemker and Rink (2017), who showed in their empirical analysis that focusing only on response rates as a single indicator of discrimination is insufficient. By conducting a field experiment with mail vignettes within German welfare offices, they identify that the quality of an answer can indicate unequal treatment. Thus, the “quality of a bureaucrat’s response is inherently multidimensional—whether a response is received is only one dimension.” (Hemker and Rink, 2017: 787).

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As with most field experiments in the context of public administration, this experiment did not include a debriefing of the contacted volunteer managers for the following reason: the exposure of the deception might cause negative emotions like anger and embarrassment from the bureaucrats. In consequence, those negative feelings might hamper a bureaucrat’s willingness to participate voluntarily in future scholarly research because scholars have deceived them in the past (McClendon, 2012). Because the research design includes the deception of bureaucrats, it raises ethical concerns (see hereto, James et al., 2017b). The Ethical Commission of the Social Faculty of the Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich reviewed the research idea and design.3 After some small adjustments to the design, the Ethical Commission accepted the thesis approach and the argument that such an experiment was necessary to identify the unequal treatment of different groups. To minimize the effort required to respond to the request, the email was as brief as possible, including questions that permitted short answers that were easy for bureaucrats working in such positions to formulate. The quantitative analysis included additional independent variables to assess the impact of contextual factors on SLBs’ willingness to cooperate with different groups (cf. Section 4.3). Several authors have demonstrated that the administrative embedding of SLBs can influence their behavior (Hupe and Buffat, 2014; Østergaard Møller, 2019; Considine, 2000; Dussuet and Ledoux, 2019; Hemker and Rink, 2017; Jilke et al., 2018). In Germany, organizational support is delivered either through SLBs directly located in the local authority or through statefinanced but independent agencies (BMFSFJ, 2017). Qualitative results have indicated that the administrative embedding of volunteer managers can affect their working methods. Therefore, this experiment captured the administrative structure of the volunteer management for every municipality (internal public administration, independent agency, or general municipal contact4 ). Assuming that the local context in which street-level bureaucrats work affects their behavior (see, for instance, Goodsell, 1981; Adam et al., 2020; Riedel and Schneider, 2017), independent variables in the data set capture specific local needs for civil engagement in their respective fields. The need for civil support in the sector of senior welfare is measured by the number of elderly people living in a city. Therefore, the variable measures the percentage of people older than 65 3

For more information on the Ethical Commission of the Social Faculty of the LMU, see https://www.sozialwissenschaften.uni-muenchen.de/fakultaet/ethikkommission/index.html 4 The general municipal contact includes SLBs in the municipal social welfare office as well as in the city administration, without any reference on the homepage of volunteer management or civil society support.

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(Regionaldatenbank Deutschland, 2019a). To assess the demand for third-sector support in integration, the experiment uses the percentage of people in one region that receive social benefits as asylum seekers. Because such data are not available at the city level in Germany, population ratios for the administrative district level serve as proxies (Regionaldatenbank Deutschland, 2019c). To measure the effect of socioeconomic factors of the municipalities where the SLBs are working, the variables include the annual municipal tax revenue5 per city, its population size, and affiliations to Christian churches. The latter takes into account whether a religious climate affects volunteer managers’ cooperation interest (Regionaldatenbank Deutschland, 2019d; Regionaldatenbank Deutschland, 2019b). The population size is important because larger cities might profit from economies of scale as established structures that foster civil society networking are more frequently present and general costs are better spread (Bouckaert et al., 2011). Brandtner et al. (2017) made the argument that a city’s capacities and institutional frameworks affect the formation of local governance networks. An additional variable indicates whether the municipality is located in former East Germany. This dummy category identifies differences between West and East Germany that might emerge due to varying attitudes of the population toward religion and foreigners. Table 5.2 provides a descriptive summary of the independent variables. Table 5.2 Descriptive statistics Variable

Number of observations

Mean

Min

Max

External contact

690

0.171

0

1

General contact

690

0.088

0

1

Communal tax income per capita (thousands)

687

1.196

0.704

9.335

Inhabitants (thousands)

690

Christian population share

684

0.601

0.059

0.888

Former East German state

690

0.125

0

1

Share of asylum seekers

668

0.006

0.000

0.032

Share of people > 65 years

688

0.220

0.079

0.345

5

70174.61

20,005

3,574,830

The original German word for the number used is “Steuereinnahmekraft”; this index includes an adjusted tax rate that makes municipal tax income comparable between German municipalities.

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General Empirical Results

In total, this experiment sent 690 emails to medium and large German cities. It omitted four municipalities (cf. in total, there are 694 German municipalities with more than 20,000 inhabitants) to avoid possible distortions because the qualitative interviews took place with volunteer managers in those cities before the field experiment started, including questions on the emergence of cooperation with FBOs. Table 5.3 provides an overview of the email requests by stimulus. Table 5.3 Summary of email requests by stimulus Senior welfare

Integration

Experience

Experience

No experience

Total No experience

Non-confessional

57

58

58

56

229

Christian

57

57

58

57

229

Muslim

58

58

58

58

232

172

173

174

171

690

Total

The overall response rate was 62.3 percent, which is a good result compared to similar studies (Hemker and Rink, 2017: 792). Because in smaller cities people might know each other better than in larger cities, the field experiment could introduce problems if SLBs thought they should know the author of the email. A comparison of the total response rate with that for cities with fewer than 30,000 inhabitants (N = 297), indicated that the response rate for this sample was 60.3 percent, just slightly less than the rate for the total sample. This result makes clear that SLBs were not influenced by uncertainties about the sender of the email, which strengthens the external validity of the field experiment. However, response rates did vary by organizational setting. Whereas almost 70 percent of the non-confessional organizations received a response, only 55.5 percent of Christian and 61.6 percent of Muslim organizations did. The results of a logistic regression model confirm that the likelihood of receiving a response to a cooperation request is significantly lower for Muslim and Christian than for non-confessional organizations (cf. Table 5.4).

5.2 General Empirical Results Table 5.4 Response rates compared to non-confessional organizations

103

All

Experience

No experience

Muslim

−0.367* (0.20)

−0.407 (0.28)

−0.326 (0.28)

Christian

−0.622*** (0.20)

−0.457* (0.28)

−0.785*** (0.28)

Observations

690

346

344

Note: Logistic regression. Standard errors in parentheses. ***p < .01. **p < .05. *p < .1.

Expressing it in concrete numbers, for Muslim organizations the chance of receiving a response is 30.7 percent lower (1—exp(−0.367)) than for nonconfessional organizations. It is 46.3 percent lower for Christian organizations. The response rate for Muslim organizations does not differ depending on whether the requesting group has experience in social work or not. In contrast, for Christian organizations, having no experience considerably lowers the chance of receiving an answer. These results indicate that the presumed control logic, that non-confessional organizations are easier to handle than confessional ones, influences the cooperation interest of SLBs in the field experiment. In contrast, the group’s experience seems less decisive, which weakens the validity of the competency logic. Only in the case of Christian organizations does the competency logic have some explanatory power. In the next step, to create the main dependent variable—cooperation interest—the three sub-indexes presented in Table 5.1 are summarized to one total index with the help of a confirmatory factor analysis, integrating Monte Carlo methods (cf. Brown, 2014; Quinn, 2004). Response speed and email length were converted into logarithmic values assuming that it makes a difference whether someone answers during the first or second working day or after three weeks or three weeks and a day. Likewise, the length of the email has more value in capturing the cooperation interest of SLBs when the impact of very long answers is diminished. The assumption of equal space between categories was not applied to expand the scope of the main dependent variable. Between the ordinal variables of support possibilities and information content, the latter has a stronger effect on the total index. For the continuous variables, email length has more relevance than response speed (see Figure 5.2 and Figure 5.3 for more details about variable loadings). Due to the continuous output of the generated quantities (normalized to have mean 0 and standard deviation 1) regression analysis is possible.

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Note: HPD = highest posterior density Figure 5.2 Variable loading on the total index (continuous variables)

Note: HPD = highest posterior density Figure 5.3 Variable loading on the total index (ordinal variables)

Table 5.5 shows the results of the regression analysis. The results for organizational characteristics (model 1) confirm the findings of the first analysis that focused only on the response rate (cf. Table 5.4). Volunteer managers’ cooperation interest with Muslim and Christian organizations is significantly lower than their interest in cooperating with non-confessional organizations, whereas the experience of a group has no general effect.

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Table 5.5 SLBs’ cooperation interest (1) Organizational characteristics

(2) Administrative embedding

(3) Contextual factors

(4) All

Muslim

−0.157* (0.089)

−0.150* (0.089)

Christian

−0.249*** (0.089)

−0.251*** (0.089)

Experience

−0.003 (0.073)

0.006 (0.073)

Independent agency

0.169* (0.098)

0.177* (0.097)

General contact

0.007 (0.130)

0.076 (0.130)

Communal tax income per capita (thousands)

0.013 (0.053)

0.028 (0.053)

Inhabitants (thousands)

0.001*** (0.000)

0.001*** (0.000)

Christian population share

0.418 (0.310)

0.400 (0.312)

Former East German state

0.018 (0.192)

−0.001 (0.193)

−0.026 (0.042)

−0.315 (0.224)

−0.227 (0.237)

690

684

684

Constant Observations

0.141* (0.073) 690

Note: Regression analysis. Standard errors in parentheses. ***p < .01. **p < .05. *p < .1.

Again, skepticism toward Christian organizations is greater than toward Muslim ones. Considering the output-legitimacy logics, the competency logic is not pivotal as a general rule (cf. Op. 3a). In contrast, the control logic seems to be valid comprehensively because a preference toward non-confessional groups is clearly visible (cf. Op. 4). A higher cooperation interest toward Muslim organizations compared to Christian organizations partly contradicts the logic of cultural closeness (cf. Op. 2). The result suggests that SLBs actively prioritize Muslim organizations over Christian ones. This result also supports in part the assumption that SLBs follow a

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representation logic, seeking social blending within governance networks (cf. Op. 1). However, compared to non-confessional organizations, the cooperation interest with Muslim organizations is still lower. This result limits the explanatory potential of SLBs as pure state-agents aiming to reach equal representation in governance networks. Thus, the part of Op. 2 that states that due to a logic of cultural closeness, SLBs favor cooperation with non-confessional organizations over Muslim organizations seems to be valid. The effect of organizational characteristics on individual sub-indexes highlights some interesting results. For example, the average waiting period for an answer to a cooperation request displays notable differences between Muslim, Christian, and non-confessional groups. Whereas non-confessional groups had to wait for an answer for three days on average, it was almost four days for Muslim and between three and four days for Christian organizations. Figure 5.4 illustrates the differences. Those differences for Muslim organizations were also statistically significant (cf. Appendix 6).

4.5 4 3.5

3 2.5 2 1.5 1 0.5 0 Muslim groups

Christian groups

Non-conf. groups

Note: N = 430 Figure 5.4 Average waiting period in days (excluding non-response cases)

The sub-index of email length separately generates further noteworthy results. Although Muslim and Christian organizations received shorter answers than did non-confessional groups, the regression coefficients are not significant. However, the experience of a group plays a role (cf. Table 5.6). When an organization

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107

indicated it had experience in the social field, the response of the volunteer managers or municipal bureaucrat was considerably longer. Bureaucrats evidently assume that experienced groups could handle more detailed information than “newcomers” could. Table 5.6 Average email length depending on characteristics of CSOs

(1) Muslim

−1.61 (8.586)

Christian

−0.88 (8.87)

Experience

14.80** (7.20)

Constant Observations

122.56*** 6.91 430

Note: Regression analysis. Standard errors in parentheses. ***p < .01. **p < .05. *p < .1.

Focusing on the administrative embedding of the volunteer manager (model 2, Table 5.5), the results showed that SLBs working in independent agencies are more interested in cooperation with civil society organizations than those embedded in internal public administration structures. SLBs in independent agencies are generally more willing to cooperate with all civil society organizations because of their specialization in networking tasks. Additionally, time-limited funding concerns at least some of the agencies, which makes successful work more essential to have a better chance of prolonging the funding. If there was no specific position dealing with public-nonprofit partnerships in a municipality, contacting an SLB with a more general position in the social welfare office or the general local administration did not lower the cooperation interest. Model 3 captures additional contextual factors (cf. Table 5.5). Findings indicate that whereas the financial performance of a municipality seems not to have a decisive impact on the cooperation interest, the size of the municipality does have an impact: the larger the municipality, the higher the cooperation interest. Larger cities might profit from economies of scale. Including additional variables, such as the percentage of the Christian population and a dummy variable for whether the municipality is located in East Germany (the former German Democratic Republic) do not show any significant results. To verify the validity of the general results, the regression analysis was conducted without integrating the Monte

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Carlo method to build the total index. The findings were largely comparable (cf. Appendix 7). To examine whether municipalities with a higher share of a Christian population are more in favor of cooperation with Christian organizations, which could strengthen the validity of the logic of cultural closeness, a further analysis integrated interaction effects (cf. Table 5.7). Table 5.7 SLBs’ cooperation interest with Christian organizations in Christian municipalities

(1) Christian sender Christian population

−0.567 (0.250) 0.496 (0.249)

Christian sender * Christian population

−0.322 (0.386)

Muslim sender

−0.149* (0.089)

Experience

0.005 (0.072)

Independent agency

0.176* (0.097)

General contact

0.077 (0.130)

Communal tax income per capita (thousands)

0.028 (0.053)

Inhabitants (thousands)

0.001*** (0.000)

Former East German state

−0.008 (0.194)

Constant

−0.282 (0.247)

Observations

684

Note: Regression analysis. Standard errors in parentheses. ***p < .01. **p < .05. *p < .1.

The results confirm that municipalities with a higher proportion of Christians do not act in favor of Christian organizations. The coefficient indicates rather the opposite, namely that skepticism toward Christian organizations is particularly high in very Christian regions; however, the correlation is not significant.

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109

First results indicate that SLBs working in independent agencies do have a greater cooperation interest. The next step explored whether SLBs working in such a setting, more often apply the control logic or the logic of cultural closeness as logics that follow a strategy of risk aversion. Previous literature has shown that administrators that are not directly part of the public administration are more prone to diverge and even discriminate in their behavior (Jilke et al., 2018). Table 5.8, therefore, includes interaction effects between SLBs working in independent agencies and religious senders (including Muslim and Christian groups separately). In no case were interaction effects significant, indicating that unequal treatment of different civil society organizations does not depend on administrative embedding. Table 5.8 Administrative embedding and its effects on SLBs’ cooperation interest (1) Interaction with (2) Interaction with (3) Interaction with religious sender Muslim sender Christian sender Independent agency

0.324** (0.158)

Religious sender

−0.148* (0.085)

Religious sender * independent agency

−0.265 (0.200)

0.174 (0.118)

Muslim sender

−0.142 (0.096)

Muslim sender * independent agency

−0.057 (0.206)

Christian sender

−0.242*** (0.089)

Observations

−0.149* (0.089)

−0.203** (0.096) −0.235 (0.210)

Christian sender * independent agency Constant

0.227** (0.116)

0.075 (0.070) 690

0.105 (0.067) 690

Note: Regression analysis. Standard errors in parentheses. ***p < .01. **p < .05. *p < .1.

0.095 (0.067) 690

110

5.3

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Policy Field-specific Results

As the field experiment asked for cooperation in two different policy fields, integration and senior welfare, the following analyses present potential differences of SLBs’ cooperation interest in both fields. First, regression analysis for the two policy fields respectively checked whether specific local needs enhance cooperation interest, with the share of local asylum seekers and the proportion of elderly in the population as indicators of the local need (cf. Table 5.9). However, the results show that those variables do not have a significant effect on SLBs’ cooperation interest. In general, one may presume that SLBs’ cooperation interest is higher for integration than for senior welfare because integration tasks are more salient in public debate and the need for further engagement seems higher. An additional regression analysis attempted to detect such potential policy field-specific differences (cf. Table 5.10). However, no significant difference between the two policy fields appeared. In general, therefore problem pressure does not seem to lead automatically to higher cooperation interest. High rates of asylum seekers in a municipality also did not increase the relevance of the representation logic (cf. Appendix 8). An additional test explored whether organizational characteristics might have different impacts in the two fields of interest on SLBs logics, and Table 5.9 presents those findings. Once again, SLBs had less interest in cooperation with Christian organizations. Interestingly, bureaucratic reluctance toward them is higher in the integration field than in senior welfare. For Muslim organizations, the opposite is true, but due to the smaller number of cases, the results are no longer significant. Focusing only on the response speed as one sub-index of cooperation interest highlights these policy-field-specific particularities (cf. Table 5.11). Whereas Muslim organizations have to wait significantly longer for a response in the field of senior welfare, they do not in the integration field. Those policy-specific particularities support the assumption that SLBs follow a competency logic to some extent when they associate single FBOs with specific topics and expect them to have a greater competency in that field that enhances their cooperation interest. In this setting, they view Muslims as better suited for integration tasks and Christians for services for elderly people (cf. Op. 3b). Additionally, the separate analysis of the two single policy fields suggests that administrative embedding in an independent agency and the size of the municipality only clearly impact cooperation interest in senior welfare. In the integration field, those two variables show the same trend but are no longer significant, which might also be a function of fewer cases (cf. Table 5.9).

5.4 Summary of the Field Experiment

111

Table 5.9 SLBs’ cooperation interest by policy field (1) Senior welfare

(2) Integration

Muslim

−0.193 (0.125)

−0.115 (0.131)

Christian

−0.208* (0.125)

−0.340*** (0.130)

Experience

0.006 (0.103)

−0.005 (0.107)

Independent agency

0.269* (0.140)

0.114 (0.139)

General contact

0.060 (0.194)

0.060 (0.189)

−0.067 (0.077)

0.117 (0.075)

Communal tax income per capita (thousands) Inhabitants (thousands)

0.001*** (0.000)

0.000 (0.000)

Christian population share

0.299 (0.427)

0.568 (0.501)

Former East German state

−0.171 (0.256)

0.101 (0.314) −7.084 (27.645)

Share of asylum seekers Share of people > 65 years

−0.380 (1.992)

Constant

−0.023 (0.612)

−0.318 (0.420)

342

330

Observations

Note: Regression analysis. Standard errors in parentheses. ***p < .01. **p < .05. *p < .1.

5.4

Summary of the Field Experiment

The results of the field experiment partly correspond to the results of the qualitative interviews and show that certain logics shape SLBs’ cooperation interest toward different organizations. Concerning policy advocacy strategies, the results demonstrate that SLBs partially apply a representation logic when they favor cooperating with Muslim organizations over Christian ones. The field experiment only partially validated a competency logic, assuming that the higher competency

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Table 5.10 SLBs’ cooperation interest in the field of integration in comparison to the field of senior welfare

(1) Integration field

0.079 (0.073)

Muslim

−0.157* (0.089)

Christian

−0.249*** (0.089)

Experience

−0.004 (0.073)

Constant

0.102 (0.081)

Observations

345

Note: Regression analysis. Standard errors in parentheses. ***p < .01. **p < .05. *p < .1.

Table 5.11 Response speed by policy field

(1) Senior welfare

(2) Integration

Muslim

0.246* (0.137)

0.170 (0.141)

Christian

0.298** (0.138)

0.298** (0.142)

Experience

0.029 (0.112)

−0.012 (0.115)

Constant

2.163 (0.113)

2.168 (0.117)

Observations

345

345

Note: Negative binomial regression. Standard errors in parentheses. Non-response is included. ***p < .01. **p < .05. *p < .1.

of an organization leads to a higher SLBs’ cooperation interest. Whereas SLBs indeed favor groups with an expected expertise as cooperation partners, they do not favor groups with experience in a certain field. The results also partially confirm logics that refer to a strategy of risk aversion. A logic of cultural closeness is evident when SLBs prefer non-confessional organizations to Muslim ones. However, as SLBs’ cooperation interest is higher for Muslim than for Christian organizations, this logic seems to be only partially valid. In contrast, the results

5.4 Summary of the Field Experiment

113

completely confirm the control logic. This logic implies that SLBs prefer nonconfessional organizations confessional ones because they are easier to handle. Table 5.12 summarizes the general results of the field experiment. Table 5.12 Summary of logics, their operationalization, and the results Logic

Operationalization

Results

Representation logic Policy advocacy strategy

Op. 1: SLBs are more interested in cooperation with Muslim organizations than with Christian organizations.

confirmed

Logic of cultural closeness Strategy of risk aversion

Op. 2: SLBs’ cooperation interest is higher for Christian and non-confessional organizations than for Muslim organizations.

partly confirmed

Competency logic Policy advocacy strategy

Op. 3a: SLBs’ cooperation interest is higher for organizations that have experience in the field in which they want to engage.

not confirmed

Op. 3b: SLBs’ cooperation interest is higher for organizations that have an expected expertise in the field in which they want to engage.

confirmed

Op. 4: SLBs’ cooperation interest is higher for organizations with a non-confessional than for those with a confessional character.

confirmed

Control logic Strategy of risk aversion

6

Conclusion

This closing chapter summarizes the central findings of this thesis and again responds to the main research questions. It also presents theoretical implications and directions for future research, including comments about its contribution to the literature on welfare, governance, and street-level bureaucracy. Finally, this chapter includes an explanation of the general limitations of the thesis and its practical implications.

6.1

Summary

Due to intensifying societal challenges in fields like migration, the environment, or elder care, cooperation between public actors and civil society organizations is gaining importance in most Western societies. The state is incapable of resolving those issues alone, and more comprehensive strategies must include different stakeholders (Steen et al., 2019; Sørensen and Torfing, 2007). Despite this trend, there has been relatively little research about the emergence of those forms of cooperation and how political and administrative actors select partners. Even welfare state literature, which focuses on cooperation between the state and civil society organizations during service delivery in the social field has devoted little attention to the formation of such constellations (but see Grohs, 2010; Merchel, 2011; Ruflin, 2006). As religious organizations and churches are often prominent partners for welfare delivery in many Western countries, some authors have described the historical circumstances that lead to certain roles for single churches within the social sphere of a state (see, for instance, Evers, 2010). The general welfare system and the state church regime in individual countries can also explain the role of CSOs and religious organizations in welfare delivery (Esping-Andersen, 1990; Fox, 2015). However, authors dealing with this topic © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2021 L. Fischer, Street-Level Bureaucrats’ Impact on the Emergence of Local Governance Networks, Stadtforschung aktuell, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-36153-2_6

115

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Conclusion

have primarily had a macro- and meso-level focus, whereas studies of the micro level of specific local governance networks are largely absent. The integration of civil society organizations into the newly founded governance networks has not been a focus of the current debate. Therefore, it remains unclear whether or why the state favors certain civil society organizations as partners. Within the very broad governance literature, which considers different forms of cooperation between public, private and civil society actors, most research questions deal with already existing structures of cooperation and governance networks, their functioning, and efficiency (see, for instance, Denters, 2011; Selsky and Parker, 2005; Ferlie et al., 2011). The emergence process has not been sufficiently considered, particularly the specific arrangement of governance networks and the integration of certain organizations therein. Only a few authors (see, for instance, Ruflin, 2006; Grohs, 2010) have focused on the role of bureaucrats in shaping the emergence process at the local level. In street-level bureaucracy literature, where SLBs, their interests, and behavior are the core themes of the debate, the emergence process of governance networks has largely been neglected so far. In closing existing research gaps, this thesis shows how street-level bureaucrats prefer to cooperate with certain civil society organizations instead of others. To do so, it conceptualizes four different logics that could shape SLBs’ cooperation interest: The expectation was that reflections of input as well as of output legitimacy are decisive for SLBS in deciding with which organizations to collaborate in networks. If considering the input legitimacy of a network, SLBs could tend to favor groups that are underrepresented (representation logic) or apply a logic of cultural closeness to favor organizations that correspond to the dominant cultural imprint of a society. If considering the output legitimacy of a governance network, SLBs might select a competency logic, assuming that the experience and expertise of an organization make it attractive as a state partner or apply a control logic, which avoids potential partners that are harder to control. The logic of control and the logic of cultural closeness can even lead to discriminatory behavior against organizations with strong core beliefs or other cultural backgrounds. All logics were viewed as complementary. The application of a representation logic and a competency logic would relate to a strategy of policy advocacy, while a logic of cultural closeness and a control logic would reflect a strategy of risk aversion. To test the plausibility and prevalence of the set logics empirically, this study used a mixed-methods design by integrating qualitative and quantitative methods. The SLBs of interest for this thesis are volunteer managers in Germany, who are directly responsible for building new governance networks at the local level. In particular, this study examines SLBs’ cooperation interest toward CSOs in the

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117

fields of integration and senior welfare. Those two fields are under high pressure because the need for state action seems higher there than the state resources available to fulfill the needs. Therefore, support through civil engagement is especially indispensable (Mayblin and James, 2019; Kendall and Knapp, 2000). First, this thesis connects material deriving from interviews with volunteer managers with already existing studies and scholarly contributions about volunteering in Germany in the fields of integration and senior welfare, demonstrating that civil engagement is indeed crucial in both sectors. It also makes clear that the state recognizes the relevance of civil engagement and therefore tries actively to support and promote it. In particular, there are state attempts to make civil engagement as inclusive as possible and to foster the engagement of underrepresented groups, such as migrant groups. Enhancing governance networks’ input legitimacy serves as one reason. The next step explores several conditions making an impact on volunteer managers during the formation phase of governance networks, including tasks directly connected to the building of governance networks, their perception of their role as network managers, and challenges they face during task fulfillment. Most volunteer managers have considerable leeway within the scope of their tasks, and most SLBs in the field of civil society management perceive themselves as networkers, who act proactively to form governance networks. Very few reported a passive and “work-to-rule” approach. Volunteer managers face a variety of challenges including conflict between professionals and volunteers and financial and personnel restrictions. Because of these limitations, volunteer managers cannot support all CSOs at the same level and must prioritize. Interview questions explored the cooperation interest of volunteer managers toward different kinds of groups to identify the existence and plausibility of the four logics. Most claimed an openness toward all organizations except for extremist ones. Regarding religious organizations, some admitted that cooperation might be difficult if religious objectives were not separated from social engagement, which is not always the case. Those results suggest that religious organizations are more difficult to control, making the application of a logic of control more probable. Additionally, interviews with volunteer managers revealed several challenges in cooperating with Muslim organizations. They view Muslim organizations as difficult to access and as requiring more effort in communication than other groups. Although those factors make cooperation more challenging and riskier, volunteer managers do not report being less interested in cooperation, and several actively search for Muslim organizations with whom to cooperate to integrate this underrepresented group, thus reporting a certain degree of representation logic. Some volunteer managers expressed a preference for familiar

118

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Conclusion

CSOs. This preference may indicate a competency logic, as those CSOs might have already demonstrated their competency, but it may also indicate a logic of cultural closeness. As Muslim organizations are underrepresented in German civil engagement, the qualitative research included interviews with representatives of Muslim organizations. Interview results made clear that despite many positive experiences with state cooperation, Muslim CSOs perceived a control logic as well as a logic of cultural closeness on the part of the SLBs. In a second approach, this study included a field experiment to clarify the prevalence of the logics and to prevent social desirability by SLBs and Muslim organizations from distorting the interview results and hindering a valid measurement of logics that are dominant in SLBs’ decision-making. In total, 690 fictive emails containing requests for cooperation from different types of organizations were sent to all German municipalities with more than 20,000 inhabitants. Imaginary senders varied regarding their experience and religious affiliation. The results demonstrated that Muslim organizations have a lower probability of receiving an answer to cooperation requests than non-confessional organizations but a higher probability than Christian organizations. Because SLBs perceive religious organizations as organizations with strong core beliefs that are more difficult to handle, this finding supports the assumption that a logic of control affects SLBs’ decisionmaking. Thus, SLBs partially follow a strategy of risk aversion. The higher cooperation interest toward Muslims compared to Christians indicates the existence of a representation logic. In that case, SLBs also pursue a strategy of policy advocacy. The field experiment also revealed some evidence of a logic of cultural closeness, as SLBs’ cooperation interest is lower for Muslim groups than for nonconfessional groups, but not lower than for Christian ones. Furthermore, while the experience of a group does not play a role in determining the cooperation interest, the expertise expected from a group does. Resonance toward Muslims was higher in the field of integration than in the field of senior welfare; for Christian groups, it was exactly the opposite. Thus, a competency logic also partially affects SLBs’ cooperation interest. As a whole, the findings of the qualitative interviews and the field experiment show that SLBs are, to a certain degree, led by different logics in their decision of with whom to cooperate and how to assemble governance networks. In particular, they handle religious organizations with skepticism. Thus, to answer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s prominent question, “How do you feel about religion, tell me?”1 the answer for German SLBs acting as volunteer managers is “not good.”

1

Quotation from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s tragedy Faust, published in 1808.

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Although churches and FBOs remain important players in the social field, their integration into new networks seems to be compromised.

6.2

Theoretical Implications

Those findings lead to important theoretical implications. The thesis contributes to three different strands of literature that have rarely been connected in political and social science: (1) welfare state literature, (2) governance literature, and (3) street-level bureaucracy literature. For welfare state literature, the results demonstrate that current logics of street-level bureaucrats, by influencing their cooperation interest, might change established welfare structures. Welfare states with strong historical ties to religious organizations might be especially affected as religious actors could play a smaller role in future governance networks. This result is consistent with that of Liedhegener (2016), who found that Caritas has recorded growth rates belowaverage compared to other welfare organizations. From a functional perspective, the findings indicate that not all potential resources from civil society in the social field are being currently exploited. Placing the focus on the emergence process of governance networks and on individual logics that shape that process adds an innovative perspective to the very broad governance literature that hitherto has primarily considered only the functioning of and challenges facing already existing networks (Selsky and Parker, 2005; Ferlie et al., 2011). Illustrating that street-level bureaucrats apply different logics that either follow a strategy of policy advocacy or risk aversion contributes specifically to the discussion of the legitimacy of governance networks. The results of this thesis strengthen critical positions on the growing relevance of governance networks, arguing that policy decisions and policy implementation through such networks often lack a democratic basis (Klijn and Skelcher, 2007; Considine and Afzal, 2011; Skelcher and Torfing, 2010) because not all groups and organizations have the same chance to participate. Organizations with strong core beliefs are particularly affected by this unequal treatment, as they are more difficult to control and therefore less attractive to SLBs for cooperative partnerships. In general this thesis demonstrates that participatory elements of democracy have to be examined with regard to their openness and integration capacity towards diverse groups and individuals. Finally, this study provides a new perspective in street-level bureaucracy literature, theoretically as well as empirically. Hitherto, most research in that field has

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focused on SLBs’ role in the interaction between public administration and individual citizens or clients (Brodkin, 2012; Jensen and Pedersen, 2017; Keulemans and Van de Walle, 2018; Winter, 2002). Viewing SLBs as active in the formation process of governance networks makes their impact even more important. As governance networks themselves aim to deliver important services to citizens, SLBs, who affect the design of such networks, have an important if indirect effect on how those services are delivered. Thus, SLBs have a double effect on how policy is implemented: As many scholarly studies have demonstrated, they have a direct impact through their interaction with the policy’s target group but also indirectly through their impact on the formation of networks that interact with citizens. Consequently, future research into street-level bureaucracies should put a stronger focus on the latter impact, recognizing that SLBs who deal with governance networks have a large scope for action and might use it to shape the character and quality of such networks.

6.3

Limitations of the Thesis

In addition to the several strengths of this thesis, including the robust empirical approach and the interesting results, it has some limitations. First, the empirical analysis is limited to one country, Germany. Although the empirical results hold for Germany, the detected logics that affect German SLBs’ cooperation interest may also occur in other Western societies. In many European countries, volunteer managers are at least partly responsible for the work of governance networks and determine how supportive they are toward different groups and organizations (GHK, 2010). There is no reason to assume that the logics shaping the cooperation interest of German SLBs are not relevant in other countries as well, but the strength of their influence might vary due to different national settings, such as a different state-church relationship and specific statutory requirements regarding local cooperation with civil society organizations (Fox, 2017; Fox, 2015). In France, for example, due to the laic system, SLBs’ skepticism toward religious organizations might be even more pronounced than in Germany (see, for instance, Freedman, 2004; Asad, 2006). In contrast, Western countries with a strong connection to Catholicism, such as Italy or Poland, might be more open toward cooperation with Catholic organizations (see, for instance, Bolzonar, 2016; Ramet, 2006). Additionally, stereotypes toward single organizations with strong core beliefs, including religious organizations, differ among Western societies; these differences might shape the openness of SLBs toward cooperation with certain groups.

6.3 Limitations of the Thesis

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In their comparative study of Islamophobia in the US and selected European countries, Ogan et al. (2014) demonstrated that unfavorable opinions about Muslims are more widespread in Britain and France than in Germany and Spain. In Germany in 2008, 40 percent of the population reported an unfavorable or very unfavorable opinion of Muslims, but the figure was almost 65 percent in Britain (Ogan et al., 2014: 37). There might be even more reluctance toward the provision of social services by FBOs in countries where they are less established or generally associated with more negative attitudes. The specific level of unequal treatment of confessional and non-confessional organizations by local bureaucracies might vary nationally. Comparable national differences might also apply to other organizations with strong core beliefs. Very leftist organizations, for example, might be treated very differently within Western societies, where their views of Marxist or communist ideologies differ. Second, a limitation of the internal validity of the research method might be that the specific design of a local governance network affects the field-specific cooperation interest of volunteer managers. If there are already enough groups engaging in a certain field, SLBs’ cooperation interest might be lower for additional groups interested in becoming active in that field (cf. Example 3, Appendix 5). The quantitative research design did not include a variable that captures the strength of the existing local networks in the social field for each city included in the field experiment. However, independent of additional variables that might affect SLBs’ individual cooperation interest, including the specific design of a local network, the hierarchical structure of the volunteer agency, the political orientation of the municipality, and the political party of the mayor, the applied experimental approach nevertheless produces valid results. Third, there is a certain weakness concerning the connection between the operationalization of SLBs’ logics and the specific empirical measurement by the field experiment. Whereas the empirical setting can be deduced regarding the competency logic as well as the logic of cultural closeness and the representation logic, the applied methods do not easily detect the control logic. Although volunteer managers have a lower cooperation interest toward religious organizations, the quantitative field experiment cannot determine whether this negative stance is a result of a logic of control and the fact that religious organizations have strong core beliefs or rather a general rejection of religious organizations. However, based on the results of previous scholarly studies, control logics are relevant to cooperation with religious organizations. In addition, the qualitative interviews indicated that cooperating with organizations with strong core beliefs, including religious organizations, is more complicated. Therefore, considerations of control

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are likely the causal link that discourages street-level bureaucrats from working with such organizations. Fourth, there may be some critical limitations to the execution of a vignette study. The formulation of the email request may have yielded a reaction that accurately gauges the SLBs’ cooperation interest or it may reflect mere friendliness or unselfconscious task fulfillment. Nevertheless, the results of the qualitative research indicate that this form of request is realistic. Additionally, the field study detected unequal bureaucratic treatment toward different organizations and disadvantaging behavior, regardless of whether one calls it divergent cooperation interest or not.

6.4

Practical Implications

Frequently, scholars in public administration research and other disciplines call for a stronger connection between academia and practice (Steen et al., 2019; Pollitt, 2017). In particular, SLB research claims to produce such a strong practical pay-off (Brodkin, 2012: 947). This thesis not only contributes to current debates in political science and administration research but also includes practical implications for street-level bureaucrats who are dealing with civil society organizations and their supervisors, including political decision-makers at the local level. Although Germany is known to favor Christian organizations at the national level (Kortmann, 2019), the results of this thesis challenge this perception at the local level. Whereas the state may appreciate well-known religious actors like Caritas or Diakonie as partners, unknown Christian groups face lower cooperation interest from SLBs than do non-confessional organizations or Muslim organizations. Understanding that such preferences and resulting discriminatory patterns of behavior exist in Germany and likely in other Western settings, SLBs who are in charge of building new governance networks need more detailed political instructions. At the local level, the local council or the city council could develop guidelines for how to search for suitable state partners. These guidelines might include both output-oriented and input-oriented criteria but should apply consistently to all civil society organizations that want to become part of governance networks. Such a strategy of transparency could prevent unequal treatment of confessional and non-confessional groups and in general lead to fairer and more traceable selection processes for different kinds of networks. As a consequence, such a process would also increase the legitimacy of local governance networks

6.4 Practical Implications

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and strengthen the democratic decision-making process as a whole. Additionally, evaluation of the emergence process of existing networks can further consolidate their democratic basis. Additionally, measures that limit the impact of SLBs’ stereotypes likewise have a functional advantage by generally allowing the state to exploit the full potential of civil society engagement. These general implications apply not just in a German context but are transferable to most other European and Western countries that claim to follow an approach of legitimacy, neutrality, and fairness in the establishment of governance networks.

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