ERC Advanced Grant for Prof. Dr. Klaus H. Goetz

Professor Klaus H. Goetz was successful in the latest round of ERC grants, obtaining an Advanced Grant. The award comes with funding of up to 2.5 million euros, or even 3.5 million euros in exceptional cases. ERC Advanced Grants are aimed at established researchers from all disciplines whose highly innovative work pushes beyond the current frontiers of research and opens up new domains of investigation.

Democratic policy-makers in Europe’s multi-level system grapple with multiple times, since different levels of government, parliaments, and administrative agencies follow distinct time rules and time preferences. Synchronization is, therefore, a critical, but very little understood dimension of public policy-making. It is designed to keep the system running by structuring the timing, speed, frequencies, sequences, durations, and time horizons in policy-making. However, simultaneous demands for "faster action", "more time" and "extended time horizons" have pushed multi-level synchronization in opposing directions.

This is where the new ERC project of Klaus H. Goetz comes in. "Synchronized Politics: Multiple Times and Political Power" (SYNCPOL) analyzes the challenges for the synchronization of European policy-making; and it asks how the reshaping of synchronization arrangements alters the distribution of political power in Europe’s multi-level system. With SYNCPOL, Goetz wants to explore these questions across EU, national, and sub-national governments, parliaments, and administrative agencies for Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, and Spain. The focus will be on the domains of migration-asylum and public health policy.