Research focus areas
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Research concept
Content orientation
The Public Management department focuses on the public sector as its central object of study. All projects focus on new, creative approaches to the use of large data sets. The planned research is oriented towards three central research directions and integrates concepts of data science (see Figure 1). The core of future research lies in empirical studies in the following areas: (1) administrative transformation, (2) administrative reform and (3) digital communication in the public sector.
All three of these different areas focus on the reform and transformation of the administration through digitalization in various forms. In particular, coordination, capacity building, regulation and the provision of services in connection with digitalization in administration (at local, federal and national level) should be mentioned.
The content of these planned research projects is explained in more detail below and references are made to Prof. Dr. Lampe's previous research projects, making use of the knowledge acquired in the process.
The third branch of research focuses on digital communication and is divided into two different types: (1) Public Sector Communication and (2) Public Communication.
The first focus of this research strand, Public Sector Communication, will shed light on the potential impact of public sector communication and its precursors in terms of underlying motivations. It is planned to analyze different digital communication channels of the public sector. One channel will be local government websites. Data is currently being collected for this purpose (together with Prof. Dr. Jürgen Willem - WU Vienna) by Prof. Dr. Lampe crawling the homepages of German municipal administrations. Another channel to be analyzed is Twitter. In a current project (in collaboration with Prof. Dr. Dominik Vogel - University of Hamburg), he crawled the Twitter accounts of all German districts and independent cities and conducted an initial study. In this project, he focused on measuring the content of Twitter tweets and their impact on different manifestations of citizen reactions: Approval, Dissemination and Engagement.
The second strand of this research is Public Communication, which focuses on public communication. Existing projects analyze how sentiment in public communication affects the knowledge transfer of inventors with a migration background (9,000,000,000 news articles were analyzed for this purpose). In another project, the Department of Public Management analyzes large volumes of news articles and compares them with the Global Terrorism Database in order to make predictions about terrorist attacks.
The next step in the analysis of public communication is to measure the legitimacy of the public sector from the perspective of the public/citizens on the basis of news content. Based on initial assessments, the department plans to further deepen the measurement of the legitimacy of digital government measures.
Methodological orientation
The research focus of the department includes data science techniques and advanced econometric models. The research focus of the department includes data science techniques and advanced econometric models. The focus is on big data, the creation of datasets with hundreds of thousands of observations and the use of crawling techniques to collect data from different sources. Natural language processing, especially in the field of machine learning, is used to extract relevant variables from text data. Econometric models include dynamic panel models, spatial regressions and instrumental variable approaches such as 2SLS. The department attaches great importance to the selection of suitable estimation methods and is in active methodological exchange with other researchers.
Already during his habilitation, Prof. Dr. Lampe supervised several dissertations and advised doctoral candidates on methodological and statistical issues and supported them with courses. He attaches great importance to good doctoral training and would also like to make a strong contribution in this respect at the University of Kassel.