Ines Mergel
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inesmergel.bsky.social
Ines Mergel
@inesmergel.bsky.social

Professor of Public Administration | University of Konstanz | Fellow National Academy of Public Administration | Supervisory Board Member eGov Academy | Founding Editor Teaching Public Service in the Digital Age

Ines Mergel is a full professor of public administration in the department of politics and public administration at the University of Konstanz, Germany. She was previously on the public administration faculty at The Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs of Syracuse University, where she earned tenure as an associate professor of public administration and international affairs. Mergel is an expert in social media and teaches courses in agile government, digital government, and social media in the public sector. .. more

Political science 37%
Communication & Media Studies 27%

🤓 Take a look at our co-authored article with lead author Juliane Schmeling on "Data collaboration in digital government research: A literature review and research agenda" published in Government Information Quarterly: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
Data collaboration in digital government research: A literature review and research agenda
Sovereign data infrastructures are a central building block of the European Data Strategy, yet little is known about how public administrations share …
www.sciencedirect.com
Academic journals are flocking to BSKY 🦋

JPART @jpart1991.bsky.social
PMR @pmreview.bsky.social
PA @journalpa.bsky.social
JBPA @jbpa.bsky.social
BPP @bppjournal.bsky.social
Governance @govjournal.bsky.social
NHB: @naturehumbehav.bsky.social & many others

More to come, hopefully.

Candidates’ explanatory style – how they attributed causes to bad events – predicted election outcomes.
Optimism predicted Trump’s victory: explanatory style during the 2024 presidential campaign
Candidates’ explanatory style – how they attributed causes to bad events – predicted election outcomes. We analyzed causal explanations from the 2024 presidential campaign using Content Analysis of...
www.tandfonline.com

A.I. Is Starting to Wear Down Democracy www.nytimes.com/2025/06/26/t...
A.I. Is Starting to Wear Down Democracy
www.nytimes.com

✨ Our new paper, co-authored with Noella Edelmann and Nathalie Haug, was just published in the journal Digital Government: Research and Practice: "Outcomes of Value Co-Creation and Co-Destruction in the Digital Transformation of Public Services." ✨

🆓 Read it here: dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/...
Outcomes of Value Co-Creation and Co-Destruction in the Digital Transformation of Public Services | Digital Government: Research and Practice
Transforming public services from an analog to a digital delivery mode is generally assumed to have positive effects. Most recently, these transformations include the co-creation of newly designed dig...
dl.acm.org

There are elections next week.

Our paper "Digitally-induced change in the public sector: a systematic review and research agenda" was the top-cited article in Public Management Review.

You can read it here open access: lnkd.in/eTbE-MSj

Le sigh... 🫣
63 studies: women who assert their ideas, make direct requests, and advocate for themselves are liked less.

They're also less likely to get hired—and it hasn't improved over time.

When will we stop punishing women for violating outdated gender stereotypes?
63 studies: women who assert their ideas, make direct requests, and advocate for themselves are liked less.

They're also less likely to get hired—and it hasn't improved over time.

When will we stop punishing women for violating outdated gender stereotypes?
If you worked for 18F and got fired, Group together to start a consulting company.

It’s just a matter of time before DOGE needs you to fix the mess they inevitably create.

They will have to hire your company as a contractor to fix it. But on your terms.

I’m happy to invest and/or help
18F was doing exactly the type of work that DOGE claims to want – yet we were eliminated shortly after midnight. Read our letter to the American people:
18f.org
We're not done yet | 18F
18f.org
18F is *precisely* what Musk and team claim should exist within government. But when his team found it, they destroyed it, because it is evidence that government works well (can’t have that!), and because like Zelensky, 18F didn’t bend the knee.

❤️ A very special thank you goes to Jessica Sowa, a brilliant scholar and world-class editor at PPMG who takes on tasks that go so far beyond what you might expect from an editor. She makes academia a kind place and is deeply invested in the articles she helps to move forward in the process.

We use the theoretical framework of co-production to highlight who is involved in which phase. Based on the empirical evidence, we advance our conceptual understanding of what co-production looks like when it comes to digital public services (instead of analog public service co-production).

❗ In this article, we interviewed digital transformation experts who explained to us how they proceed to implement digital public services.

New article alert 🤓

"Co-Production Phases in the Development and Implementation of Digital Public Services," co-authored with Noella Edelmann and Nathalie Haug

Now published in Oxford University's Perspectives on Public Management and Governance journal: doi.org/10.1093/ppmg...

Not Incentivized Yet Efficient: Working From Home in the Public Sector: papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

Why not help out? 🇩🇰

denmarkification.com
Help Denmark Buy California – Because Why Not?
Buy it from Trump, the bigliest crowdsourcing ever
denmarkification.com

Reposted by Ines Mergel

I talked with three experts on government efficiency about DOGE taking over the Obama-era US Digital Service, including its co-founder @pahlkadot.bsky.social. They all said Elon Musk has a rare opportunity to make government work better. And they all worried he might blow it. wapo.st/4jHi3s3
Analysis | How DOGE could succeed — or fail miserably
Government efficiency experts say Elon Musk has a chance to build on what the U.S. Digital Service accomplished — or ruin it.
wapo.st

DOGE will take over the US Digital Service - effectively destabilizing its integration into the bureaucracy given that DOGE itself is only a temporary organization: www.nytimes.com/2025/01/21/u...
How Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency Will Work
The structure and goals of the cost-cutting effort have changed over the past 10 weeks. Here’s how.
www.nytimes.com

Sad loss to the community of public management researchers :(

Reposted by Ines Mergel

I was lucky enough to chair the Gaus award committee in the year Hood won, and we offered a decent summary of his amazing career. His first book was in 1976, and continued to produce excellent work for the next 45 years or so. politicalsciencenow.com/christopher-...
Christopher Hood Receives the 2021 John Gaus Award -
The John Gaus Award is presented annually by the American Political Science Association (APSA) to honor a lifetime of exemplary scholarship in the joint tradition of political science and public administration.  Christopher Hood (www.christopherhood.net), a baby boomer and the first of [...]
politicalsciencenow.com

Hello editors, what can we do to make our academic content more accessible? We need to write in plain language, avoid wild abbreviations, explain better/easier than convoluted language, maybe put the research design into an appendix, and get right to the core of the findings.
Academic writing is getting harder to read—the humanities most of all
We analyse two centuries of scholarly work
www.economist.com
Did you see this experiment my colleague Kristina conducted not just at my university but *in my department*? She and the male instructor assumed eachothers’ names for an online course: and the difference in feedback they received was horrifying.
Student Evaluations Can’t Be Used to Assess Professors. They’re Discriminatory.
And that means they’re illegal.
slate.com

Wouldn't it be nice to apply similar design principles to public service design? www.dw.com/en/how-the-f...
How the 'Frankfurt kitchen' triggered a domestic revolution – DW – 12/27/2024
Around a century ago, working in the kitchen was still cumbersome and inefficient. But then a Viennese architect had a groundbreaking idea that has endured to this day: the fitted kitchen.
www.dw.com

Not good: Women faculty feel ‘pushed’ from academia by poor workplace climate | Science | AAAS www.science.org/content/arti...
Women faculty feel ‘pushed’ from academia by poor workplace climate
The gender gap in faculty attrition worsens after tenure, according to a new study
www.science.org