Moodle UDE

Seminar im DaZ-Modul Master Grundschule: "Inklusion in der Grundschule"

In de zomer van 1823 maken twee Leidse studenten, Dirk van Hogendorp en Jacob van Lennep, die later een beroemde schrijver zou worden, samen een voetreis door Nederland. Van Lennep deed 
verslag van hun reis in een dagboek.

Das Ende kolonialer Herrschaft bildet einen der Fundamentalprozesse des 20. Jahrhunderts. Das Seminar zeichnet die Wurzeln und Varianten dieses Vorgangs in verschiedenen Weltregionen nach, beleuchtet dessen politische, wirtschaftliche und intellektuelle Dimensionen und diskutiert seine Rückwirkungen auf koloniale Metropolen. Es fragt nach dem vielfältigen Erbe des Kolonialismus und danach, ob dieser überhaupt der Vergangenheit angehört. Die Bereitschaft zur Lektüre englischsprachiger Fachlektüre und Quellen ist absolut erforderlich.

Being assigned with both the making and implementation of public policies public administration is a core ingredient of modern democratic rule. Public servants working in ministries write legislation and coordinate public programs between different departments, political actors and interest groups, while subordinated state agencies and local administrations are responsible for implementing policies across the country. Eventually, at the intersection of government and society, street-level bureaucrats, such as police officers, social workers and teachers, determine the delivery of public services to the individual cases of citizens and shape the ways in which mass publics experience and are affected by the execution of state authority.

Such an extraordinary position of public administration within democratic governance systems raises the question of how we may tie administrative acting to the preferences and interests of the public, since, other than politicians, public servants do not depend upon the vote of the people to take and remain in office. A traditional view of democracy theory suggests that public servants are connected with the will of the people through a dyadic chain of accountability where citizens control political behaviour through elections while politicians in turn steer administrative acting through formalized hierarchies within which public servants conduct their daily duties. Yet, if we want public administration to deploy its distinctive technical and practical expertise and to act and exist independently from the ups and downs of political majorities and the short-term interests of vote-seeking partisan-politics it needs to keep a certain independence from its public and political superiors. In many instances, a formalized accountability chain is hence not sufficient for safeguarding that administrative acting functions upon citizens’ dispositions and interests.

From the perspective of democracy theory, there is thus a latent dilemma between public administration as an autonomous, professional and permanent institution and the idea that all power is supposed to flow from the people. At the heart of the seminar lies the question of how this dilemma is and can be solved in contemporary democratic governance practices. We will address various specific aspects that underly the answers to this question and that require us to acknowledge a wide variety of complex tasks, layers, occupations and normative demands within which public servants to date have to perform their tasks. These aspects include the theory of the relationship between bureaucracy and democracy and its development, political steering of public administration, accountability mechanisms beyond formal hierarchies, trust and legitimacy, the distinctive ethics and values public servants adhere to, conditions and consequences of administrative professionalism, bureaucratic discrimination as well as the role of public administration as a guardian of democratic principles in times of political polarization, extremism and democratic backsliding.