Introduction

Germany has a long tradition of academic and applied research conducted outside universities but sometimes at arm’s-length distance to or in close collaboration with the academic world, dating back to the founding of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society in 1911. To a very large degree these non-university or extramural research institutes get their core institutional funding from public sources. These research institutes and their academic expert staff – many of whom hold cross-appointments or adjunct status at universities – are one external source of policy analysis and policy advice in an increasingly diverse group of information providers located inside and outside the federal government in Berlin. Inside the German federal government, bodies as diverse as upper echelon ministerial civil servants, policy-planning units, the staff of parliamentary committees, Enquete-Kommissionen (legislative research committees), parliamentary research services and various arm’s-length advisory councils as well as auditing and accounting offices provide policy-relevant information and analysis. A special group of in-house actors conducting policy analysis and providing policy advice in Germany are so-called Ressortforschungseinrichtungen (departmental research institutes), which operate at arm’s-length distance from the career civil service. Outside government, actors such as think tanks, operating foundations, party foundations and party research foundations play a similar role to research institutes and the academic experts working therein.

There is clearly a huge overlap between so-called ‘academic think tanks’ (see Chapter 16, this volume) and many non-university research institutes. Like academic think tanks, research institutes can be university adjuncts or extramural. As a matter of fact, a significant number of academic think tanks portrayed elsewhere in this volume are members of large extramural research organisations such as the Leibniz Association (discussed later). Henceforth, the funding structures, organisation, staff recruiting procedures, mission statements and dissemination patterns of non-university research institutes resemble those of academic think tanks. Like academic think tanks, extramural research institutes conduct policy-relevant research and analysis, which is often interdisciplinary, of national, if not international, importance and team-oriented. On the other hand, applied policy research and active involvement in political consultancy are much less central to the mandate of most non-university research institutes than to that of academic think tanks.