Welcome to my website!


I am a research group leader based at the Geschwister-Scholl-Institute of Political Science at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich.

My main research interests include European Union politics in general and the legislative organization of the European Parliament in particular. In addition, I work in the area of comparative public policy, most importantly on morality and gun policy. I am currently involved in a research project the effects of policy accumulation on democratic political systems and I work on the causes and consequences of policy complexity in the European Union. Since April 2019, I have been leading an Emmy Noether research group entitled "EUPLEX - Coping with policy complexity in the European Union". Please find all information on this project on www.euplex.org.


Office hours: upon request.
​
Please contact me by email to schedule an appointment.

​NOW AVAILABLE: Animation for "Policy Accumulation and the Democratic Responsiveness Trap" 



Recent publications

Hurka, Steffen and Steinebach, Yves (2020). Legal Instrument Choice in the European Union. JCMS: Journal of Common Market Studies (early view, DOI: 10.1111/jcms.13068).

​Link to the publication (OPEN ACCESS)
Hurka, Steffen and Kaplaner, Constantin (2020). Are popular and powerful committees more representative? Evidence from the Ninth European Parliament. Research and Politics (early view, DOI: 10.1177/2053168020914453).

​Link to the publication (OPEN ACCESS)

Replication files
Fernández-i-Marín, Xavier, Hurka, Steffen, Knill, Christoph and Steinebach, Yves (2019). Systemic Dynamics of Policy Change: Overcoming Some Blind Spots of Punctuated Equilibrium Theory. Policy Studies Journal (early view, DOI: 10.1111/psj.12379).

​Link to the publication (OPEN ACCESS)
Hurka, Steffen and Haag, Maximilian (2020). Policy complexity and legislative duration in the European Union. European Union Politics 21 (1): 87-108.

Link to the publication (publisher's version)
PDF of the post-print version

Here's a summary of the article published in the LSE EUROPP blog:
How policy complexity affects the duration of legislative negotiations in the EU
Adam, Christian, Hurka, Steffen, Steinebach, Yves and Knill, Christoph (2019). Policy Accumulation and the Democratic Responsiveness Trap. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Link to the publication

​Read the book's introduction here.

​Read a related newspaper article in the "Neue Zürcher Zeitung" (2 April 2019): ​Die moderne Demokratie droht sich selber zu überfordern

​Check out our animated video summarizing the book's key messages here!
Adam, Christian, Hurka, Steffen, Knill, Christoph, Peters, B. Guy and Steinebach, Yves (2019). Introducing Vertical Policy Coordination to Comparative Policy Analysis: The Missing Link Between Policy Production and Implementation. Journal of Comparative Policy Analysis: Research and Practice 21 (5): 499-517.

​Link to the publication (publisher's version)
PDF of the post-print version
Obholzer, Lukas, Hurka, Steffen and Kaeding, Michael (2019). Party group coordinators and rapporteurs: Discretion and agency loss along the European Parliament's chains of delegation. European Union Politics 20 (2): 239-260. 

Link to the publication (publisher's version)
PDF of the post-print version
Hurka, Steffen and Knill, Christoph (2020). Does regulation matter? A cross-national analysis of the impact of gun policies on homicide and suicide rates. Regulation & Governance 14(4): 787-803.

Link to the publication (publisher's version)
Daniel, William T., Obholzer, Lukas, and Hurka, Steffen (2019). Static and dynamic incentives for Twitter usage in the European Parliament. Party Politics 25 (6): 771-781.

Link to the publication (publisher's version)
PDF of the post-print version