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" (www.euplex.org). Most recently, I have been awarded an ERC Consolidator Grant for my project "DEMOLAW - The Design, Creation and Survival of Democratic Laws".

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, Knill, Christoph and Steinebach, Yves (2023). Rules as Policy Data? Measuring and Linking Policy Substance and Legislative Context. Regulation & Governance (online first, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/rego.12528).

Link to the publication (OPEN ACCESS)
Hurka, Steffen (2023). The institutional and political roots of complex policies - Evidence from the European Union. European Journal of Political Research 62 (4): 1168-1190.

Link to the publication (OPEN ACCESS)

Blog post for ECPR The Loop
Hurka, Steffen, Haag, Maximilian and Kaplaner, Constantin (2023). Proposal complexity and report allocation in the European Parliament. European Union Politics 24 (2): 307-326.

​Link to the publication (OPEN ACCESS)
Hurka, Steffen, Haag, Maximilian and Kaplaner, Constantin (2022). Policy complexity in the European Union, 1993-today: introducing the EUPLEX dataset. Journal of European Public Policy 29 (9): 1512-1527.

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

Link to dataset and documentation
Adam, Christian, Hurka, Steffen, Knill, Christoph and Steinebach, Yves (2022). On Democratic Intelligence and Failure: The Vice and Virtue of Incrementalism under Political Fragmentation and Policy Accumulation. Governance 35 (2): 525-543.


Link to the publication (OPEN ACCESS)
Fernández-i-Marín, Xavier, Hurka, Steffen, Knill, Christoph and Steinebach, Yves (2022). Systemic Dynamics of Policy Change: Overcoming Some Blind Spots of Punctuated Equilibrium Theory. Policy Studies Journal 50 (3): 527-552.

​Link to the publication (OPEN ACCESS)
Hurka, Steffen and Steinebach, Yves (2021). Legal Instrument Choice in the European Union. JCMS: Journal of Common Market Studies 59 (2): 278-296.

​Link to the publication (OPEN ACCESS)