Political Science
Publications

Selection of five peer-reviewed articles

  1. Meckling, J., Lipscy, P. Y., Finnegan, J. J., & Metz, F. (2017). Why nations lead or lag in energy transitions. Policy-driven change hinges on institutions supportive of insulation or compensation. Science, 378(6615), 31-33. 

    Contribution to science: The article proposes that governments can pursue energy transitions through one of three pathways—insulation, compensation and markets—to manage opposition from those who stand to bear the costs of policy change.

  2. Metz, F., & Brandenberger, L. (2023). Policy Networks Across Political Systems. American Journal of Political Science, 67(3), 569-586. 

    Contribution to science: The article pioneersin modelling and theory-building of actor networks by suggesting methodological innovations to compare networks—to date a major difficulty—and link political systems to relational patterns of power dependencies.

  3. Bolognesi, T., Metz, F., & Nahrath, S. (2021). Institutional complexity traps in policy integration processes: a long-term perspective on Swiss flood risk management. Policy Sciences, 54, 911–941. 

    Contribution to science: The article is a preliminary test of the new Theory of Institutional Complexity Traps about long-term policy integration processes. The data gathered under my lead and my analyses were key to deliver empirical tests of the theory and move beyond the counting of adopted policies.

  4. Metz, F., Angst, M., & Fischer, M. (2020). Policy integration: Do laws or actors integrate issues relevant to flood risk management in Switzerland? Global Environmental Change, 61, 101945. Contribution to science: The article goes beyond the state of the art in policy integration research by introducing a novel conceptual network approach to compare administration coordination to policy integration across sectors.

  5. Pham-Truffert, M., Metz, F., Fischer, M., Rueff, H., & Messerli, P. (2020). Interactions among Sustainable Development Goals: Knowledge for identifying multipliers and virtuous cycles. Sustainable Development, 28(5), 1236-1250. 

    Contribution to science: The article takes a systems perspective on the global SDG agenda seriously and analyses, based on state-of-the-art knowledge, the positive and negative interactions among SDGs to outline priorities for policy action.

     

Research monographs

  • Metz, F. (2017). From network structure to policy design in water protection: A comparative perspective on micropollutants in the Rhine River Riparian countries. Cham: Springer.

Contribution to science: The book entails an in-depth analysis of policy processes, the elites involved, their beliefs and collaboration patterns to explain policy reforms in the water sector. By operationalising policy processes as networks of relationships between political actors, I quantified otherwise qualitative concepts such as advocacy coalitions, agency or power constellations.

 

Selection of published datasets

  • Metz, F. & Zomer, F. (2022). "Interview data on "Mobility- and behaviour-based early-warning system after the first wave of COVID-19", DANS Data Station Social Sciences and Humanities, V2, doi.org/10.17026/dans-z3c-54eq. 

Interviews with Dutch bureaucrats investigate how they have dealt with uncertainties typical for COVID-19 models and which diverse roles exist in policymaking to translate scientific into actionable results.

  • Metz, F., Schick, V. & Rapp, M. (2022)."Energy policy discourses after the 1973 oil price shock in the UK and Germany", ETH Zurich Research Collection, doi.org/10.3929/ethz-b-000547027.

  • Metz, F. & Brandenberger, F. (2022). "Replication Data for: Policy Networks Across Political Systems", Harvard Dataverse, V1, doi.org/10.7910/DVN/NKCDCO.

  • Metz, F., Angst, M. & Fischer, M. (2019). "Data for: Policy integration: Do laws or actors integrate issues in Swiss flood risk management?", Eawag: Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology, doi.org/10.25678/0000ZZ.