Research Projects

Firstly, I have an long-standing interest in the behaviour of political and bureaucratic elites (leaders, teams, committees, cabinets etc.), in both front stage and back stage settings, and I have sought to employ and marry analytical tools and methods from different corners of the social sciences – particularly psychology, comparative politics and public administration – to understand this behaviour. In more recent years I have had the opportunity for frequent and intensive interaction with numerous Dutch office-holders in various layers and sectors of government, and thus have been able to acquire data and insights with comparative ease ('t Hart and Wille et al, 2002; Boin, 't Hart, Van der Torre, 2003; 't Hart and Ten Hooven, 2004). I have long maintained an interest in Australian politics and government. In 1992 and 1997 I gathered data on the making of social-economic policy changes during the Hawke-Keating governments in particular, and I have used this to publish two articles on reformist leadership in government (Gustavsson and 't Hart, 2002; Goldfinch and 't Hart, 2003). A current project in this research track involves a comparative study of the politics of leadership succession in the two major political parties of five Western democracies in the 1945-2005 period, including Australia.

Secondly, since 1983 I have been interested in how governments prepare for and respond to extreme situations of various kinds. In the post-9/11 era, this once rather obscure issue has suddenly caught on and has now moved more central stage in both practitioner and academic circles. I have more than twenty years of crisis research under my belt. I have observed, trained and evaluated politicians, civil servants, emergency services and military commanders in several countries. Along with my intellectual mentor Uriel Rosenthal I co-founded a multidisciplinary Crisis Research Center (CRC). As CRC, we published scores of books and articles, reporting in-depth case study research (often based on direct observation and access to all relevant decision makers in the immediate wake of disasters, riots, major police investigations etc.). For almost ten years I was heavily involved in developing CRC's academic research capabilities as well as its ability to translate research findings into tools for training and evaluation (see, for example, Rosenthal, Charles and 't Hart, 1989; Rosenthal et al, 1994; 't Hart et al, 1997; Rosenthal and 't Hart, 1998). My group at Leiden eventually moved its research focus from case-based, incident-focused studies on 'hands-on' crisis management, to theory-based, policy-focused questions about institutional crisis management. In parallel, a fruitful collaboration with Swedish crisis researchers that began in 1993 (see, for example, 't Hart, Stern and Sundelius, 1997, 1998; Boin, 't Hart, Stern and Sundelius, 2005) led to my appointment as adjunct professor of public management at the Swedish Defence College (in 2000), where I became research mentor for a nascent Baltic region crisis research team. This team, supported by big grants from Swedish government agencies, has evolved into CRISMART, a centre for crisis research and training quite like the Dutch model it emulated. Much of my earlier work in this area has been re-published in this 2008 mammoth anthology of crisis management research published by Sage.

• Read an interview with Paul about his 25 years of crisis research.

• Listen to a lecture Paul presented in October 2007 about the Howard Government Northern Territory intervention, analysed from a crisis management perspective. Listen to MP3 or stream from this page

• Read 'Crisis exploitation: reflections on the "national emergency" in Australia's Northern Territory' here (November 2007)

• Here are the summaries for 15 cases of political crisis management reported in an article in the Journal of European Public Policy, 16 (1), 2009 entitled ‘Crisis Exploitation: Political and Policy Impacts of Framing Contests’

Thirdly, I have been studying how public policies and programs become portrayed publicly and evaluated politically. This began in the late eighties when Mark Bovens and I wanted to develop a theory of policy failure, and conducted a series of studies into major policy controversies and (alleged) policy fiascos. We soon realised that rather than a generic explanatory theory of policy failure (an impossible venture, I now realise), what was really needed was an understanding of the analytical assumptions and political processes that determine why some public policies, programs and projects become viewed as major mishaps, whereas highly comparable others escape this fate. This quest for a theory of 'policy fiascos' as socio-political constructions took us seven years of reconsidering our ontological, epistemological and methodological commitments (Bovens and 't Hart, 1996). It triggered an empirical research program that bred cooperation with international scholars (Gray and 't Hart, 1998) and eventually a comparative study of the politics of policy evaluation in six different countries, resulting in a mammoth volume (Bovens, 't Hart and Peters, 2001).

Finally, one area that started as a personal hobby project concerns the topic of time and politics ('t Hart, 2001 – in Dutch only). Operating on the borderline of the fields of history, political science and social psychology, I have tried to grasp how communities and polities remember and forget parts of their past. Which forces and mechanisms determine the selectivity of collective memory? More generally, how do policymakers and governments deal with the temporal dimensions of political life? What sort of conceptions of time do they use? How do they manage their time in power? How do they try to control how their acts will be remembered? The book I wrote is merely a first attempt by a relative outsider to what turned out to be a vibrant interdisciplinary research venture to map out various key issues at stake and develop a conceptual apparatus for studying them. One ambition for the coming years is to work with historians, political scientists and philosophers on these issues in the more concrete context of particular episodes and controversies in (Australian?) national politics and history.