JAN-HINRIK MEYER-SAHLING

JAN-HINRIK MEYER-SAHLING

I am Sir Francis Hill Professor of Political Science at the University of Nottingham, School of Politics and International Relations. My research and teaching cut across the areas of comparative politics, public administration, public policy and international development.

My research focuses on the challenge of building state capacity in Europe and the developing world. In this context, I am mainly interested in how to best manage people in government, which factors hamper effective management, and what actions to take to achieve high performance and integrity in the public service.

I have regularly collaborated with OECD/SIGMA and the Regional School of Public Administration (ReSPA) on improving civil service management in Central and Eastern Europe and the Western Balkans. This research has examined the sustainability of civil service reform after EU accession, challenges of civil service professionalisation, and strategies to strengthen merit-based recruitment. More recently, this line of work has been extended to the Middle East through a national survey of public servants in Jordan conducted with OECD/SIGMA and the Jordanian Service and Public Administration Commission (SPAC). Together with partners from the World Bank, UCL and Stanford University, I also co-founded the Global Survey of Public Servants (GSPS), a global initiative to study people management in government across more than 30 countries worldwide.

I have long been interested in the politicisation of the senior civil service in post-communist Europe. I was part of the Party Patronage in European Democracies project and currently study the role of party patronage in the context of autocratisation. This work includes a forthcoming book with Cambridge University Press, Dismantling Democracy: Patronage and Autocratisation in Hungary (with Petr Kopecký, Maria Spirova and Fanni Tóth).

I also lead Working Group 2 on Careers of the COST Action on Comparative Research on the Executive Triangle (CoREx), which brings together researchers from more than 30 countries to build a comparative dataset on the careers of ministers, advisors and senior bureaucrats in the executive branch.

My work on anti-corruption, ethics and integrity management in the Global South began with the project What Works in Civil Service Management funded by the DFID–British Academy (now Governance & Integrity) Anti-Corruption Evidence Programme. It surveyed over 23,000 public servants in 10 countries in four developing regions. This research has evolved into ongoing collaborations on ethical leadership and integrity training with governments in Nepal and Bangladesh, where we continue to evaluate the impact of integrity reforms through large-scale surveys and field experiments.

In 2022, I secured funding together with Christian Schuster (PI) and Kim Sass Mikkelsen (Co-I) from a joint ESRC/FNR scheme on Training Executives to Enhance Employee Engagement in Government. The project assesses the impact of executive training through a field experiment in collaboration with the Government of Luxembourg and will run until the end of 2025.