Decision-Making Under Ambiguity and Time Constraints: Assessing the Multiple Streams Framework

Policy issues have grown ever more complex and politically more contestable. So governments in advanced democracies often do not understand the problems they have to deal with and do not know how to solve them. Thus, rational problem-solving models are highly unconvincing. Conversely, the Multiple-Streams Framework starts out from these conditions, which has led to increasing interest in it. Nevertheless, there has not yet been a systematic attempt to assess the potential of such scholarship. This volume is the first attempt to fill that gap by bringing together a group of international scholars to assess the strengths and weaknesses of the Framework from different angles. Chapters explore systematically and empirically the Framework's potential in different national contexts and in policy areas from climate change and foreign policy to healthcare and the welfare state.

Reimut Zohlnhöfer is a professor of political science at the University of Heidelberg. He received a Master’s degree in political science from the University of Heidelberg and a PhD in political science from the University of Bremen. Afterwards he was assistant professor in Heidelberg, and John F Kennedy Memorial Fellow at the Center for European Studies, Harvard University. He became a professor of comparative public policy at Otto-Friedrich-University, Bamberg, in 2008 before returning to Heidelberg in 2011. He has published in many leading political science journals including Comparative Political Studies, Governance, Journal of Comparative Policy Analysis, Journal of European Public Policy, Journal of European Social Policy, Journal of Public Policy, Social Policy and Administration, and West European Politics. He is also the editor of numerous volumes and special issues, the most recent of which include Developments in German Politics 4 (Palgrave 2014; with Stephen Padgett and William Paterson).


Friedbert W Rüb is a professor of political sociology and social policies at Humboldt University of Berlin. He received a diploma in political science, sociology and history and a PhD in political science from the University of Hannover. Afterwards he was, among others, Fellow of the Collegium Budapest and assistant professor at the University of Heidelberg. In 2002 he become a professor at the University of Hamburg and moved to Humboldt University of Berlin in 2008. He has published on democratisation processes in Eastern Europe, on social policies (healthcare, pension policies etc) in Germany, on political parties, and on governance problems in the German Republic. He is also co-editor of two special issues of German Policy Studies concerning changes to the Bismarckian welfare state.