Political Governance in Complex Systems
The political scientist Fritz W. Scharpf, for many years a director of the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies, turns ninety.
With his work on federalism, the European Union, and democratic theory, as well as in in the field of administrative and policy research, Fritz W. Scharpf has played a significant role in shaping German political science since the 1970s. From 1986 to 2003, he was a director of the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies in Cologne. He celebrated his ninetieth birthday on February 12, 2025.
Fritz W. Scharpf is considered to be one of the leading figures in German political science. He has contributed significantly to the visibility and recognition of the discipline both nationally and internationally, and his writings are among the most cited by German political scientists. Through his involvement in various commissions, insights from his research have time and again found their way into policy advice since the 1970s. At the age of 90, Fritz W. Scharpf is still academically active.
The range of Scharpf’s research is impressively broad. He has carried out comparative studies of inflation, unemployment, and crisis policy in Western Europe and analyzed the political economy of the welfare state under conditions of globalization. He has devoted particular attention to European economic and monetary union, most recently the euro crisis. His work on joint decision-making and multi-level governance in the European Union was groundbreaking. In particular, his distinction between input and output legitimacy had a lasting impact on the debate on democratic legitimacy in the EU.
Scharpf's work has had a significant impact on other disciplines, and his analyses have found resonance in sociology, economics, and law. For example, his collaboration with the sociologist Renate Mayntz, his codirector at the MPIfG, was interdisciplinary in nature. In the 1980s and 1990s, they developed the theoretical foundations of “actor-centered institutionalism” together. This approach, which focuses on the interactions between institutional structures and the strategic actions of political actors, became a landmark in research on steering and governance in sociology and political science. In his influential work Games Real Actors Play (1997), Scharpf systematically elaborated this theory and, incorporating elements of game theory, showed how political outcomes arise from the interplay of actor strategies and institutional framework conditions.
Scharpf is not only an outstanding theoretical researcher but also an academic who has been actively engaged in the transfer of insights from political science into practice. Since the 1970s, he has repeatedly been able to use his research findings in the context of policy advice, most recently as a member of the Commission on the Reform of the Federal Order (2003–2004).
In 1986, Fritz W. Scharpf was appointed as a director of the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies (MPIfG) in Cologne, where he remained until his retirement in 2003. For the majority of this time, he led the Institute together with its founding director, Renate Mayntz, who retired in 1997. Under their joint aegis, the Institute grew into an international interdisciplinary center for research into the social and political foundations of modern societies.
Fritz W. Scharpf – short CV
Born in Schwäbisch Hall in 1935, studied law and political science at the Universities of Tübingen and Freiburg (first state examination in law in 1959, second state examination in law and doctorate in 1964). First academic position as Assistant Professor of Law at Yale University. 1968 Habilitation at the University of Freiburg. 1968 Professor of Political Science at the University of Konstanz. 1973 to 1984 Director of the International Institute for Management and Administration at the WZB Berlin Social Science Center. From 1986 until his retirement in 2003, Director at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies (MPIfG), Cologne.
International positions: Stanford University; European University Institute, Florence; Sciences Po Paris.
Fritz W. Scharpf received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the German Political Science Association (DVPW) in 2024 and the Lifetime Contribution Award in EU Studies from the European Union Studies Association (EUSA) in 2007. In 2002 Scharpf was awarded the Schader Prize. In 2000 he was the first German to win the prestigious Johan Skytte Prize. He is a recipient of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany for his achievements in the field of knowledge transfer between research and practice.