Session

Thu. 16.04. 17:05

Seeds of Inequality: How Legal Design, Administrative Guidance, and Judicial Interpretation Shape Public Service Delivery

Stefanie Rueß

Zeppelin University

Session

Thu. 16.04. 17:05

Seeds of Inequality: How Legal Design, Administrative Guidance, and Judicial Interpretation Shape Public Service Delivery

Stefanie Rueß is a postdoctoral researcher at Zeppelin University, working in the ERC-funded project DEMOLAW (PI: Prof. Dr. Steffen Hurka). DEMOLAW examines how democratic legislation is designed, written, and maintained, and her research focus is on how legal texts shape administrative practice and real-world outcomes. She received her PhD from the University of Konstanz in June 2025, where her dissertation analyzed how immigration-related media coverage influences decision-making in German welfare offices. Stefanie’s broader research interests lie at the intersection of welfare state policies, bureaucratic discrimination, and media framing. Methodologically, she combines survey experiments with public officials and text-as-data approaches, including natural language processing, to study laws, administrative guidance documents, and frontline bureaucratic behavior.