Technologies based on artificial intelligence (AI) represent a crucial governance challenge for policymakers. This study contributes to the understanding of how states plan to govern AI with respect to the role they assume and to the way they develop AI in a responsible manner. In different policy instruments across 22 countries plus the European Union, there is considerable variation in how governments approach the governance of AI, both regarding the policy measures proposed and their focus on public responsibility. Analysing a set of policy instruments we find multiple modes of AI governance, with the major difference being between self-regulation-promoting and market-based approaches, and a combination of entrepreneurial and regulatory governance approaches. Our analysis also indicates that the approach to public responsibility is largely independent of the chosen policy mix of AI governance. Therefore, responsibility seems to be a cross-cutting issue that cannot be tied to a specific approach of states towards technology.

A major challenge with the increasing use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) applications is to manage the long-term societal impacts of this technology. Two central concerns that have emerged in this respect are that the optimized goals behind the data processing of AI applications usually remain opaque and the energy footprint of their data processing is growing quickly. This study thus explores how much people value the transparency and environmental sustainability of AI using the example of personal AI assistants. The results from a choice-based conjoint analysis with a sample of more than 1.000 respondents from Germany indicate that people hardly care about the energy efficiency of AI; and while they do value transparency through explainable AI, this added value of an application is offset by minor costs. The findings shed light on what kinds of AI people are likely to demand and have important implications for policy and regulation.

Concerns about energy transition and policies to achieve a clean energy Europe are omnipresent in all European discourses. A transformation dynamic has captured all European states, whereby the extent, scope, and direction of this transition vary between different (EU member‑) states and political levels (European, national, federal, local). Likewise, governance dynamics and policies vary between the different European governance and regulatory systems. This Special Issue aims to take stock and discuss approaches in governance and policy research to assess, analyse and evaluate this variance from a theoretical, methodological, and empirical perspective. Of particular interest are recourses to investigate concepts describing and analysing the formation of new policy fields. Within the framework of the Special Issue, the role of specific architectures in which the energy transformation in Europe is embedded (e.g., federalism and multi-level structures, institutional constellations of actors, multi-sector networks, etc.) are analysed to explain the energy transition policies and their transformative properties. Linking the empirical results back to basic research concepts and relating the results to the existing approaches in policy and governance research facilitates a better understanding of the energy transition as a classic and/or new transformation policy.

Zusammenfassung: Die politikwissenschaftliche Literatur zum deutschen Föderalismus ist überaus vielfältig. Neben Analysen der institutionellen Arrangements, ihrer Veränderungen sowie der Dynamiken des deutschen Verbundföderalismus, finden sich auch zahlreiche Untersuchungen zu einzelnen Politikfeldern, die sowohl die Interaktionen zwischen Bund und Ländern als auch die Varianz zwischen den Policies der Länder samt ihrer Bestimmungsfaktoren untersuchen. Darüber hinaus haben sich in den vergangenen Jahrzehnten eigene Forschungszweige zu Parteien im Bundesstaat und zur Parlamentsforschung auf Länderebene etabliert. Trotz dieser großen Forschungsaktivität sind jedoch einige zentrale Fragen der Politikwissenschaft zum Zusammenspiel zwischen Wählern, Parteien, Parlamenten und Regierungen sowie deren Wirkung auf politischen Outputs und Outcomes weiterhin unbeantwortet. Dies ist, so das Argument dieses Beitrags, insbesondere der fehlenden Zusammenführung einzelner Literaturstränge und der noch unzureichenden empirischen Datenbasis geschuldet. Mittels einer Systematisierung des gegenwärtigen Literaturstands entwirft der Aufsatz ein Forschungsprogramm, das auf eine umfassende Analyse des politischen Willensbildungs- und Entscheidungsfindungsprozesses in den deutschen Bundesländern abstellt und Fragen der Responsivität und Rückkopplung systematisch in den Blick nimmt.