Andreas Enderlin-Mahr is a doctoral candidate at the University of Vienna, where he also received his BA and MA degree in history. His PhD project is titled: 'Informal ways to the Emperor’s Desk – governance networks, political practice and culture in the 19th century’.
Since February 2018, he is working as a research assistant at the Institute of Austrian Historical Research, University of Vienna, as part of the FWF-Project „The Emperor’s Desk: A Site of Policy Making“. Also since February 2018, he is holding the position of a research associate at the Institute of Modern and Contemporary History, Johannes Kepler University Linz. He is a doctoral fellow of the Vienna Doctoral Academy Theory and Methodology in the Humanities. His research fields include masculinity studies and digital game studies.

Complete CV

At the heart of the Habsburg Empire, in Vienna, stood one of the most pivotal sites of decision making of the monarchy: the desk of the Emperor. But before the Emperor formally resolved each and every single decision personally, the issues were negotiated within networks of governance and patronage, heavily depending on influential intermediaries, such as the director of Emperor Francis Joseph’s I. cabinet office, Adolf Braun.

In my PhD I analyse Braun’s correspondence during his tenure 1865–1899, aiming for a deeper understanding of 19th century political culture (Reinhard 2001) in the Habsburg Empire, illuminating various networks of governance as well as investigating a political practice of policy making beyond the formal rules and regulations. Policy making in the Habsburg Empire was built on negotiations between various actors as well as on attempts of politicians, members of the regional and central governments, intermediaries, and the emperor to establish compromises in politically sensitive questions. Following the lead of theoretically advanced political sciences (Grunden 2014; Rüb 2014) and historical network research (Düring, Eumann, Stark, Keyerslingk 2016) I examine the ways in which individual, collective, and corporate actors employed networks of governance and patronage to influence decisions to their favour. The letters preserved among Adolf Braun’s papers provide for the reconstruction of an ego-centered-network. With the center of the Empire embedded in a vast web of clients, patrons and intermediaries from various Empires and regions of the world, the processes of agenda setting and policy making become far more complex by taking place within informed, multidirectional networks on the regional, imperial and international level. Additionally, I explore how intermediaries connected the regional to the imperial to the global within certain policy fields and furthered imperial integration by creating transnational networks of patronage.