This proposal aims to contribute to the understanding of the converging agendas in higher education in Europe by analyzing the ongoing transformation of the role and function of the doctorate in Germany (Hornbostel 2009, Leopoldina 2017) in regard to new organizational actors. Nowadays, universities of applied sciences are aiming to participate in the realm of doctoral education and are challenging the historically established monopoly of doctoral education of the universities (Pautsch 2019).

To understand the recent debate about this topic in Germany, a historical-comparative approach of policy analysis (Schmidt 2003), following the analytical framework of Actor-Centered Institutionalism (Mayntz/Scharpf 1995), is applied to answer the following research questions:

• To what extent can the recent debate regarding the right to award doctorates for universities of applied sciences be compared to the debate regarding the award of this right to polytechnics and mining academies in Germany, which took place over 120 years ago?
• How do these debates resemble and differ regarding the involved stakeholders, their positions as well as their arguments for and against the right to award the doctorates to the new organizational actors?

The analysis of the two debates takes the outstanding role and function of the modern research doctorate for the history of Germany into account. It formed the starting point of Germany's development into the leading science nation until the second half of the 20th century (Schmidhuber 2010), but even before contributed significantly to Germany's full-scale industrialization based on the emerging chemical, electrical and mechanical engineering industries that still characterize Germany's economy today (Bredt 1900).

An examination of the (dis-)similarities in these debates enables insights for a deeper understanding of why in the present debate, the relevant stakeholders in Germany have their specific positions regarding the right to award doctorates to universities of applied sciences as well as to understand Germany's unique development path regarding the doctorate within Europes higher education environment (Kehm et al. 2006; Kehm 2012).

The investigation of the presented phenomenon along the framework of Actor-Centered Institutionalism (Scharpf 2018) requires a qualitative research design (Mayntz 2002). A historical-comparative perspective is adopted, whereby the central analytical dimensions of the environmental preconditions, the positioning of actors, their arguments and the influence of the state are analyzed in parallel. For the comparative approach, the positionings of the relevant actors, including the (technical) universities and universities of applied sciences, the polytechnics as well as the academies and state governments as the authority granting the right to award doctorates, are analyzed. As an analytical frame for the arguments, the positions of the stakeholders will be categorized under the aspects of scientificity, application orientation, qualification of the faculty and the organizational framework. For the present debate, a compiled literature corpus of selected position papers serves as the basis for the qualitative content analysis (Gläser & Laudel 2009). While for the past debate, the literature corpus consists mainly of speeches and statements that are available as a source for the analysis, such as speeches by rectors of technical universities, that were held in the context of obtaining the right to award doctorates and subsequently published (e.g. Bredt 1900, Meyer 1900).

As a result of this investigation, it is expected that the current struggle for the right to award doctorates is characterized by numerous historical preconditions and that clear parallels to the situation in the past can be identified. In both cases, it becomes clear that the environmental preconditions are similar, like the international competition in science and economy, as well as the changing demand for the workforce based on new emerging industries and technologies (Chambaz 2008, Pedersen 2014). Furthermore, there are parallels in the arguments and the positioning of the stakeholders. On the side of the (technical) universities, there are concerns about the quality assurance of the doctorate against the background of broadening access to doctoral education. Today's universities of applied sciences, on the other hand, like the polytechnics in the past, argue the relevance of their contribution of applied research with its contribution to Germany's technological innovation capability and the contribution to the economic prosperity of the country. A major difference between the two debates is that the lack of a suitable organization to provide top-tier doctoral education in the fields of technology and engineering, except for some specialized departments and chairs located at universities, was an argument to grant polytechnics the right to award the engineering doctorate in the past. As of today, technical universities already exist to fulfill this purpose. Therefore the fight of the universities of applied sciences for the right to award doctorates relies on other arguments concerning aspects of equality and participation.

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