Policy Accumulation and the Democratic Responsiveness Trap

1. Policy accumulation and the democratic responsiveness trap: 1.1 Accumulation and democratic overload; 1.2 Caught in a responsiveness trap; 1.3 Structure of the book; 2. Policy accumulation: concept and measurement: 2.1 Conceptual challenges; 2.2 Targets and instruments: policy elements as a universal unit of policy accumulation; 2.3 Data and measurement; 3. Policy accumulation: a uniform trend in democratic policy making: 3.1 Empirical patterns of policy accumulation; 3.2 Origins of policy accumulation; 3.3 The (false) promises of contemporary attempts to reverse this trend; 4. The threat to our ability to talk policy, not politics: 4.1 Public policies as complex systems; 4.2 How policy accumulation affects the demandingness of policy debate; 4.3 Towards a representative model of discourse quality; 4.4 The divergence of policy debates; 4.5 Old vs. young policy mixes; 4.6 Implications: addressing the populist challenge; 4.7 Meanwhile, our friend John Doe ...; 4.8 Complex problems, simple conclusions?; 5. The threat to effective and even policy implementation: 5.1 The well-known challenges of policy implementation; 5.2 Policy accumulation and the increasing burdens of implementation; 5.3 The aggregate burdens of policy implementation; 5.4 Structural overload and increasing prevalence of implementation deficits?; 5.5 Meanwhile, our friend John Doe ...; 5.6 Challenges for policy implementation in the twenty-first century; 6. The threat to evidence-based policy making: 6.1 Striving for evidence-based public policy; 6.2 Evaluating policy effectiveness within increasingly complex policy mixes; 6.3 Handling the aggravating independent variable problem; 6.4 So what's the problem?; 6.5 Meanwhile, our friend John Doe ...; 6.6 Implications and conclusions; 7. Ways towards sustainable policy accumulation: 7.1 Why deregulation is not the answer; 7.2 Strengthening our democratic infrastructure; 7.3 How much should we worry?; 7.4 How can we tell? Implications for policy research; 7.5 Policy accumulation beyond politics: implications for organisational research?; 7.6 Final remarks; 8. Appendix; 9. Index; 10. References.