Policy Accumulation and the Democratic Responsiveness Trap
Published on 17. December 2020
Book
Paperback/Softback
252 pages
978-1-108-96927-7 (ISBN)
Description
The responsiveness to societal demands is both the key virtue and the key problem of modern democracies. On the one hand, responsiveness is a central cornerstone of democratic legitimacy. On the other hand, responsiveness inevitably entails policy accumulation. While policy accumulation often positively reflects modernisation and human progress, it also undermines democratic government in three main ways. First, policy accumulation renders policy content increasingly complex, which crowds out policy substance from public debates and leads to an increasingly unhealthy discursive prioritisation of politics over policy. Secondly, policy accumulation comes with aggravating implementation deficits, as it produces administrative backlogs and incentivises selective implementation. Finally, policy accumulation undermines the pursuit of evidence-based public policy, because it threatens our ability to evaluate the increasingly complex interactions within growing policy mixes. The authors argue that the stability of democratic systems will crucially depend on their ability to make policy accumulation more sustainable.
More details
Series
Language
English
Place of publication
Cambridge
United Kingdom
Target group
Professional and scholarly
Product notice
Paperback (trade)
Illustrations
Worked examples or Exercises
Dimensions
Height: 221 mm
Width: 153 mm
Thickness: 17 mm
Weight
386 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-108-96927-7 (9781108969277)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions
Christian Adam | Steffen Hurka | Christoph Knill
Policy Accumulation and the Democratic Responsiveness Trap
Book
04/2019
Cambridge University Press
€116.50
Shipment within 15-20 days
Persons
Christian Adam is an Assistant Professor at the Geschwister Scholl Institute of Political Science at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Munchen. In his research he focuses mostly on issues that lie at the intersection of comparative public policy, judicial politics, and public administration. In this context, his main interests are analyses of the perceived legitimacy of political institutions and their decisions. His research has appeared with internationally renowned publishers and in a number of internationally renowned peer-reviewed journals, such as the Journal of Common Market Studies, The Policy Studies Journal, Policy Sciences, and Public Administration Review.
Content
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.