Policy Accumulation and the Democratic Responsiveness Trap

Christian Adam, Steffen Hurka, Christoph Knill, Yves Steinebach

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781108481199
• eBook ISBN: 9781108592604
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

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.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title page
• Series page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Preface
• 1 Policy Accumulation and the Democratic Responsiveness Trap
• 2 Policy Accumulation: Concept and Measurement
• 3 Policy Accumulation: A Uniform Trend in Democratic Policy Making
• 4 The Threat to Our Ability to Talk “Policy”, Not “Politics”
• 5 The Threat to Effective and Even Policy Implementation
• 6 The Threat to Evidence-Based Policy Making
• 7 Ways Toward Sustainable Policy Accumulation
• Appendix
• Notes
• References
• Index