Balancing Trade‐Offs between Policy Responsiveness and Effectiveness: The Impact of Vertical Policy‐Process Integration on Policy Accumulation

• Published date: 01 January 2021
• Author: Christoph Knill,Christina Steinbacher,Yves Steinebach
• Date: 01 January 2021
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/puar.13274

Public Administration Review,

Vol.81, Iss. 1, pp. 157–160. © 2020 The

Authors. Public Administration Review

published by Wiley Periodicals LLC. on behalf of

The American Society for Public Administration.

DOI: 10.1111/puar.13274.

157

This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Balancing Trade-Offs between Policy Responsiveness and

Effectiveness: The Impact of Vertical Policy-Process

Integration on Policy Accumulation

Abstract: In modern democracies, policy stocks pile up over time. In many ways policy accumulation reflects

societal modernization and progress. However, if policy accumulation is not matched by corresponding expansions

in administrative capacities necessary for policy implementation, a negative trade-off between responsiveness and

policy effectiveness evolves. We argue that aligning policy formulation and implementation activities through

vertical policy-process integration (VPI) may curb policy accumulation towards a more sustainable level. Our

conceptualization of VPI builds upon the distinction of two dimensions: (1) bottom-up integration affecting

policy design and improving policies’ effectiveness and (2) top-down integration concerning the allocation of

implementation costs and, hence, constraining responsiveness incentives. It is the central aim of this viewpoint to

raise awareness about the importance of VPI as a potential way out of the responsiveness trap that threatens modern

democracies.

Evidence for Practice

• Administrators have to deal with ever-more implementation tasks induced by policy accumulation. This

bears the risk of systematic implementation deficits and thus ineffective policies.

• From this perspective, it is highly important to identify and develop mechanisms that allow for sustaining

the process of policy accumulation. We argue that this can be achieved by the integration of policy

formulators into the implementation process as well as by involving policy implementers in policy-making.

• The concept proposed in this paper can serve decision-makers as a yardstick to determine the degree

of vertical integration among policy formulators and implementers and to identify areas for future

improvement and organizational reform.

Introduction

It is a major asset of democratic governments

that they are responsive to societal demands.

Citizens and interest groups claim cleaner

environments, better social protection and education,

more transparency, or more individual freedoms.

Governments typically respond to these demands by

adopting new policy outputs, in the form of laws,

regulations, or programs. As established policies

are terminated only rarely (Bardach1976), policy

outputs pile up over time. Policy accumulation hence

constitutes a central, yet largely unexplored feature of

modern democracies.

In many ways, policy accumulation reflects societal

modernization and progress. Most citizens are happy

not to live in a country that still trusts in the social

policies of the 1870s, or the environmental policies of

the 1950s. Yet, merely adopting new policies reflects

nothing but symbolic politics if these measures are not

effective in addressing the problems for which they

were designed. There are potential trade-offs between

policy responsiveness and policy effectiveness. The

more governments respond to societal demands via

policy accumulation, the more they might overburden

implementation bodies with ever-more and

increasingly complex policies (Limberg et al.2020).

This, in turn, has the potential to undermine the

long-term support for governmental intervention

(Keiser and Miller2020).

Theoretically, there are three ways to escape from

this “responsiveness trap” (Adam et al.2019). First,

citizens can reduce their expectations vis-à-vis the

government. Yet, this is an unlikely scenario. Public

opinion data suggest that citizens have a rather

“schizophrenic” view on the government (ibid.,

2019: 35). While people are generally critical of

governmental intervention, they tend to be quite

demanding when it comes to solving concrete policy

problems such as healthcare, the provision of decent

housing, or the imposition of strict environmental

legislation. Second, governments might avoid the

responsiveness trap by expanding administrative

Christoph Knill

Christina Steinbacher

Yves Steinebach

LMU Munich

Yves Steinebach is Assistant Professor of

Political Science and Public Administration

at LMU Munich.

Christina Steinbacher is doctoral

researcher at LMU Munich.

Christoph Knill is Full Professor of Political

Science and Public Administration at LMU

Munich and holds the Chair of Empirical

Theories of Politics.

Email: christoph.knill@gsi.lmu.de

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