Abstract
AbstractIn response to societal demands, democratic governments constantly adopt new policies. As existing policies are rarely abandoned, policies accumulate over time. Policy accumulation bears the challenge of overburdening implementation bodies, hence undermining policy effectiveness. Any escape from this situation requires democratic governments to strike a balance between policy responsiveness and effectiveness. We posit that the extent to which countries are able to achieve this depends on the vertical integration of processes of policy formulation and implementation. We provide a novel conceptualization of vertical policy‐process integration (VPI) that is based on two channels. While bottom‐up integration captures the extent to which policy implementers can communicate reasons for potential policy failure from the bottom up, top‐down integration indicates the degree to which the policy formulation level has to cover the implementation costs of the policies they produce. We illustrate our argument by an empirical analysis of VPI patterns in Denmark and Italy.
Highlights
From the operation of a functioning healthcare system and the protection of the environment to the provision of jobs, social benefits and decent housing, citizens demand a lot from their governments
To what extent are these differences in policy accumulation between Denmark and Italy reflected in different patterns of vertical policy-process integration (VPI)? In the following, we provide a detailed assessment of VPI in both countries and policy sectors under study
This article started from the diagnosis of ever-increasing policy stocks in modern democracies and potential problems emerging from the fact that policy accumulation is not sufficiently backed by corresponding expansions in implementation capacities
Summary
From the operation of a functioning healthcare system and the protection of the environment to the provision of jobs, social benefits and decent housing, citizens demand a lot from their governments. VPI captures the structural arrangements that shape the interactions between governmental bodies responsible for policy formulation and those in charge of policy implementation at different institutional levels. Depending on the extent to which VPI ensures the integration of implementation input and costs in policy formulation, we identify different patterns of policy accumulation and, ways in which governments balance responsiveness and effectiveness concerns.
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