Sustaining statehood: A comparative analysis of vertical policy‐process integration in Denmark and Italy
| Published date | 01 December 2021 |
| Author | Christoph Knill,Christina Steinbacher,Yves Steinebach |
| Date | 01 December 2021 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/padm.12705 |
ORIGINAL ARTICLE
Sustaining statehood: A comparative analysis of
vertical policy-process integration in Denmark and
Italy
Christoph Knill | Christina Steinbacher | Yves Steinebach
Department of Political Science, LMU Munich,
Munich, Germany
Correspondence
Christoph Knill, Department of Political
Science, LMU, Oettingenstrasse 58, 80538
Munich, Germany.
Email: christoph.knill@gsi.uni-muenchen.de
Funding information
H2020 European Research Council, Grant/
Award Number: 788941
Abstract
In response to societal demands, democratic governments con-
stantly adopt new policies. As existing policies are rarely aban-
doned, 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 for-
mulation and implementation. We provide a novel conceptuali-
zation 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 inte-
gration 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.
1|INTRODUCTION
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. It is a major asset of
Received: 10 July 2020 Revised: 4 September 2020 Accepted: 1 November 2020
DOI: 10.1111/padm.12705
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.
© 2020 The Authors. Public Administration published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
758 Public Admin. 2021;99:758–774.wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/padm
democratic governments that they are responsive to societal demands, by constantly adopting new policies in the
form of laws, regulations, or programmes. At the same time, the termination of existing policies rarely constitutes an
attractive option for governments seeking re-election (Knill and Bauer 2014). The resulting aggregate pattern is
hence one of policy accumulation (Adam et al. 2019): Governments produce more new policies than they abolish.
Yet, in the long term, the continuous growth of policy stocks may lead to governmental ‘overload’(King 1975).
Modern democracies are caught in a ‘responsiveness trap’(Adam et al. 2019), a vicious circle of adopting more and
more policies while being less and less able to realize their multiple goals in practice by overburdening implementa-
tion bodies with ever-more and increasingly complex policies (Limberg et al. 2020). This, in turn, can undermine the
long-term support for governmental intervention. In short, there are potential trade-offs between political respon-
siveness and policy effectiveness.
Any escape from this situation requires democratic governments to strike a balance between responsiveness
and effectiveness, implying that the continuous adoption of new policies does not overburden the capacities avail-
able for implementation. It is only on this basis that policy accumulation remains at a ‘sustainable level’, that is, is
backed by sufficiently well-equipped implementation arrangements and structures. Unfortunately, there are no easy
ways to overcome this problem. On the one hand, it is hardly realistic that societies become more abstinent in terms
of their demands on governments. Public opinion data reveal that citizens have generally a rather ‘schizophrenic’
view of the government (Adam et al. 2019, p. 35). While people are generally critical of governmental intervention,
they tend to be quite demanding when it comes to solving concrete policy problems. On the other hand, the most
obvious option of expanding administrative resources for policy implementation hardly seems feasible. Most govern-
ments face fundamental fiscal and ideological constraints for public sector expansions in times of globalized financial
markets, austerity, and still reverberating ideas of New Public Management (Lobao et al. 2018).
Despite this gloomy picture, countries seem to differin their capacities to keep policy accumulation at a sustain-
able level (Limberg et al. 2020). We argue that this variation emerges from two sources. A first approach is to reduce
policy accumulation through better policy design. Better design means that policies are more effective in addressing
their objectives, implying less need for updating, modifying and complementing existing policies in order to resolve a
given policy problem.This approach presumes institutionalized processesof policy evaluation and learning,in particular
by systematicallyintegrating expertise and information from the implementation level into thepolicy formulation pro-
cess. The secondapproach, by contrast, works viathe internalization of implementation costs. If thosebodies in charge
of developingnew policies also have to carry thecosts of implementing these policies, policy accumulation is expected
to be less pronounced;the less implementation costs can be passed onto other institutional bodies, the lower are the
opportunitiesfor the policy-formulatinglevel to excessively respond tosocietal demands via new policies.
The extent to which these options apply is affected by what we refer to as patterns of vertical policy-process
integration (VPI). 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. Pat-
terns of VPI might vary not only across countries but also across policy sectors. 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, hence, ways in which governments balance responsiveness and effectiveness concerns.
The remainder of this article is structured as follows. In section 2, we introduce our concept of VPI. Based on
these considerations, we deduce four ideal-type scenarios of the relationship between policy accumulation and VPI
patterns in section 3. These arguments are empirically illustrated in section 4, in whichwe compare the cases of Italy
and Denmark for the areas of social and environmental policy. Section 5 concludes.
2|THE CONCEPT OF VPI
We conceive of VPI as institutional arrangements that are part of public service bargains. On this basis, we identify differ-
ent dimensions of VPI and indicators for its empirical assessment across highly diverse political-administrative systems.
KNILL ET AL.759
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