TY - BOOK ID - 85644560 TI - Policy accumulation and the democratic responsiveness trap AU - Adam, Christian AU - Hurka, Steffen AU - Knill, Christoph AU - Steinebach, Yves PY - 2019 SN - 1108592600 1108646883 1108481191 1108755984 1108969275 PB - Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, DB - UniCat KW - Policy sciences. KW - Political planning. KW - Democracy. KW - Social policy. KW - Environmental policy. KW - Social values KW - Values KW - Environment and state KW - Environmental control KW - Environmental management KW - Environmental protection KW - Environmental quality KW - State and environment KW - Environmental auditing KW - National planning KW - State planning KW - Economic policy KW - Family policy KW - Social history KW - Self-government KW - Political science KW - Equality KW - Representative government and representation KW - Republics KW - Planning in politics KW - Public policy KW - Planning KW - Policy sciences KW - Politics, Practical KW - Public administration KW - Policy-making KW - Policymaking KW - Public policy management KW - Government policy. KW - Government policy UR - https://www.unicat.be/uniCat?func=search&query=sysid:85644560 AB - 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. ER -