When Policies Pile Up

By Carla Goltings

Public policies shape almost every aspect of daily life. They determine how clean our air and water are, how schools are funded, who receives social benefits, how businesses operate, and what rights citizens enjoy. In essence, policies are the tools governments use to address collective problems and organise society. When they work well, they provide stability, protection, and opportunities; when they do not, the consequences are often felt widely and deeply.

In a democracy, citizens expect their governments to respond to their demands. These calls range from cleaner environments or stronger social protection to better education and expanded individual freedoms. To address these expectations, governments frequently adopt new laws, regulations, and programmes. What rarely happens, however, is the removal of older measures, so over time the overall body of policies steadily expands.

Christoph Knill describes this dynamic as ‘policy accumulation’: governments continuously layer new rules and initiatives onto existing ones, while seldom dismantling what is already in place. As a result, the policy burden grows. This not only increases the workload for public administrations but also makes the network of rules harder to oversee and evaluate. ‘People find it more difficult to understand policies the more complex these policies become,’ Knill explains.

Between reacting and acting

Although each individual rule or programme often makes sense, the problem emerges as they build up - like a to-do list that only ever grows. Policies do not implement themselves. They require administrative capacity – people, time, expertise, coordination, money – because every new policy creates work for administrations. 

That democratic governments react to societal demands, nevertheless, is a good thing, says Knill. Responsiveness shows that governments address the problems of their citizens and societies. But they need to carefully balance this and avoid a so-called ‘responsiveness trap’. If the system becomes overstretched, because administrative capacities are pushed to their limits and policies grow ever more complex, democracies risk weakening their ability to respond effectively. 

When governments take on more commitments than they can realistically implement, even well-intended responses may fail to deliver results. Eventually, this kind of structural overload can undermine not only current policies but also a government’s capacity to tackle future challenges.

Patterns across countries

In his ERC-funded project ACCUPOL, Christoph Knill examined how this build-up of policies unfolds in 25 countries, focusing on the areas of social and environmental policy. ‘Regardless of the sector and regardless of the country, we see a trend that overall policies are accumulating.’

Still, some countries have a greater inflation of policies than others. ‘The institutional quality of the different political systems matters.’ This is rooted in how well connected different government bodies are - most notably those who formulate policies and those who implement them. ‘The more they are separated, the more we see an accumulation trend and the more we see an overstretching of the implementation capacities.’ 

Here, Knill’s team also observed the most variation across countries. In Scandinavian states, for example, new policies are usually well matched with the ability to put them into practice. In contrast, in countries like Italy and France, policies tend to mount up faster than administrations can implement them.

There are also basic differences between the policy areas Knill looked at. Environmental policy is a relatively young and dynamic field, with frequent changes, whereas social policy is an older, ‘more mature’ policy area.

Effectiveness of policies

Governance is therefore not just about making laws, but also about whether governments can implement them.  This is a question of quality, shows Knill’s research. ‘To implement policies, you need agencies and authorities that are sufficiently equipped in terms of expertise, budget, and personnel.’ 

However, the effectiveness of policies also depends on whether the authorities responsible for implementing them are involved in shaping the rules from the start. The way a policy is designed can strongly influence how successfully it is put into practice. As Knill puts it, this resembles ‘to what extent the concerns and problems emphasised by the implementation agencies are really taken into account when the policies are made.’ 

Crises turning into ordinary?

Following his ERC-project on policy accumulation, Knill is now investigating how crises affect policymaking in his CRISPOL project. He wants to understand how focusing on one urgent problem, such as a financial crash, a pandemic, or a security threat, can lead governments to shift attention and resources away from other spheres of political activity.

Knill moves away from the traditional approach of viewing crises strictly within their policy sector – a natural disaster or hazard is a crisis in the area of environment; a rapid increase of the cost-of-living is a crisis in the social sector. Within their own sectors, these ‘shock events’ happen relatively seldom. ‘However, once you move beyond the sector perspective and look at policy sectors in general, you immediately see that crises are much more frequent.’ 

Overall, there is always a certain crisis that needs to be addressed, Knill explains. By taking a cross-sectoral perspective, one can see that crises are effectively a constant feature of modern democracies.

Steering of political attention

When Knill and his team looked at the COVID-19 pandemic, they saw that the focus on responding to this crisis meant that other topics lost priority, especially in the case of climate change. They observed trade-offs between the policy areas – a ‘crowding out’ effect – since ‘the political attention of governments is limited.’

Currently, they are exploring to what extent policy responses are driven by objective signals and criteria. Are measurable crisis indicators behind political action, or is it more the public perception that matters? To assess the public perception of crises, they study, for instance, how newspapers report on different shock events.

Funding shapes research

For Christoph Knill, his ERC grants created the possibility to build a strong, lasting research team within which he nurtured long-term collaborations. He especially values that he has been able to promote younger scholars who have, over time, become leading researchers in their fields. 

‘Having three ERC Advanced Grants over the last 15 years is a big opportunity as they bring great continuity.’ Within and across these projects, Knill developed a clear research focus and has been able to conduct large-scale, cross-country, and cross-policy studies, gather extensive data, and develop new concepts that push the field of comparative policy analysis forward.

Biography

Christoph Knill is the chair of Empirical Theories of Politics at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University’s Department of Political Science in Munich, Germany. His research focuses on comparative public policy and public administration. In particular, he has made important contributions to the study of how European integration shapes national administrations and policymaking, as well as broader patterns of European governance. Knill received his first ERC Advanced grant in 2010, followed by two additional grants in 2017 and 2023.