Sustaining the Policy State: A Concept of Vertical Policy Process Integration

As public policy-making is motivated by the attempt to solve political problems, states might be naively evaluated against the number of policy targets addressed and the number of policy instruments applied. However, recent studies have shown that the growing stock of policies is often not mirrored by an equal increase in implementation capacities. Addressing problems by more and more policies but not being capable of putting these policies into effect, governments are threatened to be caught in a vicious circle: Problems do not get solved despite governmental activity and require further measures which cannot be implemented either. Stuck in such a ‘responsiveness trap’, political orders are substantially threatened. Consequentially, scholars are required to react and to engage in answering the question on how sustainable policy-making can be reached. This paper highlights the importance of an integrated policy-making process. In this context, we propose an innovative two-dimensional concept of vertical policy process integration which captures (1) the degree of involvement of policy formulators in the affairs of policy implementation and, vice versa, (2) the degree of implementers’ integration into the process of policy formulation. Accordingly, the paper deduces four types of vertical policy process integration: Non-integration, administrative integration, political integration, and full integration. We expect a higher level of vertical policy integration to result in a more sustainable policy growth path. To test and illustrate the explanatory power of our concept, we examine the nexus between the level of vertical policy integration and the patterns of policy accumulation at the sectoral level for four crucial cases. The concept proposed enables researchers to gain insights into public policy-making on an epidemiological level nurturing comparative analyses in the field of public policies. By asking how policy-making is structurally connected, vertical policy process integration provides the missing link to integrally systematize previous thoughts on public policy integration. Our concept links and contributes to various theoretical approaches developed in both the public policy and the public administration literature as well as in administrative law.