Towards an Epidemiological Assessment of Implementation Stress: Proof of Concept with Data from Germany

Descriptive epidemiology plays a central role in other areas of scientific inquiry by, for example, capturing the prevalence of infectious diseases of substance dependence. In contrast, implementation research has so far struggled to establish such an epidemiological pursuit. While the last five decades of implementation research have well established that policy implementation is precarious and identified a growing list of factors that contribute to implementation problems, we have lacked the descriptive tools to capture whether policy implementation is becoming more precarious or less precarious and whether this varies from sector to sector, or from country to country. This paper proposes an empirical strategy that allows scholars to capture systematically the longitudinal development of implementation stress within the public administration. To do so, the paper focuses on selective parts of the German public administration. For these organizations, it identifies all relevant legislation that affected these organizations’ implementation burden since 2012 based on estimated compliance costs indicated in legislative draft proposals. Finally, by assessing the co-evolution of implementation burden and personnel inside these organizations, the paper is able to describe the trajectory of implementation stress within these organizations in a comparable and systematic way.