Self-Inflicted Policy Traps and the Politics of Squaring the Circle

In a recent article, McConnell (2020) introduced the metaphor of ‘policy traps’ to describe situations in which governments are “subject to varying pressures to address a policy problem but have limited capacity to do so”. This paper presents an analytical framework which helps to understand how policymakers end up in those policy traps and explains why those traps are often self-inflicted. I build on Herweg et al.’s (2015) extended multiple streams framework (EMSF) but argue that the connection between the two coupling processes, agenda and decision coupling, is more ambivalent than hitherto suggested. While successful agenda coupling is necessary for decision coupling, the former can at the same time undermine the latter if it helps to bring deficient policy proposals to the decision agenda. This is generally the case when electoral opportunism or ideological convictions trump technical and legal reservations at the agenda stage. As a result, the already challenging bargaining process at the decision stage is further complicated by the need to fulfill technical and legal requirements. Since the goals of securing public support, fostering legislative majorities and meeting technical and legal requirements are often hard to reconcile, policymaking at this point amounts to the invidious task of squaring the circle. The framework is illustrated using the example of the failed introduction of the road charge in Germany, one of the most prominent failures of German policymaking in recent years.