Patterns of Vertical Policy-Process Integration: A Comparative Empirical Analysis

As a result of the increasing relevance of complex policy problems and in the aftermath of New Public Management, calls for coordination and integration in policy-making are becoming louder. Modern democracies are unequivocally concerned with problems related to the complexity of policy-making, growing rule stocks and the performance of government activity. Nevertheless, the ways in which governments are capable to deal with these issues vary widely. Why and in how far they differ remains unclear. Against this background, this paper introduces a new data set on vertical-policy process integration (VPI). The data set captures the evolution of procedural arrangements within government and public administration over 21 OECD countries and more than four decades (1976-2020) and covers two policy areas, namely social and environmental policy. The sectoral VPI concept claims to measure procedural integration by capturing and assessing, firstly, the processes that involve policy formulators in policy implementation (top-down integration), and, secondly, the processes that enable policy implementation input to reach the policy design stage (bottom-up integration). Using descriptive statistics, Bayesian network and cluster analyses and combining the novel VPI data set with well-established structural, political and institutional variables, the proposed paper aims at four contributions: First, to identify patterns of vertical policy-process integration necessary to understand the concept and potential findings based on it; second, to determine in how far and on which basis these patterns vary across countries, between sectors and over time; third, to gain deeper insights into the extent to which the concept and its indicators measure what they purport to measure; and, finally to initially identify structural and institutional features that presuppose, accompany, facilitate or impede procedural integration and vice versa. On this basis, this paper seeks to shed light on the politico-administrative processes behind policy-making, potential patterns and their placement within various settings. Additionally, introducing and probing a novel data set on sectoral vertical policy-process integration contributes to previous attempts of measuring governance.