From Bottleneck to Boost? Vertical Policy-Process Integration and Crisis Management Performance

Crisis situations constitute a litmus test of a state’s governance capacity. They place particular strain on the relationship between politics and public administration, as effective crisis response requires careful balancing between central leadership and local flexibility. Institutional structures – most notably forms of vertical policy-process integration (VPI) – play a key role in shaping this relationship. Yet it remains unclear whether vertically integrated politico-administrative arrangements facilitate or hinder effective crisis management. On the one hand, tighter vertical coupling between decision-making and implementation may foster trust and shared expertise, thereby supporting adaptive crisis governance. On the other hand, existing research suggests that institutional intertwinement can produce inertia and decision-making deadlock, undermining effective crisis responses. Addressing this tension, this quantitative multilevel study examines crisis management performance among German district authorities in relation to their politico-administrative embeddedness. The analysis combines survey data on crisis management with structural data on relationships between implementing and directing authorities across levels of government, covering the management of the 2015/16 migration crisis and the 2020 COVID-19 crisis. The paper contributes to theoretical and conceptual debates on institutional structures in effective (crisis) governance and helps advance the still limited body of systematic comparative research on crisis management performance in public administration.