On democratic intelligence and failure: The vice and virtue of incrementalism under political fragmentation and policy accumulation

Adam, Christian; Hurka, Steffen; Knill, Christoph und Steinebach, Yves (2021): On democratic intelligence and failure: The vice and virtue of incrementalism under political fragmentation and policy accumulation. In: Governance-An International Journal of Policy Administration and Institutions, Bd. 35, Nr. 2: S. 525-543

Abstract

The vice and virtue of incrementalism have been the subject of a long-standing academic debate. This debate, however, lacks a dynamic perspective that analyzes how the transformation of politics-mainly in the form of increasing levels of political fragmentation within decision-making arenas and increasing complexity of policy-mixes-affects the role of incrementalism. We argue that both of these trends make the virtues of incrementalism politically even more valuable than they have always been. At the same time, this proliferation of incrementalism comes at the costs of overlooked second-order effects. Since the empirical reality of incrementalism is primarily one that results in incremental policy accumulation, it continuously adds implementation burdens, enhances the demandingness of substantive policy debate, and makes effective science communication more difficult. Thereby, accumulative incrementalism becomes one source of pressure on three cornerstones of legitimate governance: effective policy implementation, sophisticated policy debate, and evidence-based policymaking.

• Dokumententyp: Zeitschriftenartikel
• Fakultät: Sozialwissenschaften > Geschwister-Scholl-Institut für Politikwissenschaft
• Themengebiete: 300 Sozialwissenschaften > 320 Politik
• ISSN: 0952-1895
• Sprache: Englisch