Yves Steinebach

Fernandez-i-Marin, Xavier; Knill, Christoph & Steinebach, Yves (2021).Studying policy design quality in comparative perspective. American Political Science Review. ISSN 0003-0554. doi: 10.1017/S0003055421000186.

Kaplaner, Constantin & Steinebach, Yves (2022). Why We Should Use the Gini Coefficient to Assess Punctuated Equilibrium Theory. Political Analysis.ISSN 1047-1987. doi: 10.1017/pan.2021.25.

Steinebach, Yves (2022). Instrument choice, implementation structures, and the effectiveness of environmental policies: A cross-national analysis.Regulation & Governance. ISSN 1748-5983. doi: 10.1111/rego.12297.

Steinebach, Yves (2022). Administrative traditions and the effectiveness of regulation. Journal of European Public Policy. ISSN 1350-1763. doi: 10.1080/13501763.2022.2070240.

Bayerlein, Louisa; Knill, Christoph & Steinebach, Yves (2020). A Matter of Style? Organizational Agency in Global Public Policy. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 9781108836371.

Adam, Christian; Hurka, Steffen; Knill, Christoph & Steinebach, Yves (2019).Policy accumulation and the democratic responsiveness trap. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 9781108481199.

• Hurka, Steffen & Steinebach, Yves (2026). Legal complexity undermines effective climate policy implementation. Climate Policy. ISSN 1469-3062. doi: 10.1080/14693062.2026.2629393. Full text in Research Archive
• Lenz, Alexa; Knill, Christoph & Steinebach, Yves (2026). Addition preferences among policymakers as driver of policy growth. West European Politics. ISSN 0140-2382. doi: 10.1080/01402382.2026.2650384. Full text in Research Archive
• Fernández-i-Marín, Xavier; Hinterleitner, Markus; Knill, Christoph & Steinebach, Yves (2026). Regulatory Offsetting Schemes as Effective Governmental Self-Binding Device? Lessons From the German Experience. Public Administration Review. ISSN 0033-3352. doi: 10.1111/puar.70107. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  Governments in advanced democracies often implement self-binding mechanisms like regulatory offsetting schemes to counteract short-term political incentives. This paper evaluates the effectiveness of Germany's offsetting scheme by analyzing over 3000 legal acts for restrictive clauses and passages related to replacing or repealing existing regulations. Despite Germany being a “least likely” case for failure, our analysis indicates that the scheme has not reduced regulatory burdens. These findings suggest that self-binding measures struggle to override political incentives for rule production, especially with inadequate monitoring. We contribute to the literature by systematically assessing governmental self-binding effectiveness, introducing a novel methodological approach based on large language models, and employing a robust difference-in-differences design to estimate counterfactual effects. Our study highlights the challenges of implementing effective self-binding mechanisms in democratic governance.

• Fernández-i-Marín, Xavier; Hinterleitner, Markus; Knill, Christoph; Steinebach, Yves & Nachtigall, Daniel (2025). Analyzing Climate Policy Portfolios. Journal of Comparative Policy Analysis. ISSN 1387-6988. doi: 10.1080/13876988.2025.2555888. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  This paper introduces the concept of policy portfolios as a new analytical tool for examining climate policies. Climate policy portfolios systematically categorize government actions along two key dimensions: (i) the target dimension, which identifies the specific goals being addressed, and (ii) the instrument dimension, which outlines the policy instruments employed to achieve these goals. The advantages of utilizing climate policy portfolios are manifold. Primarily, these portfolios provide a clear and illustrative framework for visualizing governments’ climate policy actions. Additionally, the structured categorization across these two dimensions enhances the analysis of the size, growth, diversity, and similarities within countries’ climate policy portfolios. To illustrate the effectiveness of the climate policy portfolio approach, the article leverages the OECD CAPMF dataset to map the evolution of portfolio development across 49 countries.

• Steinebach, Yves; Fernández-i-Marín, Xavier; Hinterleitner, Markus & Knill, Christoph (2025). Towards ‘better deregulation’: from crude cost-cutting to the targeted pruning of policy activities. Journal of European Public Policy. ISSN 1350-1763. doi: 10.1080/13501763.2025.2548350. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  Deregulation is a prominent theme, but difficult to implement. Current approaches either focus only on ‘new’ rules without considering already existing policies, or fail to differentiate between effective policies and those that impose unnecessary regulatory burdens. This paper proposes a new, policy-informed approach to deregulation that addresses these issues by centering on existing policies and their interactions. The approach consists of three steps: (i) creating a systematic overview of government activities within a specific policy area, (ii) identifying stacked policies – multiple measures addressing the same issue, and (iii) pruning conflicting measures. By applying this approach to the environmental policy portfolios of 21 advanced democracies, we find an average deregulation potential of about 36 percent of existing measures per country. We additionally provide a specific list of policy measures for each country that merit scrutiny for potential deregulation and indicate whether these measures would have to be abolished at the national or at the EU level. This targeted approach seeks to enhance regulatory efficiency while preserving essential policies that support effective governance.

• Lenz, Alexa; Fernández-i-Marín, Xavier; Hinterleitner, Markus; Knill, Christoph & Steinebach, Yves (2025). Democratic governance and policy complexity: revisiting the intelligence of democracy. Journal of European Public Policy. ISSN 1350-1763. doi: 10.1080/13501763.2025.2553756. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  Democracies are praised for managing complex problems, yet ballooning rule stocks may erode their effectiveness and legitimacy. We ask whether this ‘complexity trap’ is uniquely democratic. Building on theories of participatory and deliberative governance, we hypothesise that countries with higher democratic quality generate a higher baseline of policy complexity but adapt more smoothly as problems grow, while less-democratic regimes initially regulate sparsely yet see complexity surge with mounting challenges. Using an original dataset covering the climate-policy portfolios of 134 countries from 1998–2022, we measure external problem complexity, policy complexity, and regime characteristics. Several models reveal that problem complexity drives policy complexity everywhere, but interaction effects confirm our expectations: more participatory and deliberative systems absorb additional complexity more gradually than their less democratic counterparts. The findings nuance fears of democratic self-overload, showing that institutional openness creates not only complexity but also resilience. Our results challenge deterministic decline narratives, confirm the relative intelligence of democracy, and inform debates on effective, legitimate climate governance worldwide.

• Fernández-i-Marín, Xavier; Hinterleitner, Markus; Knill, Christoph & Steinebach, Yves (2025). Assessing and comparing the effects of public policies–a new approach. Journal of European Public Policy. ISSN 1350-1763. doi: 10.1080/13501763.2025.2454535. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  Assessing the effects of public policies is essential for academic and practical reasons. While existing approaches focus on the effects of individual policies or entire sectoral policy regimes, approaches that evaluate individual policies within the context of sectoral policy mixes are missing. This paper introduces a middle-ground approach called the Conditional Effects of Public Policies (CEPP) method. The CEPP approach uses a Bayesian-based procedure to (1) capture all policies in a specific area aimed at a particular outcome and (2) compare each policy’s effect on that outcome. We demonstrate the analytical value of our approach for the ‘Porter Hypothesis’ in order to distinguish between environmental regulations that hinder or promote green innovations. Covering 21 OECD countries over two decades we show that while no environmental policy is universally ‘good’ or ‘bad’ in this regard, public investment programmes tend to be a driver of innovation. Hierarchical instruments by contrast show varied effects. Taken together, this paper not only provides a new method to assess policy effects in times of increasingly congested policy spaces, but also makes a clear contribution to a contested question in policy research, namely, whether and under which conditions environmental policies can offer benefits for the regulated companies.

• Fernández-i-Marín, Xavier; Hinterleitner, Markus; Knill, Christoph & Steinebach, Yves (2025). Do Governments Put Their Money Where Their Mouth Is? Policy Adoption And Administrative Resource Provision in 15 OECD Countries. Perspectives on Politics. ISSN 1537-5927. doi: 10.1017/S1537592724001944. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  Government programs often fail because administrative actors receive insufficient financial and personnel resources for their implementation. Despite the importance of resource provision for policy implementation, we know very little about when and why implementers are equipped with the resources they need. We examine the conditions under which new policies go hand in hand with resource increases for the administration. We match data on policy adoptions and budgetary changes in the area of social policy for 15 European countries over 30 years (1990 to 2020). The analysis reveals that governments tend to provide more financial resources when 1) an issue is prominently discussed among parties, and when 2) institutional fragmentation is low. Moreover, governments provide fewer additional resources for policy implementation 3) when their chances of getting re-elected are low due to intense political competition. These findings contribute to our broader understanding of democracy and public administration.

• Fernández-I-Marín, Xavier; Hinterleitner, Markus; Knill, Christoph & Steinebach, Yves (2025). When Less Means More: Policy Accumulation, Administrative Capacities, and Policy Performance. The Economists' Voice. doi: 10.1515/ev-2025-0003. Full text in Research Archive
• Kaplaner, Constantin; Knill, Christoph & Steinebach, Yves (2025). Administrative Overload and Policy Triage: Causal evidence from the Introduction of the Acid Rain Program in the United States. Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory (JPART). ISSN 1053-1858. 35(4), p. 422–433. doi: 10.1093/jopart/muaf020. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  Recent research suggests that additional public policies can sometimes decrease overall policy effectiveness rather than improve the problem-solving capacity of the state. This occurs when new policies are not supported by additional administrative capacities, leading to an overburdened administration. Public authorities handle the increased workload by employing “policy triage,” which involves reallocating resources among different policies. Despite this straightforward argument, a systematic understanding of these dynamics is lacking in the existing literature. This paper addresses this by examining the US Environmental Protection Agency’s introduction of the Acid Rain Program. Utilizing a difference-in-differences analysis, it reveals a significant reduction in inspections for industrial sites not covered by the Acid Rain Program as administrators redirected enforcement efforts. These findings, robust against various alternative explanations, highlight the inherent trade-offs in the public sector when policy and administrative expansions are not considered together. To assess broader relevance, we complement our analysis with twenty-eight interviews in Germany, Italy, and Portugal, showing that policy triage is a common response to administrative overload across diverse institutional contexts.

• Steinebach, Yves; Knill, Christoph & Casula, Mattia (2025). Policy Growth and Its Impacts on Policy Implementation: Changes, Challenges and Chances. Regulation & Governance. ISSN 1748-5983. 19(3), p. 601–606. doi: 10.1111/rego.70041. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  In this Special Issue titled “Policy Growth and Its Impacts on Policy Implementation,” we present a collection of articles examining the relationship between the policy growth and policy implementation. The issue is organized around three key themes: changes, challenges, and chances. In the “changes” section, we feature scholarly work that investigates how policy growth influences the evolution of implementation structures and practices. The “challenges” section offers analyses on how the increasing complexity and volume of policies affect the effectiveness and operational practices of public authorities. Finally, the “chances” section highlights strategies that can be employed to manage policy growth and thus bolster countries' implementation capabilities. By addressing these issues, we contribute to various strands of literature, including studies on ungovernability, policy growth, policy implementation, and street-level bureaucracy. In this introduction, we underscore our contributions to these areas of research and provide a brief overview of the within this Special Issue contributions structured around the three core themes.

• Knill, Christoph; Hinterleitner, Markus; Fernandez-i-Marin, Xavier & Steinebach, Yves (2024). More Liberty, More Rules? Abortion Policy and the Liberalization-Rule Nexus. Comparative Political Studies. ISSN 0010-4140. 58(12), p. 2654–2681. doi: 10.1177/00104140241302771. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  While conventional wisdom often equates liberalization with deregulation, theoretical arguments from different scientific backgrounds suggest that states tend to increase their rule stock when they adopt more liberal policies. This article studies the case of abortion policy to better understand the liberalization-rule nexus. By examining data from 25 countries over 50years, we empirically assess the dynamics between liberalization events and corresponding regulatory changes. Our findings reveal that while the majority of countries does indeed introduce more rules upon liberalizing abortion, the extent of these regulatory changes varies considerably. The analysis suggests that the extent of rule growth depends on the conflicts that characterize liberalization processes in particular countries and time periods. Right-leaning governments, religious groups and institutional veto players are shown to have a positive influence on rule growth. On the contrary, higher levels of liberalization reduce the necessity for additional rules. By illuminating a contested empirical relationship, the article helps to better understand the implications of liberalization in modern democracies.

• Heinrich, Carmen; Knill, Christoph & Steinebach, Yves (2024). Analyzing industrial policy portfolios. Policy sciences. ISSN 0032-2687. 58, p. 97–109. doi: 10.1007/s11077-024-09559-0. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  Industrial policy has regained political attention due to the challenges associated with global market integration, technological changes, and the need for sustainable transformation. However, the lack of a consistent understanding of industrial policy hampers systematic comparisons. This paper develops a novel concept of industrial policy portfolios that captures different dimensions of industrial policy outputs across countries and over time. We illustrate this approach by comparing the policy dynamics in the United States and Germany over the last four decades and show that despite similar dynamics of policy growth, the countries display pronounced variation in the areas and instruments they prioritized.

• Lenz, Alexa; Steinebach, Yves & Casula, Mattia (2024). Mapping bureaucratic overload: Dynamics and drivers in media coverage across three European countries. Regulation & Governance. ISSN 1748-5983. 19(3), p. 618–636. doi: 10.1111/rego.12606. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  Bureaucratic overburdening has emerged as an important theme in public policy and administration research. The concept signifies a state where public administrators are overwhelmed with more tasks and responsibilities than they can effectively handle. Researchers attribute this phenomenon to several key factors, such as an increasing assault on the public sector, a growing volume of policies to enforce, and “external” shocks. These studies converge on the perception that the public sector's capacity to effectively implement policies and to address societal problems is progressively diminishing. However, there is a clear knowledge gap regarding the breadth, dynamics, and pervasiveness of this issue, as existing research often narrows its focus on the implementation of specific policies or policy sectors. This paper addresses this research gap by mapping the frequency of bureaucratic overload reports in newspaper articles from Italy, Ireland, and Germany, spanning two decades from 2003 to 2022. In the second step, we describe the drivers of overload that we coded in a random sample of articles. Our research reveals that the overburdening of public administration is indeed an escalating problem resulting from an “explosive” cocktail of external and internal challenges that simultaneously affect public authorities.

• Bhuwania, Pragya; Chen, Jidong & Steinebach, Yves (2024). On Concepts, Analytics, and Statistics in Comparative Policy Studies: An Introduction from the New Section Editors. Journal of Comparative Policy Analysis. ISSN 1387-6988. doi: 10.1080/13876988.2024.2376894. Full text in Research Archive
• Steinebach, Yves; Hinterleitner, Markus; Knill, Christoph & Fernandez-i-Marin, Xavier (2024). A review of national climate policies viaexisting databases. npj Climate Action. 3. doi: 10.1038/s44168-024-00160-y. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  Various databases have been developed to track national climate policy efforts. These datasets facilitate comparisons across countries regarding policy activity, instrument choice, and policy effectiveness. This article evaluates these datasets to see whether they converge in their observations about climate policy development. Our findings reveal that all datasets agree at the aggregate level in that they show that ever-more climate policies are being adopted. However, they diverge significantly when scrutinizing more nuanced elements like policy instrument types and their stringency. The main contributions of our review are to highlight what research endeavors are already possible with existing datasets and to identify the gaps that still remain. We also provide concrete suggestions on how to enhance the existing datasets, making them more useful for social science research on climate policy. The article provides the most comprehensive and up-to-date source for scholars and practitioners interested in the comparative analysis of governmental climate policy efforts.

• Steinebach, Yves; Hinterleitner, Markus & Fernandez-i-Marin, Xavier (2024). Regulatory offsetting in advanced democracies. Public Administration Review. ISSN 0033-3352. 85(5), p. 1398–1411. doi: 10.1111/puar.13887. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  The growth of rules in modern democracies burdens citizens, businesses, and administrative bodies. To address this, many governments have implemented so-called “regulatory offsetting schemes,” requiring the removal of existing rules and regulations for each new one introduced. However, systematic knowledge on which countries have adopted these schemes and their specific designs remains lacking. Our study maps regulatory offsetting initiatives across OECD states and offers a first theoretical framework for understanding government adoption. While political and ideational factors influence the adoption of offsetting schemes, they do not explain their specific design. Offsetting schemes thus reflect the political tensions between advocates for an activist state and supporters of a more restrained government, with design being of secondary importance. These findings enhance our understanding of how governments and public administrations manage rule growth.

• Eckert, Sandra; Steinebach, Yves & Karassin, Orr (2024). A policy portfolio approach to plastics throughout their life cycle: Supranational and national regulation in the European Union. Environmental Policy and Governance. ISSN 1756-932X. 34(4), p. 427–441. doi: 10.1002/eet.2092. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  The environmental and health problems caused by plastics throughout their life cycle have attracted considerable public attention over the past decade, triggering policy responses in many constituencies. Similarly, interdisciplinary research on plastics has been burgeoning in the past few years, and political science contributions have covered the manifold root causes and consequences of this shift in public policy including media coverage, evolving discourses and policy agendas. In view of this policy relevance that drives scholarly inquiry, it is surprising that we lack a systematic assessment of the actual policy outputs. This article fills this lacuna by developing a policy portfolio approach to plastic regulation. To illustrate and substantiate our approach, we provide an exploratory analysis of EU plastics regulation over the last twenty years, complementing this with Denmark, Germany, and Poland as diverse cases of member state regulation. Overall, our research shows that the number of policy measures targeting plastics has massively increased both at the supranational and national level. This policy growth, however, varies across policy targets and instruments. Our findings highlight first, that the policy targets addressed are mainly located at the end of the plastics life cycle; and second, that the instrument choice is privileging the use of hierarchical forms of intervention over the use of market- or information-based instruments. We discuss these features of the policy portfolio approach in light of existing research on plastics and life-cycle-oriented policy approaches such as the Circular Economy.

• Zink, Dionys; Knill, Christoph & Steinebach, Yves (2024). Bureaucratic overload and organizational policy triage: A comparative study of implementation agencies in five European countries. Regulation & Governance. ISSN 1748-5983. 19(3), p. 637–655. doi: 10.1111/rego.12581. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  Research on policy implementation traditionally has focused on understanding the success or failure of individual policies within specific contexts. Little attention has been given to the challenges that emerge from the cumulative growth of policy portfolios over time. This paper is addressing this research gap by examining the phenomenon of organizational policy triage, which occurs when implementation organizations face overload and are forced to make trade-off decisions between the implementation of the different policies in their portfolios. We investigate empirical patterns of policy triage across 16 social and environmental implementation agencies in five European countries (Denmark, Germany, Ireland, Italy, and UK). We show that variation in policy triage can be explained by the combination of three central factors: blame-shifting opportunities, the mobilization of external resources, and the commitment to compensate for overload by implementation authorities.

• Fernández-i-Marín, Xavier; Hinterleitner, Markus; Knill, Christoph & Steinebach, Yves (2024). Testing theories of policy growth: public demands, interest group politics, electoral competition, and institutional fragmentation. Journal of European Public Policy. ISSN 1350-1763. 32(3), p. 784–809. doi: 10.1080/13501763.2024.2317358. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  Policy growth is a ubiquitous feature of modern democracies that has attracted increased attention in political science and beyond. However, the literature is characterised by considerable disagreement on why policy growth occurs. Existing explanations centre on the influence of (1) public demands, (2) interest group politics, (3) electoral competition, and (4) institutional fragmentation. While all four explanations are plausible, there are no studies that assess their relative explanatory power within a single empirical analysis. This article provides such an analysis by examining the drivers of policy growth in 21 OECD countries from 1976 to 2020 in the area of environmental policy. We identify strong ties between organised interests and the government as the primary driver of policy growth. Public demands and institutional fragmentation are relevant but comparatively less important factors, while the intensity of electoral competition has no influence on policy growth. These findings have important implications for our understanding of the functioning of democracy in the long run.

• Knill, Christoph; Steinbacher, Christina; Steinebach, Yves & Trein, Philipp (2024). Policy growth and maintenance in comparative perspective. Regulation & Governance. ISSN 1748-5983. 19(3), p. 675–689. doi: 10.1111/rego.12611. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  Policy growth comes with multiple challenges for policy implementation. Congested policy portfolios increase the likelihood of interactions and contradictions between different policy objectives and instruments. Moreover, policy growth can lead to difficulties during implementation when many public and private organizations must cooperate and manage increasing complexity and overlapping responsibilities. Consequently, policy growth should ideally be accompanied by maintenance activities, namely institutional reforms aimed at (1) preventing policy contradictions, or (2) improving administrative coordination. We test this relationship through a comparative analysis that examines the level of policy growth and maintenance activities in 13 OECD countries in environmental and unemployment policy over 35 years. We find that policy growth and maintenance activities are not systematically linked but occur independently, even when controlling for the influence of moderating factors such as government effectiveness or the presence of veto players. Consequently, modern governments seem to struggle with managing the downsides of policy growth.

• Limberg, Julian; Steinebach, Yves & Nyrup, Jacob (2024). Dedicated climate ministries help to reduce carbon emissions. npj Climate Action. 3. doi: 10.1038/s44168-024-00147-9. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  Several countries have introduced dedicated national climate ministries in the last two decades. However, we know little about the consequences of these ministries. We demonstrate that the introduction of climate ministries helps to reduce carbon emissions. A difference-in-differences analysis of a global sample of countries reveals robust and statistically significant evidence that introducing a dedicated climate ministry lowers carbon emissions substantially. At the same time, establishing such climate ministries does not significantly influence the introduction of new climate policies. This indicates that climate ministries primarily amplify climate action by improving the effectiveness of the governmental measures taken rather than by increasing the number of climate policies themselves.

• Fernandez-i-Marin, Xavier; Hinterleitner, Markus; Knill, Christoph & Steinebach, Yves (2023). Bureaucratic overburdening in advanced democracies. Public Administration Review. ISSN 0033-3352. 84(4), p. 696–709. doi: 10.1111/puar.13725. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  Constant policy growth can overburden bureaucracies if implementation capacities are not expanded in lockstep with policy production. This development may undermine policy effectiveness and hence the long-term legitimacy of democracies. This article provides a systematic analysis of this phenomenon. We demonstrate that (i) overburdening is a general trend in advanced democracies; (ii) the extent of overburdening varies by the institutional context in which policy makers operate; and that, in consequence, (iii) countries' bureaucracies differ in their distance (or closeness) to the “tipping point” after which additional policies do more harm than good. We provide information on the ratio between the policies up for implementation and the bureaucratic capacities available for 21 OECD countries over a period of 45 years (1976–2020), focusing on the areas of environmental and social policy as two major areas of governmental intervention. Bayesian analyses and background interviews serve to illuminate the reasons for and consequences of overburdened bureaucracies.

• Hurka, Steffen; Knill, Christoph & Steinebach, Yves (2023). Rules as policy data? Measuring and linking policy substance and legislative context. Regulation & Governance. ISSN 1748-5983. 18(3), p. 724–739. doi: 10.1111/rego.12528. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  There is growing scholarly interest in analyzing changes in policies, laws, and regulations. Some concepts depart from the goal of identifying changes in policy substance. Other contributions have concentrated on the structural characteristics of laws and regulations containing these substantive changes. Extracting measures of policy substance from legislative texts is a challenging and time-consuming endeavor as it requires the manual assessment and coding of legal acts. The assessment of the structural characteristics of laws and regulations, by contrast, can be done applying automated natural language processing. An important critical question is, thus, whether we can combine these approaches and simplify the information extraction by inferring changes in the policy substance from the legislative context in which these changes are embedded. Examining more than 100 legal acts in the area of EU environmental and climate policy, we find that the measures capturing policy substance and the structural characteristics of legal acts context are not systematically linked. In other words: changes in the structural features of legal acts cannot be used as an approximation for changes in policy substance. We conclude by sketching out a research agenda when (and when not) to use the different concepts and related measurements.

• Kaplaner, Constantin & Steinebach, Yves (2023). Coping practices and the spatial dimension of authority design. Public Administration Review. ISSN 0033-3352. 84(1), p. 86–99. doi: 10.1111/puar.13654. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  Frontline implementers develop coping practices to deal with implementation burdens. Unfortunately, we have only limited knowledge of how widespread and systematic these practices are applied. This paper provides a comprehensive analysis of the enforcement activities carried out in the context of the European Union Industrial Emission Directive, relying on a quantitative data set that summarizes the information from more than 2000 inspection reports published by the German state Baden-Württemberg. Our analysis reveals that inspectors tend to give priority to sites that (1) are closer and easier to reach and (2) that pose only a small risk to their environment. These findings indicate that implementers are primarily guided by concerns over the quantitative rather than the qualitative aspects of their work. These insights highlight that public authorities' spatial location is a crucial, yet still unexplored factor in the study of policy implementation.

• Fernández-i-Marín, Xavier; Knill, Christoph; Steinbacher, Christina & Steinebach, Yves (2023). Bureaucratic Quality and the Gap between Implementation Burden and Administrative Capacities. American Political Science Review. ISSN 0003-0554. 118(3), p. 1240–1260. doi: 10.1017/S0003055423001090. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  Democratic governments produce more policies than they can effectively implement. Yet, this gap between the number of policies requiring implementation and the administrative capacities available to do so is not the same in all democracies but varies across countries and sectors. We argue that this variation depends on the coupling of the sectoral bureaucracies in charge of policy formulation and those in charge of policy implementation. We consider these patterns of vertical policy-process integration an important feature of bureaucratic quality. The more the policymaking level is involved in policy implementation (top-down integration) and the easier the policy-implementing level finds it to feed its concerns into policymaking (bottom-up integration), the smaller the so-called “burden-capacity gap.” We demonstrate this effect through an empirical analysis in 21 OECD countries over a period of more than 40 years in the areas of social and environmental policies.

• Fernandez-i-Marin, Xavier; Knill, Christoph & Steinebach, Yves (2023). Do parties matter for policy accumulation? An analysis of social policy portfolios in 22 countries. European Journal of Political Research. ISSN 0304-4130. 63(3), p. 1175–1196. doi: 10.1111/1475-6765.12642. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  This article analyses the role of political parties in policy accumulation. We study this relationship in the area of social policy. Our analysis builds on a large data set covering the size of policy portfolios (policy targets and instruments) in three subfields of social policy for 22 OECD countries over 30 years. We find that the probability of social policy accumulation is not affected by the government's ideological position. Left governments do not produce more extensive social policy portfolios than right ones. Yet, this striking result does not contradict governments’ political ideologies, as left and right parties accumulate for different reasons. While left parties address new social policy targets to broaden the scope of the welfare state, right parties adopt new policy instruments to condition social benefits. These findings hold regardless of how we measure governments’ ideological position and despite strong endogenous policy growth dynamics, that is, countries with greater policy portfolios also display higher levels of policy accumulation. Our findings indicate that party political considerations can explain the reasons for but not the level of policy accumulation. Changes in government are thus unlikely to stall or slow down the constant accumulation of public policies.

• Kaplaner, Constantin; Knill, Christoph & Steinebach, Yves (2023). Policy integration in the European Union: mapping patterns of intersectoral policy-making over time and across policy sectors. Journal of European Public Policy. ISSN 1350-1763. 32(1), p. 26–51. doi: 10.1080/13501763.2023.2288932. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  Policy integration has become an important principle guiding public policy development. Despite its prominence, we lack comprehensive knowledge of the exact degree of policy integration and its variation across policy sectors and time, mainly due to the lack of systematic measurement approaches. We address this shortcoming by (1) developing a novel measure that evaluates the intersectorality of legal acts and (2) assessing its development in the European Union over four decades (1977–2019) for 16 policy sectors. Our mapping reveals that, on average, intersectoral policy-making has increased since the 1990s with the most substantial rise during the Barroso I and II Commissions and a trend reversal after Juncker took office in 2014. Furthermore, we identify substantial variation in intersectoral policy-making between different policy areas reflecting varying levels of political attention and public salience. We deem our measurement concept and findings to have important implications for the study of policy integration in general and the study of EU policies in particular.

• Fernández-i-Marín, Xavier; Hinterleitner, Markus; Knill, Christoph & Steinebach, Yves (2023). Policy growth, implementation capacities, and the effect on policy performance. Governance. An International Journal of Policy, Administration and Institutions. ISSN 0952-1895. 37(3), p. 927–945. doi: 10.1111/gove.12816. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  Democratic governments have constantly added new policies to existing policy stocks to confront societal, economic, and environmental challenges. This development has the potential to overburden public administrations in charge of policy implementation. To address this issue, we theorize and analyze how the relationship between the size of sectoral policy portfolios and implementation capacities affects sectoral policy performance. Our Bayesian analysis of the environmental policies of 21 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development countries from 1976 to 2020 reveals a widening “gap” between the policies up for implementation and the implementation capacities available and shows that this gap negatively affects environmental policy performance. Qualitative insights from 47 in-depth interviews with implementers validate these findings and shed light on the underlying causal processes. Our findings suggest that in advanced democracies transforming additional policies into effective problem-solving crucially hinges on the deliberate expansion of implementation capacities.

• Aschenbrenner, Christian; Knill, Christoph & Steinebach, Yves (2023). Autocracies and policy accumulation: the case of Singapore. Journal of Public Policy. ISSN 0143-814X. 43(4), p. 637–658. doi: 10.1017/S0143814X2300017X. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  The tendency of vote-seeking politicians to produce ever-more policies in response to the citizens’ demands has been identified as a central driver of the process of “policy accumulation.” If we accept this premise, policy accumulation should be a central feature of modern democracies but overall be less pronounced in autocracies. Due to its highly ambivalent nature, policy accumulation and its implications may thus constitute an important but so far neglected facets of the new system competition between democracies and autocracies. In this article, we test this argument in the context of the authoritarian regime of Singapore. Singapore is one of the very few autocracies that display elements of political competition and has a level of socio-economic development that is comparable to advanced democracies. Singapore thus constitutes a least-likely case for low levels of policy accumulation. By studying changes in Singapore’s environmental policy over a period of more than four decades (1976 to 2020) and by contrasting the patterns observed with the policy developments in 21 OECD democracies, we find that autocratic regimes do indeed tend to accumulate less than democratic regimes. More precisely, we find that Singapore (1) has only produced about one-fourth of the environmental policy measures of an “average” democracy and (2) is constantly the country with the lowest level of policy accumulation in our sample. These findings hold even when controlling for alternative explanations, such as the effectiveness of the administration and the government’s ability to opt for stricter and more hierarchical forms of intervention.

• Hinterleitner, Markus; Knill, Christoph & Steinebach, Yves (2023). The growth of policies, rules, and regulations: A review of the literature and research agenda. Regulation & Governance. ISSN 1748-5983. 18(2), p. 637–654. doi: 10.1111/rego.12511. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  This article reviews the vibrant literature on policy growth in political science and adjacent disciplines, thus offering a conceptual framework for situating past and future research efforts and facilitating the engagement between them. The first part presents important concepts that capture policy growth or aspects of it (rule growth, policy layering, policy mixes, policy accumulation, policyscapes, the policy state) and dominant measurement approaches. The second part provides an overview of the main drivers of policy growth in advanced democracies, discussing the role of societal demands, political competition, institutional fragmentation, and bureaucratic processes. The third part outlines the multi-faceted and far-reaching consequences of policy growth for policy, politics, and the polity. While policy growth is often portrayed as the price to pay for upholding the democratic capitalist order in constantly modernizing and diversifying societies, the existing research also points to the negative consequences emanating from increased state activity. Policy growth not only threatens to overburden bureaucracies and thereby undermine policy effectiveness; it may also transform the institutional structure of the democratic state and make its politics more complicated and conflictual.

• Knill, Christoph; Steinebach, Yves & Zink, Dionys (2023). How policy growth affects policy implementation: bureaucratic overload and policy triage. Journal of European Public Policy. ISSN 1350-1763. 31(2), p. 324–351. doi: 10.1080/13501763.2022.2158208. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  While policies pile up in modern democracies, the effect of policy growth on policy implementation has not been addressed so far. Implementation research has focused on individual policies instead of studying the challenges implementation organizations face in dealing with growing policy stocks. In this paper, we address this research gap in three ways. First, we introduce the novel concept of organizational ‘policy triage’ which captures implementation effectiveness from an organizational rather than a policy-based perspective. Second, we develop a theoretical framework to account for variations in the prevalence of policy triage across organizations. We argue that policy triage is affected by the interplay of several factors related to (1) organizational overload vulnerability and (2) organizational overload compensation. Third, we provide an initial empirical test of our conceptual and theoretical considerations through four comparative case studies on environmental policy implementation in Ireland and England.

• Steinebach, Yves & Knill, Christoph (2022). Comparative Studies of Public Administration and Public Policy beyond the Nation State. Journal of Comparative Policy Analysis. ISSN 1387-6988. 24(3), p. 201–209. doi: 10.1080/13876988.2021.1958658. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  International organizations (IOs) and their bureaucracies are more and more recognized as important players in public policy-making and -implementation beyond the nation state. Despite substantial advancement made in the study of IOs and their bureaucracies, there are still some issues that have remained fairly understudied. We largely lack, for instance, scholarly contributions that cover multiple cases and that focus on aspects that go beyond the structural characteristics of IOs such as their delegated authority or mandate. The central objective of this Special Issue is to highlight and address this research gap. To do so, it brings together various scholarly contributions that compare multiple IOs and study aspects of international public administrations and public policy that have not been on the analytical radar so far.

• Steinebach, Yves (2022). Implementing market mechanisms in the Paris era: the importance of bureaucratic capacity building for international climate policy. Journal of European Public Policy. ISSN 1350-1763. doi: 10.1080/13501763.2021.1925330. Full text in Research Archive
• Bayerlein, Louisa; Kaplaner, Constantin; Knill, Christoph & Steinebach, Yves (2022). Singing together or apart? Comparing policy agenda dynamics within international organizations. Journal of Comparative Policy Analysis. ISSN 1387-6988. doi: 10.1080/13876988.2020.1813031. Full text in Research Archive
• Steinebach, Yves (2022). Administrative traditions and the effectiveness of regulation. Journal of European Public Policy. ISSN 1350-1763. doi: 10.1080/13501763.2022.2070240. Full text in Research Archive
• Fernández-i-Marín, Xavier; Hurka, Steffen; Knill, Christoph & Steinebach, Yves (2022). Systemic Dynamics of Policy Change: Overcoming Some Blind Spots of Punctuated Equilibrium Theory. Policy Studies Journal (PSJ). ISSN 0190-292X. 50(3), p. 473–724. doi: 10.1111/psj.12379. Full text in Research Archive
• Kaplaner, Constantin & Steinebach, Yves (2022). Why We Should Use the Gini Coefficient to Assess Punctuated Equilibrium Theory. Political Analysis. ISSN 1047-1987. 30(3), p. 450–455. doi: 10.1017/pan.2021.25. Full text in Research Archive
• Steinebach, Yves & Knill, Christoph (2022). What has happened and what has not happened due to the coronavirus disease pandemic: a systemic perspective on policy change. Policy and Society: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Policy Research. ISSN 1449-4035. 41(1), p. 25–38. doi: 10.1093/polsoc/puab008. Full text in Research Archive
• Limberg, Julian; Steinebach, Yves & Knill, Christoph (2022). Condemned to complexity? Growing state activity and complex policy systems. Governance. An International Journal of Policy, Administration and Institutions. ISSN 0952-1895. doi: 10.1111/gove.12684. Full text in Research Archive
• Christian, Adam; Hurka, Steffen; Knill, Christoph & Steinebach, Yves (2021). On democratic intelligence and failure: The vice and virtue of incrementalism under political fragmentation and policy accumulation. Governance. An International Journal of Policy, Administration and Institutions. ISSN 0952-1895. doi: 10.1111/gove.12595. Full text in Research Archive
• Fernandez-i-Marin, Xavier; Knill, Christoph & Steinebach, Yves (2021). Studying policy design quality in comparative perspective. American Political Science Review. ISSN 0003-0554. doi: 10.1017/S0003055421000186. Full text in Research Archive
• Limberg, Julian; Steinebach, Yves; Bayerlein, Louisa & Knill, Christoph (2021). The more the better? Rule growth and policy impact from a macro perspective. European Political Science Review. ISSN 1755-7739. doi: 10.1111/1475-6765.12406. Full text in Research Archive
• Knill, Christoph; Steinbacher, Christina & Steinebach, Yves (2021). Balancing Trade‐Offs between Policy Responsiveness and Effectiveness: The Impact of Vertical Policy‐Process Integration on Policy Accumulation. Public Administration Review. ISSN 0033-3352. doi: 10.1111/puar.13274. Full text in Research Archive
• Eckhard, Steffen & Steinebach, Yves (2021). Staff recruitment and geographical representation in international organizations. International Review of Administrative Sciences. ISSN 0020-8523. doi: 10.1177/00208523211031379. Full text in Research Archive
• Eckhard, Steffen & Steinebach, Yves (2021). Le recrutement du personnel et la représentation géographique dans les organisations internationales. Revue Internationale des Sciences Administratives. ISSN 0303-965X. doi: 10.3917/risa.874.0607. Full text in Research Archive
• Steinebach, Yves; Fernández-i-Marín, Xavier & Aschenbrenner, Christian (2021). Who puts a price on carbon, why and how? A global empirical analysis of carbon pricing policies. Climate Policy. ISSN 1469-3062. doi: 10.1080/14693062.2020.1824890. Full text in Research Archive
• Knill, Christoph; Steinbacher, Christina & Steinebach, Yves (2021). Sustaining statehood: A comparative analysis of vertical policy-process integration in Denmark and Italy. Public Administration. ISSN 0033-3298. doi: 10.1111/padm.12705. Full text in Research Archive
• Hurka, Steffen & Steinebach, Yves (2021). Legal Instrument Choice in the European Union. Journal of Common Market Studies. ISSN 0021-9886. doi: 10.1111/jcms.13068. Full text in Research Archive
• Knill, Christoph & Steinebach, Yves (2021). Crises as driver of policy accumulation: Regulatory change and ratcheting in German asylum policies between 1975 and 2019. Regulation & Governance. ISSN 1748-5983. doi: 10.1111/rego.12379. Full text in Research Archive
• Knill, Christoph & Steinebach, Yves (2020). Hypocrisy as a crisis response? Assessing changes in talk, decisions, and actions of the European Commission in EU environmental policy. Public Administration. ISSN 0033-3298. doi: 10.1111/padm.12542. Full text in Research Archive
• Steinebach, Yves (2019). Instrument choice, implementation structures, and the effectiveness of environmental policies: A cross-national analysis. Regulation & Governance. ISSN 1748-5983. 16(1), p. 225–242. doi: 10.1111/rego.12297. Full text in Research Archive
• Steinebach, Yves (2019). Water quality and the effectiveness of European Union policies. Water. doi: 10.3390/w11112244. Full text in Research Archive
• Adam, Christian; Hurka, Steffen; Knill, Christoph; Peters, B. Guy & Steinebach, Yves (2019). Introducing vertical policy coordination to comparative policy analysis: The missing link between policy production and implementation. Journal of Comparative Policy Analysis. ISSN 1387-6988. doi: 10.1080/13876988.2019.1599161. Full text in Research Archive
• Steinebach, Yves; Knill, Christoph & Jordana, Jacint (2019). Austerity or welfare state transformation? Examining the impact of economic crises on social regulation in Europe. Regulation & Governance. ISSN 1748-5983. Full text in Research Archive
• Steinebach, Yves & Knill, Christoph (2018). Social policies during economic crises: an analysis of cross-national variation in coping strategies from 1980 to 2013. Journal of European Public Policy. ISSN 1350-1763. doi: 10.1080/13501763.2017.1336565. Full text in Research Archive
• Adam, Christian; Knill, Christoph & Steinebach, Yves (2018). Neglected challenges to evidence-based policy-making: The problem of policy accumulation. Policy sciences. ISSN 0032-2687. doi: 10.1007/s11077-018-9318-4. Full text in Research Archive
• Steinebach, Yves & Knill, Christoph (2017). Social Policy in Hard Times: Crisis-Coping Strategies in Europe from 1976 to 2013. International Journal of Public Administration. ISSN 0190-0692. doi: 10.1080/01900692.2017.1317802. Full text in Research Archive
• Steinebach, Yves & Knill, Christoph (2017). Still an entrepreneur? The changing role of the European Commission in EU environmental policy-making. Journal of European Public Policy. ISSN 1350-1763. doi: 10.1080/13501763.2016.1149207. Full text in Research Archive

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• Knill, Christoph & Steinebach, Yves (2022). International Public Administrations in Global Public Policy. Routledge. ISBN 9781003323297. Full text in Research Archive
• Bayerlein, Louisa; Knill, Christoph & Steinebach, Yves (2020). A Matter of Style? Organizational Agency in Global Public Policy. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 9781108836371. Full text in Research Archive
• Adam, Christian; Hurka, Steffen; Knill, Christoph & Steinebach, Yves (2019). Policy accumulation and the democratic responsiveness trap. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 9781108481199. Full text in Research Archive

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• Bach, Tobias & Steinebach, Yves (2026). How to Organize Government to Address Cross-Cutting Policy Issues. Full text in Research Archive
• Knill, Christoph; Steinebach, Yves & Fernandez-i-Marin, Xavier (2024). Political institutions and public policy. In Vatter, Adrian & Freiburghaus, Rahel (Ed.), Handbook of Comparative Political Institutions. Edward Elgar Publishing. ISSN 9781803929088. doi: 10.4337/9781803929095.00036. Full text in Research Archive
• Knill, Christoph & Steinebach, Yves (2022). How and How Much Do International Public Administrations Matter?: Patterns and Sources of Their Influence in Global Public Policy, International Public Administrations in Global Public Policy. Routledge. ISSN 9781003323297. Full text in Research Archive
• Knill, Christoph; Steinebach, Yves & Bayerlein, Louisa (2022). How Administrative Styles Matter: International Public Administrations as Agents in Global Public Policy, International Public Administrations in Global Public Policy. Routledge. ISSN 9781003323297. Full text in Research Archive
• Steinebach, Yves; Knill, Christoph; Kaplaner, Constantin & Bayerlein, Louisa (2022). Bureaucratic Agency and Policy Performance in International Organizations, International Public Administrations in Global Public Policy. Routledge. ISSN 9781003323297. Full text in Research Archive
• Knill, Christoph & Steinebach, Yves (2022). Introduction: International Public Administrations in Global Public Policy, International Public Administrations in Global Public Policy. Routledge. ISSN 9781003323297. Full text in Research Archive
• Knill, Christoph; Steinebach, Yves; Adam, Christian & Hurka, Steffen (2020). Policy dismantling, accumulation and performance. In Capano, Giliberto & Howlett, Michael (Ed.), A Modern Guide to Public Policy. Edward Elgar Publishing. ISSN 9781789904970. Full text in Research Archive
• Knill, Christoph; Steinbacher, Christina & Steinebach, Yves (2019). Policy Integration: Challenges for Public Administrationlocked. In Thompson, William R. (Eds.), Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Politics. Oxford University Press. ISSN 9780190228637. doi: 10.1093/acrefore/9780190228637.013.1413. Full text in Research Archive

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