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...

In modern democracies, policy stocks pile up over time. In many ways policy accumulation reflects societal modernization and progress. However, if policy accumulation is not matched by corresponding expansions in administrative capacities necessary for policy implementation, a negative trade-off...

Principal‐agent theorizing is based on the idea of a linear inverse relationship between principal control and agency slack: the higher the control over the agent, the less likely is the agent to slack. In this paper, we challenge this assumption by explicitly taking the varying nature of...

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...

Oliver Falck, Yuchen Mo Guo und Christian Pfaffl, ifo Institut, berechnen die wirtschaftlichen Nachteile der hohen Bürokratie in Deutschland: Die Kosten durch entgangene Wirtschaftsleistung liegen bei 146 Mrd. Euro pro Jahr. Ein umfassender Bürokratieabbau, kombiniert mit Digitalisierung,...

While much has been written about the European Union (EU), most of the scholarly work is concerned with the developments at the European level. It is only recently, that we observe increasing attempts to address this research deficit. Notwithstanding a growing number of studies explicitly...

This paper is looking at European environmental policy from the "second image reversed" perspective. Specifically, it investigates the conditions under which we see administrative change in the EU member states as a consequence of the implementation of EU environmental policies. We adopt a...

The European Union is becoming a regulatory state with many faces. Classical top-down regulatory policy is joined by less authoritative, less interventionist and more participatory regulatory forms. At least in part, these regulatory experiments are intended to improve the quality of governing...

The process of European integration and policy-making is sometimes rather puzzling. On the one hand, it is well documented that with respect to the implementation of European legislation member states tend to do less than they are supposed to do. On the other hand, it is striking that with...