Responsiveness to societal demands entails policy accumulation, which undermines the ability of democracies to communicate, implement and evaluate public policy.

Christian Adam is an Assistant Professor at the Geschwister Scholl Institute of Political Science at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Munchen. In his research he focuses mostly on issues that lie at the intersection of comparative public policy, judicial politics, and public administration. In this context, his main interests are analyses of the perceived legitimacy of political institutions and their decisions. His research has appeared with internationally renowned publishers and in a number of internationally renowned peer-reviewed journals, such as the Journal of Common Market Studies, The Policy Studies Journal, Policy Sciences, and Public Administration Review.

1. Policy accumulation and the democratic responsiveness trap: 1.1 Accumulation and democratic overload; 1.2 Caught in a responsiveness trap; 1.3 Structure of the book; 2. Policy accumulation: concept and measurement: 2.1 Conceptual challenges; 2.2 Targets and instruments: policy elements as a universal unit of policy accumulation; 2.3 Data and measurement; 3. Policy accumulation: a uniform trend in democratic policy making: 3.1 Empirical patterns of policy accumulation; 3.2 Origins of policy accumulation; 3.3 The (false) promises of contemporary attempts to reverse this trend; 4. The threat to our ability to talk policy, not politics: 4.1 Public policies as complex systems; 4.2 How policy accumulation affects the demandingness of policy debate; 4.3 Towards a representative model of discourse quality; 4.4 The divergence of policy debates; 4.5 Old vs. young policy mixes; 4.6 Implications: addressing the populist challenge; 4.7 Meanwhile, our friend John Doe ...; 4.8 Complex problems, simple conclusions?; 5. The threat to effective and even policy implementation: 5.1 The well-known challenges of policy implementation; 5.2 Policy accumulation and the increasing burdens of implementation; 5.3 The aggregate burdens of policy implementation; 5.4 Structural overload and increasing prevalence of implementation deficits?; 5.5 Meanwhile, our friend John Doe ...; 5.6 Challenges for policy implementation in the twenty-first century; 6. The threat to evidence-based policy making: 6.1 Striving for evidence-based public policy; 6.2 Evaluating policy effectiveness within increasingly complex policy mixes; 6.3 Handling the aggravating independent variable problem; 6.4 So what's the problem?; 6.5 Meanwhile, our friend John Doe ...; 6.6 Implications and conclusions; 7. Ways towards sustainable policy accumulation: 7.1 Why deregulation is not the answer; 7.2 Strengthening our democratic infrastructure; 7.3 How much should we worry?; 7.4 How can we tell? Implications for policy research; 7.5 Policy accumulation beyond politics: implications for organisational research?; 7.6 Final remarks; 8. Appendix; 9. Index; 10. References.