ERC Advanced Grant for Prof. Dr. Christoph Knill

Professor Christoph Knill was successful in the latest round of ERC grants, obtaining an Advanced Grant. The award comes with funding of up to 2.4 million euros. ERC Advanced Grants are aimed at established researchers from all disciplines whose highly innovative work pushes beyond the current frontiers of research and opens up new domains of investigation.

Knills project "An Analysis of Causes and Consequences of Policy Accumulation" (ACCUPOL) starts from the assumption that modern democracies are potentially caught in a responsiveness trap. On the one hand, it can be considered a major asset of democratic governments that they are responsive to societal demands. Citizens claim cleaner environments, better social protection, more and better education, more transparency, or more individual freedoms. Governments typically respond to these demands by adopting new policy outputs, such as laws, regulations or programs. As existing policies are dismantled or terminated only very rarely, over time policy outputs continuously pile up in modern democracies. Policy accumulation hence constitutes a central, yet unexplored feature of modern democracies, regardless of the country or policy sector under study.

Yet, merely adopting new policies reflects nothing but symbolic politics as long as the respective policy outputs do not also reduce the problems that they are supposed to solve. This on the other hand requires an expansion of administrative capacities since policy accumulation directly translates into the accumulation of administrative burdens. As a consequence, there is the risk of an increasing gap between accumulating policies and stagnating or even declining implementation capacities. This scenario indicates the potential responsiveness trap of modern democracies. Any escape therefrom presumes that policy accumulation and implementation capacities must remain in a concerted balance – either by keeping policy accumulation at a ‘sustainable rate’ or by expanding implementation capacities.

It is the central objective of ACCUPOL to systematically investigate both theoretically and empirically whether the above-mentioned responsiveness trap actually exists and to what extent it can be overcome.