Research on policy accumulation established the hypothesis about a creeping divergence between implementation burdens and implementation capacity. This paper revisits this hypothesis using improved measures of implementation burden. Using official data on administration and enforcement costs, it finds that policy accumulation does raise implementation stress within the German Statutory Pension Insurance, analyzed as a least‐likely case to do so. This finding supports the “implementation‐gap hypothesis.” More generally, however, the paper serves as a “prove of concept” of how to adopt an epidemiological perspective within implementation research. This perspective is characterized by systematically capturing the changing prevalence of implementation stress within administrative organizations. It enables future research on how to deal with policy growth more effectively by raising awareness for whether and where implementation burden and capacity diverges strongly, and by helping to identify “best practice” cases able to cope with this divergence successfully.

中文翻译：

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更多的政策，更多的工作？德国养老金政策背景下累积实施压力的流行病学评估


对政策积累的研究确立了关于实施负担和实施能力之间逐渐分化的假说。本文使用改进的实施负担测量重新审视了这一假设。使用有关管理和执行成本的官方数据，它发现政策积累确实增加了德国法定养老保险的实施压力，被分析为最不可能这样做的情况。这一发现支持了“实施差距假说”。然而，更一般地说，该论文是如何在实施研究中采用流行病学观点的“概念证明”。这种观点的特点是系统地捕捉行政组织内不断变化的实施压力普遍性。它通过提高对实施负担和能力是否以及在何处存在强烈差异的认识，以及通过帮助确定能够成功应对这种差异的“最佳实践”案例，使未来研究如何更有效地应对政策增长。