Conference Agenda

When crises culminate, political urgency demands that redress protocols are set up to compensate victims. It is not uncommon for these hurriedly designed protocols to demonstrate various policy gaps, resulting in oversights, unexpected delays and injustices (e.g. excessively complex procedures or procedures imposing excessive financial burdens on citizens). The core of our argument is that these policy gaps can lead to a vicious cycle of overburdening, underperformance and administrative limbo. We explore this phenomenon supported by evidence from interviews and secondary data interviews from one Irish and two Dutch crises. We propose that, as policy gaps leave citizens in limbo, the call for both revised protocols and additional protocols increases. The turmoil induced by citizen demands and continuous protocol reform in turn overburdens the agencies tasked with the protocols’ implementation. Ironically, this overburdening worsens citizens’ states of administrative limbo, as citizen applications are delayed further and as frontline civil servants decide to leave an organization in turmoil. With citizens’ already extensive limbo being worsened further, the vicious cycle begins anew. The net result is increased turmoil and failure to adequately address the policy problem. Meanwhile, remaining civil servants are stuck in the middle, dealing with turmoil and overburdening from the top, turmoil from citizen interactions, and turmoil within the organization.

The number and complexity of public administration tasks are constantly growing and increasingly exceed available administrative capacities. This overload necessitates prioritization, a pivotal factor shaping policy outcomes. Surprisingly, the mechanisms and logics of prioritization within public administrations have not yet received sufficient attention in empirical studies. Consequently, this study explores the intersection of political and administrative prioritization in overloaded administrations and seeks to uncover the circumstances and effects of political interference in regular public administration affairs. To address these questions, the study employs a mixed-methods approach, drawing on a dataset of over 100 semi-structured interviews across climate and social policy administrations in five European countries. Contrary to the conventional assumption that policymakers tend to neglect policy implementation, our findings show that political prioritization is more commonplace than exceptional. Furthermore, the paper demonstrates that the interplay between administrative and political prioritization is crucial for the productivity of prioritization in managing overload and achieving policy goals.