The Multitasking State: Investigating Government Activity Across Policy Sectors

Assessments of state activity document a consistent increase in the number of policies that democratic governments adopt. As previous research has shown, governments steadily expand the number of policy sectors and issue areas they cover and adopt ever more rules and regulations within them. Like an expanding farming business then, modern states need to till ever more fields; a situation that requires them to multitask. Multitasking in this context captures a government’s ability to intensify policy activity in one area without losing the capacity to work on other areas. However, we currently know very little about patterns of governmental multitasking across countries and the factors that may explain differences in multitasking. This paper conceptualizes and empirically investigates this increasingly important aspect of state activity. We begin by developing a way of thinking about governmental multitasking that focuses on policy activity across various policy sectors and their interrelations. We then draw on new policy adoption data spanning six policy sectors and 22 OECD countries over several decades to examine how intensified policy activity in one sector affects policy activity in other sectors. We subsequently theorize factors that allow modern democracies to engage in multitasking: administrative capacity, institutional fragmentation, and political polarization. The analysis and results contribute to our understanding of policymaking in modern, policy-heavy democracies.