On democratic intelligence and failure: The vice and virtue of incrementalism under political fragmentation and policy accumulation
分析了政治碎片化和政策复杂性增加如何影响渐进主义的价值，指出渐进主义在政治上更有价值，但累积的渐进政策会加重实施负担、使政策辩论更困难、阻碍科学传播，从而威胁有效实施、成熟辩论和循证决策三大治理基石。
Abstract The vice and virtue of incrementalism have been the subject of a long‐standing academic debate. This debate, however, lacks a dynamic perspective that analyzes how the transformation of politics—mainly in the form of increasing levels of political fragmentation within decision‐making arenas and increasing complexity of policy‐mixes—affects the role of incrementalism. We argue that both of these trends make the virtues of incrementalism politically even more valuable than they have always been. At the same time, this proliferation of incrementalism comes at the costs of overlooked second‐order effects. Since the empirical reality of incrementalism is primarily one that results in incremental policy accumulation, it continuously adds implementation burdens, enhances the demandingness of substantive policy debate, and makes effective science communication more difficult. Thereby, accumulative incrementalism becomes one source of pressure on three cornerstones of legitimate governance: effective policy implementation, sophisticated policy debate, and evidence‐based policymaking.