Why Government Fails So Often: And How It Can Do Better (15 page)

Less remarked but perhaps even more relevant to government performance is how this heavy reliance on private, independent
campaign support reduces the control by candidates and parties of their campaign messages and strategies and thus their political behavior once in office. As candidates swiftly learn where their bread is now buttered, the new system encourages them to be freelance entrepreneurs rather than party loyalists, which weakens party influence over politicians. Moreover, the growing frequency, competitiveness, and cost of primary and general election battles have not only increased the level of conflict within Congress and between it and the presidency; they have also made elected politicians, and the agency policy makers they influence, more accountable and sensitive to shifts in voter sentiment—shifts that the parties are less able to mediate. Arguably, this more exquisite electoral sensitivity is a good thing; it certainly accords with the textbook model of democracy. (I say “arguably” because precisely how free politicians should be of constituent pressures even in a democracy is a perennially difficult question; Edmund Burke’s letter to the electors of Bristol, November 3, 1774, is a classic discussion of this issue.) For present purposes, however, its most noteworthy effect is to render federal policy ever more unstable, mercurial, and inconsistent.

The future of the American party system is uncertain. The proportion of voters who eschew a party affiliation and call themselves independents was about 40 percent in 2011,
⁶³
a record high. Although the share of independents usually drops in presidential election years, the May 2012 figure reached 44 percent (nine points more than at the same stage of the 2008 campaign) before dropping a bit. Nor is party decline peculiar to the United States; it is even more pronounced in Europe.
⁶⁴
The reasons for this decline—and for the concomitant rise of what political scientist Russell Dalton calls “apartisan” voters—are complex and controversial, but one of the causes is the changing media, discussed immediately below.
⁶⁵

How this less representative party system will affect policy making is not yet clear, but several consequences seem likely. Deprived of strong, dependable party structures, legislative politics and public policy will probably be more volatile and unpredictable than before, which will reduce the credibility of government programs even
further, a problem discussed in
chapter 5
. This greater uncertainty will affect party finances and thus campaigning to some extent, while rippling through the rest of the policy system in a variety of other ways.

The relationship between parties and policies is mediated by a distinctive institution: plurality elections (also called “winner-take-all” or “first-past-the-post”), which is the rule in almost all American elections, most notably in the Electoral College for the presidency. This institution profoundly affects politics, parties, and policy making. First, it encourages and fortifies a system of two broadly based parties. This contrasts with systems of proportional representation, common in continental Europe, which usually produce partisan fragmentation in the legislature with arguably more faithful representation of voters’ views but greater instability in the governing coalition. Plurality elections also contrast with majoritarian elections, which award victory only to candidates who win more than 50 percent of the vote (either in the first round or after a runoff election). Second, the plurality system tends to reduce sharp ideological cleavages by inducing minorities to seek a home within the two major parties. These aspects of the system lead to more centrist policies, as the two parties seek to appeal to the “median voter.” Plurality elections, like any electoral system, has its characteristic disadvantages, especially the “wasted votes” of those who either supported a losing candidate and have no party explicitly representing their views in the legislature, or whose votes exceeded what was needed to elect the candidate.
⁶⁶
This feature also tends to reduce voter turnout and to encourage gerrymandering. Third, and perhaps most significant to policy substance, plurality-based two-party systems are much less likely—indeed, one-third as likely according to a study of seventeen large democracies—than proportional representation systems to elect center-left governments that will redistribute wealth to the poor.
⁶⁷
All things considered, the United States has found that plurality elections’ advantages—especially a stable two-party system that tends to absorb most social conflict, that both reflects and promotes political moderation in the electorate, and that therefore avoids extreme public policies—are compelling.

Media
. Even the traditional American media, compared with that in other liberal democracies, is decentralized, locally owned (for newspapers), crowded (for radio and TV stations), competitive, wholly independent of government, and opinionated but largely nonpartisan.
⁶⁸
The “new” web-based media is even more so. Its technologies have rendered the traditional news cycle utterly anachronistic, vastly increasing the opportunities for public influence on policy making rapidly and in a variety of nontraditional forms. Feedback loops, once attenuated, are now almost instantaneous, giving sudden gusts of public opinion outsized influence over politicians’ behavior, reducing officials’ leeways. Using the media to build public support for policies has become more difficult given the public’s greater skepticism about media accuracy and bias and given the media’s greater negativity about politics and politicians.
⁶⁹
These media-related changes may also have made it more difficult for politicians to negotiate compromises, lest they be attacked immediately by partisans in the media before the difficult bargains can be struck.

*
The rule of law is in many ways a public good; everyone benefits from it and none can be denied it (constitutionally). In fact, financial and other barriers exclude many people from accessing the justice system; these barriers have no obvious parallels to national security or clean air (except perhaps for very poor people trapped in a badly polluted environment).

*
Private contracts to reallocate the externality’s costs and benefits more efficiently than these legal mechanisms do may be impeded by transaction costs or equitable concerns. Ronald Coase analyzes this aspect of externalities in “The Problem of Social Cost,”
Journal of Law and Economics
3 (1960): 1–44.

*
As James Madison’s “Federalist No. 51” famously put it, “[T]he great security against a gradual concentration of the several powers in the same department, consists in giving to those who administer each department the necessary constitutional means and personal motives to resist encroachments of the other…. Ambition must be made to counteract ambition.”

CHAPTER 4

The Political Culture of Policy Making

A
government’s political culture—the ensemble of institutions, practices, and attitudes that animate public policy—is in a sense its DNA. Political culture does not wholly predetermine policy outcomes, but it does create very powerful tendencies and constraints on which outcomes are possible and likely. This culture does change over time. The most important examples are attitudes toward ethnic minorities, gay people, and women, and the “new system” of policy making discussed in
chapter 1
. But absent an existential threat such as an all-out war or a deep economic depression, most changes in public policy occur over generations within limits and in forms largely dictated by the political culture.

In every sphere of human activity, of course, the gravitation pull of familiarity is immense. The comforts of routine, illusion, fear of the unknown, and self-satisfaction (even smugness) among most elites reinforce the social status quo. These conservative forces, however, are constantly being challenged and subverted by two related forces: technology and popular culture.
¹
What primarily drives and exploits the relentless dynamism of these two forces is human ingenuity and motivation, expressed through market and nonmarket activity. Popular culture and technology are the spheres in which the passion for tumultuous change that foreigners have long associated with American life is chiefly to be found, and they then transform other, supposedly stable, areas of civil society such as religion.

Political culture could hardly be more different. Where popular culture is dynamic and subversive, political culture is stable and conservative. The former is irreverent and youth-driven, the latter venerates institutions and is cemented by the sheer electoral power of the elderly. Like popular culture, political culture does change, but the pace of that change is glacial, and when it does occur the change agents, exquisitely sensitive to the appeal of stability in this culture, tend to (mis)represent it as continuity. This misrepresentation is most self-conscious in the courts, where a common law tradition frequently creates new rules while concealing these innovations with citation of precedents, disavowals of invention, and other forms of judicial sleight of hand. Politicians have their own techniques for promoting change in the guise of a firm fidelity to the past.

This contrast between the extraordinary dynamism of civil society and the equally remarkable stability, even inertia, of government is by no means a contradiction. Disparate spheres of life often have different cultures and produce different identities; the culture of one’s family life differs from the culture of one’s workplace, political organization, consumer activity, religion, and so forth. This normative and experiential diversity, this protean character of our identity-forming, value-expressing contexts, is characteristic of modernism, which is itself a kind of transcendent metaculture. Our experience of modernism is both liberating (we can take on different roles and identities) and alienating (we struggle to achieve a rooted, integrated personality). Despite the ministrations of psychotherapy, religion, yoga, and other contending suppliers of meaning, it seems inescapable.

The unique culture that shapes our policy making is my chief concern in this chapter. I focus here on ten elements of the culture: (1) constitutionalism, (2) decentralization, (3) protection of individual rights, (4) interest group pluralism, (5) acceptance of social and economic inequality, (6) religion and political moralism, (7) social diversity, (8) populist suspicion of technical expertise and official discretion, (9) public opinion, and (10) civil society.
*
(Another cultural
sphere, the market, is so powerful and pervasive that I devote an entire chapter—
chapter 7
—to it.) These cultural commitments, I believe, help to explain why our public policies fail so often; they are in this sense a large part of the price that we pay for preserving these features of our culture.

Before proceeding, let me clarify the nature of my argument. I do not believe that these features of our political culture represent past choices that are now readily reversible. Quite the contrary: some of these cultural values are constitutionally inscribed and all are so deeply embedded in our national psyche that they are alterable, if at all, only slowly and at the margins, particularly since there is no evidence of any widespread popular wish to repudiate them. Nor do I contend here that these values
should
be abandoned, even on the doubtful assumption that they
could
be. To responsibly support such a change, one would first have to clarify and then assess the complex normative and empirical trade-offs. Such an analysis far exceeds this book’s scope. What I do maintain is that our political culture is one important reason, along with others elaborated in this book, why the United States is a difficult nation to govern effectively.

CONSTITUTIONALISM

As countless commentators on American politics have observed, the Constitution is our civic religion, venerated and constantly appealed to by participants in public debate as the ultimate authority and source of fundamental principles that mark our faith as a people. For purposes of this particular discussion, the important point about the Constitution is that it is exceedingly difficult to amend and thus casts a shadow over policy innovations of certain kinds. For example—and for better or worse—the constitutional principles of federalism, while broadly permissive, limit what the federal government may require the states to do, how and what states may tax, and which judicial remedies they
may provide. The First Amendment severely limits Congress’s power to regulate campaign finance. The Seventeenth Amendment prevents states from imposing term limits on members of Congress. And so forth.

The constitutional restraints on government action influence how the economy, the bureaucracy, the legal system, and the mass media operate, all of which shape and significantly constrain policy makers’ adoption, design, implementation, enforcement, and subsequent revision of government programs. First, the political system is presidential, not parliamentary, yet the Congress is almost certainly the most powerful legislature, both constitutionally and functionally, in the world. Most members of Congress are elected on schedules that are to some degree independent of the presidential election and come from states and districts where local issues often influence the outcome more than does presidential popularity. Congress can reject even the most important presidential proposals without causing a new election to be held, and when there is a new election, the support or opposition that legislative candidates receive from the president ordinarily counts for little, even when the presidential party controls the Congress. If the policy process produces failure, as it too often does, Congress is largely responsible.
²