Why Government Fails So Often: And How It Can Do Better (19 page)

What is most salient about this religiosity and moralism, for present purposes, is that it raises both the stakes and the heat in policy debates. As participants are determined to vindicate fundamental—even sacred—principles, and as they mobilize politically around these issues, compromise becomes more difficult. Religion also gives many ordinary policy disputes a constitutional dimension; the courts must expound principles under the First Amendment’s free exercise and establishment clauses that even Supreme Court justices lament are opaque, inconsistent, and even unprincipled. Many disputes end up in court, with the relevant public programs having to abide the judicial decisions. Examples of these issues include the use of public funds to promote school choice, institutional dress codes, local zoning disputes, criminal law’s application to exotic religious practices, military and prison discipline, and countless others. Moralism, then, not only animates policy making but is a wild card in the many policy debates that ensue.

SOCIAL DIVERSITY

America is probably the most diverse society on earth, with the possible exception of India.
⁶⁶
This is true regardless of how one thinks about or measures diversity or which kind of diversity is under discussion. Diversity in the United States grows apace despite ostensibly homogenizing factors—national mass media, advertising, popular culture, frequent intermarriage—and sometimes
because
of them. It is growing even in areas like residential housing and elite sectors of the economy in which segregation long existed.

America does more than tolerate diversity. Today, it also views diversity as constitutive of the national mythos and underwrites this by welcoming roughly one million legal immigrants each year. (Canada, a vast, thinly settled land seeking more people, accepts many fewer, but they constitute a much larger share of its much smaller population.) According to sociologist (and immigrant) Orlando
Patterson, America’s embrace of diversity “finds no parallel in any other society or culture in the world today.”
⁶⁷
In truth, diversity has little support outside the United States and Canada; even inside them, acceptance of a diversity ideal is quite recent.

This social diversity is highly advantageous to the policy process, but it also increases political conflict and the difficulty of managing it.
⁶⁸
Many of the policy advantages of diversity parallel those of markets. As we have seen, markets are highly responsive mechanisms for giving effect to individuals’ diverse choices.
*
In a similar way, diverse groups competing for resources, status, and various forms of power benefit society by limiting undue concentrations of political and economic power, increasing accountability by elites, enhancing public participation in decisions that affect them, encouraging innovation, educating public officials about the consequences of their actions, and much more.

Diversity also increases a society’s capacity to learn and to adapt swiftly and creatively to changing conditions.
⁶⁹
(As discussed in
chapter 5
, government tends not to possess this adaptability.) Religious diversity, for example, fostered social learning such as the lessons that the Constitution’s framers took from the long history of religious wars in Europe and intolerance in early America, the role of religions in easing immigrant assimilation, the social reforms for which religious groups campaigned to great effect, and the work of faith-based organizations in providing many essential public goods and social services, which in turn has helped make possible America’s commitment to limited government.

Political diversity also advances social learning. The federal system, for example, both enables and encourages the states and localities to experiment with their own programmatic approaches to a
wide variety of public issues. Louis Brandeis’s now clichéd view of the states as “little laboratories” of social learning is probably even truer today that it was in his time. State-level policy innovations now set the agenda for national debates in a host of policy areas. Examples include term limits, health care regulation, voter registration rules, recent antismoking efforts, gun control, the death penalty, working conditions, environmental standards, tax law, consumer protection, campaign finance, special education, energy deregulation, conservation, school choice, same-sex marriage, and bureaucratic reforms.
⁷⁰
(Of course, simply extrapolating from the experience of one or a few states to the nation as a whole may be methodologically doubtful,
⁷¹
and there are other limits on the efficacy of the “laboratories” model.
⁷²
)

A particularly important instance of diversity-inspired policy learning was Congress’s overhaul in 1996 of the welfare system, which many bitterly denounced when president Bill Clinton agreed to sign it, but is widely hailed as one of the great policy successes of recent decades.
⁷³
This far-reaching reform, discussed in
chapter 11
, followed—both substantively and chronologically—several years of experimentation by several states with a variety of approaches. Some of these experiments became possible only after the Clinton administration granted waivers from federal law requirements that all state programs conform to uniform national standards. In Wisconsin and some other states, these experiments showed promising results in moving welfare recipients into jobs and in reducing their dependency without generating the increased homelessness, child abuse and abandonment, and other indicators of immiseration that most commentators had predicted. Although powerful political pressures would probably have ensured extensive welfare reform in any event, these experiments contributed greatly to the political viability and the specific programmatic content of the 1996 law. States’ policy
failures
can be as influential as their successes in shaping national policy debates.
*

For all its policy advantages, diversity can also be dysfunctional. It can adversely affect group performance in a variety of contexts by interfering with the ability of people to communicate, define common goals, and pursue them effectively. Indeed, the chaos of the Tower of Babel in Genesis made this nonobvious point long before social science confirmed it. Within any particular group—whether public or private, profit or nonprofit—the existence of conflicting views and interests, mobilized by strategic behavior opportunities, magnifies the costs of internal governance, decision making, and collective action. In the extreme, this produces organizational paralysis or failure. Research by political scientist Robert Putnam suggests that diversity can imperil what he calls “bridging social capital,” encouraging people in ethnically diverse communities to withdraw from civic life.
⁷⁴
Indeed, a diversity that is too widespread, too divisive, too inward-looking, and runs too deeply can narrow or dissolve the bonds that make collective action possible.

Pointing to party line voting in Congress, bitter Supreme Court nomination battles, budget impasses, government shutdowns, and a partisan media that has sundered our shared informational base,
⁷⁵
many commentators conclude that the government has reached such a paralytic point. This dire conclusion, however, is highly doubtful. First, the current level of invective and character assassination pales before the politics of the early republic, the antebellum and Civil War eras, and many periods since then,
⁷⁶
yet our political system has endured—indeed flourished—for more than two centuries. Americans’ fervent patriotism, far deeper than in other Western democracies,
⁷⁷
somehow transcends even sharp partisan divisions.

Second, the fact that Americans and their politicians and media are deeply divided on important public policy issues is neither surprising nor worrisome. Inherently complex problems such as
sustaining Medicare, Social Security, and other entitlements in the face of unprecedented demographic and fiscal challenges,
*
do and should engender competing approaches and sharp conflicts. The compromises that are ultimately struck—and they
will
be struck—are inevitably messy, unsatisfying, and, in a sense, inevitably unprincipled. This says more about the difficulty of the issues than about any political pathology.

Third, some prominent political scientists, led by Morris Fiorina, reject what they call “the myth of a polarized America”; the public, they find, is not more polarized than before.
⁷⁸
Other scholars disagree.
⁷⁹
Many voters do live in more ideologically homogeneous communities,
⁸⁰
and the parties and politicians are somewhat more ideological in recent years, but this does not mean that the citizenry as a whole is more sharply divided.

Finally, the nation is more difficult to govern today than in the recent past. This fact, however, has far less to do with social and political diversity than with government’s inability to muster the resources discussed in
chapters 5
and
6
—incentives, rationality, dynamism, and credibility—that are essential to government’s ability to deal effectively with an ever more complex social and policy environment.

POPULIST SUSPICION OF TECHNICAL EXPERTISE AND OFFICIAL DISCRETION

American history and society are laced with populism—the belief that ordinary people, more than elites, are to be trusted with important political decisions. In the United States, and indeed in mass democracies everywhere, bitter resentment and suspicion of powerful groups—banks, large corporations, exclusive universities, “inside the Beltway” politicians and agency bureaucrats, and “establishments” of every kind—always has some political resonance. This resentment sometimes assumes darker conspiratorial tones, as with movements against the putatively powerful: Masons, Jews, the Catholic Church,
“outside agitators,” the “striped pants” State Department, foreign powers, and even the New York Yankees in their juggernaut days.

Populism can have far-reaching policy significance, some of it desirable, much of it undesirable. What is desirable is the faith in democratic self-governance, the conviction that ordinary people can do extraordinary things, and a healthy suspicion of elites. Unfortunately, populism can also go too far. Almost 90 percent of judges in the state systems face some kind of popular election, with thirty-eight states putting all of their judges up before the voters. Almost no other country in the world has ever experimented with the popular election of judges, and there are good reasons to think that judicial elections, particularly in their current form, are an inferior mode of selection than appointments.
⁸¹
Obviously, however, reasonable people (and states) differ on this question.

More worrisome are populist attacks on public health advice by technical experts. Stephen Breyer, before ascending to the Supreme Court, wrote a fine book defending such expertise and analysis in the face of what he saw as widespread mistrust of it in health and safety regulation,
⁸²
only to find it being used against him in the name of populism during his Senate confirmation hearings. More recent and alarming examples are bogus conspiracy theories and fraudulent claims that encourage parents not to immunize their children against the risk of cervical cancer, a leading killer of women, and against the risks of measles, mumps, and rubella, despite unequivocal science supporting use of the human papilloma virus and MMR vaccines, respectively.
⁸³

But the targets of populist suspicions go far beyond scientific expertise and technical analysis; they extend to the exercise of official discretion more generally. Indeed, this hostility to official discretion has always been a major motif in American public law, distinguishing it sharply from European policy making, and is by no means confined to those with populist attitudes. Elites harbor it as well. The history of public law is in substantial part a search to domesticate and legitimate the growing administrative state by instituting various kinds of techniques (many discussed in
chapter 3
) to control official discretion.
This perennial search has had mixed results: greater public participation, more complex and protracted decision processes, and the subordination of expertise to political and judicial controls, among others.
⁸⁴

There are other valid concerns about populism. It can flatter intuition or what passes for simple common sense about public issues that are in fact highly complex, issues that can only be apprehended through careful study and analysis. Politicians are often tempted to pander to this populist strain in our public life; indeed, the trope of “the people against the interests” is a prominent one in almost all political campaigns, even when the candidates who employ it are themselves exceedingly wealthy elites. Finally, populist demonology is often used to divert attention from the substantive merits of policy proposals to their provenance. This tactic encourages the use of ad hominem arguments in which all one really needs to know in order to appraise a position is who is advancing it on behalf of which group. The idea that we are known by the company we keep may be better advice to our children than it is to those wishing to seriously assess policy proposals. Such mental shortcuts are tempting, of course—like any simplistic process, they reduce decision costs—but sound policy making requires more complex analysis.