once they’re in power, the two parties tend to move policy only marginally in the direction they want and the effects of those policy changes are often smaller than anticipated. Republicans’ increased political power did not reverse either the size or scope of state government through the 1990s and 2000s.
Pointer from Tyler Cowen.
What would explain this?
1. Tyler suggests the median voter theorem, which is that parties compete for centrist voters. But I am not sure that the median voter in all of these states wants big government.
2. My ;ate father’s favorite political scientist, Murray Edelman, would have said that politicians satisfy their base on symbolic issues, but they satisfy interest groups on substantive issues. In fact, Grossman points out that
Republicans were especially effective at passing legislation across multiple states on social issues like education, abortion and guns.
This fits with a Public Choice story, in which the interest groups dominate regardless. Teachers’ unions want more spending on education, and they get it.
3. One can argue that this is consistent with an increase in affective polarization (people having an emotional stake in political outcomes) without strong differences on policy.
I think bike-shedding plays a part. Politics focuses on trivial issues rather than complex issues/choices with large impact. Hard issues are only tackled when a crisis forces a difficult decision to be made.
I think this is a very good point, and is why they are trying so hard to convince everyone that global warming is a crisis.
Perhaps a short true story might help provide some explanation …
I turned the TV news on just at the very end of the Inaugural ceremonies in January 2017. The scene was Barack and Michelle Obama standing alongside Donald and Melania Trump at the top of the Capitol (???) steps for a final dual photo-op. The ritual continues with the Obama’s doing their final “farewells” (or whatever) to the Trumps, and then descending the steps to begin their walk of a few hundred yards to Marine One for their final ride to wherever.
The only “audio” for all this scene are the voices of three commentators, one of whom is Brit Hume.
And as the outgoing President and First Lady begin their walk to Marine One, one of the commentators asks, “What do you suppose Barack Obama’s legacy will be?” And that question is followed by a somewhat sullen pause – during which time I’m thinking one of the commentators will say something like “ObamaCare”, or one of his other “signature” legislative accomplishments. I was wrong.
Brit Hume was the first commentator to break the silence, and answered the question by saying, “Barack Obama’s ‘legacy’ is Donald Trump.”
True story – you may have even seen it yourself.
Merging this post to this story does get us to the right place. I think Hume reflected a mistaken perception that Obama deserved the bulk of the blame, but he was just the last of a string of Presidents that failed to understand that this era was producing a large block of very angry voters.
The voters did not accept this. They get limited binary choices. It happened because of the shape of our system and its marginal incentives. When it finally bubbled to the surface, it produced Trump. This was not a stable equilibrium.
I would argue 3) and 1) are very core as most government policy is situated close to the median voter but politicians and pundits must make political divide sound larger than it is. So everybody sounds like Guirri but most people don’t want significant changes to most issues. Look at Trump 2016, he was consider more center politically than Hillary Clinton!
Otherwise, 70% of the economy is still private sector so most voters are not into too large of government.
2)
Also think about Trump as authoritarian nationalist! His speeches and taunting twitter feed are bad and most conservative media hails him as a Great Leader but frankly he was popularity not power. He passed a tax cut with no real impact on spending and some minor deregulations but that is it. And look how big the Democrats talk in the current Primary about what they will do when the best case D Senate is everything is decide by Joe Manchin! (Manchin is about as median as you get right now.)
And look at other Western Christian nationalist leader, Orban from Hungary. His big policies have eliminating women studies from local universities.
Can someone look at, say, California, New York, Illinois, relative to Texas, Florida, and Indiana and say there is no substantive difference between the way Democrats govern compared to Republicans? And even when the political dominance is less deep or long-lasting, can one not spot differences in Wisconsin pre-Walker, North Carolina early 2000’s versus early 2010’s, one could go on?
A lot of budget items at the federal level are on “auto pilot” – that is, they’re considered non-discretionary. Expenditures on these items are indexed to inflation and changing any one of them is beyond the power of any President, Congressman, or Senator. In addition, Congress has delegated much of its legislative power to the regulatory agencies, which all have a vested interest in retaining and expanding their power. The inertia in this system is enormous and changing the party in power has little impact.
As MG points out, however, which party is in control at the city and state levels makes a considerable difference. Political power has not been delegated away at these levels of government to the extent that it has at the federal level.
Small states / large state contradiction.
Small states need earmarks, not large programs the large states have. If small states, like Vermont or Wyoming do not get specialized federal support they lose populations and go extinct, stopping the Senate from working.
So distribution of government goods from a republic is heavily skewed and requires more government volatility than can be supported from small government. It is the major blunder of the Constitution.
The solution is a Coasian fee paid to the Senate. A bribe, in essence and the next budget priority after interest costs. The House need to buy off the Senators with a lump sum cash each legislation period. During the negotiations, the House determine the large programs it wants, then the House sends the Senate with a negotiated lump sum per state, about 3 billion, but it will vary.
I call it the Constitutional Adjustment Act, the Coase solution to an insurmountable problem. We simply follow the Constitution and keep the small states subsidized and viable. If we do not do this, Vermont and Wyoming and a few other small states are gone in a few years and the Swamp stops working all together.
Politically, creating new benefits and hand outs and expenditures is much easier than targeting those that already exist, and rolling them back. This is discussed in the article, but this is the simplest explanation for the observed trend.
This kind of “political science” analysis is unfair and misleading when not blaming 90% of the problem on the courts and the current federal arrangement that allows only the tiniest room for maneuver for any genuine reforms in a non-progressive direction. We’ve seen plenty of genuinely non-progressive initiatives crash on the rocks and crumble into smoking dust after making first contact with an injunction.
Look at it this way. Let’s say the grocery store arranged the cereal boxes in order of junk-foodiness. “Nothing-But-Hardwood-Sawdust Ultra-Wholesome-Bran” all the way to the left, and flakes of crunchy rock candy over on the right. Four roommates go shopping together, and get to alternate in terms of who gets to pick this week’s cereal box. Abe likes it wholesome. Bob and Charlie are middle-of-the-road types. But Dan has a sweet-tooth, and tells everyone that, if he gets to choose, it’s rock candy flakes all the way.
Then one day Dan gets the choice, and, -yank!- turns out his ankle has been chained to the center of the aisle, and he’s not allowed to go any further than honey nut cheerios. “Oh man! Not even frosted flakes or lucky charms?” -yank!- Nope, the chain won’t budge. So he buys the cheerios.
Then someone else comes along and uses “political science” to call Dan a liar who is beholden to the median roommate theorem. Dan objects and points to the short, heavyweight chain, but gets, “Well, we don’t study chains around here, so we’ll just leave that out of the analysis, ok?”
+1
Brilliant.
The USA winner-take-all electoral system was always unrepresentative and with declining electoral integrity (vote harvesting absentee ballots in districts with 30 percent more registered voters than actual residents), a politicized judiciary with no real checks or balances upon it and a de facto 4th branch of government in the career bureaucracy with very few checks or balances upon it, the USA no longer bears any resemblance to a constitutional republic. Professor Kling may be content with this state of affairs. And who wouldn’t be in his shoes. The rest of us will just have to exit.
My idea is that in the Administrative State era, we need “civilian control of the bureaucracy” even more than “civilian control of the military”.
Do a Google ngram case-insensitive run of “Civilian Control of the Military”. I was surprised that the peak was reached sometime in the late 90’s and has continued on a plateau since, my faulty impression was that this was something I read and heard a lot of folks – mostly liberals – harp on in the Cold War / Reagan-Bush Sr. era, and that it kind of died off in intellectual circles after that – with maybe a little echo bump during the early War On Terror as the zeitgeist moved on to other things. And maybe it did after 2008 when the ngram data runs out: Obama, Social Justice, Global Financial Crisis, etc. Still I thought it had decayed a lot, and much earlier.
Consider this definition of CCOTM, “the proper subordination of a competent, professional military to the ends of policy as determined by civilian authority.”
One doesn’t have to get into all that “Deep State” rhetoric about it, I’m talking about run-of-the-will Sir Humphrey Appleby-ism as portrayed in Yes Minister, which anyone who has ever worked in government immediately recognizes as a “funny cause it’s true”, hilariously accurate portrayal of typical bureaucracy-vs-elected officials dynamics.
With “civilian control of the bureaucracy”, I propose a principle of, “the proper subordination of a competent, professional civil service to the ends of policy as determined by elected officials and their politically-appointed agents.”
We have CCOTM right now, and plenty of laws, processes, and institutions to guarantee it in all variety of circumstances short of ongoing and catastrophic nuclear holocaust. We don’t have CCOTB in the least, especially given our incredibly under-reported ongoing Constitutional Crisis of half the Plum Book positions either going empty or being filled in some kind of “permanent emergency” indefinite temporary non-standard capacity.
This is because of the complete breakdown of the Senate’s “advice and consent” norms and process for confirming nominated officials in the executive and judicial branches in an era of intense partisan acrimony. The old tradition used to be that blocks or no-votes were rare and based on extraordinarily objectionable circumstances, but otherwise, comity and reciprocity dictated rubber stamps 95% of the time for any arguably qualified individual.
When all confirmations moved to party-line votes when the President of either party is unlikely to have 60 Senators on-side, then the gears all grind to a halt.
But since the bureaucracy is infinitely-resilient by design, and, so long as it’s arguably ‘legal’, there is always another individual somewhere down the hierarchy who can catch any bag, everything can just keep humming along, even if that means half the executive branch is being run by holdovers from the prior administration with zero political alignment or loyalty to the agenda of the current Administration.
Which is plainly, obviously, Unconstitutional. It makes an even worse joke of democracy, elections, and the “peaceful transition of power” when power has not left the hands of the same folks who yielded it before the election.
There is a Constitutional “nondelegation doctrine” which says that Congress that can’t give up all its powers to the bureaucracy. As Cass Sunstein quipped, in the courts, that doctrine has “had one good year [1935], and 230 bad ones.” Why so many bad ones? It’s not just because the courts tend to be progressive and so tend to side with the structurally-progressive-leaning bureaucracy. It’s also because everyone kind of secretly fears that if Congress had to do the job, it just … wouldn’t do it. And then … we don’t know.
Everyone is terrified of the “shutdown scenario”, but without that prospect looming in the background, there’s no incentive to force compromise. Notice that even for “shutdowns”, at least 80% of government employees (i.e., military, law enforcement, “essential” personnel, etc.) are still at work, still getting paid, the entitlement program payments are still going out, and so forth.
If the senior ranks of the permanent civil service are a buffer and political shock absorber for not having political appointees or CCOTB, then it’s like playing a game of chicken in bumper cars. You get a lot of head-on collisions, because honestly, who cares, and the benefits in fun and conspicuous, media-coverage-bait public signaling outweigh the cost of, at worse, mild whiplash.
Instead, one needs to get rid of the air bags and seat belts and put in some real dagger-in-the-steering-wheel type consequences for failing to confirm officials – i.e., the office, bureau, agency, or whole department simply stops working, and no exceptions – or else the Constitutional scheme of government takes yet another step towards an utter sham.
Handle’s CCOB made me think of the recent Quillette podcast with Canadian Jonathan Kay interviewing David Frum on the Canadian Election Result. Both Kay and Frum have interesting perspectives and delve into Canada having more CCOB than the U.S.
Neither promotes the difference as a critical issue to be addressed.
“once they’re in power, the two parties tend to move policy only marginally in the direction they want and the effects of those policy changes are often smaller than anticipated. Republicans’ increased political power did not reverse either the size or scope of state government through the 1990s and 2000s. ”
geez
Reps are not interested in smaller government, other than saying that government is the problem cause it gives things to people of color that don’t pay taxes.
Whocouldaknowed?
Anyone paying the slightest bit of attention for the last 50 years or so.