Reading 1:
America’s “Broken Government”: What Would James Madison Say? / Laurence E. Lynn Jr.1
Editor’s Note The DSF contribution for this issue comes from Laurence E. Lynn Jr. of the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas, at Austin. It was delivered as the Charles H. Levine Memorial Lecture in 2012. I asked him to allow us to publish it because I think it contains the most important message that the field of public administration needs to hear, absorb, and act upon. That is—we study, teach, and practice within a government NOT of “separated powers,” but rather as James Madison intended, a government of shared or overlapping powers. Richard Neustadt said it well with the phrase “separate institutions but shared powers.” But our theories, research, and practice seem to me, with only a few exceptions, to fail to grasp this most fundamental of realities. Instead, we tend to think and act as though our field of study and practice exists in a vertical and unitary system more akin to the unitary and vertical corporation model. Unfortunately, as Dwight Waldo once remarked: “There is only one unitary form of government in our entire political system—the council-manager form of government.” Sometimes I wonder if we will ever “get it.” Perhaps there is some hope. Professor Lynn drives that point home very effectively
Abstract : It has become impossible, or so it seems, to reach agreement on reasonable solutions to the problems confronting American government. Many claim that our political system is broken, our unique Constitutional scheme of governance – separation of powers, checks and balances, federalism, pluralism—dysfunctional or obsolete. Would James Madison, the principal author of that scheme, agree? It Truem the way our political system works can undermine the general welfare. Often our politics seem farcical. Bur Madison would know why. Our governing structures do not fail. We, the people, do. Liberty and justice cannot be secured, Madison argued, unless the people embrace the principle that the stronger parties among them submit to a government that protects all parties, the weaker as well as themselves. When the people abandon this principle – when, for example, wealth rules and joblessness persist liberty and justice for all, the goals of our republican democracy, are in jeopardy. Keywords Madison, Federalist No. 51, separation of powers, checks and balances, Adam Smith We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, ensure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America. Preamble to U.S. Constitution. Suppose the Founders’ spirits were to ask us: “About that ‘more perfect union’,” “about ‘domestic tranquility,’ how are we doing?” “Alas,” we might have to say, “it’s been worse, but with a bit more time, we might yet reach a new low.” Stress fractures in the Founders’ scheme of governance have become more noticeable in recent years. Sources as varied as CNN, the Center for Public Integrity, and Scientific American magazine, as well as a recent book by a U.S. Court of Appeals judge, have proclaimed that our government is broken. In its feature, “Our Broken Government,” the Time magazine author reminisced: “I remember when I first worked in our Washington bureau in the 1980s being amazed at the easy camaraderie that existed across the aisle in Congress. The public jockeying seemed more like acting.” The memories of my decade in Washington are the same. Moderates in both parties were among the most influential members of Congress and in the other branches of government. Now, a document famous for having been conceived in compromise, the Constitution, is invoked by powerful factions who proclaim that, unlike the Founders they revere, they will never compromise on their principles. Perhaps all this handwringing is only the media echo chamber doing what it does. It is harder, however, to ignore surveys by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, which document the extent to which the people’s trust in their government and in its political institutions, which have been declining of decades, reached an all-time low just before the 2010 midterm elections. It has not shown much recovery since. Broken government is one of the rare issues that is bipartisan. Left and right prophesy doom, one because we have too much government, the other because we have too little. Veteran legislators from both parties have decided to give up their seats rather than seek re-election, launching another lament: “the disappearance of the center.” Not only can the center not hold, as the poet Yeats puts it, the center is not even there. In a new book, a judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals argues that, owing to failures to compromise by left and right, issues once left to the people have increasingly become the province of the courts, eroding the role of our representative institutions and, thus, leaving us bereft of our democratic liberties. As political scientists tell us, the more difficult it is to create consensus, the greater the threat to democratic stability. Much of our current politics is what I would call “pre-Constitutional.” The early Americans revered by a large segment of voters are not those in Philadelphia in 1787, but those who settled the Massachusetts Bay Colony in the early 17th century, 150 years earlier. The Puritans were not seeking what the Founders sought, namely, liberty and justice for all, not the individualism that is America’s most conspicuous trait, but a community of believers in which the Biblical meanings of moral and immoral were strictly enforced. Imagine the Constitution if it had been drafted by the heirs of John Winthrop, not by the likes of James Madison. In a recent Atlantic article, James Fallows said, in the same vein, that perhaps never in the history of our republic has politics been so closely aligned with religion. In the light of these developments, what could the Founders have been thinking? Has their scheme become obsolete, as many claim? These are more than rhetorical questions. The United States has long been a puzzle to its admirers and detractors across the world. In the second decade of the 21st century, however, we have become more puzzling than ever, at Lynn 613 home and abroad. How are we to account for what historian Eric Foner has termed “the riddle of America” (Foner, 1984, p. 57)? Over a long period, students of American political development and American exceptionalism have offered various explanations for America’s paradoxical combination of apparent “statelessness” and its production of often stunningly positive policy outcomes domestically and internationally. Explanations range from the inherent weakness of its institutions to its distinctive anti-statist ideology to social issues such as racial, ethnic, and religious divisions. Whatever the explanation, the Founders’ system is clearly vulnerable to dysfunction. The debt crisis of 2011 “revealed a number of weaknesses in the political system,” said conservative Washington Post columnist Michael Gerson (2011), whose views were widely shared. The presidency was weakened when one party took “a routine procedure—the debt-limit increase— and [turned] it into a powerful policy lever.” That party had come to be dominated by an intransigent faction that attained a partisan veto over pragmatic solutions to the crisis. As a result, the policy that was enacted would hurt the poor and the unemployed the most, make the revival of a struggling economy much more difficult, and presage rising debt levels due to higher interest costs on existing Federal debt. Public opinion polls revealed extraordinary anger among people who expected better from their leaders. Ideological polarization of the two political parties made serious discussion of the most important issues of taxation and entitlements literally impossible. “[A]after this spectacle,” Gerson asked, “why would a credit rating agency, a foreign investor or an American voter have confidence in the ability of the American political system to confront those issues?” I argue that, properly understood, the structural features of America’s constitutional scheme of self-governance, largely credited to founder James Madison, provide a necessary but insufficient explanation for why America can supply “the defects of better motives,” in Madison’s words,1 while also tolerating the reflections of baser motives.2 These failings—on near-fatal display as Abraham Lincoln was gaining the presidency on the eve of the Civil War—seemed to be gaining strength again during America’s 2011 “debt/spending/deficit crisis.” But many readings of the words of the Founders, and especially of Madison, have neglected passages that add essential qualifications to their most famous statements, which emphasize the structures of government. These qualifications make it clear that the success of America’s “compound republic” (Madison’s term) was intended to depend not only on the capacity of its basic governing structures but, in extremis, on the virtues, the inherent fairness, of “the people.” Competence and virtue are evident in American history, but neither of them is a certainty.
Keywords Madison, Federalist No. 51, separation of powers, checks and balances, Adam Smith
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Reading 2:
The Policy Consequences Of Intergovernmental Competition / Thomas R. Dye
Competition and Public Policy
Most debates over federalism are only lightly camouflaged debates over policy. Philosophers and economists (Rawls 1971, Buchanan and Tullock 1962) may assert a distinction between constitutional issues-deciding how issues should be decided-and policy issues-deciding the issues themselves. But in politics, constitutional decisions are never separated from policy outcomes. People do know what the policy consequences of various constitutional arrangements will be. Citizens as well as political leaders consistently subordinate constitutional questions to immediate policy concerns. Indeed, history is replete with examples of the same political leaders arguing one notion of federalism at one point in time to achieve their immediate policy goal, and then turning around and supporting a contradictory notion of federalism later when it fits a new policy goal. No American politician, from Thomas Jefferson onward, has ever so strongly supported a view of federalism that he ended up conceding a policy battle. Debates about federalism must acknowledge policy consequences. Policies have been usefully classified as allocational, developmental, or redistributional (Lowi 1964). Allocational policies produce and distribute public goods and services to consumer-taxpayers. These policies encompass the provision of a broad range of state and local government services-education, health, welfare, streets and highways, police and fire protection, sewers, water and utilities, garbage disposal, parks, and recreation, and so on. Developmental policies are those that directly enhance the economic wellbeing of the state or community.
Cato Journal
These policies are directed toward economic growth; they include attracting industry, building transportation facilities, providing utilities, renewing urban areas, training the labor force for work, and so on. Redistributional policies are designed to redirect wealth to benefit particular segments of society to satisfy equity concerns. These policies include traditional welfare services, health care for the poor, unemployment compensation, and low-income housing, as well as progressive taxation. Note that these are analytical distinctions among types of policies; any specific government activity may have allocational, developmental, and redistributive elements within it.
Allocational Policy
Intergovernmental competition directly strengthens the allocative functions of government. Decentralization permits governments to match services with variations in demand. Greater overall citizen satisfaction can be achieved with multiple governments offering different packages of public services at different prices. Competition forces governments to become more efficient in their allocative activities, providing better services at lower costs. Competition forces governments to be more responsive to citizens’ preferences than monopoly government. The major thrust of the original Tiebout model (Tiebout 1956) centered on allocational policies. And the value of intergovernmental competition in allocational policies has never been seriously challenged. Paul E. Peterson, one of the few political scientists to incorporate the notion of competition into a coherent theory of federalism, appears to agree: Allocation is the functional that local governments can perform more effectively than central governments, because decentralization allows for a closer match between the supply of public services and their variable demand. Citizens migrate to those communities where the allocation best matches their demand curve [Peterson 1981, p. 77].
Developmental Policy
Intergovernmental competition inspires state and local governments to be concerned with the impact of their taxing and spending policies on economic growth and to become directly involved in economic development activities. In recent years, international competition began to inspire similar concerns in Washington. Prior to 1981, discussion of federal tax policy almost always centered on redistributional issues. Scholars and politicians who raised questions.
INTERGOVERNMENTAL COMPETITION
about the growth-retarding effects of federal tax policies were ignored or ridiculed. But developmental issues have long been central to debates over taxing and spending in state capitols and city halls, and it is competition that has kept developmental concern in focus. Monopoly governments have no direct way of estimating the growth-retarding effects of their tax policies. Cross-national comparisons are confounded by vast cultural differences, and longitudinal examinations of the effects of past tax policies are obscured by historical circumstances. Competing governments are in a better position to observe the economic consequences of their policy decisions. Of course, we must distinguish between economic growth policy and state industrial policies. Economic growth policy is the provision of truly public goods and services with minimum burdens in taxes and regulations. State industrial policy generally involves special treatments-loans and subsidies, guarantees, and tax or regulatory exemptions-that in the long run contribute to economic inefficiency. But the effects of various industrial policy decisions are not easy to identify. The literature to date has failed to observe any significant aggregate growth effects for any direct state industrial development activities (ACIR 1967; Peirce, Hagstrom, and Steinbach 1979; Rasmussen, Bendick, and Ledebor 1984; Rubin and Zom 1985; Ambrosius 1986). There are good theoretical reasons for predicting that direct state involvement in capital formation, as well as special tax treatments, will inevitably produce inefficiencies. But competition among the states in industrial policies is self-correcting in the long run. States will gradually learn from their mistakes as they compare their progress with other states. Consider how much worse a national industrial policy would be-a monopoly government allocating capital, dispensing subsidies, and granting special privileges and protections. (Not that the federal government does not already do so in innumerable tax code provisions and subsidy programs, but a national industrial policy would legitimize and enlarge the scope of these subsidies, privileges, and protections.) The only corrective to a national industrial policy would be international competition, and far more damage would be done to the nation before global competition would exert its correcting influence. Perhaps the results of the industrial policy experiments currently being conducted in America’s “laboratories of democracy” will succeed in discouraging the federal government from pursuing national industrial policy. Thus, development policies are well served by federalism. Peterson et al. (1986, p. 230) argue convincingly that the federal.
government would be wise to leave economic development policy to state and local government: Since state and local governments are well equipped to pursue developmental objectives, most public efforts of this type should be left to them. By delegating responsibility for most developmental programs to state and local governments, the federal government would frankly admit its incapacity to use those programs to help populations with special needs. Even strong proponents of state industrial policies warn against federal intervention. According to Osborne (1988, pp. 283-84): The America economy-indeed the world economy-is made up of a series of regional economies, each of which radiates out from a city or network of cities. Each regional economy is unique. Each has a different mix of industries, a different labor market, a different set of educational institutions, and different capital markets. In this country, the governmental unit that most closely matches the regional economy is the state.
Redistribution Policy
The most serious challenge to intergovernmental competition arises in redistributional policy. Can multiple, competing governments undertake redistributive policies without creating unbearable free-rider problems for themselves? Will states and communities be restrained from providing the welfare services they would otherwise prefer because of the threat of an inundation of poor people from less-beneficent “free-riding” jurisdictions? Will each state and community wait for other states and communities to provide welfare services in the hope that their poor people will migrate to the more generous jurisdictions? Will tax burdens to support generous welfare services encourage the nonpoor-both households and businessto migrate to jurisdictions that impose lighter tax burdens because they provide frugal welfare services?
Welfare and Competition in Theory
Median Voter Model
Median voter models have provided economists and political scientists with simplified sets of assumptions about democratic political systems-assumptions that have expressly or implicitly formed the basis of a great deal of empirical research in state and local government. In the basic model, each individual consumer-taxpayer tries to maximize the tradeoff between various public goods and services and disposable private income. Each consumer-taxpayer balances the “utilities” obtained from higher levels of public services against the “disutilities” of higher taxes, to choose an “optimal” benefit level. After each consumer-taxpayer has made a choice based on his or her own preferences, tastes, needs, and so on, the choice of the median voter in any democratic political system should determine public policy. The “median voter” label is taken from the early work of Duncan Black (1958), who suggested that democratically elected governments would seek to make the median voter’s indifference curve the state’s indifference curve. A simple version of the median voter model treats the political system itself as a neutral conversion mechanism, transforming the needs, demands, and preferences of the median voter into public policy. The model is similar to the early systems model in political science literature (Easton 1965, Dye 1966). The preferences of votertaxpayers were usually specified in state policy studies in terms of median or average characteristics of the population-for example, median family income, median school level completed, or percentage of the population aged, young, black, urban, and so on. This required an inferential leap that characteristics of the populations determined median voter preferences and, hence, community preferences. When variations in public policies among the states were shown to correlate with variations in population characteristics, this simple median voter model gained empirical support. The traditional literature on the “determinants” of state and local government taxing and spending policies relied implicitly on this simple median voter model (Sachs and Harris 1964, Fisher 1964, Bahl 1965, Dye 1966, Hofferbert 1966).
Redistribution and the Median Voter
The median voter has an equity preference for redistribution. Few of us want to see poverty, hunger, homelessness, ill-health, or deprivation in our society, even if we do not expect to suffer these maladies ourselves. Moreover, some of us may wish to establish a floor for the human condition as an insurance policy against our own potential misfortunes. We may disagree on what minimal standards should be incorporated into this floor, but few would deny the existence of a general public interest in eliminating the worst conditions of poverty, or the greatest insecurities and afflictions of old age or disability, or the worse effects of discrimination. The simple model of a median voter with a preference for some distributional government activities on behalf of poor, aged, young, and black populations can be developed further by assuming that these groups will contribute independently to the demand for redistribution…
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Reading 3
Understanding Intergovernmental Relations, Twenty-five Years Hence Author(s): Brendan F. Burke
Abstract This article reviews Deil Wright’s textbook, Understanding Intergovernmental Relations, and assesses its current relevance to its field of coverage. Wright’s last edition of this book was published in 1988. This article, after describing significant lessons from the textbook, summarizes Wright’s related research and commentary from the following two decades, and also analyzes three current intergovernmental topics based on four of Wright’s most important metaphors and historical observations. The 1988 book remains relevant to intergovernmental relations today, though it only tangentially informs the more cross-sectoral turn that the field has taken in recent years. Keywords intergovernmental relations, collaborative public management, public management, public administration history
Introduction: An Unfinished Project? Deil Wright (1930-2009) was one of the great scholars, instructors, and practitioners of public administration. His research articles number well into the triple figures, and the quantity of his output is more impressive for its high quality, as validated through honors such as American Society for Public Administration (ASPA’s) Dwight Waldo Award for career achievement and the Herbert Kaufman Award (three times) for the best paper in Public Administration Review. Some of his dozen books have been central to the teaching of comparative public administration, urban politics, and intergovernmental relations (IGR) around the world. All of this output supplemented and served his teaching for nearly fifty years, most prominently from his base at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. In addition to his training of many prominent public managers and accomplished public administration scholars, Deil served a president (Richard Nixon), a governor (James Holshauser of North Carolina), and agencies including the Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations (ACIR). A number of colleagues wrote in respect and admiration upon his passing (Brudney 2009; Weissert 2009; Dometrius et al. 2009). He joked, late in life, that his success came from his ability to “work like the devil.” In his scholarly work, Wright had a penchant for alliteration and metaphors, which are on display within this article. This was probably not driven by a sense of artistry, though he was an evocative and creative writer. It was more likely a matter of issue framing. In his research and teaching on IGR, simplification, and synthesis are important qualities. When it comes to the codification of over 200 years of history, across approximately 88,000 American government as delivered by over 110 agency types (at the state level alone), a summative artifact can be a useful thing. Thus, we have the “picket fence,” seven “phases,” and intergovernmental games like “beggar thy neighbor,” “the Golden Rule,” and “grantsmanship baseball.” All of these…
(see link below for the rest of this reading).
Understanding Intergovernmental Relations, Twenty-five Years Hence (jstor.org)