Political Order and Political Decay (78 page)

Part of the phenomenon of decay has to do with intellectual rigidity. The idea that lawyers and litigation should be such an integral part of public administration is not a view widely shared in other democracies, and yet it has become such an entrenched way of doing business in the United States that no one sees any alternatives. Strictly speaking, this is less an ideological matter than a political tradition shared by both Left and Right. Similarly, despite a widespread populist outcry against the influence of interest groups in Congress, many people (beginning with members of the Supreme Court) fail to see that a problem even exists, and no one sees a realistic way of curbing their influence.

The underlying sources of political decay—intellectual rigidity and the influence of elite groups—are generic to democracies as a whole. Indeed, they are problems faced by all governments whether democratic or not. The problems identified here of excessive judicialization and interest groups exist in other developed democracies. But the impact of interest groups depends heavily on the specific nature of institutions. There is a wide variation in the way that democracies structure the incentives facing political actors, which make governments more or less susceptible to these forces. In the following chapter, I will argue that the United States, as the world's first and most advanced liberal democracy, suffers from the problem of political decay in a more acute form than other democratic political systems. The long-standing distrust of the state that has always characterized American politics has led to an unbalanced form of government that undermines the prospects of necessary collective action. The result is what I label “vetocracy.”

 

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AMERICA THE VETOCRACY

How the American system of checks and balances has become a vetocracy; how other democracies have stronger mechanisms to force collective decisions; how strong authority is nonetheless delegated to the executive in certain areas; how the European Union is becoming more like the United States

The American Constitution protects individual liberties through a complex system of checks and balances that was deliberately designed by the Founders to constrain the power of the state. American government arose in the context of a revolution against British monarchical authority and drew on even older wellsprings of resistance to the king in the English Civil War. Intense distrust of government and reliance on the spontaneous activities of dispersed individuals has been a hallmark of American politics ever since.

The American constitutional system checks power in any number of ways. In contrast to a parliamentary system, in which a unified executive (that is, an executive centralized under a single authority) carries out the wishes of legislative majorities, the American presidential system splits authority between an elected president and a Congress that have equal democratic legitimacy and whose survival is independent of one another. The Constitution also establishes a judicial branch that over time acquired the power to invalidate legislation coming from Congress. It further distributes powers to the states—or rather, the states, which were the original holders of power, gave up authority to a federal government only slowly and grudgingly in the course of the two hundred years following ratification of the Constitution. Congress itself is divided into two houses, the upper one originally designed to be a bastion of state power. In many democratic systems like that of Britain, the upper house has largely ceremonial powers; in the United States, it is very strong and exercises specific powers such as confirmation of executive appointments and authority over war and peace. The American executive branch itself does not always answer to the president; many regulatory commissions are under the control of commissioners appointed by the parties in Congress.

As Huntington pointed out, powers in America are not so much functionally divided as replicated across the branches, leading to periodic usurpations of one branch by another and conflicts over which branch should predominate. Congressional authority over national security policy and the influence of the courts over social policies like abortion are recent examples of this. American federalism oftentimes does not cleanly delegate powers to the appropriate level of government; instead it duplicates them at multiple levels, giving federal, state, and local authorities jurisdiction over, for example, toxic waste disposal. Under such a system of redundant and nonhierarchical authority, different parts of the government are easily able to block one another.

POLARIZATION

Of the most important challenges facing developed democracies is the unsustainability of their welfare-state commitments. The existing social contracts underlying contemporary welfare states were negotiated generations ago, when birth rates were higher, people didn't live as long, and economic growth was more robust. The availability of finance has allowed all modern democracies to keep pushing this problem into the future, but at some point the underlying demographic reality will set in.

These problems are not insuperable. The debt-to-GDP ratios of both Britain and the United States coming out of World War II were higher than they are today.
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Sweden, Finland, and other Scandinavian countries found their large welfare states in crisis during the 1990s and were able to make adjustments to their tax and spending levels. Australia succeeded in eliminating almost all of its external debt, even prior to the huge resource boom of the 2000s.

The American political system early in the twenty-first century has failed to deal with this issue. The fundamental reason for this failure has to do with the two dominant political parties, which have become more ideologically polarized than they have been since the late nineteenth century. There has been a large geographical sorting of the parties that began in the 1960s, with virtually the entire South moving from the Democratic to the Republican Party, and Republicans becoming almost extinct in the Northeast. Since the breakdown of the New Deal coalition and the end of the Democrats' hegemony in Congress in the 1980s, the two parties have become more evenly balanced and have repeatedly exchanged control over the presidency and the two houses of Congress. This higher degree of partisan competition has fueled an arms race between the parties for funding and has undermined personal comity between them.
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As noted in the previous chapter, there is disagreement among social scientists as to how deeply rooted this polarization is in American society. But there is no question that the parties and the activist groups driving their behavior have sorted themselves into far more rigid and ideologically cohesive groups. They have increased their homogeneity through their control, in most states, over redistricting, which allows them to gerrymander voting districts to increase their chances of reelection. The spread of primaries has put the choice of party candidates into the hands of the relatively small numbers of activists who turn out for these elections.
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Polarization is not the end of the story, however. Democratic political systems are not supposed to end conflict; they are supposed to peacefully resolve and lessen conflicts through agreed-upon rules. Americans have always been divided on issues from slavery to abortion to gun control. A good political system mitigates underlying polarizations and encourages the emergence of political outcomes representing the interests of as large a part of the population as possible. But when polarization confronts America's Madisonian check-and-balance political system, the result is particularly devastating.
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VETO PLAYERS

Ideally, a democracy provides equal opportunity for participation on the part of every member of the political community. Democratic decisions should be taken by consensus, where every single member of the community agrees on a particular decision. This is what typically happens in families, and in band- and tribal-level societies.

However, the efficiency of consensual decision making deteriorates rapidly as groups become more diverse and as their size increases. This means that for most groups, decisions are made not on the basis of consensus but on the basis of assent on the part of some portion of the whole group. The smaller the percentage of the group necessary to take a decision, the easier and more efficiently it can be made. The trade-off between the percentage of votes required and the costs of decision making, in terms of both time and effort, is illustrated by
Figure 22
. As anyone who has chaired a meeting of a club or committee knows, decision costs rise exponentially if one needs consensus in large groups.

Decisions taken under a majority voting rule (50 percent plus one) often used in democratic countries thus deviate very far from an ideal democratic procedure, since they can disenfranchise nearly half the population. Indeed, under plurality (or what is sometimes known as first-past-the-post) voting, decisions can be taken on behalf of the whole community by a minority of voters. (The United States and the United Kingdom, both of which have such voting systems, elected Bill Clinton in 1992 with 43 percent of the vote, and Tony Blair with 42 percent in 2001.)
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FIGURE 22.
Political Participation vs. Cost of Decision Making

SOURCE
: James M. Buchanan and Gordon Tullock,
The Calculus of Consent

It is evident that rules like majority voting are not adopted on the basis of any deep principle of justice but rather as an expedient that reduces decision costs and allows large communities to make a decision of some sort. Democracies impose other mechanisms to force decisions and decrease the number of potential veto players. These include cloture rules that allow for cutoff of debate, rules restricting the ability of legislators to offer amendments, and what are called “reversionary” rules in the event that the legislature can't agree on important matters like budgets. Under the Meiji Constitution, if the Diet couldn't agree on a new budget, the previous year's budget was automatically adopted. Under the reversionary rules adopted in Chile and other Latin American countries, failure to pass a budget meant that budgetary authority went back to the president and the executive.
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Other types of rules are meant to promote stability, which they do at the expense of minority prerogatives. The postwar German Federal Republic, learning from the weaknesses of Weimar democracy, has provisions for what is called a “positive” vote of no confidence: a party cannot topple a government coalition (that is, exercise a veto) unless it can put together an alternative government. Parliamentary systems have evolved one of the best mechanisms for forcing legislative decisions ever invented: if there is deadlock or a high degree of contention over a particular issue, the government can dissolve parliament and call for new elections, allowing a democratic electorate to speak directly to the issue at hand.

Political scientist George Tsebelis coined the term “veto players” as a means of comparing diverse political systems. All institutional rules that delegate powers to different political actors within the system constitute potential veto points where individual veto players can block action by the whole body. Virtually all features of a constitution—presidentialism, bicameralism, federalism, judicial review—while functionally different from one another can be thought of as potential veto points in the process of reaching a collective decision. In addition, there are many nonconstitutional rules that affect the ability of minorities to block the will of majorities, such as the parliamentary rules under which amendments can be offered. A veto player is simply political science lingo for what Americans have traditionally called checks and balances.
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Using the concept of veto players, it is possible to array different political systems on a linear scale going from an absolute dictatorship, in which there is only one veto player (the dictator), to a consensus system in which every citizen wields a potential veto over action by the whole. Democratic political systems grant many more vetoes to players within the system than do authoritarian states; that's why they are democracies. But within the universe of democracies, there are substantial differences in the number of veto players permitted.
Figure 23
reproduces the Buchanan-Tullock curve, but with the horizontal axis representing the number of veto players able to block decisions rather than percentages of the electorate needed to make them.