Political Order and Political Decay (79 page)

FIGURE 23.
Veto Players and the Difficulty of Decision Making

In terms of the sheer number of veto players, the American political system is an outlier among contemporary democracies. It has become unbalanced and in certain areas has acquired too many checks and balances, which raise the costs of collective action, sometimes making it impossible altogether. It is a system that might be labeled a vetocracy. In earlier periods of American history, when one or the other party dominated, this system served to moderate the will of the majority and force it to pay greater attention to minorities than it otherwise might. But in the more evenly balanced, highly competitive party system that has arisen since the 1980s, it has become a formula for gridlock.

America's large number of veto players becomes evident when the U.S. system is compared to that of another long-standing democracy, Britain. The Westminster system, which evolved in the years following the Glorious Revolution, is one of the most decisive in the democratic world because, in its pure form, it creates a much smaller number of veto players. In Britain, citizens have one large, formal check on government—their ability to periodically elect Parliament. (There is another important check, a free media, which is not part of the formal political system.) In all other respects, however, the system concentrates rather than diffuses power. A pure Westminster system has only a single all-powerful legislative chamber, no separate presidency, no written constitution and therefore no judicial review, and no federalism or constitutionally mandated devolution of powers to localities. It has a plurality, or first-past-the-post, voting system, which tends to produce a two-party system and strong parliamentary majorities even when the majority party wins only a plurality of the vote.
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Critical to the functioning of this system is party discipline; the leadership of the Conservative or Labour Party can force its members of Parliament to vote according to their wishes because they can deny recalcitrant MPs the ability to run for office in the next election. The British equivalent of the cloture rule needs only a simple majority of MPs present to force a vote; American-style filibustering is not possible. The parliamentary majority then chooses a government with strong executive powers, and when it makes a legislative decision, it generally cannot be stymied by courts, states, municipalities, or other bodies. It is for this reason that the British system is often described as a “democratic dictatorship.”
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The Westminster system understandably produces governments with more formal powers than in the United States. This greater degree of decisiveness can be seen clearly with respect to the budget process. In Britain, national budgets are not drawn up in Parliament, but in Whitehall, the seat of the bureaucracy, where professional civil servants act under instructions from the cabinet and prime minister. The budget is then presented by the chancellor of the exchequer (equivalent of the U.S. treasury secretary) to the House of Commons, which votes to approve it in a single up-or-down vote. This usually takes place within a week or two of its promulgation by the government.

The process in the United States is totally different. The Constitution grants Congress primary authority over the budget. While presidents formulate budgets through the executive branch Office of Management and Budget, this office often becomes more like another lobbying organization supporting the president's preferences. The budget, put before Congress in February, works its way through a complex set of committees over a period of months, and what finally emerges for ratification (we hope) by the two houses toward the end of the summer is the product of innumerable deals struck with individual members to secure their support. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office was established in 1974 to provide Congress with greater technocratic support in drawing up budgets, but in the end the making of an American budget is a highly decentralized and nonstrategic process in comparison to what happens in Britain.

The openness and never-ending character of the American budget process in turn gives lobbyists and interest groups multiple opportunities to exercise influence. In most European parliamentary systems, it makes no sense for an interest group to lobby an individual MP, since the rules of party discipline give him or her little or no influence over the party leadership's position. In the United States, by contrast, committee chairs and party leaders have enormous powers to modify legislation and therefore become the target of lobbying activity.

The Westminster system for all of its concentrated powers nonetheless remains fundamentally democratic. It is democratic because if voters don't like the kinds of policies and state performance it produces, they are free to vote the current government out and replace it with another. Indeed, with a vote of no confidence, they do not have to wait until the end of a presidential term or congressional cycle; they can immediately dethrone a prime minister. Governments are judged much more on their overall performance than on their ability to provide specific pork barrel benefits to particular interest groups or lobbies.

The classic Westminster system no longer exists anywhere in the world, including Britain itself, which has gradually adopted more checks and balances. Nonetheless, in terms of its position on the horizontal axis of Figure 23, Britain still remains far to the left of the United States in terms of numbers of veto players. While the Westminster system may represent something of an extreme among contemporary democracies, most other parliamentary systems in Europe and Asia provide their governments with stronger mechanisms for forcing decisions than does the United States. The United States tends to share the space at the right end of Figure 23's horizontal axis with those Latin American countries which, having copied the U.S. presidential system in the nineteenth century, have faced similar problems with gridlock and politicized administration.

Budgeting is not the only aspect of American government that differs systematically from its democratic counterparts in terms of proliferating veto players. In a parliamentary system, a great deal of legislation is formulated in the executive branch with heavy technocratic input from the permanent civil service. Ministries are accountable to parliament and hence ultimately to voters through the ministers who head them, but this type of hierarchical system can take a longer-term strategic view and produce much more coherent legislation. In Sweden, for example, there is a small civil service separate from the implementing agencies that actually deliver services; the former's main function is to help parliament prepare legislation.
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Such a system is utterly foreign to American political culture, where Congress jealously guards its right to legislate. Bill Clinton's health care plan was formulated in the executive branch by a group of experts operating under the leadership of First Lady Hillary Clinton away from the glare of immediate public scrutiny. This was one important reason that it failed ignominiously to get through Congress in 1993. Barack Obama was able to get the Affordable Care Act passed in 2010 only because he abdicated virtually any role in shaping the legislation, leaving the final bill in the hands of multiple congressional committees.

The lack of legislative coherence in turn produces a large, sprawling, and often unaccountable government. Congress's multiple committees frequently produce duplicative and overlapping programs, or create multiple agencies with similar mandates. Moreover, a system that is fragmented at the center gets further fragmented as a result of American federalism. In the words of legal scholar Gerhard Casper,

In our system of public administration and adjudication of public law issues, we suffer from too many layers of government with concurrent jurisdiction … Where just a single level of government would busily produce a regulatory maze, complex and internally inconsistent enough to employ legions of handholding lawyers, we allow two, three, or four to have their say. Not only do multiple government agencies have a say, but so do innumerable citizens acting as private attorney generals, empowered to bring private suits. Government decisionmaking is further distorted when enforcement rights, over matters concerning the public interest, are granted to private parties.
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The Pentagon in this system is mandated to produce close to five hundred reports to Congress on various issues annually, more than one for every day of the year. These mandates are often duplicative and never expire, consuming huge amounts of bureaucratic time and energy.
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Congress created fifty-one separate programs for worker retraining, and eighty-two projects to improve teacher quality.
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Financial sector regulation is shared by the Federal Reserve Board, the Treasury Department, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, the National Credit Union Administration, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, the Office of Thrift Supervision, the Federal Housing Finance Agency, and the New York Federal Reserve Bank, as well as a host of state attorneys general who have broadened their mandates to take on the banking sector. The federal agencies are overseen by different congressional committees who are loath to give up their turf to a more coherent and unified regulator. It was easy for the banking sector to game this system to bring about deregulation of the financial sector in the late 1990s; reregulating it after the crisis proved much more difficult.
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THE PERILS OF PRESIDENTIALISM

Vetocracy is only half the story of the American political system. In other respects, Congress delegates huge powers to the executive branch, allowing it to operate rapidly and sometimes with a very low degree of accountability. Our overall evaluation of the system therefore needs to be tempered by an appreciation of areas in which it can act with strength and decisiveness.

There are several areas of delegation to highly autonomous bureaucracies. These include the Federal Reserve Board, the intelligence agencies, the military, and specialized agencies like NASA and the Centers for Disease Control.
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On the state and local levels, attorneys general or prosecutors are given a great deal of discretion over whether to bring charges against individuals accused of crimes, and they are free to enter into plea bargains—much more so than, say, their German counterparts. The military is typically allowed substantial autonomy with regard to operational matters. And, as the world has come to know through the revelations of Edward Snowden, the National Security Agency has been given broad leave to collect data not just on foreign activities but also on American citizens since September 11, 2001.
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While many American libertarians and conservatives would like to abolish these agencies altogether, it is hard to see how it would be possible to govern properly without them under modern circumstances. America today has a vast, diverse, complex national economy, connected to a globalized world economy that moves with extraordinary speed and that takes a great deal of expertise to master. It faces serious external security threats. During the acute phase of the financial crisis that unfolded after the collapse of Lehman Brothers in September 2008, the Federal Reserve and Treasury Department had to make massive decisions literally overnight, decisions that involved flooding the market with trillions of dollars of liquidity, propping up individual banks, and imposing new regulations. The severity of the crisis led Congress to an emergency appropriation of $700 billion for the Troubled Asset Relief Program, largely on the say-so of the Treasury Department and the Bush administration. There has been a large amount of after-the-fact second-guessing of specific decisions made during this period. But the idea that such a crisis could be managed by any other branch of government—and in particular by Congress, exercising detailed oversight—is ludicrous. The same applies to national security issues, where the president is in effect delegated to decide how to respond to nuclear and terrorist threats that potentially affect the lives of millions of Americans. It is for this reason that Alexander Hamilton in Federalist No. 70 spoke of the need for “energy in the executive.”

There is intense populist distrust of elite institutions and demand either to abolish them (as in the case of the Federal Reserve) or to open up their internal deliberations to television and public scrutiny. Ironically, however, Americans when polled show the highest degree of approval precisely for those institutions—the military, NASA, the CDC—that are the least subject to immediate democratic oversight. Part of the reason they are admired is that they actually get things done. By contrast, the institution most directly accountable to the people, the U.S. Congress, receives disastrously low levels of approval (see
Figure 24
). Congress is typically regarded as a talking shop where only lobbyist influence produces results and partisanship prevents commonsense solutions.