Why Government Fails So Often

And How It Can Do Better

Peter H. Schuck

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780691168531, 9780691161624
• eBook ISBN: 9781400850044
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Public Law
• Index: Politics & International Relations

How government can implement more successful policies, more often

From healthcare to workplace and campus conduct, the federal government is taking on ever more responsibility for managing our lives. At the same time, Americans have never been more disaffected with Washington, seeing it as an intrusive, incompetent, wasteful giant. Ineffective policies are caused by deep structural factors regardless of which party is in charge, bringing our government into ever-worsening disrepute. Understanding why government fails so often—and how it might become more effective—is a vital responsibility of citizenship.

In this book, lawyer and political scientist Peter Schuck provides a wide range of examples and an enormous body of evidence to explain why so many domestic policies go awry—and how to right the foundering ship of state. An urgent call for reform, Why Government Fails So Often is essential reading for anyone curious about why government is in such a disgraceful state and how it can do better.

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

Our political system has long been admired and wondered at by Americans and outsiders who marvel at its ability to govern for 225 years a remarkably dynamic, diverse society. Yet most Americans today believe that our government is failing to deliver what it promises, and they have lost confidence in its effectiveness. Herein lies a deep and dangerous dilemma, one that this book seeks to explain and perhaps to help solve.

Consider some of our government’s past successes—many of commission, some of restraint. Since the Civil War, the U.S. political system has been extraordinarily stable and durable, experiencing no deep crisis of regime legitimacy and requiring only a dozen additional amendments to our eighteenth-century Constitution, most of them of only historical significance. Our polity and civil society have accepted and integrated a vast number of immigrants of diverse races, religions, languages, and cultural backgrounds, most with relatively low education levels, transforming them into patriotic Americans and loyal permanent residents. Our competitive, resilient economy leads the world in technological innovation and has given us the highest standard of living in the world. (Despite recent setbacks, it still vies for that distinction with oil-rich Norway and tiny tax haven Luxembourg.¹) Having rescued our allies in two world wars, the United States has exerted hegemonic military, cultural, diplomatic, and economic power (for better and worse) for seven decades. It has extended civil rights for racial and religious minorities, women, gay people, and the disabled. It reduced poverty significantly between 1960 and 2010, with much of that decline occurring since 1980.² Its civil society is the world’s most robust and creative, with a vibrant religious and civic culture that supports a bewildering variety of philanthropic, religious, and social service activities. Among liberal democracies, Americans are by far the most patriotic people; almost 90 percent completely or mostly agree with the statement “I am very patriotic”; most claim to engage in patriotic activities.³ Our natural environment, highlighted in its national park system and vast tracts of unsettled territory, is stunning. The U.S. demographic structure and fertility rate are the envy of faster-aging Western democracies. A deep norm of tolerance leaves the United States as one of the few advanced democracies without a nativist or xenophobic political party. Its formidable military establishment poses no threat to civilian politics. Its response to 9/11 was largely effective in avoiding subsequent attacks on the homeland. It maintains a stable currency that helps support the global economy. Some of its domestic policies and programs are highly successful (see chapter 11).*

This is the good news. The bad news is that Americans have a dismal opinion of the federal government’s performance, one that is only getting darker.⁴ Significantly, this growing antipathy is not antigovernment generally (see chapter 4). Instead, it targets only the federal government; respect for state and local governments is both high and stable. Nor is this hostility toward the federal government in Washington a partisan matter. Instead, it is expressed by a majority of Democrats as well as Republicans.⁵ And perhaps most revealing, this disaffection long preceded the current political gridlock in Congress that many pundits see (wrongly, as I shall show) as the root of the problem.

In both 1997 and 2010, a Princeton Survey Research Associates/Pew survey reported that only 2 percent of respondents believed that the federal government does an “excellent job” in running its programs; 74 percent of respondents said that it did only a “fair” or “poor job.”⁶ In 2011, 79 percent said they were “frustrated” or “angry” with the federal government. (In 2007, before the recession, that total was 74 percent.) Again, Obamacare’s initial website breakdown, unexpectedly low enrollment by the young and healthy, and the constant regulatory maneuvers necessitated by these factors have probably magnified this deep discontent.

In 2010, only 36 percent thought the government “often does a better job than it is given credit for.” Fully 83 percent thought that federal programs’ performance was “getting worse” or “staying the same.” In 2011, 64 percent thought that “big government” was the biggest threat to the country in the future; only 26 percent identified “big business” as the biggest future threat, even only five years after the economic meltdown.⁷ In 2010, only 4 percent had “a lot of confidence” that when the federal government decides to solve a problem it will actually be solved. In July 2013, a Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll reported that 83 percent of Americans disapprove of Congress’s performance—the highest in the poll’s history.⁸ And, perhaps most ominous, a Harvard Institute of Politics poll published in April 2013 found that among voters under thirty, traditionally the most optimistic and idealistic demographic group, trust in the president and in Congress is at low levels and declining.⁹ Not surprisingly, both parties are finding it harder to induce attractive, ambitious candidates to run for the U.S. Senate.¹⁰ Even the public’s approval rating of the Supreme Court, which it traditionally revered, has declined significantly since the 1980s to just 44 percent.¹¹

Consider the responses to a question that pollsters have asked for more than a half century: “How much of the time do you think you can trust the government in Washington to do what is right?” In 1958, 73 percent said “just about always” or “most of the time”; in 2011, only 10 percent did so.¹² In April 2013, only 28 percent of Americans had a favorable opinion of the federal government; even among Democrats, who controlled both the White House and the Senate, it fell to only 41 percent, down ten points from the previous year.¹³ Indeed, even the Democrat leadership decries failures in many programs, while insisting that it can rectify them with more money, greater fairness, and smarter administration.¹⁴ The public evidently disagrees. A 2011 Rasmussen poll found that a record-low 17 percent of voters felt “the federal government has the consent of the governed” and 38 percent (a plurality) wanted the federal government to become “inconsequential” in American life.¹⁵ In 2013, the Brookings Institution found that even 56 percent of Democrats believe the government is “mostly or completely broken.”¹⁶ And this was before the government shutdown and failed Obamacare rollout on October 1, 2013, which of course aroused even greater public disgust! Even liberalism’s century-old flagship, the New Republic, now despairs.¹⁷

In short, the public views the federal government as a chronically clumsy, ineffectual, bloated giant that cannot be counted upon to do the right thing, much less to do it well. It does not seem to matter much to them whether the government that fails them is liberal or conservative, or how earnestly our leaders promise to remedy these failures. Failure is also common in the private sector, of course. Most new firms go out of business within their first five years,¹⁸ and the performance of leading private firms have often been abysmal and sometimes criminal¹⁹—for example, the “big four” accounting firms that audit brokerage safety and performance,²⁰ the top bond rating companies,²¹ stock exchanges,²² and the major financial institutions.²³ The leading heart organizations’ new set of cholesterol guidelines was discredited within days. But whereas consumers dissatisfied with private providers can usually take their business elsewhere (as Blackberry and other companies have discovered), discontented citizens are stuck with the government they have, until the next election.

Why, then, do most members of such a successful society so disparage their government? (Interestingly, Europeans’ faith in their governments appears to be even lower!)²⁴ This is an urgent, complex question, to which I offer five answers that are consistent with the social science evidence.²⁵

The most straightforward answer is that the federal government does in fact perform poorly in a vast range of domestic programs. (As explained below, this book focuses exclusively on federal domestic programs.) This is amply demonstrated by the large body of evidence compiled by the nation’s leading social science analysts and public administration scholars,²⁶ evidence that I prefigure later in this chapter and in detail in part 2. A competitive party system and an attentive, critical media get the word out on these failures, and the public naturally takes notice.

Second, and equally conspicuous, our legislative process is highly dysfunctional by almost any standard. “Even in some of the worst years of partisan gridlock,” New York Times reporter Jonathan Weisman reports, “a deadline has meant something to Congress—until 2013.”²⁷ The title of a recent book by two leading scholars of Congress is telling: It’s Even Worse Than It Looks.²⁸ And as with the survey evidence just discussed, these professional judgments were rendered before both the latest government shutdown, the Obamacare website fiasco, and the impending debt limit crisis.

Third, Americans perceive a gap between “the democracy of everyday life” and democracy as practiced in Washington,²⁹ between how well their neighborhoods and religious communities generally function, and the federal government’s often dismaying performance.*

Fourth, prosperity may have raised public expectations and demands.† This could explain why voters from wealthier countries like the United States tend to criticize their governments more than those from poorer ones do, and also why they direct their discontent not at democracy per se, which still enjoys very strong support in all industrialized countries, but instead at their governing institutions and leaders. Some analysts ascribe this discontent to “postmodern” attitudes that erode respect for authority;³⁰ people want to know, “What have you done for me lately?”

Finally, Americans harbor the conceit that we the people are not responsible for the government’s failures, which are instead caused by alien forces in Washington. In this self-justifying view, those politicians are shortsighted, selfish, partisan, lazy, and hypocritical, but we citizens are not. We do not acknowledge the role played by our inattention, apathy, cynicism, ignorance, and demand for many more government services than we are willing to pay for.* Failure produces more finger-pointing than blame acceptance, as president John F. Kennedy noted after his own failure at the Bay of Pigs: “Victory has a thousand fathers; defeat is an orphan.” Walt Kelly’s cartoon character Pogo uttered another version of this truth: “We have met the enemy and he is us.”³¹

DEFINING FAILURE AND SUCCESS

Assessments of policy or program effectiveness necessarily depend on how I (and the analysts whose work I synthesize) define and measure failure and success. Because these judgments are contestable, I use chapter 2 to explore these definitions and measures, answering questions like: Failure and success compared with what—an unregulated market? What about programs that are successful in some respects but not in others? How can one assess a program’s performance? Since even ineffective ones create some benefits for at least some people, how can we assess them overall? Chapter 2 presents my answers to such questions. I note there that the main index of a program’s performance should not be its durability or its enthusiastic defenders,† which may reflect political inertia protected by strategically positioned beneficiaries, but instead its cost-effectiveness. I explain there what this means, how it can be assessed, and why many such assessments are controversial. We shall see that it is much harder to assess government failure than market failure, and to conclude that particular public programs do or do not “work.”

As the analysis proceeds, readers should keep in mind several points that subsequent chapters will exemplify. Even the most successful programs (see chapter 11) exhibit flaws, some of them serious, and even failed policies confer some benefits. Sometimes the benefits are immense, but they are delivered at much higher costs than necessary. (This is why I do not count Medicare a success, as I explain in chapter 11.) All such assessments are relative—both to the criteria of success presented in chapter 2 and to how effective the program might be if its shortcomings could somehow be remedied. And although people often blame government failure on powerful interest groups, campaign contributions, and partisan polarization, the causes are almost always much deeper—and most of them, as we shall see, originate in Congress! In fact, interest groups (discussed throughout, especially in chapters 4, 5, 7, 8, and 11) are the lifeblood of a vibrant democracy like ours; their effects are large but widely misunderstood. Campaign contributions play a smaller role than most people think, as we shall see in chapter 7. And political polarization merely shows that the country is deeply divided; indeed, it has been from the very beginning and at times even more than now. But it does not explain policy failure.

Understanding government failure, then, presents complex challenges. Its funders, consumers, and ultimate appraisers—“We the People”—are more disgruntled than ever, and the social scientists who assess the evidence most rigorously find that these appraisers’ disapproval is amply warranted. In a consent-based polity, ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter 1: Introduction
• Part 1: The Context of Policy Making
• Part 2: The Structural Sources of Policy Failure
• Part 3: Remedies and Reprise
• Notes
• Index