There’s a long tradition in political science of skepticism regarding proposed quick fixes in politics. For example: term limits sound good but they weaken the legislature and reduce voter choice. Jungle primaries sound fair but they encourage insincere voting. Campaign finance rules sound like a good idea but donors can always get around them. Anticorruption laws might sound necessary for preserving political integrity, but ultimately politics is all about favors so why single out certain practices and label them as bribery? Gerrymandering sounds bad but it’s all part of the political process.
These arguments typically follow the patterns of anti-reform arguments noted by Albert Hirschman: perversity, futility and jeopardy. From wikipedia:
– According to the Perversity Thesis, any purposive action to improve some feature of the political, social, or economic status quo only serves, perversely, to exacerbate the very condition one wishes to remedy (compare: Unintended consequences).
– The Futility Thesis holds that attempts at social transformation will be unavailing, that they will fail to “make a dent” in the problem, and the motives of those who keep attempting futile reforms are suspect.
– The Jeopardy Thesis states that the risk of the proposed change is too great as it imperils some previous, precious accomplishment.
Just because these are standard forms of argument, it doesn’t mean they’re wrong. In any given case–indeed, in many actual cases–one or more of these points can be correct. Just cos a proposed reform sounds kinda reasonable, it doesn’t mean that it would be a good idea if implemented.
But I see a broader themes in political science anti-reformism, a cynical attitude that we’ve described in the past as, A quick rule of thumb is that when someone seems to be acting like a jerk, an economist will defend the behavior as being the essence of morality, but when someone seems to be doing something nice, an economist will raise the bar and argue that he’s not being nice at all. In political science this comes out in the form of, Ha ha those silly reformers don’t understand the real world. Among economics writers you sometimes see the argument that insider trading laws shouldn’t be enforced, either because insider trading is going to happen anyway (futility, in Hirschman’s terminology) or that insider trading is good in itself because it makes the market more efficient (jeopardy). There’s also the argument that environmental regulation is bad because it can be evaded (futility), that it leads to the dreaded “regulatory capture” (perversity) or that, being a government-enforced law, will interfere with a preferable market solution (jeopardy). Political science anti-reform arguments are a bit different from economics anti-reform arguments in that the economists often seem to want to remove politics and government as much as possible, whereas political scientists will argue that all problems should be settled at the ballot box.
I’m not saying that the political scientists or the economists making anti-reform arguments are themselves cynical. There’s no reason you can’t sincerely believe that campaign finance laws will be futile or that insider trading laws can’t work. But I do think they can have knee-jerk reactions against anything that is promoted as a good-government reform. Skepticism is fine, but just cos something is promoted as a reform, that doesn’t automatically make it bad either.
I’m not sympathetic to the general argument that he bad guys are gonna win anyway, so let’s not even try to stop them.
All this has become clearer to me in the current political climate in which corruption has pretty much become legalized (see here for one of many high-profile recent examples). Partisn redistricting is out of control, all sorts of lies are heavily promoted by public officials and on social media, nonpartisan news sources are being attacked by the government, campaign finance laws are routinely violated with no consequence, but meanwhile ordinary people are at risk all over the country for getting fired because of saying something insufficiently worshipful about Charlie Kirk or saying something that some campus watchdog doesn’t like. This is political polarization–anything goes because the view is that the other side is worse–and I’m not saying that any particular reforms, whether they be campaign finance restrictions, anti-gerrymandering laws, or an end to court rulings that effectively legalize bribery, will stop this trend–but I do think that the ending of political restraint has been facilitated by the efforts made in recent decades to take away the rules.
In short: Yes, political reforms don’t always deliver what they promise. But a continuing flow of reforms may be necessary to counter trends in lawlessness.
To put it another way, the fact that bad actors can work their way around reforms is often taken as an argument against reform: if a reform is gonna be evaded, why do it? But I’d argue it the other way: if bad actors are going to try to get around the rules, we should make it effortful for them to do so, and risky too. When corruption is effectively legalized, as it is now, the barriers go down and more people will do corrupt things, indeed from an economic and political standpoint they’re pushed in that direction. When corruption is forbidden, yes, it will still happen, but you’d expect to see less of it. And there’s a big difference between “some politicians are corrupt” and “the government is up for sale.”
A different way to put this, perhaps: what is the optimal amount of corruption?
1. zero: the idealized ethical approach, easily shown to be unrealistic and naive
2. whatever is currently seen: the ultimate skeptical view, no improvement is possible
3. the level at which incremental benefits = incremental costs of reducing corruption: the “rational” view (especially represented by economists).
My skeptical self often succumbs to option 2, while my gut reaction is to always want 1. Option 3 is almost always depressing, since it acknowledges our inability to obtain perfection but requires the hard work of doing something less. But even if we pursue option 3, there are different ways to characterize the choice: economists approach it in terms of monetary estimates of benefits and costs while political scientists may use different metrics (and I suspect philosophers use even different metrics). I suspect that discussions about what rules to apply to applying option 3 really end up as variations of arguments between the other two options. Compromise seems to lose out every time. I lament this even as I am myself guilty of finding compromise unsatisfying.
Ask a different question. What’s the optimal amount of governance imposed on the majority by a tiny minority using guns and prisons and militaries?
I have been extraordinarily busy with local school board politics the last month. Here a group of 7 people led by the board president with some kind of self interest in mind attempted to impose school closure plans written by the president by hiring a consultant and laundering her plans through their expertise. The consultant formed a citizens committee and then use a sham process to try to manufacture the appearance of legitimacy. the committee started out with due diligence and rapidly recognized they were being manipulated. In the end the committee voted 66% or so against each and every suggested option. meanwhile public records act releases uncovered illegal and unethical backroom deals by the board president. All of this culminating in a board meeting where hundreds of people came to comment on the entire process. the board then voted 6-1 against even accepting the consultants report as a document deliverable. the process died.
Most parents recognize that declining enrollment means future changes in the school configurations, but they refused to be ruled by the whims of 1 person pushing ideas onto 6 other board members who then push their ideas onto 14000 families.
A fellow activist parent exclaimed how “democracy sometimes works” but she was wrong… Democracy is when a tiny group of elected people impose their ideas on thousands to hundreds of millions of others. Democracy was literally what caused the problem. What worked was anarchy, where people refused to be ruled by a tiny minority and reject the legitimacy of rule and place heavy pressure on rulers.
People see what is going on in the US as abberant, but devolution into naked self dealing is the natural purpose of the state. it ALWAYS winds up this way. The problem is when we beat it back we have been so propagandized that we reproduce it again. Take Nepal as the perfect example. the people literally burned their government to the ground a year ago or so but having no framwork for understanding an alternative, held elections and reproduced the problem again. The Zapatistas avoided this trap because they had a functional alternative framework to organize within.
Nepal will see the production of a ruling class and hierarchy imposing itself on common people. its literally built into the structure of their govt. The Zapatistas will not see that. They haven’t over the last 40 years because they build their governance horizontally.
I assume the answer to your alternative question is zero. But the presupposed conditions make that a mostly irrelevant answer. What is the optimal number of people to knowingly wrongly kill of crimes we know they did not commit? Zero. What is the optimal number of people to kill for crimes we believe they have committed – not so clear (although there is an ethical position that would still say zero – a position I can respect but I don’t think is relevant to this discussion). Your statement that “devolution into naked self dealing is the natural purpose of the state” and that it “ALWAYS” winds up this way is a bit too extreme for me. Like the extreme assumptions economists often make – that all people always act in their own self interest – there is plenty (too much) evidence of this, but I still find it too extreme. “Public service” used to mean something different, despite the numerous examples where it didn’t. Humans can’t avoid self-interest but are capable of putting it aside for the good of others. I don’t want to say that too strongly since I find it rare enough in practice. But, Daniel, you are too pessimistic for me – and I’m pretty pessimistic.
Dale, I consider anarchism a form of optimism actually. There is a different way of being and its actually here all along and does a lot of the real work of the world for which it gets no credit.
I think this perception of “public service” being something people used to do is kind of a rose colored look at the past. COINTELPRO was something people used to do. J Edgar Hoover likely committed more felonies than any person in the history of the US. For decades he did illegal wiretaps of the frickin presidents themselves. He authorized break ins by FBI black ops teams on a regular basis, he nakedly blackmailed every major politician in the country. JFK declined to fire him saying “You dont fire god himself”
Joseph McCarthy did stuff people used to do. He probably saw it as “service”. Eisenhower did stuff people used to do. Namely ruthelessly persecuted gay people in the government. Strom Thurmond did stuff people used to do, filibustering the civil rights act… John C Calhoun did stuff people used to do, in “service” of the public he argued vehemently that slavery was a benefit to the enslaved…
I’m really not pessimistic enough I think.
“A fellow activist parent exclaimed how “democracy sometimes works” but she was wrong… Democracy is when a tiny group of elected people impose their ideas on thousands to hundreds of millions of others. Democracy was literally what caused the problem. What worked was anarchy, where people refused to be ruled by a tiny minority and reject the legitimacy of rule and place heavy pressure on rulers.”
I think your contention is with “elite” democracy, or “representative” democracy. (Are you in favor of choosing politicians randomly by sortition, or removing them entirely?) I would call the success that you and others achieved democratic, and also anarchist. One way of describing anarchist socialism is “workplace democracy”, where every worker owns part of the company and the decisions about how the profits of the company are distributed are made by everyone.
I don’t think saying “democracy doesn’t work” is helpful.
electoral democracy is what I meant yes.
Originally democracy in Greece was sortition. I’d take that over what we have for sure.
If you want to call anarchist socialism as workplace democracy I wouldn’t argue with you I’d just point out that its a kind of technical jargon usage that doesn’t first pop into peoples heads when they think “Democracy” the vast majority of people think “Federal elections for a legislative body and an executive president” or “parliamentary elections and coalitions” when they think “Democracy” stuff like the US, Germany, UK, France, South Korea, Japan, Australia etc
The goal of the original democracy was to avoid oligarchy.
However, ~1700s it was redefined to include elections, which is only a minor tweak to how oligarchs are chosen. Ie, a larger weight on charisma/deception skills over military, bloodlines, industry.
The perversity and futility arguments are invariably true, in a limited sense. There is no such thing as a Pareto-superior reform–there will always be a bad consequence to somebody, somewhere. There is no such thing as a rule that will not be evaded by someone, somewhere, somehow. Every benefit has a cost–the question is whether the benefits exceed the cost, not whether a cost exists. Merely pointing to the cost is a form of whataboutism.
Many reform proposals seem to match the politician’s syllogism (“We must do something. This is something. Therefore, we must do this.”).
It’s not that the problem isn’t real or can’t be addressed at all, just that the particular solution put forward is pants-on-head stupid.
This post makes me think about a mindset I run into a lot online – especially among libertarians – where “government action always has unintended consequences” becomes axiomatic in order to support the logic that we’re better off if government doesn’t act. But that mindset seems based on flawed logic: a kind of faith that inaction doesn’t also usually generate unintended consequences. But in the real world every choice has a counterfactual.
This ties into my pet peeve that people easily slip into weak counterfactual thinking: Government action X had negative side effects, therefore we know X shouldn’t have been taken. The pandemic was basically counterfactual-palooza, people pointed to the downsides of NPIs as if the alternative would have been cost-free.
In less contentious fields, unintended consequences are expected without cynicism. Multiple levels of testing and demonstration of early releases and pre-releases or prototypes to representative users exist to catch unintended consequences as early and as cheaply as possible. Unintended consequences loom so large in politics because they are not examined until the politicians have committed themselves. Cynics might point to cases where effort appears to have been expended not to fix, but to hide those consequences, and perhaps to cases where supposedly unintended consequences were in fact designed in. To disarm the cynics, demonstrate that social science research can partner with those making changes to society to detect unintended consequences as early and cheaply as possible, and then pivot to mitigate or remove those consequences.
Yes, I think there’s a difference between saying, “I think we need to account for this consequence that wasn’t part of the original intention,” and saying “I think we shouldn’t do this because some other consequence might also occur.” But in practice it’s often just a yes or no vote.