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studentstime · 3 years

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GENDER BAISNESS IN LEADERSHIP FORMATION IN BANGLADESH

written by

Israfil Hossain

INTRODUCTION:

Bangladesh is undergoing phenomenal changes/reforms in its economy, governance, women empowerment, human resource development, poverty reduction, health, education, etc. Its economy is moving at quite a good pace, given the spurt in export earnings, mainly due to private entrepreneurs, and high remittance earnings mainly coming from the Bangladeshis working in the Middle East, Europe and America. Bangladesh has huge potentials, as the experts predict, even to reach to the middle income group of countries, given some more momentum in terms of improving governance, eradicating corruption and ensuring political stability. As is known, Bangladesh is often battered by natural calamities which cause substantial damage to its infrastructure, and its effort to eradicate poverty, not to speak of the loss to human lives. Bangladesh has certain advantages like homogeneity in terms of ethnicity, religion and a culture of tolerance which play a great impacting role in its integration process. It has a huge population, which may be called a comparative advantage that can be converted into competitive advantage like turning them into human resources. If the huge population can be turned into more literate, skilled, semi-skilled manpower, and utilized domestically and exported to developed countries then the country would greatly benefit economically and socially. Given the limited space of Bangladesh that finds it difficult to sustain such a huge population, this is one of the most feasible and pragmatic options left for Bangladesh. Otherwise Bangladesh’s human security will be in jeopardy.

TRANSFORMATIONAL LEADERSHIP TRAITS

Transformational Leadership is the latest and most promising phase in the leadership spectrum. “Here the focus is on leader behavior during periods of organizational transition and on processes such as creating visions of desired future state and obtaining employee commitment to change.” Transformational Leadership is a kind of leadership that can transcend the normal boundary management of an environment. It aims to walk an extra mile, or take a bit more risk, or take more responsibilities instead of passing the buck in undertaking a task. It should be able to improvise, if required, to reengineer or reinvent. Stagnancy or maintaining status quo is the job of a routine manager or a transactional leader but creating a new context in order to be more productive is the goal of a transformational leader. It should be able to take the team along who strongly upholds the visions, values and objectives of the leader to be their own and inspires them in such a way that they would carry out the tasks enthusiastically even at the peril of their life. They would not necessarily turn into rabble rouser. They should, as far as possible, reflect charisma, be able to inspire the subordinates and should be able to intellectually stimulate the subordinates or the stakeholders.

Charisma entails providing vision and mission to the stakeholders so that the team moves along the path the leader has foreseen. He should be able to instill pride and gain respect and trust from the subordinates or his constituency. Charisma reflects his personality, knowledge, wisdom, sense of justice and commitment. One may argue this is a born quality- a gift from God. This argument is largely not tenable since - many scholars term it as a myth – such qualities can be acquired through rigorous exercise, given a deep commitment. Next point is about inspiring the stakeholders in undertaking even the arduous jobs. The leadership is about understanding the environment, adapting to the environment and be able to communicate the contingencies commensurate with the environment to the stakeholders. Now the leader should be able to communicate the high expectations expected of the team members in a simple and understandable language. He may use different symbols at his disposal. Gandhi and Mao Tse Tung inspired the whole nation to fight for freedom and emancipation in such a way that hundreds and thousands of them were even ready to die for the cause at their every beck and call. However, such historical examples may not appropriately apply to every level, tier or environment of leadership. But one can always draw lessons from such examples.

A leader should be able to intellectually stimulate his team members. He should understand the context, environment, rationality of his cause or vision, and that would need deep intellectual exercise. He should be able to provide careful and creative problem solving techniques to his team members. All great leaders of the world are generally men of knowledge and wisdom. Henry Kissinger called Mao Tse Tung one of the greatest teachers of mankind. A leader must pursue knowledge-based critical thinking, especially in this globalized intelligent world. Practical knowledge has no substitute for a leader in order to inspire his subordinates with ideas, values, attitudes, perceptions, visions, missions and objectives. The subordinates are unlikely to accept one as leader if he cannot provide rational and creative problem solving techniques. Without such course, a leader might become redundant in the society.

The last point the author would like to make is personal touch a leader provides to his subordinates. This aspect of leadership practice is seriously lacking in Bangladesh environment. A leader has to give personal attention, and treat all his subordinates individually. He has to counsel and mentor his members, if possible. A leader has to care about the welfare, mental or health state, family problems of his subordinates. This works marvel in Bangladesh environment. Mere patting makes a lot of difference to an employee in the Bangladesh environment. Maslow’s Theory of Needs does indicate such directions in order to upgrade the motivation levels of the employees.

A leader should be an innovator apart from being an administrator only. He should be able to inspire trust than merely relying on control. A leader, depending on the tier he is holding in the hierarchy, should generally have a long range perspective and an eye on the horizon apart from having an eye on the bottom line. A leader should not ask how and when an event took place; he, however, would do better if he asks what and why of the incident. He challenges the system or status quo, of course not unsettling the environment. Conflict management is a good technique but that should not destabilize the system one is holding. In a nutshell, transformational leaders are seen as change agents, courageous, believing in people, having a strong set of values, life-long learners, capable of coping with complexity, uncertainty and ambiguity and visionaries.

BANGLADESH BUREAUCRACY IN PERSPECTIVE:

Max Weber, the chief architect of bureaucracy, provides certain features of bureaucracy like hierarchy, promotion based on professional merit, development of a career service, reliance on and use of rules and regulations and impersonality of relationships among career professionals in the bureaucracy and with their clientele. To a commoner, taking cue from Max Weber, bureaucracy would appear to be something to do with red tapism, inefficiency and abuse of power in the context of official-client relationship. It develops a system of authority, which is indestructible and an entrenched bureaucracy that can serve any interest. It shows allegiance only to the authority above it even if political changes have taken place. Webster’s New International Dictionary defines bureaucracy as a system that is narrow, rigid and formal, depends on precedent, and lacks initiative and resourcefulness. The essence of traditional public administration tends to be rigid, rule-bound, centralized, insular, self-protective and profoundly antidemocratic; and such traits often collide with the contemporary paradigm of bureaucracy that “allows qualified voters an efficient instrument through which the will of the people may be expressed; makes officers both responsive and responsible,” and thereby ensures common welfare.

Theorists and practitioners would like to emphasize bureaucratic paradigms like fairness, representation, participation, accountability, responsiveness, political neutrality, efficiency, rationality, and expertise. But the very nature of public administration poses problem to such value. The bureaucrats have a tendency to rely more on expertise and knowledge than over accountability, participation and democratic control. Now, therefore, a pertinent question arises: are the bureaucratic traits legitimate in terms of democratic principles. In this regard, David Rosenbloom opines that the legitimacy of bureaucracy occurs when bureaucratic policy making is subject to direct popular control. If bureaucracy is isolated from public accountability, bureaucracy can in no way be responsible to public interests and desires.

Again Merton, an American sociologist, goes deeper into the pitfalls of bureaucratic system. Bureaucracy’s adherence to rules originally conceived as a means, turns into an end-in-itself, thereby resulting in the displacement of goals. “In Bangladesh, the bureaucracy, to a large extent, conforms to the Weberian model....... Bureaucrats are not always assigned specific positions on the basis of their specialization or expertise but rather on the basis of belonging to a particular civil service cadre. Rationality is conceived in a narrow sense. It is primarily equated with administrative efficiency and economy both of which are considered ends in themselves rather than means to an end- the effective delivery of public service.”

Bureaucracy’s strict adherence to regulations induces timidity, conservatism and technicism. Bureaucracy’s avowed norm of impersonality and its dependence on abstract rules put it in conflict with the personalized consideration the members of public and clientele would expect. Bureaucracy’s entrenched corporate interests, which may be called espirit de corp, totally negates the concept of transformational leadership traits.

Given the traits as shown, bureaucracy, theoretically speaking, goes against the grain of transformational leadership. However, such theoretical branding may not always find true reflection in the practical application by an individual bureaucrat. He may have the charisma, vision or personalized consideration like that of a transformational leader and he may exert to establish his leadership, but the environment of the boundary around which he is operating may not permit him to realize his full potentials. Initiative of an individual bureaucrat is greatly circumscribed in decision making process; there may be ten tiers, in the Central Government, to be crossed, when the final decision is made. However, in most of the cases, all the ten tiers may not have to be crossed. Anyway, a kind of timidity thus sets in such a process. Initiative, dynamism, and creative and innovative thinking, the sine quo nonefor transformational leadership that should be undertaken by a bureaucrat are lost, at best diluted. Risk-taking is one of the hallmarks of real leadership. In a scenario like this, a bureaucrat will not take any risks since he has somebody above him.

It is reportedly known that a Secretary to the government puts forward a file to his Cabinet Minister seeking sanction of a paltry sum of Tk. 25,000 (equivalent to US$350) to be disbursed for the repair/maintenance of a small building in a remote village of Bangladesh. Now this brings to the fore another predicament where the authority is so much centralized that such a simple decision has to be taken by the Central Government located in Dhaka. ADB Country Governance Assessment (Draft), Bangladesh, May 2004, under heading ‘Centralization’ observes, “An additional constraint to good governance at the local level is the extremely centralized form of government now in place. Union Parishads (UPs) derive their authority and a substantial portion of their funds from national ministries whose effective reach to the level is constrained by intervening levels of government. For example, Union Parishads (UPs) must submit their budgets and work plans for review and follow-up action by several appointed officials at the Upazilla and district levels. As a result, the UNO and the Chairman of the Upazilla Development Committee have more de facto power over development projects in Unions than do the UPs themselves.”

Although Bangladesh is a unitary system, there are three administrative tiers and local government structure which could have easily taken care of such problem. Even for posting of foundation level officers like lecturer/teacher of a college/high school or a medical officer at Upazilla (Sub-district), the Central Government, where again so many tiers may have to be crossed, gets involved. Here again, timidity sets in and that delays the decision making process. This also gives rise to more probability of corruption and sufferings of the employees. Motivation, which is conditioned more by intrinsic factors than extrinsic ones, gets badly affected and the overall productivity of the government definitely suffers. However, the probability of corruption still remains valid even if decentralization in relatively important decision making is done at the administrative levels. Federalism is, however, a far-fetched idea at the moment since basic structure of the Constitution has to be amended and for that political consensus has to be reached.

Even if an individual bureaucrat would like to exert his dynamism, creativity or initiative, the system would not permit it. The system constraint has become a serious problem in transforming the officers. Delay in the system is unwarranted and is a recurrent phenomenon. This author learnt about a case where a simple clarification on a point, pending for last about six years, asked from the higher office of the Republic to a functioning ministry took about six months, that too after several reminders. Such delays are caused both vertically and horizontally. Horizontal delays (reasons for vertical delays are already pointed out) are caused mainly because of consultation or opinion seeking with the other line ministries. In the horizontal plane also files have to again move up and down the tiers as mentioned. And if there is a disagreement, the matters get further complicated. It further delays the decision making process. This author was shocked to learn a state of affair where an important appointment case remained pending in a functioning ministry for three years. The case could have been processed to the appropriate authority for his approval. As a matter of fact, the incumbent continued functioning presumably without lawful authority for three years. When, on the eve of a ceremony, it was discovered that the appointment was not validated and hence the subsequent actions that followed could be questioned, the Pandora’s Box was opened. How and why it happened was not looked into. The accountability and transparency, which are so much essential for good governance, were totally lacking in this case. The matter was, probably, somehow patched up. Even in a transactional leadership spectrum, the status quo is at least maintained. In this case, even the status quo or routine functioning was not maintained, let alone challenging and changing the status quo. So the creative or innovative ideas cannot be expected that are so critical in this globalized, intelligent 21st century world.

Transformational leaders are supposed to be intellectually sound, so that they can transmit to their followers their wisdom; and it results in two-way traffic. A leader has to command the respect through his personality, values, wisdom, and long-range view and make them think the way he thinks. Only then can the leader take the team along with him. He has to capture some of their styles or traits in order to be successful in his domain. And his own domain is to have contemporary and up-to-date knowledge and the ability to apply those in the field he is handling. If he is handling WTO matters, he should be a reasonable expert on the subject so that he can communicate, negotiate and be able to enter into agreements, keeping the country’s interests above everything, with his expert counterparts coming from both developed and developing worlds. This is a knowledge-based world, but sad enough Bangladesh has turned out be a knowledge starved society.

If our bureaucrats could be armed with more technical and appropriate knowledge, then the Government would not probably have signed the Production Sharing Contracts (PSCs) with the International Oil Companies (IOCs) where 72% of the revenue earnings are given to the IOCs in foreign currencies. Gas is stored in the territories of Bangladesh but it only gets a paltry 28% percent of revenue earnings. Again, because of the lack of adequate technical and appropriate knowledge or realizing the urgency Bangladesh, as yet, could not place its case before the United Nations regarding the maritime demarcation of the Bay of Bengal, although it ratified the UNCLOS in 2001. Bangladesh has not yet carried out necessary survey to decide about the extent of its continental shelf. The control points of its base line, both in the western and eastern sectors, have been contested by both India and Myanmar. Bangladesh is likely to get ‘zone/sea locked’ and if serious negotiations are not undertaken immediately with the actors concerned, mostly applying the equity theory as against equidistance theory, much of Bangladesh’s life sustenance resources and maritime freedom might get jeopardized. It is to be especially mentioned here that the neighboring countries like India, Myanmar, Thailand, Sri Lanka and Indonesia have settled their scores of maritime boundary demarcation.

There is a big question: is Bangladesh prepared for such serious negotiations with its neighbours in order to protect its interests? Or it is going to surrender its interests as it did during the last Hong Kong round of WTO negotiations because the Bangladesh team did not carry out enough home work for such negotiations? There can be a further question: is the person who is supposed to carry out his homework has the requisite ability and the right attitude to do so? There is a concern about it. The answer is simple: the person may not have the requisite expertise and the positive attitude that would take care of the national interest.

This author learnt about a case where a summary for an appointment to a very high office was placed in the higher office in such a way that the constitutional provision apparently got violated. When someone pointed out such violation, the reply given to him was that there was such a precedent earlier. To that officer, what was important was the precedent not the Constitution. It also shows lack of knowledge of the Constitution both by him and his predecessor. It could be also attitudinal tendencies to show what they did was right, not what the Constitution stipulates. It can be surmised that it was more of a lack of adequate knowledge of the Constitution. Superficial knowledge on such critical issues could be disastrous for the nation and on occasions national interests might get violated. Even a transactional leader is expected to have enough knowledge on a subject he handles in order to maintain the status quo; otherwise atrophy would take over. In a globalized interdependent world, specialist knowledge by the bureaucrats in their respective field of activities is essential even if we presume they are not transformational leaders. Intellectual stimulation is sine quo non for someone to be a transformational leader.

It is generally believed that the bureaucrats, especially officers from the Administrative Cadre, probably, acted as a pressure group (there could be other pressure groups also) to block the separation and independence of the judiciary and Anti-Corruption Commission. It also did not work favorably to institutionalize the local government system of Bangladesh. The Supreme Court, through its twelve point directive in 1999, asked the Government to completely separate the judiciary, especially the lower judiciary, from the executive. But the successive governments started dilly-dallying the process, presumably also at the behest of the bureaucrats. Bureaucrats might have apprehended that their power could get greatly curtailed by such action. This could also be true in the case of the local governments, as already pointed out. However, the local political leaders also had their vested interests in not institutionalizing and strengthening the local government structures.

Be that as it may, bureaucrats would not like to part with the control and superintendence they have on different aspects of the local government. Bureaucrats both at the local tiers and also at the central level have varying degrees of control over the local governments. It is a well nigh difficult task to meaningfully direct, control and monitor the activities of the local governments, from the capital city, spread in every nook and corner of the country. Personalized consideration would be totally lacking in such a scenario which goes against the concept of transformational leadership. Innovativeness, creativity and emotional attachment are essential in transformational leadership styles but sad enough such inputs may be absent in a scenario like this.

RESPONSE:

A thorough overhauling of the bureaucratic structure, span of control, style of work, motivation, values, attitudes, and mindset may be necessary in the context and environment of Bangladesh. There may be a necessity of strategic planning for this. Donor assistance, both in terms of money and expertise, may be necessary.

Firstly, flatter organization system, which generally goes with the modern management concepts, as against many-tiered vertical organization in the bureaucratic hierarchy of the Central Government, may be thought of. It could be brought down to four to five tiers that would facilitate better and faster decision making. However, the number of streams, dealing with limited subjects, within a Ministry/Division may be increased. This will help in faster decision making and specialization.

Secondly, similar types of Ministries/Divisions could be clustered together within which the officers/employees would generally rotate. Example could be the Ministries/Divisions of Finance, Planning, Commerce, External Resources Division, Expatriate Welfare Division could be clustered together, something like Strategic Business Units (SBUs), as practised in the business world, where the officers from their foundation level to even up to highest level would rotate during their stint of staff appointments. Another example could be the Ministries/Divisions like Foreign, Home, Defence, Disaster Management, Chittagong Hill Tracts, etc could be clustered together. The specialization that would accrue in such clustering would better take care of areas like WTO, maritime or land boundary demarcation, counter-terrorism, etc. where there are tendencies of faltering. This is given merely as a suggestion; one may not be sacrosanct about it. In a similar vein, Zafarullah’s categorization of ministries/divisions merits consideration, may be with certain adjustment. Those could be categorized, as he prescribes, like Executive (President’s Office, Prime Minister’s Office and Cabinet Division), Regulatory (Establishment, Finance, IRD, Local Government, Commerce, Home, Jute, Civil Aviation and Tourism, Shipping, Lands, etc), Service-orientated/Welfare (Relief, Special Affairs, Health and Family Welfare, Railways, Post and Telecommunication, Social Welfare, Women’s Affairs), Food, Labour and Manpower Developmental (Agriculture, Rural Development and Cooperative, Irrigation, Water Development and Flood Control, Roads and Road Transport, Industries, Power, Energy and Mineral Resources, Works, Fisheries and Livestock, Jute and Textile), Promotional (Primary and Mass Education, Education, Science and Technology, Environment and Forest, Information, Cultural Affairs, Youth and Sports, Religious Affairs), Advisory (Armed Forces Division, Planning, Law, Justice and Parliamentary Affairs, Parliament Secretariat), Research (Statistical and Implementation, Monitoring and Evaluation Division), and International (Foreign Affairs and Economic Relations).

Thirdly, Strategic Management Planning, along with Management by Objectives (MBO) technique, as practised in the business world, dovetailed to the culture of public service may be adopted for the Bangladesh Civil Service. Vision/Mission, long term objectives, strategies, yearly objectives, policies, feedback system for each Ministry/Division, Corporation and Department should be clearly spelt out in a realistic, achievable, time bound benchmark. This is not to say that broad objectives are not spelt out in the yearly /three yearly/five yearly planning processes. Bangladesh has a good macro level planning, but what it lacks is the micro level planning and implementation. It also lacks feed back loop which helps in further planning. Objectives are not set out in a realistic and achievable manner; as such Bangladesh generally falters in implementing the Annual Development Plans or in utilizing the foreign assistance. Strategic planning involves all segments, spectrum, activities, cohesion, top down and bottom up approaches, etc. It also involves participatory planning. All stakeholders should be consulted before deciding about an objective. Each Department/Tier/Local Government should be given their yearly achievable, tangible and intangible (to be quantified as much as possible) objectives that would, in totality, meet the yearly objectives of a particular Ministry/Division. Our foreign missions, as part of economic diplomacy, could be given the yearly objectives like export to the target country be increased by say 10% or so many skilled/non skilled manpower be exported to that country. Such objectives could be decided realistically based on past experiences and future trends. Management by objectives, although an American concept not fitting into our culture, may be followed at least in its spirit. Now any player who fails to meet a reasonable expectation of the objectives may be made answerable. Such lapses may be reflected in his yearly performance appraisal in clear terms which would ultimately impact on his career advancement. An independent team has to work out the details of modalities, in case the Government decides to implement the concept.

Fourthly, in order to attract the better graduates of the universities (private sector is now a better destination), their pay, perks and privileges should be greatly enhanced. ADB Country Governance Assessment Bangladesh (Draft), May 2004 acknowledges that the Civil Service no longer attracts the same calibre of entry- level officials that it did in the past. It prescribes salary reform, “mindful of the need to balance the prospect of competitive salary increases with the corollary need to reduce the overall costs of public administration”. If necessary, a portion of the Annual Development Plan may have to be diverted to the Revenue Budget in order to cater for the extra expenditure involved in salary increases. In the long term, it would prove to be more cost-effective. If the actors are not efficient, output would be always problematic. One cannot be expected to be efficient, if his/her physiological needs are not adequately met, when he is de-motivated.

Fifthly, since the quality of Bangladesh University education has deteriorated to a great extent, especially in relation to communication skill in English and latest developments around the world, there is a dire need for an exhaustive, realistic, up-to-date training package programme to be developed in the training institutions. This is borne out by the observations made by Shawkat Ali, a former career civil servant, “various studies have drawn attention to the deficiencies in the training of civil servants, specially post-entry and pre-entry training. Some of these deficiencies are as follows: lack of qualified and well trained staff arising out of posting unwilling civil servants in the training institutes and such postings do not take into account the qualification and experience of the civil servants which result in low quality of training and lack of motivation; the post-entry training and in-service training courses are not well integrated and scheduled to provide and continuously update the level of training and knowledge of civil servants. …Questions have already been raised about relevance of training, utilization of training and incentives for training. Training should be both class room and field based. Exhaustive training programme generally for greater duration than what is done today, especially at the foundation level would pay rich dividends in the long run. Training in the form of case studies, seminars, group projects especially at the field levels, presentations, research papers, In Basket Exercises, visits and orientation with varied types of installations, institutions, corporate world, NGOs, local government, industries, etc may be given more emphasis. Field trips and exercises, something similar to military system, could be given a consideration. For such extensive training system foreign advisory team from countries like Singapore, Japan, UK, and Australia as also from the Bangladesh Armed Forces may be sought.

Sixthly, for career advancement, successful field level appointments like Upazilla Nirbahi Officer (UNO) and Deputy Commissioner (DC), an independent assignment in a foreign mission may be given more credence. One who performs poorly in such appointments may not be given further enhancement in career. Based on the performance reflected in the Annual Confidential Reports, the officers in the promotion chain, at different tiers, may be required to go through the Assessment Centers where they would undergo various group exercises and individual tasks as well as psychometrics and interviews. Only the successful candidates would qualify for further promotion. This practice is followed in the U.K. Civil Service. This has relevance to military system of promotion as well. It is heartening to note that Bangladesh Government is already thinking of introducing similar system.

Seventhly, there is generally a degeneration of values in Bangladesh. Corruption is rampant in all segments of the society. Such situation should be arrested through greater transparency and accountability. Parliamentary standing committees may be more assertive to make the bureaucrats more accountable. Even the courts of law may, if not already doing, attempt to go into greater details of a case that involves the government projects and functionaries and make the public servants accountable. Higher bureaucracy may regularly visit the field level projects and offices to ensure better accountability and transparency.

Eighthly, E-governance or Digital Governance should be given especial priority. E-Governance has to be seen as a tool for good governance and human development. Good Governance occurs when Electronic Governance is able to enhance the “Public Value” of information supplied. The Civil Service members may be made aware of the necessity of E-Governance and be thoroughly armed with necessary competencies. Chandra Babu Naidu, a former Chief Minister of Andhra Pradesh, India, could be a role model for our system.

Lastly, as long as necessary expertise, required of a particular Ministry/Division, is not developed, a core committee of experts drawn mainly from the civil society, universities and research institutes may be formed, as a stop gap measure, to assist the concerned Ministry/Division in handling the technical/complicated matters that involve vital national interests. Of course, this has been done many a time. This now needs to be made more structured with definite terms of reference.

CONCLUTION:

In conculation, we presented a proposition of the transformational stage in the administration, bureaucracy, and state. In fact, it is emphasized here that all other organs and structure of the state are poised for change. Partisan polity in the transitional stage is about to introduce reforms after a huge paradigm shift. The quality of leadership in all spheres – politics, business, profession, bureaucracy – is in question and calls deeply for reform.

In the current reformist and transformational scenario, the bureaucracy has a critical role in enabling an orderly transition to provide the prerequisites for democracy and development. For achieving this, the bureaucracy may help establish the rule of law. Without this, the arbitrary and capricious decision making of the past could reappear.

Leadership in Bangladesh is definitely at a critical juncture and, needless to say, standing at the threshold of the 21st century, Bangladesh has to discard the old perception of it. In this regard, the author considers this phase of history as transitional and transformational. Whether we like it or not, the coming generations will complete the full circle of change that is needed to move from one level of development to the next and thank us for “beginning the beginning”.

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loisalloisa · 3 years

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THEORIES OF ENTREPRENEURSHIP

These theories that are chosen are somehow made us felt easier to understand and to make an informational words to provide enough information for those who are willing to take a risk or have plans upon joining the entrepreneurship field.

Innovation is the creation, development and implementation of a new product, process or service, with the aim of improving efficiency, effectiveness or competitive advantage. Innovation is not only about thinking a new idea to be implemented but it is also a subject that enables you to invent or make some things that can be useful for the future. These are the things that will either help us for our growing economy. It may be hard to invent some equipments but if you do it with a group that has a potential to make it public or to produce more equipments and the government will approve these inventions and provide some materials needed and to introduce these to all the people who are willing to use your inventions, then there will be a big possibility that the economic development will grow differently not for the negativity but it will grow and give people a lot of positive thoughts. Introducing new innovation to people are actually a hard task especially to the community that are not interested but if you introduce it slowly and let them see a process that you, yourself is using the product that is being invented, there will be a possibility that they will be interested to your innovation.

Years from now, we’ll all be hearing about newly invented technologies that can be useful for the economic growth. The video is related to the theory because as the example given like amazon. In Amazon they are experimenting for a drone delivery. They develop a new echo device which is named “alexa” instead going to amazon.com they can order it by just telling alexa. In the video it also shows the innovations of spotify and tinder.

Video: https://youtu.be/avWVPaJFgFk

Keynesian theory stated that the government should increase demand to boost growth. Keynesian believes that consumer demand is the primary driving force in an economy. As a result, the theory supports the expansionary fiscal policy. Its main tools are government spending on infrastructure, unemployment benefits, and education. The government should practice a proper handling of financial needs to be able to manage a business properly. The government should also know how to analyze the demands of a business and should know how to balance rates of a certain needs for each developments of government and in that way the government will easily improve. According to the British Economist, John Maynard Keynes, developed this theory in the 1930s, had defied all prior attempts to end it. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, used Keynesian economics to build his famous New Deal program in his first 100 days in office, FDR (Frequency Domain Reflectometry) increased the debt by $3 billion to create 15 new agencies and laws. He used his skills by analyzing the demands of his business, balancing the rates of the certain needs for the developments.

The rates of a certain needs for the developments. The videdo is related to the theory because it shows how to practice about handling financial needs and to manage proper business, it talks about earning money, efforts and improvements of skills. It is important on how to manage money or to give the best effort in order to earn more money. More effort, more money and the growth of the economy will increase. The growth of the economy also depends on the strategy that the entrepreneur used. The government should also learn different kinds of strategy to be able to have a lot of options in case the growth of the economy will be slowing down. Being able to understand the meaning of learning some strategies will lead you to a good economy.

Video: https://youtu.be/qC-U76O76X0

For this theory, entrepreneurs or people handling a business should be prepared whatever the result of their hard works. There are times that even if we did our best, we actually sometimes fail, it is either we lack business strategies or it’s just that we lack information. We need to accept and face the failures because in that case, we will be able to learn on how to solve and make ways for a new opportunity. In opening business or innovating a technology, we must be also prepared for the result, it’s either we fail or we can receive success. The reason why other entrepreneurs, some of them haven’t tried to experience failures, it’s not because they have a lot of connections but they are also a street-smart people.

Receiving failures does not mean that you are not capable of making and to continue your small business, but failures also give you a lesson, and that lesson will lead you to a better path or to a better option that will help you grow your business. Taking risk is not very easy at all, it may include political fights but if you know how to handle it properly, you’ll be able to manage it with your own hand. Money is one of the problem when it comes to business, but it does not mean that if you will do an illegal action, if you are really willing to let your business grow, you must take a path, take a risk to communicate, ask for a help or you should work hard for your business to be able to make it public. It’s better to have a lot of communications when it comes to business, because in that way, you’ll be able to share your business but always be careful for people who you trust for your business, you may be able to experience dealing with scammers. We chose to relate this video in this this theory because it shows the different franchisers taking risks and facing some lost profits from their growing business.

Video: https://youtu.be/duQow41bTx0

We can easily begin with Weber's words: "Socialology is a science which tries to understand social action in terms of interpreting, thus explaining its course and effects." In addition, when action takes other people's actions into account, it is social action and is thus oriented towards it" (Weber, 1947). Fair choices or action theory may be interpreted as the potential understanding of Weber's programme, but one which is very unique is to call upon us to follow the least complicated conception of social action from which we can analytically describe its course and consequences." It thus departs from many post-Weberian (and for that matter pre-Weberian) theoretical traditions-particularly those of phenomenological persuasion-where the aim seems to be to tilt in a completely opposite direction, namely to find ways of conceiving (social) actions that are locally detailed and complex. Why this heterodox stance should be embraced by rational choice theory would hold us down below.

The video below is very relatable into this theory. Tim Cook likes to be reminded of where he came from. He never wasted his money for nothing. Thus, he spend his fortune for helping people for social problems. It could also be a reminder for all part of entrepreneurships that we should all be a good role model because being one of it will always lead you to become a successful entrepreneur.

Video: https://youtu.be/swOtYThF8JQ

Alertness is the basic notion in Kirzner's theory of entrepreneurship. Alertness leads people to make valuable discoveries capable of satisfying human desires. In their alertness to hitherto unnoticed possibilities, the role of entrepreneurs lies. According to Kirzner (1999), Alertness has the ability to bring tremendous value to a business, because it helps entrepreneurs to be aware of changes, shifts, opportunities and overlooked possibilities. Kirzner believes that entrepreneurial alertness cannot be taught. However, this belief has been critiqued because market research and customer discovery can clearly help to recognize certain types of opportunities. But a rebuttal might be that knowing that market research was needed in the first place is entrepreneurial. This video also relates the theory of kirzner’s, it shows how subway was getting more money because of their commercial which many people called a healthy brand. But in 2008 due to the world suffering from recession, subway was alert and introduce new promotion because of that the sales increased in 17%. The entrepreneur was also alert to price differences.

Video: https://youtu.be/duQow41bTx0

#entrep #entrepreneurship

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aslamdiaz · 4 years

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Intro to IR: Answering Question

Aslam Luqman Diaz-072011233076-USA

Nationalism is an ideology based on the premise that the individual’s loyalty and devotion to the nation-state surpass other individual or group interests. Nationalism is a modern movement. Throughout history people have been attached to their native soil, to the traditions of their parents, and to established territorial authorities, but it was not until the end of the 18th century that nationalism began to be a generally recognized sentiment molding public and private life and one of the great, if not the greatest, single determining factors of modern history. Because of its dynamic vitality and its all-pervading character, nationalism is often thought to be very old; sometimes it is mistakenly regarded as a permanent factor in political behaviour (Kohn, hans, 1949-1962).

National character is an expression which describes forms of collective self-perception, sensibility, and conduct which are shared by the individuals who inhabit modern nation-states. It presupposes the existence of psychological and cultural homogeneity among the citizens of each country, as well as the idea that each nation can be considered a collective individual, with characteristics analogous to the empirical individuals who are its inhabitants. The noun character seeks to describe a universal aspect of social life-an internal dimension to the existence of individuals and an external one, observable through collective behaviour. The adjective national situates this universal aspect of social life in the specific context of those social units we call nations. Social theory interested in understanding the social force of feelings of national belonging has turned once again to this expression, which was first formulated in Europe during the second half of the eighteenth century. What distinguishes this trend is the fact that there is no attempt at attributing any theoretical status to national character; instead, it is more concerced with it as a practical category used in the discourse and action of the social agents and groups. The aim of this article is to summarize the genealogy of the expression and to discuss its current heuristic value (Neiburg, 2001).

One can differentiate between hard and soft power tools in international relations. Traditionally, the states opted for hard power tools in the framework of realpolitik thinking. Meanwhile, the scholars and practitioners start to recognize that the world is in need of a shift from old assumptions and rigid distinctions about ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ power since the economic and political challenges can no longer be simply resolved by military power or policy innovation (Bound, et al. 2007: 13). However, the concept of soft power, initially introduced by Joseph Nye (1990), is still in its theorization process and requires further studies. Hence, the aim of this paper is to evaluate the concept of power, with specific reference to Nye’s frames: hard, soft, and smart. The research objectives are three-fold; first, to provide an brief overview of the concept of power in international relations, second, to evaluate some of the key issues pertaining to the concept of soft power and, third, to assess education as a tool of power. This paper is based on the on-going research for the author’s Ph.D. dissertation.

The subject of power has been an interest of social scientists for many decades, if not centuries, if one were to go back to writings of Aristotle, Plato, and Machiavelli. Despite such great deal of attention, however, there are still notable academic debates over power’s specific definition and its features, which lead to the topic’s complexity and ambiguity. In discussing power, it is important to note whose power one is referring to. For instance, Arendt (1970: 44) defined power not as the property of an individual, but rather 2 argued that it belongs to a group and remains in existence only so long as the group keeps together. Meanwhile, Dahl (1957: 203) proposed to call the objects in the relationship of power as actors. The term actor is inclusive and may refer to individuals, groups, roles, offices, governments, nation-states, or other human aggregates. One of the most influential definitions of power in the field of social science belongs to Max Weber (1947: 152) who defined it as the probability of one actor within a social relationship to be in a position to carry out his own will despite resistance. According to Weber, power is a zero-sum game and is an attribute that derives from the qualities, resources and capabilities of one subject. However, the Weberian definition attracted a number of criticisms. Martin (1971: 243) pointed out that Weber did not define power, but rather provided the basis for a comparison between the attributes of actors. Moreover, the author argued that, by building the element of conflict into his definition and viewing power solely in zero-sum terms, Weber disregarded the possibility of mutually convenient power relations (Martin, 1971: 243). In contrast, Talcott Parsons (1967) offered a conceptualization of power, which did not define it in terms of conflict, but rather views it as a system resource. Parsons (1967: 208) argued that power is a capacity to secure the performance of binding obligations by units in a system of collective organization, when obligations are legitimized with reference to the collective goals, and where in case of recalcitrance, there is a presumption of negative sanctions. In this regard, Anthony Giddens (1968: 264) stated that, among other things, the Parsonian definition does not take into account that power is exercised over someone and by treating power as necessarily legitimate and assuming a consensus between power holders, Parsons ignores the hierarchical character of power. To sum up, the two major threads in this discussion about power, the Weberian and the Parsonian, both suffer from major problems of definition (Martin, 1971: 244). These are just two instances of how power discussion attracts intense debates and disagreements. The purpose of this short discussion is to emphasize that power is one of the most central and problematic concepts in social science. Despite widespread use, there is little agreement upon basic definitions, with individual theorists proposing their own idiosyncratic terminologies of power (Bierstedt, 1950). Gallie (1956) confirms that due to the existence of competing theories and meanings, power is essentially a contested subject.

Power remains one of the critical subjects in political science, including the sphere of international relations. The discipline of International Relations incorporates a number of competing schools of thought, but for the long time, the discipline has treated power as the exclusive prerogative of realism. In fact, there is still a tendency among scholars and 3 practitioners to view power predominantly through the realist lens. To reiterate, the five basic assumptions of realists about the international system are that it is anarchic; all great powers possess some offensive military capability; states can never be certain about the intentions of other states; survival is the primary goal of states; and states are rational actors (Mearsheimer, 2001: 30-31). The realists view the nation-states as the key actors in the international system. Hans Morgenthau (1954: 25) famously proclaimed that international politics, like all politics, is a struggle for power and ‘whatever the ultimate aims of international politics, power is always the immediate aim’. According to the author, the ‘ubiquity of the struggle for power in all social relations on all levels of social organization’ made the arena of international politics a necessity of power politics (Morgenthau, 1954: 31). Carr (1964: 102) was in agreement with Morgenthau and asserted that politics, at its heart, is power politics. For all realists, calculations about power lie at the core of how states perceive the world around them (Mearsheimer, 2001: 12). While realists are in agreement that power is a key determinant in political relations, there is there is a variation in how individual realists understand the concept. For instance, classical realists posit that the permanent struggle for power stems from the fundamental human drive for power (Morgenthau, 1954). In contrast, for structural or neo-realists, it is the architecture of the international system that forces states to pursue power and maximize their power position (Mearsheimer, 2001; Dunne, Kurki, and Smith, 2013). Furthermore, there are disagreements as to how the power should be conceived and measured (Walt, 2002). There are two dominant traditions of power analysis in IR: the ‘elements of the national power approach’, which depicts power as property of states, and the relational power approach, which depicts power as an actual or potential relationship (Baldwin, 2012: 2). In other words, some realists define power in terms of resources, while others define it in a relational manner as the ability to exercise influence over other actors. Proponents of the elements of the national power approach associate power with the possession of specific resources. All of the important resources that a state possesses are typically combined to determine its overall aggregate power. The resources that are indicators of national power are the level of military expenditure, size of the armed forces, gross national product, size of territory, and population. In line with this tradition, Morgenthau (1954) equated power with the possession of identifiable and measurable resources and listed geography, natural resources, industrial capacity, military, and population as stable power elements of a nation. Carr (1946: 109) argued that military power was the most important form of power in international politics, as it serves as both a means and an end in itself. However, one of the difficulties with the elements of the national power approach is the issue of power conversion.

Refrensi:

https://www.britannica.com/topic/nationalism

https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/social-sciences/national-identity

http://www.culturaldiplomacy.org/academy/content/pdf/participant-papers/2015-12_annual/Power-In-Ir-By-Raimzhanova,-A.pdf

#IRFEST_USA_Intro to IR

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phriestly · 4 years

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𝐃𝐈𝐄 𝐏𝐇𝐈𝐋𝐎𝐒𝐎𝐏𝐇𝐈𝐄 𝐈𝐒𝐓 𝐈𝐇𝐑𝐄 𝐙𝐄𝐈𝐓 𝐈𝐍 𝐆𝐄𝐃𝐀𝐍𝐊𝐄𝐍 𝐄𝐑𝐅𝐀𝐒𝐒𝐓 . ( 𝐆. 𝐖. 𝐅. 𝐇𝐄𝐆𝐄𝐋 )

THEMES APPEARING : authenticity, Angst and Entwurf. choice. instrumental rationality. sexuality. in short: miranda priestly as a product of modernity and its failures.

okay so. here’s another long overdue character study that aims to enunciate the impact of the malaise of modernity, and especially the failure of existentialism as a meaningful philosophy on miranda’s life and how these things shape who she is. she is not an existentialist (moreso a structuralist when it comes to fashion studies), but the emergence of existentialism shapes indirectly her life.

a fair warning before i get to the actual meta itself: it will feature discussion of martin heid/egger’s philosophical work because it is seminal to understanding existentialism and any contemporary continental philosophy. heidegger was an antisemite. there are no excuses for this anymore, he’s not just the philosopher who made the wrong decisions before and during world war two - the schwarzen hefte are disgusting. it does contaminate his philosophy. still, one can not simply throw away his philosophical work, because he is one of the few na/zi’s that has an ideology / philosophy that does apply to the modern world - it is generalizable outside of the era. it’s not utter garbage. as much as i’d like continental philosophy to be uncontaminated by hei/degger it is simply impossible to avoid him. so. this by way of being clear upfront. if anyone wants to discuss this, my dms are open.

actual meta under the cut because it’s too fucking long

𝐈𝐍𝐓𝐑𝐎𝐃𝐔𝐂𝐓𝐈𝐎𝐍.

in the end, authenticity can’t, shouldn’t, go all the way with self-determining freedom. it undercuts itself. yet the temptation is understandably there. and where the tradition of authenticity falls for any other reason into anthropocentrism, the alliance easily recommends itself, becomes almost irresistible. that’s because anthropocentrism, by abolishing all horizons of, threatens us with a loss of meaning and hence a trivialization of our predicament. at one moment, we understand our situation as one of high tragedy, alone in a silent universe, without intrinsic meaning, condemned to create value. but at a later moment, the same doctrine, by its own inherent bent, yields a flattened word, in which there aren’t very meaningful choices because there aren’t any crucial issues.

Charles Taylor, The Ethics of Authenticity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), 68.

all of this [ i.e. the ontological turn from art as imitation to creativity, paralleling that of the turn towards the subject & schiller’s conception of art as higher than morality when it comes to wholeness ] contributes to the close links between authenticity against art. and this helps explain some of the developments of the notion of authenticity in the last two centuries; in particular, the development of forms in which the demands of authenticity have been pitched against those of morality. authenticity involves originality, it demands a revolt against convention. it is easy to see how standard morality itself can come to be seen as inseparable from stifling convention. morality as normally understood obviously involves crushing much that is elemental and instinctive in us, many of our deepest and most powerful desires. so there develops a branch of the search for authenticity that pits it against the moral.

Ibid., 65.

𝐀𝐔𝐓𝐇𝐄𝐍𝐓𝐈𝐂𝐈𝐓𝐘, 𝐀𝐍𝐆𝐒𝐓 𝐀𝐍𝐃 𝐄𝐍𝐓𝐖𝐔𝐑𝐅. the principal feature of our modern culture is authenticity and a culture related to authenticity, something existentialist philosophers - and existential phenomenologists like heid/egger have emphasized. this existential comes with a burden however - to be authentic is to live your life, not imitating, but creating. not in the traces of someone else. but as something that is innate to ourselves. it does come with a burden, as the demand of the Entwurf, the grand plan of one’s life is a demanding one.

often, it results in existential angst, a suffocating feeling of having to live an authentic life. angst here is the fear for the nothing, for the irrelevance of our existence, which is always a Sein-zum-Tode/Being-towards-Death. in our realization of our authentic life, the easy choice is to follow the mores prescribed by das Man, the impersonal, plural, ‘they’ that is the driving force behind our societal mores. in the quotes above, the failure of this philosophy is brilliantly demonstrated by Charles Taylor, for in the end, there is a temptation of meaninglessness and morality can be abrogated - it turns violent in the name of authenticity.

this violence does not always have to be bad: it can be a violence of smashing, for example, the gender binary, the patriarchy, or the oppressive structures of religion. but this violence can also go awry, in various forms: an example would be fascism’s nostalgia for the ‘authentic’ past. however, this violence is a spectrum: there is not one mode of being violent and they all differ greatly from each other despite having their origins in the same idea.

miranda’s life is exemplary of the failure of the culture of authenticity exalted by existentialism. it’s not all bad: the only reason she is capable of being editor - in - chief of a magazine like runway is because of the ontological turn of art as imitation to art as creation. authenticity (despite all the fakeness) is one of its crucial selling points - and she is brilliant at this. yet, as Taylor has pointed out, authenticity demands a revolution.

miranda, as a character, is symbolical for the breaking free of the modern woman from the traditional expectations of housewives. but this breaking free - while not a bad thing in itself, it didn’t occur without some sort of ‘violence’ (as should be clear by now. violence, for me, is subject to broad interpretation), as in that she can’t afford to be ‘nice’, as is traditionally expected of her.

𝙲𝙷𝚁𝙸𝚂𝚃𝙸𝙰𝙽: 𝚜𝚑𝚎'𝚜 𝚊… 𝚜𝚑𝚎'𝚜 𝚊 𝚗𝚘𝚝𝚘𝚛𝚒𝚘𝚞𝚜 𝚜𝚊𝚍𝚒𝚜𝚝… 𝚊𝚗𝚍 𝚗𝚘𝚝… 𝚗𝚘𝚝 𝚒𝚗 𝚊 𝚐𝚘𝚘𝚍 𝚠𝚊𝚢.

𝙰𝙽𝙳𝚈: 𝚘𝚔𝚊𝚢, 𝚜𝚑𝚎'𝚜 𝚝𝚘𝚞𝚐𝚑, 𝚋𝚞𝚝 𝚒𝚏 𝚖𝚒𝚛𝚊𝚗𝚍𝚊 𝚠𝚎𝚛𝚎 𝚊 𝚖𝚊𝚗… 𝚗𝚘 𝚘𝚗𝚎 𝚠𝚘𝚞𝚕𝚍 𝚗𝚘𝚝𝚒𝚌𝚎 𝚊𝚗𝚢𝚝𝚑𝚒𝚗𝚐 𝚊𝚋𝚘𝚞𝚝 𝚑𝚎𝚛, 𝚎𝚡𝚌𝚎𝚙𝚝 𝚑𝚘𝚠 𝚐𝚛𝚎𝚊𝚝 𝚜𝚑𝚎 𝚒𝚜 𝚊𝚝 𝚑𝚎𝚛 𝚓𝚘𝚋.

however. it doesn’t stop there. which is what i will be discussing next.

𝐈𝐍𝐒𝐓𝐑𝐔𝐌𝐄𝐍𝐓𝐀𝐋 𝐑𝐀𝐓𝐈𝐎𝐍𝐀𝐋𝐈𝐓𝐘. das rechenende Denken is what hei/degger - but also the mar/xist frankfurter school of philosophy - labeled as the greatest ill of modernity. the devil wears prada is, in part a movie about instrumental rationality, which is the mode of thought that has emerged together with the advancement of science. it is a mode of reasoning that focuses on the most effective means to an end.

𝙰𝙽𝙳𝚈: 𝚒… 𝚒 𝚌𝚘𝚞𝚕𝚍𝚗'𝚝 𝚍𝚘 𝚠𝚑𝚊𝚝 𝚢𝚘𝚞 𝚍𝚒𝚍 𝚝𝚘 𝚗𝚒𝚐𝚎𝚕, 𝚖𝚒𝚛𝚊𝚗𝚍𝚊. 𝚒 𝚌𝚘𝚞𝚕𝚍𝚗'𝚝 𝚍𝚘 𝚜𝚘𝚖𝚎𝚝𝚑𝚒𝚗𝚐 𝚕𝚒𝚔𝚎 𝚝𝚑𝚊𝚝.

𝙼𝙸𝚁𝙰𝙽𝙳𝙰: 𝚖𝚖. 𝚢𝚘𝚞 𝚊𝚕𝚛𝚎𝚊𝚍𝚢 𝚍𝚒𝚍. 𝚝𝚘 𝚎𝚖𝚒𝚕𝚢.

these betrayals are part of the industry. they are part of instrumental reason - a mode of rationality that has little regard for morality or nigel’s feelings, but only for the outcome. the weberian iron cage dominates. the violence of authenticity in part tied to the iron cage of instrumental reason. one wonders how authentic that individualist conception of authenticity is.

𝐂𝐇𝐎𝐈𝐂𝐄. another heavy emphasis is laid on choice:

𝙰𝙽𝙳𝚈: 𝚝𝚑𝚊𝚝'𝚜 𝚗𝚘𝚝 𝚠𝚑𝚊𝚝 𝚒… 𝚗𝚘, 𝚝𝚑𝚊𝚝 𝚠𝚊𝚜… 𝚝𝚑𝚊𝚝 𝚠𝚊𝚜 𝚍𝚒𝚏𝚏𝚎𝚛𝚎𝚗𝚝. 𝚒 𝚍𝚒𝚍𝚗'𝚝 𝚑𝚊𝚟𝚎 𝚊 𝚌𝚑𝚘𝚒𝚌𝚎.

𝙼𝙸𝚁𝙰𝙽𝙳𝙰: 𝚘𝚑, 𝚗𝚘, 𝚢𝚘𝚞 𝚌𝚑𝚘𝚜𝚎. 𝚢𝚘𝚞 𝚌𝚑𝚘𝚜𝚎 𝚝𝚘 𝚐𝚎𝚝 𝚊𝚑𝚎𝚊𝚍. 𝚢𝚘𝚞 𝚠𝚊𝚗𝚝 𝚝𝚑𝚒𝚜 𝚕𝚒𝚏𝚎, 𝚝𝚑𝚘𝚜𝚎 𝚌𝚑𝚘𝚒𝚌𝚎𝚜 𝚊𝚛𝚎 𝚗𝚎𝚌𝚎𝚜𝚜𝚊𝚛𝚢.

choice is fundamental in existential philosophy as it affirms human freedom. the Entwurf, the design can never be realized by someone else. one has to develop authentic life for themselves - Jemeinigkeit: authenticity is an authenticity that is personal, and that has to be realized in one’s own existence. however, for hei/degger the facticity of our human existence and the risk of Verfallen into an average existence or Durschnittlichkeit are omnipresent. They taint the Entwurf. for s/artre however, freedom is radicalized. existence precedes essence: who we are precedes what we are. our choices define our existence. and as we are doomed to human freedom, we have to make choices. andy tries to avoid these - representing the existentialist mauvaise foi, whereas miranda takes full responsibility for them. however, they become meaningless.

𝙽𝙸𝙶𝙴𝙻: 𝚜𝚘𝚖𝚎𝚝𝚒𝚖𝚎𝚜 𝚒 𝚌𝚊𝚗'𝚝 𝚋𝚎𝚕𝚒𝚎𝚟𝚎 𝚒 𝚝𝚊𝚕𝚔 𝚊𝚋𝚘𝚞𝚝 𝚝𝚑𝚒𝚜 𝚌𝚛𝚊𝚙 𝚊𝚕𝚕 𝚍𝚊𝚢.

existentialism fails to recognize crucial issues because nothing is important anymore. the choice of having steak for lunch over pasta becomes as important as say, the choice to save someone from imminent death or not. a larger horizon is needed. which is conspicuously absent . authenticity becomes inauthentic easily enough .

𝐒𝐄𝐗𝐔𝐀𝐋𝐈𝐓𝐘. with all this being out of the way, i want to briefly go over miranda’s sexual orientation vis à vis the fact she has been in the closet her whole life and will likely continue to remain so. important to recognize, in the case of existentialism, is that there is no prior authentic essence to be uncovered. one does not first sit down and ponder on what is the most authentic mode of life for them, but one simply chooses. and because of the choice one makes as a free human, one is authentic. an existentialist culture of authenticity pushed to the extreme has as its consequence that sexual orientation too is also merely a choice. and paradoxically enough, because of this culture of authenticity, miranda’s choices for ‘this life’ involve choices that are inauthentic, that are part of hei/degger’s Verfallen. because of this, there’s that creeping existential Angst that permeates her life, her sense of not being whole, of not having realised the Entwurf fully.

#i don't want to see this anymore.#have it as it is #i'm tired of it.#future metas re: womanhood & second wave feminism . will b written sometime .#first the one bridging faith and arts .#nazi mention /#antisemitism mention /#* 𝙊𝙊𝘾 : character study .

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arcticdementor · 1 month

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Have a potential effort-post brewing in my mind, involving Weberian rationalization, software "eating the world," Tanner Greer's posts on the popularity of dystopian YA novels, "computer says 'no'," "Karens" wanting to talk to a manager, Benjamin Boyce interviewing Aydin Paladin, and the Butlerian Jihad.

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readyaiminquire · 5 years

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Not my president? - Understanding charisma.

Note: While I’m reworking this blog’s format, I wanted first to finish a planned series of posts on charisma that I began publishing a while back. Rather than making it a series, I figured I might well play around with a long-form format instead. This post will re-hash some of the information from the earlier post, but this time I promise it will actually reach a conclusion!

With US election campaigns in full swing, and with Democrats hoping to oust Trump from the Oval Office, the question of how Trump won at all has re-emerged. After four chaotic years, no-one Blue would want another four. Despite a laundry list of failures, scandals, and broken promises, will Trump be able to galvanise enough voters – again? Though I am by no means an expert on US politics, I feel that one area that a lot of pundits and commentators have failed to consider is that of his charisma. At the end of the day, it is Trump’s charismatic leadership that allowed him to be elected in the first place - and bear with me on this! We must really begin to look and deconstruct charisma to get to the heart of it all. Make no mistake, charisma serves a fundamentally important function within any democratic system – they would not be able to operate without it. As oxymoronic as it might sound, charismatic leadership is not reserved for the despotic, but it is a process we all engage with.

Who are our charismatic leaders? We think of Gaddafi, Stalin, the Kims in North Korea, or indeed the Ayatollahs in Iran – alongside questionable undercurrents of fooling the masses, abusing one’s power, and the creeping, assured emergence of ever more oppression. Charisma’s negative political baggage, however, doesn’t really help us to understand what it functionally is. So let’s shed all judgement, positive or negative, and instead look at charisma as a process. German sociologist Max Weber succinctly defined charisma as

“a certain quality of an individual person by virtue of which he is set apart from ordinary men”

In other words, charisma is a sort-of otherworldly quality that sets you apart from the masses. Authority is derived from charismatic qualities. Unlike other forms of authority, such as legal-rational authority (which relies on some sort of legal code, such as, a constitution) or traditional power (where authority is derived from something outside of the system itself, like the divine right to rule), charismatic authority comes from the very simple fact that people want to follow you.

It’s quite evident that Weber effectively sees charisma as some innate and mystical power – some sort of magic you have that makes people want to follow you. So, let’s look at Weber’s definition from a different perspective. Let’s consider charisma as something you do, rather than something you have. Charisma must always be the result of a set of rhetorical actions intended to convince the ‘common man’ that the charismatic person is indeed not common. Through such conviction, the ‘common man’ becomes a willing follower. In his book How to do things with words, J. L. Austin outlines that there are two different kinds of rhetorical actions: referential and performative. Referential actions simply describe the world, which means that it is either right or wrong. Performative actions, on the other hand, doesn’t describe anything at all and therefore cannot be right or wrong, merely successful or unsuccessful. To shamelessly steal an example from Alexei Yurchuk:

“If one makes an oath under appropriate conditions, while internally not intending to keep it, the oath is not made any less powerful in the eyes of those who accept it as such”.

Assuming you accept the above, charisma as something performed has some broad implications in the real world. But to make sense of that, we need to look at the typical Western democratic system.

Democracy comes with an awkward promise: that all people are created equal, and that the whole system is run by the people and for the people, while at the same time requiring elected hierarchies and leaders to effectively function. In other words, democracy only works because we’re willingly giving up our sovereignty to the system – something which, in most situations, might be perceived as deeply undemocratic. This tension, obviously, needs to be resolved somehow. The relationship between the State and the leader is roughly analogous with the relationship between power and authority. The State has power, and without diving far too deep into Foucault, power is inherently relational rather than what we might classify as material. Put simply, it emerges from social structures. In the case of the State, this relational power is very clear when you consider the different experiences and interactions different people – minorities, the homeless, immigrants, the privileged, and so on – have with its representatives. They all have a very different relationship to the State as an entity (anthropologists Veena Das and Deborah Poole refer to this as the ‘centre and the peripheries’, arguing that the best place to ‘see’ the State is the border at which its power breaks down).

In the same way, the State as an entity is also immaterial – we only interact with representatives of the State (civil servants, politicians, police officers) or we see the outcome of these representatives enforcing the power of the State upon us (laws, regulation, taxes). Authority, on the other hand, is effectively the ability to ‘direct’ power. The leader of the State relates in the same way to its structure, coming to embody the system as a whole, while the structure itself maintains the overarching power relations.

It is commonly understood that states only ‘work’ as a concept if the people within them act as if they do, something akin to the thought experiment of ‘would war end if all soldiers refused to fight?’. The leader, as the embodiment of the whole structure, begins to play a key role in maintaining this illusion. Much work has been done on this idea of ‘two bodies’. Alexei Yurchuk wrote that this set-up is traditionally very common among kings and other monarchs – in some cases very literally, with dolls being made of the monarch upon their deaths to quite literally give them a second body. The bodies a king inhabited were their ‘individual’ body, i.e. the person itself, and the second being that of the ‘office’ of Kingship, a divine-like body. It is this second regal body, in full regalia upon their throne, surrounded by servants and gold and pomp and circumstance, who is truly the king; the individual person will always simply be the person. This process is largely the same within the modern democratic state: there is the elected individual – the person – then there is the leader (president, prime minister, etc.), the embodiment of authority.

It is here we must return to what I wrote above about voluntarily submitting. When imagined, the idea of a leader as an embodiment of authority immediately sounds inherently un-democratic; non-democratic at best. It is this tension, alluded to previously, that charisma serves to reconcile.

It may sound contradictory, but in these cases charisma functions to dictate how – for example – a President can behave. It is what causes world leaders to attend particular events, or why they partake in completely-natural-totally-not-staged photo-ops. It’s not necessarily because they want to, or indeed because they think it’s fooling anyone, but rather because it is what the system requires the leader to do. It is, in other words, charismatic performance. Even more importantly, it is not the individual which fulfils the requirement, but rather them in the function as President. It is their second body, so to speak, which is having their photos taken beside some national memorial. This leads us to the crux of the whole situation: returning to the issue of democracy and leadership. We the people need to willingly submit ourselves to the leader’s authority. This is often done through voting. However, to effectively convince people, the leader must not only follow a particular agenda, philosophy, or give the correct promises, but they must also follow along in the ‘dance’. They must act statesmanlike (stateswomanlike?), to fulfil what we can in practical terms call ‘the minimum amount’ of charisma needed to be considered for leadership at all. In this sense, all democratic leaders are (somewhat) charismatic, by necessity.

Nonetheless, this of course highlights that charisma isn’t binary, despite often being spoken of in terms of haves and have-nots. Instead, we should imagine charisma as a spectrum: two people can be charismatic, and one more so than the other. Indeed, it also means that charisma is individually understood, that is to say, that different people are differently charismatic to different people. Despite the initial Weberian definition, it isn’t a magic spell. It is a performance, a dance, which functions as a safety-vale in Western political systems, a means to reconcile what is seemingly a fundamental contradiction.

This, of course, has very real-world implications. Let’s turn to an example. A rather thinly veiled metaphor, if you will, but such a reduction of an (obvious) example can help give some grounding – while playing with some nuance. You have Mr Red and Ms Blue, two presidential candidates in a totally hypothetical country. Ms Blue is a well-established politician, with a strong pedigree of various political posts. She’s experienced, educated, well-spoken, intelligent, and internationally respected. Mr Red, a newcomer on the stage, has no background in politics. He is radically outspoken, blunt even, criticised for his lack of experience, his limited rhetoric. His background is as a somewhat successful businessman, a stereotype he fully embraces. He’s divisive, to say the least. I’m sure you’re seeing where I’m going with this.

Within this completely hypothetical country, you have a traditionally large working class, which used to be strong in the past but has since declined as production jobs moved overseas. The perception among this group is that they have been abandoned by the powers that be – abandoned for several generations. They feel they’ve been systematically shut out of politics, unable to make themselves heard (lack of education, money, and so on), while the politicians – across the board – have continued toeing the same line. The established body politic, like Ms Blue, doesn’t much represent, let alone understand, them. Stage right: Enter Mr Red, down a gilded escalator. His rhetoric is outrageous, his promises ridiculous, his beliefs morally bankrupt. No-one believes what he says, not really. But it doesn’t matter. Mr Red wins anyway. He wins every time. Why? Because he dances to the tune of these otherwise marginalised voters. He speaks to them, makes promises for them, and whether he intends to keep these promises or not, or indeed whether he is expected to keep them, is irrelevant. At this stage, it was no longer about his promises but rather because he acted to this otherwise downtrodden group as the State, the leader, is expected to act: he listened to their issues, spoke to them directly, in a language they could connect with, made them a part of his wider political discourse, stepped out of the ivory tower, extended his hand as a candidate for the Presidency. He at this stage fulfilled the minimum amount of necessary charisma to even be considered as someone to follow. To counterweight this, Ms Blue maintained her distance and stance, equating herself with previous ‘establishment’ politicians, and as a result became unelectable: not because of having a worse programme, or lack of political merit, but rather because she became someone impossible for these voters to follow at all. She could not have been voted for, because she didn’t dance at all.

Charisma, though a funny thing, something we’ve all heard of and often instinctively see and understand, operates in not only a perhaps more complex way when dissected, but also with much more material force. In a sense, society as we know it requires a particular ebb and flow of charisma. But even then, it is not as random or magical as often believed; instead, it is simply the result of certain actions, of convincing people that you are indeed charismatic. Weber throughout most of his career maintained that charisma cannot be learned, that it was something you were born with, though he might have changed his mind on this, as an unfinished paper (sadly only a collection of notes) showed that he intended to write a paper on learning charisma after all. This isn’t the topic here, though, but rather to understand charisma as a social performance, a dance, which lies at the heart of the Western political system and discourse. It is a force rarely considered, not often analysed, and if even invoked, done more so to paint a mystical picture of the person in question.

The funny thing, of course, is that all leaders are charismatic, and necessarily so. Some do it better than others, of course, but without it democracy as we know it wouldn’t be able to function. Without charisma, we would all simply vote for ourselves.

Selected bibliography / recommended reading:

Austin, J. L. 1955. How to do things with Words (J. O. Urmson & M. Sbisàeds ). Oxford University Press.

Das, V. & Poole, D. (eds.) 2004 'Anthropology in the Margins of the State' Santa Fe: Scool of American Research Press; Oxford: James Currey Ltd.

Hansen, T. & Stepputat, F. 2006 'Sovereignty revisited' Annual Review of Anthropology, vol. 35

Weber, M. 1946 [1919] 'Politics as a vocation'. In Gerth, H.H. and Wright Mills, C. (trans. & eds.) Max Weber: Essays in Sociology pp. 77-128. New York: Oxford University Press

Yurchak, A. 2003 ‘The Soviet hegemony of form’ in ‘Everything was forever, until it was no more’ Comparative Studies in Society and History 45(3): 480-510

Yurchak, A. 2015 'Bodies of Lenin' in Representations vol. 2(2015) pp.116-157 215

#anthropology #charisma #leadership #essay #ethnography #argument #politics #weber #election #the state #government #performance #social and cultural anthropology #SocAnth #sociocultural #sociology

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racefortheironthrone · 5 years

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1/ I'm imagining a more modern but still feudal North, and I'm wondering, do you think a system involving local councils and city officials could come about within feudalism? My logic is that the North has to be extremely well-organised and aware of everything that's happening in every part of the kingdom, so that they can fine tune their winter preparations to be as successful as possible, and they’d need more people with authority around to make sure everything is running smoothly.

2/ I'm thinking the officials would still be the sons of minor lords and the positions hereditary (as would seem natural to a feudal lord considering this), but a side effect of more oversight would be that the citizens have an easier time contacting their leaders about necessary changes, and developing more power within the law as a result (fewer lords outright abusing their citizens now word is likely to get back to Winterfell, that sort of thing).

3/ Or would a real-life feudal aristocrat take offense to their liege suggesting they can’t manage their own fief and pressure them into scrapping the project? I’m just trying to see how modern a region can be without starting to actually break feudalism and the Iron Throne getting involved.

Great question!

I think what you’re looking for here is something like the Tudor bureaucracy. The government is mostly being run by noblemen and high-ranking clergy, but you see a lot more educated gentlemen like the Cecils and Sir Francis Walsingham (Cambridge men) or Edmund Dudley (Oxford and Gray’s Inn), educated commoners (Richard Empson was a lawyer, John Morton and Thomas Wolsey were Oxford men, Thomas More went to Oxford and Lincoln’s Inn), and auto-didacts (Thomas Cromwell). These men bring a lot more professionalism to the job, allowing for that specific Weberian form of rationality to guide policy-making.

But yes, you absolutely could have more town and city councils through the granting of town and city charters.

It depends. We see in the North that there is less autonomy when it comes to issues of estate management, due to the necessity of preparing for the coming of winter.

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shituationist · 6 years

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if you think resources are infinite or at least infinitely substitutable but you still believe in weberian economic rationalization what the fuck is wrong with you what did protestantism do to your god damn brain

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sufredux · 5 years

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America in Decay

The creation of the U.S. Forest Service at the turn of the twentieth century was the premier example of American state building during the Progressive Era. Prior to the passage of the Pendleton Act in 1883, public offices in the United States had been allocated by political parties on the basis of patronage. The Forest Service, in contrast, was the prototype of a new model of merit-based bureaucracy. It was staffed with university-educated agronomists and foresters chosen on the basis of competence and technical expertise, and its defining struggle was the successful effort by its initial leader, Gifford Pinchot, to secure bureaucratic autonomy and escape routine interference by Congress. At the time, the idea that forestry professionals, rather than politicians, should manage public lands and handle the department’s staffing was revolutionary, but it was vindicated by the service’s impressive performance. Several major academic studies have treated its early decades as a classic case of successful public administration.

Today, however, many regard the Forest Service as a highly dysfunctional bureaucracy performing an outmoded mission with the wrong tools. It is still staffed by professional foresters, many highly dedicated to the agency’s mission, but it has lost a great deal of the autonomy it won under Pinchot. It operates under multiple and often contradictory mandates from Congress and the courts and costs taxpayers a substantial amount of money while achieving questionable aims. The service’s internal decision-making system is often gridlocked, and the high degree of staff morale and cohesion that Pinchot worked so hard to foster has been lost. These days, books are written arguing that the Forest Service ought to be abolished altogether. If the Forest Service’s creation exemplified the development of the modern American state, its decline exemplifies that state’s decay.

Civil service reform in the late nineteenth century was promoted by academics and activists such as Francis Lieber, Woodrow Wilson, and Frank Goodnow, who believed in the ability of modern natural science to solve human problems. Wilson, like his contemporary Max Weber, distinguished between politics and administration. Politics, he argued, was a domain of final ends, subject to democratic contestation, but administration was a realm of implementation, which could be studied empirically and subjected to scientific analysis.

The belief that public administration could be turned into a science now seems naive and misplaced. But back then, even in advanced countries, governments were run largely by political hacks or corrupt municipal bosses, so it was perfectly reasonable to demand that public officials be selected on the basis of education and merit rather than cronyism. The problem with scientific management is that even the most qualified scientists of the day occasionally get things wrong, and sometimes in a big way. And unfortunately, this is what happened to the Forest Service with regard to what ended up becoming one of its crucial missions, the fighting of forest fires.

Pinchot had created a high-quality agency devoted to one basic goal: managing the sustainable exploitation of forest resources. The Great Idaho Fire of 1910, however, burned some three million acres and killed at least 85 people, and the subsequent political outcry led the Forest Service to focus increasingly not just on timber harvesting but also on wildfire suppression. Yet the early proponents of scientific forestry didn’t properly understand the role of fires in woodland ecology. Forest fires are a natural occurrence and serve an important function in maintaining the health of western forests. Shade-intolerant trees, such as ponderosa pines, lodgepole pines, and giant sequoias, require periodic fires to clear areas in which they can regenerate, and once fires were suppressed, these trees were invaded by species such as the Douglas fir. (Lodgepole pines actually require fires to propagate their seeds.) Over the years, many American forests developed high tree densities and huge buildups of dry understory, so that when fires did occur, they became much larger and more destructive.

After catastrophes such as the huge Yellowstone fires in 1988, which ended up burning nearly 800,000 acres in the park and took several months to control, the public began to take notice. Ecologists began criticizing the very objective of fire prevention, and in the mid-1990s, the Forest Service reversed course and officially adopted a “let burn” approach. But years of misguided policies could not simply be erased, since so many forests had become gigantic tinderboxes.

As a result of population growth in the American West, moreover, in the later decades of the twentieth century, many more people began living in areas vulnerable to wildfires. As are people choosing to live on floodplains or on barrier islands, so these individuals were exposing themselves to undue risks that were mitigated by what essentially was government-subsidized insurance. Through their elected representatives, they lobbied hard to make sure the Forest Service and other federal agencies responsible for forest management were given the resources to continue fighting fires that could threaten their property. Under these circumstances, rational cost-benefit analysis proved difficult, and rather than try to justify a decision not to act, the government could easily end up spending $1 million to protect a $100,000 home.

Mission on the move: fighting flames near Camp Mather, California, August 2013.

While all this was going on, the original mission of the Forest Service was eroding. Timber harvests in national forests, for example, plunged, from roughly 11 billion to roughly three billion board feet per year in the 1990s alone. This was due partly to the changing economics of the timber industry, but it was also due to a change in national values. With the rise of environmental consciousness, natural forests were increasingly seen as havens to be protected for their own sake, not economic resources to be exploited. And even in terms of economic exploitation, the Forest Service had not been doing a good job. Timber was being marketed at well below the costs of operations; the agency’s timber pricing was inefficient; and as with all government agencies, the Forest Service had an incentive to increase its costs rather than contain them.

The Forest Service’s performance deteriorated, in short, because it lost the autonomy it had gained under Pinchot. The problem began with the displacement of a single departmental mission by multiple and potentially conflicting ones. In the middle decades of the twentieth century, firefighting began to displace timber exploitation, but then firefighting itself became controversial and was displaced by conservation. None of the old missions was discarded, however, and each attracted outside interest groups that supported different departmental factions: consumers of timber, homeowners, real estate developers, environmentalists, aspiring firefighters, and so forth. Congress, meanwhile, which had been excluded from the micromanagement of land sales under Pinchot, reinserted itself by issuing various legislative mandates, forcing the Forest Service to pursue several different goals, some of them at odds with one another.

Thus, the small, cohesive agency created by Pinchot and celebrated by scholars slowly evolved into a large, Balkanized one. It became subject to many of the maladies affecting government agencies more generally: its officials came to be more interested in protecting their budgets and jobs than in the efficient performance of their mission. And they clung to old mandates even when both science and the society around them were changing.

The story of the U.S. Forest Service is not an isolated case but representative of a broader trend of political decay; public administration specialists have documented a steady deterioration in the overall quality of American government for more than a generation. In many ways, the U.S. bureaucracy has moved away from the Weberian ideal of an energetic and efficient organization staffed by people chosen for their ability and technical knowledge. The system as a whole is less merit-based: rather than coming from top schools, 45 percent of recent new hires to the federal service are veterans, as mandated by Congress. And a number of surveys of the federal work force paint a depressing picture. According to the scholar Paul Light, “Federal employees appear to be more motivated by compensation than mission, ensnared in careers that cannot compete with business and nonprofits, troubled by the lack of resources to do their jobs, dissatisfied with the rewards for a job well done and the lack of consequences for a job done poorly, and unwilling to trust their own organizations.”

WHY INSTITUTIONS DECAY

In his classic work Political Order in Changing Societies, the political scientist Samuel Huntington used the term “political decay” to explain political instability in many newly independent countries after World War II. Huntington argued that socioeconomic modernization caused problems for traditional political orders, leading to the mobilization of new social groups whose participation could not be accommodated by existing political institutions. Political decay was caused by the inability of institutions to adapt to changing circumstances. Decay was thus in many ways a condition of political development: the old had to break down in order to make way for the new. But the transitions could be extremely chaotic and violent, and there was no guarantee that the old political institutions would continuously and peacefully adapt to new conditions.

This model is a good starting point for a broader understanding of political decay more generally. Institutions are “stable, valued, recurring patterns of behavior,” as Huntington put it, the most important function of which is to facilitate collective action. Without some set of clear and relatively stable rules, human beings would have to renegotiate their interactions at every turn. Such rules are often culturally determined and vary across different societies and eras, but the capacity to create and adhere to them is genetically hard-wired into the human brain. A natural tendency to conformism helps give institutions inertia and is what has allowed human societies to achieve levels of social cooperation unmatched by any other animal species.

The very stability of institutions, however, is also the source of political decay. Institutions are created to meet the demands of specific circumstances, but then circumstances change and institutions fail to adapt. One reason is cognitive: people develop mental models of how the world works and tend to stick to them, even in the face of contradictory evidence. Another reason is group interest: institutions create favored classes of insiders who develop a stake in the status quo and resist pressures to reform.

In theory, democracy, and particularly the Madisonian version of democracy that was enshrined in the U.S. Constitution, should mitigate the problem of such insider capture by preventing the emergence of a dominant faction or elite that can use its political power to tyrannize over the country. It does so by spreading power among a series of competing branches of government and allowing for competition among different interests across a large and diverse country.

But Madisonian democracy frequently fails to perform as advertised. Elite insiders typically have superior access to power and information, which they use to protect their interests. Ordinary voters will not get angry at a corrupt politician if they don’t know that money is being stolen in the first place. Cognitive rigidities or beliefs may also prevent social groups from mobilizing in their own interests. For example, in the United States, many working-class voters support candidates promising to lower taxes on the wealthy, despite the fact that such tax cuts will arguably deprive them of important government services.

Furthermore, different groups have different abilities to organize to defend their interests. Sugar producers and corn growers are geographically concentrated and focused on the prices of their products, unlike ordinary consumers or taxpayers, who are dispersed and for whom the prices of these commodities are only a small part of their budgets. Given institutional rules that often favor special interests (such as the fact that Florida and Iowa, where sugar and corn are grown, are electoral swing states), those groups develop an outsized influence over agricultural and trade policy. Similarly, middle-class groups are usually much more willing and able to defend their interests, such as the preservation of the home mortgage tax deduction, than are the poor. This makes such universal entitlements as Social Security or health insurance much easier to defend politically than programs targeting the poor only.

Finally, liberal democracy is almost universally associated with market economies, which tend to produce winners and losers and amplify what James Madison termed the “different and unequal faculties of acquiring property.” This type of economic inequality is not in itself a bad thing, insofar as it stimulates innovation and growth and occurs under conditions of equal access to the economic system. It becomes highly problematic, however, when the economic winners seek to convert their wealth into unequal political influence. They can do so by bribing a legislator or a bureaucrat, that is, on a transactional basis, or, what is more damaging, by changing the institutional rules to favor themselves -- for example, by closing off competition in markets they already dominate, tilting the playing field ever more steeply in their favor.

Political decay thus occurs when institutions fail to adapt to changing external circumstances, either out of intellectual rigidities or because of the power of incumbent elites to protect their positions and block change. Decay can afflict any type of political system, authoritarian or democratic. And while democratic political systems theoretically have self-correcting mechanisms that allow them to reform, they also open themselves up to decay by legitimating the activities of powerful interest groups that can block needed change.

This is precisely what has been happening in the United States in recent decades, as many of its political institutions have become increasingly dysfunctional. A combination of intellectual rigidity and the power of entrenched political actors is preventing those institutions from being reformed. And there is no guarantee that the situation will change much without a major shock to the political order.

A STATE OF COURTS AND PARTIES

Modern liberal democracies have three branches of government -- the executive, the judiciary, and the legislature -- corresponding to the three basic categories of political institutions: the state, the rule of law, and democracy. The executive is the branch that uses power to enforce rules and carry out policy; the judiciary and the legislature constrain power and direct it to public purposes. In its institutional priorities, the United States, with its long-standing tradition of distrust of government power, has always emphasized the role of the institutions of constraint -- the judiciary and the legislature -- over the state. The political scientist Stephen Skowronek has characterized American politics during the nineteenth century as a “state of courts and parties,” where government functions that in Europe would have been performed by an executive-branch bureaucracy were performed by judges and elected representatives instead. The creation of a modern, centralized, merit-based bureaucracy capable of exercising jurisdiction over the whole territory of the country began only in the 1880s, and the number of professional civil servants increased slowly up through the New Deal a half century later. These changes came far later and more hesitantly than in countries such as France, Germany, and the United Kingdom.

The shift to a more modern administrative state was accompanied by an enormous growth in the size of government during the middle decades of the twentieth century. Overall levels of both taxes and government spending have not changed very much since the 1970s; despite the backlash against the welfare state that began with President Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980, “big government” seems very difficult to dismantle. But the apparently irreversible increase in the scope of government in the twentieth century has masked a large decay in its quality. This is largely because the United States has returned in certain ways to being a “state of courts and parties,” that is, one in which the courts and the legislature have usurped many of the proper functions of the executive, making the operation of the government as a whole both incoherent and inefficient.

The story of the courts is one of the steadily increasing judicialization of functions that in other developed democracies are handled by administrative bureaucracies, leading to an explosion of costly litigation, slowness of decision-making, and highly inconsistent enforcement of laws. In the United States today, instead of being constraints on government, courts have become alternative instruments for the expansion of government.

There has been a parallel usurpation by Congress. Interest groups, having lost their ability to corrupt legislators directly through bribery, have found other means of capturing and controlling legislators. These interest groups exercise influence way out of proportion to their place in society, distort both taxes and spending, and raise overall deficit levels by their ability to manipulate the budget in their favor. They also undermine the quality of public administration through the multiple mandates they induce Congress to support.

Both phenomena -- the judicialization of administration and the spread of interest-group influence -- tend to undermine the trust that people have in government. Distrust of government then perpetuates and feeds on itself. Distrust of executive agencies leads to demands for more legal checks on administration, which reduces the quality and effectiveness of government. At the same time, demand for government services induces Congress to impose new mandates on the executive, which often prove difficult, if not impossible, to fulfill. Both processes lead to a reduction of bureaucratic autonomy, which in turn leads to rigid, rule-bound, uncreative, and incoherent government.

The result is a crisis of representation, in which ordinary citizens feel that their supposedly democratic government no longer truly reflects their interests and is under the control of a variety of shadowy elites. What is ironic and peculiar about this phenomenon is that this crisis of representation has occurred in large part because of reforms designed to make the system more democratic. In fact, these days there is too much law and too much democracy relative to American state capacity.

JUDGES GONE WILD

One of the great turning points in twentieth-century U.S. history was the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision overturning the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson case, which had upheld legal segregation. The Brown decision was the starting point for the civil rights movement, which succeeded in dismantling the formal barriers to racial equality and guaranteed the rights of African Americans and other minorities. The model of using the courts to enforce new social rules was then followed by many other social movements, from environmental protection and consumer safety to women’s rights and gay marriage.

So familiar is this heroic narrative to Americans that they are seldom aware of how peculiar an approach to social change it is. The primary mover in the Brown case was the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, a private voluntary association that filed a class-action suit against the Topeka, Kansas, Board of Education on behalf of a small group of parents and their children. The initiative had to come from private groups, of course, because both the state government and the U.S. Congress were blocked by pro-segregation forces. The NAACP continued to press the case on appeal all the way to the Supreme Court, where it was represented by the future Supreme Court justice Thurgood Marshall. What was arguably one of the most important changes in American public policy came about not because Congress as representative of the American people voted for it but because private individuals litigated through the court system to change the rules. Later changes such as the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act were the result of congressional action, but even in these cases, the enforcement of national law was left up to the initiative of private parties and carried out by courts.

There is virtually no other liberal democracy that proceeds in this fashion. All European countries have gone through similar changes in the legal status of racial and ethnic minorities, women, and gays in the second half of the twentieth century. But in France, Germany, and the United Kingdom, the same result was achieved not using the courts but through a national justice ministry acting on behalf of a parliamentary majority. The legislative rule change was driven by public pressure from social groups and the media but was carried out by the government itself and not by private parties acting in conjunction with the justice system.

The origins of the U.S. approach lie in the historical sequence by which its three sets of institutions evolved. In countries such as France and Germany, law came first, followed by a modern state, and only later by democracy. In the United States, by contrast, a very deep tradition of English common law came first, followed by democracy, and only later by the development of a modern state. Although the last of these institutions was put into place during the Progressive Era and the New Deal, the American state has always remained weaker and less capable than its European or Asian counterparts. More important, American political culture since the founding has been built around distrust of executive authority.

This history has resulted in what the legal scholar Robert Kagan labels a system of “adversarial legalism.” While lawyers have played an outsized role in American public life since the beginning of the republic, their role expanded dramatically during the turbulent years of social change in the 1960s and 1970s. Congress passed more than two dozen major pieces of civil rights and environment legislation in this period, covering issues from product safety to toxic waste cleanup to private pension funds to occupational safety and health. This constituted a huge expansion of the regulatory state, one that businesses and conservatives are fond of complaining about today.

Yet what makes this system so unwieldy is not the level of regulation per se but the highly legalistic way in which it is pursued. Congress mandated the creation of an alphabet soup of new federal agencies, such as the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, but it was not willing to cleanly delegate to these bodies the kind of rule-making authority and enforcement power that European or Japanese state institutions enjoy. What it did instead was turn over to the courts the responsibility for monitoring and enforcing the law. Congress deliberately encouraged litigation by expanding standing (that is, who has a right to sue) to an ever-wider circle of parties, many of which were only distantly affected by a particular rule.

The political scientist R. Shep Melnick, for example, has described the way that the federal courts rewrote Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, “turning a weak law focusing primarily on intentional discrimination into a bold mandate to compensate for past discrimination.” Instead of providing a federal bureaucracy with adequate enforcement power, the political scientist Sean Farhang explained, “the key move of Republicans in the Senate . . . was to substantially privatize the prosecutorial function. They made private lawsuits the dominant mode of Title VII enforcement, creating an engine that would, in the years to come, produce levels of private enforcement litigation beyond their imagining.” Across the board, private enforcement cases grew in number from less than 100 per year in the late 1960s to 10,000 in the 1980s and over 22,000 by the late 1990s.

Thus, conflicts that in Sweden or Japan would be solved through quiet consultations between interested parties in the bureaucracy are fought out through formal litigation in the U.S. court system. This has a number of unfortunate consequences for public administration, leading to a process characterized, in Farhang’s words, by “uncertainty, procedural complexity, redundancy, lack of finality, high transaction costs.” By keeping enforcement out of the bureaucracy, it also makes the system far less accountable.

The explosion of opportunities for litigation gave access, and therefore power, to many formerly excluded groups, beginning with African Americans. For this reason, litigation and the right to sue have been jealously guarded by many on the progressive left. But it also entailed large costs in terms of the quality of public policy. Kagan illustrates this with the case of the dredging of Oakland Harbor, in California. During the 1970s, the Port of Oakland initiated plans to dredge the harbor in anticipation of the new, larger classes of container ships that were then coming into service. The plan, however, had to be approved by a host of federal agencies, including the Army Corps of Engineers, the Fish and Wildlife Service, the National Marine Fisheries Service, and the Environmental Protection Agency, as well as their counterparts in the state of California. A succession of alternative plans for disposing of toxic materials dredged from the harbor were challenged in the courts, and each successive plan entailed prolonged delays and higher costs. The reaction of the Environmental Protection Agency to these lawsuits was to retreat into a defensive crouch and not take action. The final plan to proceed with the dredging was not forthcoming until 1994, at an ultimate cost that was many times the original estimates. A comparable expansion of the Port of Rotterdam, in the Netherlands, was accomplished in a fraction of the time.

Examples such as this can be found across the entire range of activities undertaken by the U.S. government. Many of the travails of the Forest Service can be attributed to the ways in which its judgments could be second-guessed through the court system. This effectively brought to a halt all logging on lands it and the Bureau of Land Management operated in the Pacific Northwest during the early 1990s, as a result of threats to the spotted owl, which was protected under the Endangered Species Act.

When used as an instrument of enforcement, the courts have morphed from constraints on government to mechanisms by which the scope of government has expanded enormously. For example, special-education programs for handicapped and disabled children have mushroomed in size and cost since the mid-1970s as a result of an expansive mandate legislated by Congress in 1974. This mandate was built, however, on earlier findings by federal district courts that special-needs children had rights, which are much harder than mere interests to trade off against other goods or to subject to cost-benefit criteria.

The solution to this problem is not necessarily the one advocated by many conservatives and libertarians, which is to simply eliminate regulation and close down bureaucracies. The ends that government is serving, such as the regulation of toxic waste or environmental protection or special education, are important ones that private markets will not pursue if left to their own devices. Conservatives often fail to see that it is the very distrust of government that leads the American system into a far less efficient court-based approach to regulation than that chosen in democracies with stronger executive branches.

But the attitude of progressives and liberals is equally problematic. They, too, have distrusted bureaucracies, such as the ones that produced segregated school systems in the South or the ones captured by big business, and they have been happy to inject unelected judges into the making of social policy when legislators have proved insufficiently supportive.

A decentralized, legalistic approach to administration dovetails with the other notable feature of the U.S. political system: its openness to the influence of interest groups. Such groups can get their way by suing the government directly. But they have another, even more powerful channel, one that controls significantly more resources: Congress.

LIBERTY AND PRIVILEGE

With the exception of some ambassadorships and top posts in government departments, U.S. political parties are no longer in the business of distributing government offices to loyal political supporters. But the trading of political influence for money has come in through the backdoor, in a form that is perfectly legal and much harder to eradicate. Criminalized bribery is narrowly defined in U.S. law as a transaction in which a politician and a private party explicitly agree on a specific quid pro quo. What is not covered by the law is what biologists call reciprocal altruism, or what an anthropologist might label a gift exchange. In a relationship of reciprocal altruism, one person confers a benefit on another with no explicit expectation that it will buy a return favor. Indeed, if one gives someone a gift and then immediately demands a gift in return, the recipient is likely to feel offended and refuse what is offered. In a gift exchange, the receiver incurs not a legal obligation to provide some specific good or service but rather a moral obligation to return the favor in some way later on. It is this sort of transaction that the U.S. lobbying industry is built around.

Kin selection and reciprocal altruism are two natural modes of human sociability. Modern states create strict rules and incentives to overcome the tendency to favor family and friends, including practices such as civil service examinations, merit qualifications, conflict-of-interest regulations, and antibribery and anticorruption laws. But the force of natural sociability is so strong that it keeps finding a way to penetrate the system.

Over the past half century, the American state has been “repatrimonialized,” in much the same way as the Chinese state in the Later Han dynasty, the Mamluk regime in Turkey just before its defeat by the Ottomans, and the French state under the ancien régime were. Rules blocking nepotism are still strong enough to prevent overt favoritism from being a common political feature in contemporary U.S. politics (although it is interesting to note how strong the urge to form political dynasties is, with all of the Kennedys, Bushes, Clintons, and the like). Politicians do not typically reward family members with jobs; what they do is engage in bad behavior on behalf of their families, taking money from interest groups and favors from lobbyists in order to make sure that their children are able to attend elite schools and colleges, for example.

Reciprocal altruism, meanwhile, is rampant in Washington and is the primary channel through which interest groups have succeeded in corrupting government. As the legal scholar Lawrence Lessig points out, interest groups are able to influence members of Congress legally simply by making donations and waiting for unspecified return favors. And sometimes, the legislator is the one initiating the gift exchange, favoring an interest group in the expectation that he will get some sort of benefit from it after leaving office.

The explosion of interest groups and lobbying in Washington has been astonishing, with the number of firms with registered lobbyists rising from 175 in 1971 to roughly 2,500 a decade later, and then to 13,700 lobbyists spending about $3.5 billion by 2009. Some scholars have argued that all this money and activity has not resulted in measurable changes in policy along the lines desired by the lobbyists, implausible as this may seem. But oftentimes, the impact of interest groups and lobbyists is not to stimulate new policies but to make existing legislation much worse than it would otherwise be. The legislative process in the United States has always been much more fragmented than in countries with parliamentary systems and disciplined parties. The welter of congressional committees with overlapping jurisdictions often leads to multiple and conflicting mandates for action. This decentralized legislative process produces incoherent laws and virtually invites involvement by interest groups, which, if not powerful enough to shape overall legislation, can at least protect their specific interests.

For example, the health-care bill pushed by the Obama administration in 2010 turned into something of a monstrosity during the legislative process as a result of all the concessions and side payments that had to be made to interest groups ranging from doctors to insurance companies to the pharmaceutical industry. In other cases, the impact of interest groups was to block legislation harmful to their interests. The simplest and most effective response to the 2008 financial crisis and the hugely unpopular taxpayer bailouts of large banks would have been a law that put a hard cap on the size of financial institutions or a law that dramatically raised capital requirements, which would have had much the same effect. If a cap on size existed, banks taking foolish risks could go bankrupt without triggering a systemic crisis and a government bailout. Like the Depression-era Glass-Steagall Act, such a law could have been written on a couple of sheets of paper. But this possibility was not seriously considered during the congressional deliberations on financial regulation.

What emerged instead was the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, which, while better than no regulation at all, extended to hundreds of pages of legislation and mandated reams of further detailed rules that will impose huge costs on banks and consumers down the road. Rather than simply capping bank size, it created the Financial Stability Oversight Council, which was assigned the enormous task of assessing and managing institutions posing systemic risks, a move that in the end will still not solve the problem of banks being “too big to fail.” Although no one will ever find a smoking gun linking banks’ campaign contributions to the votes of specific members of Congress, it defies belief that the banking industry’s legions of lobbyists did not have a major impact in preventing the simpler solution of simply breaking up the big banks or subjecting them to stringent capital requirements.

Ordinary Americans express widespread disdain for the impact of interest groups and money on Congress. The perception that the democratic process has been corrupted or hijacked is not an exclusive concern of either end of the political spectrum; both Tea Party Republicans and liberal Democrats believe that interest groups are exercising undue political influence and feathering their own nests. As a result, polls show that trust in Congress has fallen to historically low levels, barely above single digits -- and the respondents have a point. Of the old elites in France prior to the Revolution, Alexis de Tocqueville said that they mistook privilege for liberty, that is, they sought protection from state power that applied to them alone and not generally to all citizens. In the contemporary United States, elites speak the language of liberty but are perfectly happy to settle for privilege.

WHAT MADISON GOT WRONG

The economist Mancur Olson made one of the most famous arguments about the malign effects of interest-group politics on economic growth and, ultimately, democracy in his 1982 book The Rise and Decline of Nations. Looking particularly at the long-term economic decline of the United Kingdom throughout the twentieth century, he argued that in times of peace and stability, democracies tended to accumulate ever-increasing numbers of interest groups. Instead of pursuing wealth-creating economic activities, these groups used the political system to extract benefits or rents for themselves. These rents were collectively unproductive and costly to the public as a whole. But the general public had a collective-action problem and could not organize as effectively as, for example, the banking industry or corn producers to protect their interests. The result was the steady diversion of energy to rent-seeking activities over time, a process that could be halted only by a large shock such as a war or a revolution.

This highly negative narrative about interest groups stands in sharp contrast to a much more positive one about the benefits of civil society, or voluntary associations, to the health of democracy. Tocqueville noted in Democracy in America that Americans had a strong propensity to organize private associations, which he argued were schools for democracy because they taught private individuals the skills of coming together for public purposes. Individuals by themselves were weak; only by coming together for common purposes could they, among other things, resist tyrannical government. This perspective was carried forward in the late twentieth century by scholars such as Robert Putnam, who argued that this very propensity to organize -- “social capital” -- was both good for democracy and endangered.

Madison himself had a relatively benign view of interest groups. Even if one did not approve of the ends that a particular group was seeking, he argued, the diversity of groups over a large country would be sufficient to prevent domination by any one of them. As the political scientist Theodore Lowi has noted, “pluralist” political theory in the mid-twentieth century concurred with Madison: the cacophony of interest groups would collectively interact to produce a public interest, just as competition in a free market would provide public benefit through individuals’ following their narrow self-interests. There were no grounds for the government to regulate this process, since there was no higher authority that could define a public interest standing above the narrow concerns of interest groups. The Supreme Court in its Buckley v. Valeo and Citizens United decisions, which struck down certain limits on campaign spending by groups, was in effect affirming the benign interpretation of what Lowi has labeled “interest group liberalism.”

How can these diametrically opposed narratives be reconciled? The most obvious way is to try to distinguish a “good” civil society organization from a “bad” interest group. The former could be said to be driven by passions, the latter by interests. A civil society organization might be a nonprofit such as a church group seeking to build houses for the poor or else a lobbying organization promoting a public policy it believed to be in the public interest, such as the protection of coastal habitats. An interest group might be a lobbying firm representing the tobacco industry or large banks, whose objective was to maximize the profits of the companies supporting it.

Unfortunately, this distinction does not hold up to theoretical scrutiny. Just because a group proclaims that it is acting in the public interest does not mean that it is actually doing so. For example, a medical advocacy group that wanted more dollars allocated to combating a particular disease might actually distort public priorities by diverting funds from more widespread and damaging diseases, simply because it is better at public relations. And because an interest group is self-interested doesn’t mean that its claims are illegitimate or that it does not have a right to be represented within the political system. If a poorly-thought-out regulation would seriously damage the interests of an industry and its workers, the relevant interest group has a right to make that known to Congress. In fact, such lobbyists are often some of the most important sources of information about the consequences of government action.

The most salient argument against interest-group pluralism has to do with distorted representation. In his 1960 book The Semisovereign People, E. E. Schattschneider argued that the actual practice of democracy in the United States had nothing to do with its popular image as a government “of the people, by the people, for the people.” He noted that political outcomes seldom correspond with popular preferences, that there is a very low level of participation and political awareness, and that real decisions are taken by much smaller groups of organized interests. A similar argument is buried in Olson’s framework, since Olson notes that not all groups are equally capable of organizing for collective action. The interest groups that contend for the attention of Congress represent not the whole American people but the best-organized and (what often amounts to the same thing) most richly endowed parts of American society. This tends to work against the interests of the unorganized, who are often poor, poorly educated, or otherwise marginalized.

The political scientist Morris Fiorina has provided substantial evidence that what he labels the American “political class” is far more polarized than the American people themselves. But the majorities supporting middle-of-the-road positions do not feel very passionately about them, and they are largely unorganized. This means that politics is defined by well-organized activists, whether in the parties and Congress, the media, or in lobbying and interest groups. The sum of these activist groups does not yield a compromise position; it leads instead to polarization and deadlocked politics.

There is a further problem with the pluralistic view, which sees the public interest as nothing more than the aggregation of individual private interests: it undermines the possibility of deliberation and the process by which individual preferences are shaped by dialogue and communication. Both classical Athenian democracy and the New England town hall meetings celebrated by Tocqueville were cases in which citizens spoke directly to one another about the common interests of their communities. It is easy to idealize these instances of small-scale democracy, or to minimize the real differences that exist in large societies. But as any organizer of focus groups will tell you, people’s views on highly emotional subjects, from immigration to abortion to drugs, will change just 30 minutes into a face-to-face discussion with people of differing views, provided that they are all given the same information and ground rules that enforce civility. One of the problems of pluralism, then, is the assumption that interests are fixed and that the role of the legislator is simply to act as a transmission belt for them, rather than having his own views that can be shaped by deliberation.

THE RISE OF VETOCRACY

The U.S. Constitution protects individual liberties through a complex system of checks and balances that were 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 deeper wellsprings of resistance to the king during the English Civil War. Intense distrust of government and a reliance on the spontaneous activities of dispersed individuals have been hallmarks of American politics ever since.

As Huntington pointed out, in the U.S. constitutional system, powers 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. Federalism often does not cleanly delegate specific powers to the appropriate level of government; rather, 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 non-hierarchical authority, different parts of the government are easily able to block one another. In conjunction with the general judicialization of politics and the widespread influence of interest groups, the result is an unbalanced form of government that undermines the prospects of necessary collective action -- something that might more appropriately be called “vetocracy.”

The two dominant American political parties have become more ideologically polarized than at any time since the late nineteenth century. There has been a partisan geographic sorting, with virtually the entire South moving from Democratic to Republican and Republicans becoming virtually 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 Congress. This higher degree of partisan competition, in turn, along with liberalized campaign-finance guidelines, has fueled an arms race between the parties for funding and has undermined personal comity between them. The parties have also 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, meanwhile, has put the choice of party candidates into the hands of the relatively small number of activists who turn out for these elections.

Polarization is not the end of the story, however. Democratic political systems are not supposed to end conflict; rather, they are meant to peacefully resolve and mitigate it through agreed-on rules. A good political system is one that encourages the emergence of political outcomes representing the interests of as large a part of the population as possible. But when polarization confronts the United States’ Madisonian check-and-balance political system, the result is particularly devastating.

Democracies must balance the need to allow full opportunities for political participation for all, on the one hand, and the need to get things done, on the other. Ideally, democratic decisions would be taken by consensus, with every member of the community consenting. This is what typically happens in families, and how band- and tribal-level societies often make decisions. The efficiency of consensual decision-making, however, deteriorates rapidly as groups become larger and more diverse, and so for most groups, decisions are made not by consensus but with the consent of some subset of the population. The smaller the percentage of the group necessary to take a decision, the more easily and efficiently it can be made, but at the expense of long-run buy-in.

Even systems of majority rule deviate from an ideal democratic procedure, since they can disenfranchise nearly half the population. Indeed, under a plurality, or “first past the post,” electoral system, decisions can be taken for the whole community by a minority of voters. Systems such as these are adopted not on the basis of any deep principle of justice but rather as an expedient that allows decisions of some sort to be made. Democracies also create various other mechanisms, such as cloture rules (enabling the cutting off of debate), rules restricting the ability of legislators to offer amendments, and so-called reversionary rules, which allow for action in the event that a legislature can’t come to agreement.

The delegation of powers to different political actors enables them to block action by the whole body. The U.S. political system has far more of these checks and balances, or what political scientists call “veto points,” than other contemporary democracies, raising the costs of collective action and in some cases make it impossible altogether. In earlier periods of U.S. history, when one party or another was dominant, this system served to moderate the will of the majority and force it to pay greater attention to minorities than it otherwise might have. But in the more evenly balanced, highly competitive party system that has arisen since the 1980s, it has become a formula for gridlock.

By contrast, the so-called Westminster system, which evolved in England in the years following the Glorious Revolution of 1688, is one of the most decisive in the democratic world because, in its pure form, it has very few veto points. British citizens have one large, formal check on government, their ability to periodically elect Parliament. (The tradition of free media in the United Kingdom is another important informal check.) In all other respects, however, the system concentrates, rather than diffuses, power. The pure Westminster system has only a single, all-powerful legislative chamber -- no separate presidency, no powerful upper house, no written constitution and therefore no judicial review, and no federalism or constitutionally mandated devolution of powers to localities. It has a plurality voting system that, along with strong party discipline, tends to produce a two-party system and strong parliamentary majorities. The British equivalent of the cloture rule requires only a simple majority of the members of Parliament to be present to call the question; American-style filibustering is not allowed. The parliamentary majority 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. This is why the British system is often described as a “democratic dictatorship.”

For all its concentrated powers, the Westminster system nonetheless remains fundamentally democratic, because if voters don’t like the government it produces, they can vote it out of office. In fact, with a vote of no confidence, they can do so immediately, without waiting for the end of a presidential term. This means that governments are more sensitive to perceptions of their general performance than to the needs of particular interest groups or lobbies.

The Westminster system produces stronger governments than those in the United States, as can be seen by comparing their budget processes. In the United Kingdom, national budgets are drawn up by professional civil servants acting under instructions from the cabinet and the prime minister. The budget is then presented by the chancellor of the exchequer to the House of Commons, which votes to approve it in a single up-or-down vote, usually within a week or two.

In the United States, by contrast, Congress has primary authority over the budget. Presidents make initial proposals, but these are largely aspirational documents that do not determine what eventually emerges. The executive branch’s Office of Management and Budget has no formal powers over the budget, acting as simply one more lobbying organization supporting the president’s preferences. The budget works its way through a complex set of committees over a period of months, and what finally emerges for ratification by the two houses of Congress is the product of innumerable deals struck with individual members to secure their support -- since with no party discipline, the congressional leadership cannot compel members to support its preferences.

The openness and never-ending character of the U.S. budget process gives lobbyists and interest groups multiple points at which to exercise influence. In most European parliamentary systems, it would make no sense for an interest group to lobby an individual member of parliament, since the rules of party discipline would give that legislator little or no influence over the party leadership’s position. In the United States, by contrast, an influential committee chairmanship confers enormous powers to modify legislation and therefore becomes the target of enormous lobbying activity.

Of the challenges facing developed democracies, one of the most important is the problem of the unsustainability of their existing welfare-state commitments. The existing social contracts underlying contemporary welfare states were negotiated several generations ago, when birthrates were higher, lifespans were shorter, and economic growth rates were 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 the United Kingdom and the United States coming out of World War II were higher than they are today. 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 its external debt, even prior to the huge resource boom of the early years of this century. But dealing with these problems requires a healthy, well-functioning political system, which the United States does not currently have. Congress has abdicated one of its most basic responsibilities, having failed to follow its own rules for the orderly passing of budgets several years in a row now.

The classic Westminster system no longer exists anywhere in the world, including the United Kingdom itself, as that country has gradually adopted more checks and balances. Nonetheless, the United Kingdom still has far fewer veto points than does the United States, as do most parliamentary systems in Europe and Asia. (Certain Latin American countries, having copied the U.S. presidential system in the nineteenth century, have similar problems with gridlock and politicized administration.)

Budgeting is not the only aspect of government that is handled differently in the United States. In parliamentary systems, a great deal of legislation is formulated by 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.

Such a system is utterly foreign to the political culture in Washington, where Congress jealously guards its right to legislate -- even though the often incoherent product is what helps produce a large, sprawling, and less accountable government. Congress’ multiple committees frequently produce duplicate and overlapping programs or create several agencies with similar purposes. The Pentagon, for example, operates under nearly 500 mandates to report annually to Congress on various issues. These never expire, and executing them consumes huge amounts of time and energy. Congress has created about 50 separate programs for worker retraining and 82 separate projects to improve teacher quality.

Financial-sector regulation is split between the Federal Reserve, the Treasury Department, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, the National Credit Union Administration, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, the Federal Housing Finance Agency, and a host of state attorneys general who have decided to take on the banking sector. The federal agencies are overseen by different congressional committees, which are loath to give up their turf to a more coherent and unified regulator. This system was easy to game so as to bring about the deregulation of the financial sector in the late 1990s; re-regulating it after the recent financial crisis has proved much more difficult.

CONGRESSIONAL DELEGATION

Vetocracy is only half the story of the U.S. political system. In other respects, Congress delegates huge powers to the executive branch, which allow the latter to operate rapidly and sometimes with a very low degree of accountability. Such areas of delegation include the Federal Reserve, the intelligence agencies, the military, and a host of quasi-independent commissions and regulatory agencies that together constitute the huge administrative state that emerged during the Progressive Era and the New Deal.

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 under modern circumstances without them. The United States today has a huge, complex national economy, situated in a globalized world economy that moves with extraordinary speed. During the acute phase of the financial crisis that unfolded after the collapse of Lehman Brothers in September 2008, the Federal Reserve and the Treasury Department had to make massive decisions overnight, decisions that involved flooding markets with trillions of dollars of liquidity, propping up individual banks, and imposing new regulations. The severity of the crisis led Congress to appropriate $700 billion for the Troubled Asset Relief Program largely on the say-so of the Bush administration. There has been a lot of second-guessing of individual decisions made during this period, but the idea that such a crisis could have been managed by any other branch of government is ludicrous. The same applies to national security issues, where the president is in effect tasked with making decisions on 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 The Federalist Papers, no. 70, spoke of the need for “energy in the executive.”

There is intense populist distrust of elite institutions in the United States, together with calls to abolish them (as in the case of the Federal Reserve) or make them more transparent. Ironically, however, polls show the highest degree of approval for precisely those institutions, such as the military or NASA, that are the least subject to immediate democratic oversight. Part of the reason they are admired is that they can actually get things done. By contrast, the most democratic institution, the House of Representatives, receives disastrously low levels of approval, and Congress more broadly is regarded (not inaccurately) as a talking shop where partisan games prevent almost anything useful from happening.

In full perspective, therefore, the U.S. political system presents a complex picture in which checks and balances excessively constrain decision-making on the part of majorities, but in which there are also many instances of potentially dangerous delegations of authority to poorly accountable institutions. One major problem is that these delegations are seldom made cleanly. Congress frequently fails in its duty to provide clear legislative guidance on how a particular agency is to perform its task, leaving it up to the agency itself to write its own mandate. In doing so, Congress hopes that if things don’t work out, the courts will step in to correct the abuses. Excessive delegation and vetocracy thus become intertwined.

In a parliamentary system, the majority party or coalition controls the government directly; members of parliament become ministers who have the authority to change the rules of the bureaucracies they control. Parliamentary systems can be blocked if parties are excessively fragmented and coalitions unstable, as has been the case frequently in Italy. But once a parliamentary majority has been established, there is a relatively straight-forward delegation of authority to an executive agency.

Such delegations are harder to achieve, however, in a presidential system. The obvious solution to a legislature’s inability to act is to transfer more authority to the separately elected executive. Latin American countries with presidential systems have been notorious for gridlock and ineffective legislatures and have often cut through the maze by granting presidents emergency powers -- which, in turn, has often led to other kinds of abuses. Under conditions of divided government, when the party controlling one or both houses of Congress is different from the one controlling the presidency, strengthening the executive at the expense of Congress becomes a matter of partisan politics. Delegating more authority to President Barack Obama is the last thing that House Republicans want to do today.

In many respects, the American system of checks and balances compares unfavorably with parliamentary systems when it comes to the ability to balance the need for strong state action with law and accountability. Parliamentary systems tend not to judicialize administration to nearly the same extent; they have proliferated government agencies less, they write more coherent legislation, and they are less subject to interest-group influence. Germany, the Netherlands, and the Scandinavian countries, in particular, have been able to sustain higher levels of trust in government, which makes public administration less adversarial, more consensual, and better able to adapt to changing conditions of globalization. (High-trust arrangements, however, tend to work best in relatively small, homogeneous societies, and those in these countries have been showing signs of strain as their societies have become more diverse as a result of immigration and cultural change.)

The picture looks a bit different for the EU as a whole. Recent decades have seen a large increase in the number and sophistication of lobbying groups in Europe, for example. These days, corporations, trade associations, and environmental, consumer, and labor rights groups all operate at both national and EU-wide levels. And with the shift of policymaking away from national capitals to Brussels, the European system as a whole is beginning to resemble that of the United States in depressing ways. Europe’s individual parliamentary systems may allow for fewer veto points than the U.S. system of checks and balances, but with the addition of a large European layer, many more veto points have been added. This means that European interest groups are increasingly able to venue shop: if they cannot get favorable treatment at the national level, they can go to Brussels, or vice versa. The growth of the EU has also Americanized Europe with respect to the role of the judiciary. Although European judges remain more reluctant than their U.S. counterparts to insert themselves into political matters, the new structure of European jurisprudence, with its multiple and overlapping levels, has increased, rather than decreased, the number of judicial vetoes in the system.

NO WAY OUT

The U.S. political system has decayed over time because its traditional system of checks and balances has deepened and become increasingly rigid. In an environment of sharp political polarization, this decentralized system is less and less able to represent majority interests and gives excessive representation to the views of interest groups and activist organizations that collectively do not add up to a sovereign American people.

This is not the first time that the U.S. political system has been polarized and indecisive. In the middle decades of the nineteenth century, it could not make up its mind about the extension of slavery to the territories, and in the later decades of the century, it couldn’t decide if the country was a fundamentally agrarian society or an industrial one. The Madisonian system of checks and balances and the clientelistic, party-driven political system that emerged in the nineteenth century were adequate for governing an isolated, largely agrarian country. They could not, however, resolve the acute political crisis produced by the question of the extension of slavery, nor deal with a continental-scale economy increasingly knit together by new transportation and communications technologies.

Today, once again, the United States is trapped by its political institutions. Because Americans distrust government, they are generally unwilling to delegate to it the authority to make decisions, as happens in other democracies. Instead, Congress mandates complex rules that reduce the government’s autonomy and cause decision-making to be slow and expensive. The government then doesn’t perform well, which confirms people’s lack of trust in it. Under these circumstances, they are reluctant to pay higher taxes, which they feel the government will simply waste. But without appropriate -resources, the government can’t function properly, again creating a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Two obstacles stand in the way of reversing the trend toward decay. The first is a matter of politics. Many political actors in the United States recognize that the system isn’t working well but nonetheless have strong interests in keeping things as they are. Neither political party has an incentive to cut itself off from access to interest-group money, and the interest groups don’t want a system in which money won’t buy influence. As happened in the 1880s, a reform coalition has to emerge that unites groups without a stake in the current system. But achieving collective action among such out-groups is very difficult; they need leadership and a clear agenda, neither of which is currently present.

The second problem is a matter of ideas. The traditional American solution to perceived governmental dysfunction has been to try to expand democratic participation and transparency. This happened at a national level in the 1970s, for example, as reformers pushed for more open primaries, greater citizen access to the courts, and round-the-clock media coverage of Congress, even as states such as California expanded their use of ballot initiatives to get around unresponsive government. But as the political scientist Bruce Cain has pointed out, most citizens have neither the time, nor the background, nor the inclination to grapple with complex public policy issues; expanding participation has simply paved the way for well-organized groups of activists to gain more power. The obvious solution to this problem would be to roll back some of the would-be democratizing reforms, but no one dares suggest that what the country needs is a bit less participation and transparency.

The depressing bottom line is that given how self-reinforcing the country’s political malaise is, and how unlikely the prospects for constructive incremental reform are, the decay of American politics will probably continue until some external shock comes along to catalyze a true reform coalition and galvanize it into action.

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