American Politics in the Age of Ignorance: Why Lawmakers Choose Belief over Research

Why Lawmakers Choose Belief Over Research

D. Schultz

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781137308733
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: European Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

American Politics in the Age of Ignoranc e looks at ten policy myths and bad ideas that governments and public officials - most often conservatives - consistently repeat and re-enact. Acting on these myths, the policies inevitably fail and thereby reinforce preconceived beliefs that government is ineffective at solving problems.

1

States as Laboratories of Futility

Abstract: Contemporary American political debate often criticizes the national government as an inflexible and inefficient policy maker and deliverer. Instead, some emphasize the virtues of federalism. States are depicted as laboratories of innovation, able to respond quickly to the local demands of their people and fashion creative solutions to pressing political and policy problems. But the reality is that states are often less engines of innovation than replication, reproducing ideas or programs that have been fashioned or formulated elsewhere. While in some cases this replication is good, but in many others states simply adopted failed policies found elsewhere or legislate ideas premised upon political myths, generally without any evidence of their efficacy.

Keywords: laboratories of democracy, federalism, failed public policies, innovation, policy making process, political myths

Schultz, David. American Politics in the Age of Ignorance: Why Lawmakers Choose Belief over Research. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. DOI: 10.1057/9781137308733.

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

George Santayana

President Barack Obama spent $700 billion in 2009 to stimulate the American economy. How that money was spent and what impact it had raises a host of interesting questions about how to achieve the proverbial “biggest bang for the biggest buck.” In contemplating this stimulus plan for the economy significant talk centered on perhaps giving this money to states for them to spend on “shovel ready” projects that could potentially generate up to 4 million jobs. But the spending of this money and giving authority to the states to decide which projects to spend on raises three questions. First, how good are states in spending money to encourage economic development or engaging in good policy making? Second, are some types of project better than others to help the economy? Finally, stepping back from economic development one can ask, in general, how good are states in terms of making policy informed by data and evidence.

States are often viewed favorably as innovators in making law. Or, in the language of government officials, they are innovators in public policy. Justice Louis Brandeis’ famous and often repeated quote in New State Ice Company v. Liebman, 285 U.S. 262 (1932) described states as laboratories of democracy where “a single courageous state may, if its citizens choose, serve as a laboratory; and try novel social and economic experiments without risk to the rest of the country.” Similarly, Carl E. Van Horn, in lauding the perceived [re]newed capacity of states to innovate and experiment in public policy, asserts that “Today, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, state governments are at the cutting edge of political and public policy reform” (2006: 1). During the 2012 presidential campaign heaps of scorn and criticism were thrown upon the federal government. Republicans criticized measures such as the Patient Protection and Affordability Care Act (“Obamacare” or the Obama Health Care Act) as stealing power away from the states. Debates in Arizona and Georgia regarding state authority to regulate immigration landed in the Supreme Court (as did the individual mandate for the Obama Health Care Act) raising constitutional questions over the scope of federal versus state power. Other issues, such as same-sex marriage, also raise concerns about federalism and assertions that the federal government is getting too powerful and intervening into matters where states ought to take the lead. In an era when devolution and federalism are the buzzwords among some policy makers, and at a time when others view lawmakers in Washington as hopelessly deadlocked in partisan battles, it is no surprise that the attention has shifted back to states to drive the policy process.

Yet while states, by default or design, may be forced to drive policy making, questions about their capacity to innovate and implement are still open to debate. It was not too long ago—perhaps only a generation or two ago—that states were viewed as hotbeds of parochialism and racism. It was as early as James Madison, who in Federalist Number 10 worried about factions dominating small republics and communities.

The influence of factious leaders may kindle a flame within their particular States, but will be unable to spread a general conflagration through the other States. A religious sect may degenerate into a political faction in a part of the Confederacy; but the variety of sects dispersed over the entire face of it must secure the national councils against any danger from that source. A rage for paper money, for an abolition of debts, for an equal division of property, or for any other improper or wicked project, will be less apt to pervade the whole body of the Union than a particular member of it; in the same proportion as such a malady is more likely to taint a particular county or district, than an entire State (Hamilton et al. 1937: 61–62).

States were depicted as cauldrons of passion and faction. Left unchecked, state and local governments could threaten individual liberty. Madison’s solution, again as proposed in Federalist Number 10, was to create a federal republic with a larger diversity of groups and interests.

The smaller the society, the fewer probably will be the distinct parties and interests composing it; the fewer the distinct parties and interests, the more frequently will a majority be found of the same party; and the smaller the number of individuals composing a majority, and the smaller the compass within which they are placed, the more easily will they concert and execute their plans of oppression. Extend the sphere, and you take in a greater variety of parties and interests; you make it less probable that a majority of the whole will have a common motive to invade the rights of other citizens; or if such a common motive exists, it will be more difficult for all who feel it to discover their own strength, and to act in unison with each other. Besides other impediments, it may be remarked that, where there is a consciousness of unjust or dishonorable purposes, communication is always checked by distrust in proportion to the number whose concurrence is necessary (Hamilton et al.: 60–61).

Federalism and the creation of national government was made necessary to protect individual freedom, but also to bring unity to the United States and prevent individual states from competing and discriminating against one another. The goal was to create a United States not a disunited one as the Articles of Confederation government was. Moreover, as American history would soon reveal, states were often inefficient and incompetent backwater governments that often discriminated against minorities. States, and the cities that composed them, were models of corruption, with their own Tammany Halls and political machines. Lincoln Steffens’ early-twentieth-century Shame of the Cities is a classic tale of local corruption (2011).

But some now assert that states have moved beyond those days. As a result of Supreme Court decisions that mandate legislative redistricting, the political process is more open now. Anti-discrimination laws, better professionalism, and a host of other reforms have similarly improved the capacity of states to make policy, thereby justifying the call to return more power to the states.

Yet even though Daniel Elazar (1984) has asserted that states have different political and legal cultures that affect how their institutions are set up and operate, and Putnam (2000) has argued that the levels of social capital across the country demonstrate contrasting capacity performance, one can question whether states truly are the laboratories of democracy that Brandeis described.

When states make policy, the reality may demonstrate more often than not that they are less laboratories of democracy and more factories of replication. For example, many state legislatures are not professional or full time, or they lack extensive research staff to undertake policy work (Rosenthal 1998). The reality is that often the practice one state adopts (or state legislators take when seeking to make policy) is to ask whether another has already enacted it. As an expert witness appearing before legislative committees, inquiring into whether another state had already enacted a similar policy was one of the first questions asked. If another state did legislate on the subject at hand, often that policy was adopted, subject to minor modifications. Additionally, states may find out about legislation at conferences, such as the National Council of State Legislatures, where they hear about or see programs that have been adopted elsewhere. Or some states have become national policy leaders, such as California or New York, or others become regional leaders to which other local states look to for guidance. In many cases this guidance is good, but as Peter Schrag (2004) points out in Paradise Lost: California’s Experience, America’s Future, ideas or experiments in one state—here California’s experiment with governance by initiative and referendum—demonstrates the problems such a model may have for the rest of the country.

The point here is that states may be creatures of “me tooism,” repeating and replicating policy initiatives found in other states, often adopting them without asking whether in fact they work. One of the darker or unfortunate sides to this policy diffusion and replication is that ideas adopted in one state that do not work might also be adopted elsewhere, only to reproduce policy failures across borders.

There is a need to examine the process of how state and local governments borrowing ideas from one another, often legislating from the position of ignorance. American public policy is cloaked in many myths. Encompassing such issues as public subsidies for sports stadia, tax breaks and enterprise zones, and welfare migration, there are many ideas recycled from government to government with little thought given to the evidence supporting their empirical assumptions or their prospects for success. Like bad meals that repeat on a diner, or a vampire who never dies, these ideas too are recycled and never seem to go away. This book examines several of the leading ideas and myths dominating American policy making, exploring the reasons for their repetition and the evidence for their failures. The real question raised here is simple: Why do governments consistently enact policies and laws that have already been shown to be failures?

The patterns of policy process

“Innovation [is] an idea perceived as new by an individual” (Gray 1973: 1174). Yet however much Brandeis’ laboratories-of-democracy image is invoked, seldom have policy innovation and genesis been studied, at least from the point of view of examining the role that imitation takes on. Instead, a host of related issues are generally explored. Additionally, the genesis and perpetuation of bad policy ideas is not an object of inquiry in policy studies.

One set of literature explores the agenda setting process and how ideas surface, and foment. John Kingdon’s Agendas, Alternatives, and Public Policies (1995) explains why specific policy ideas make it on to the agenda. He argues that one needs to look to policy windows and entrepreneurs where three streams—problem, policy, and politics—converge. Specifically, while many worthy ideas might merit consideration and compete for space on the limited platform for Congress or legislatures to consider, successful policy makers or entrepreneurs benefit from the luck of a specific issue being perceived as a problem, a particular policy being seen as an appropriate to it, and political timing making consideration of the problem and policy salient.

Cobb and Elder (1972), like Kingdon, seek to understand why some ideas are thrust on to the policy agenda. They argue that triggering devices are critical to that occurring. For example, external events, such as wars or new international conflicts can place items on the agenda. The events of 9/11 placed terrorism on the national and local policy agendas, as did the launching of Sputnik back in 1957 place science and math on the education agenda. Triggering devices can also be internal events. For example, the rise of AIDS as a health threat in the 1980s, or domestic abuse in the 1970s as highlighted by the women’s movements of that decade, both fit the bill as events changing the policy agenda.

Anthony Downs (1972) looks at agenda setting and issue identification in yet another way, seeing a pattern to how most policies are addressed. His issue attention cycle starts with a pre-problem stage where phenomena are not defined or seen as a problem. At some point an event, perhaps a triggering device, as described by Cobb and Elder, leads to an alarmed discovery and euphoric enthusiasm that a problem exists and that the government can in fact do something about it. However, in stage three the public and policy lawmakers come to realize the cost of significant progress, or see that addressing a problem—such as eradicating poverty—will not be quick, easy, and cheap. As a result, there is a gradual decline in public interest in addressing the problem, and finally the cycle moves into the post-problem stage where almost like the hero in an old western, the policy and issues surrounding it fade off in the sunset. Downs’ model, describing policies almost in Warholian 15 minutes of fame logic, makes the five stages of the policy issue attention cycle feel like Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’ (1973) five stages of dying—denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. Other writers, such as Jones (1977) and Pressman and Wildavsky (1973) also examine agenda setting and the difficulty of getting ideas into legislative consideration.

Finally, while the policy literature often tries to explained why items make it on to the agenda, Bachrach and Baratz (1962) became interested in explaining why some items are kept off it. Their “Two Faces of Power” was a groundbreaking essay describing non-decision making. For Bachrach and Baratz, the ability to put or not put issues on the agenda is a powerful way to influence debate. Moreover, non-decision making is still a form of policy making, especially if done repeatedly and consistently over time, when done as a result of decisions by powerful interests or elites. For example, the general lack of regulation of tobacco products, firearms, or significant reform in health care delivery in the United States may perhaps be seen as the result of non-decision making at the behest of the cigarette industry, the National Rifle Association, and the private insurance lobby as well as the American Medical Association, respectively. In just the past few years, shootings at Virginia Tech and Aurora, Colorado, as well as the one involving former Congresswoman Gabriel Giffords, should have led to renewed debate about gun control in the United States. But it may be a testament to the power of the gun lobby that such an issue stays off the policy agenda.

In parallel fashion Schattschneider’s (1960) concept of the mobilization of bias in American politics is also supposed to explain why certain issues of interest to one social economic stratum are given consideration in American politics, whereas others are not. In fact, the entire pluralist school and its critiques offer suggestions on how the bargaining process among interest groups explains what issues appear or disappear from the policy frontier (Truman 1971; Schattschneider 1960; Lowi 1969: Key 1967: McConnell 1966; Dahl 1971; Dahl 1976: Dahl 1979; Dahl 1989; Baumgartner et al. 1998; Ziegler 1964). Finally, as noted in the introduction, when it actually comes to evaluation and impact, there is a rich literature in the policy analysis field demonstrating how empirical knowledge can facilitate policy choices.

What this latter group of writers seems to be hinting at is perhaps most closely related to one issue or theme of this book—the role of evidence in the policy process. First, these authors split over whether and how social science research should impact the policy making process. Second, they seem to hint at a gulf in the policy field. By that, there are many policies that have been heavily and repeatedly researched by social scientists and a significant amount of data are available either to indicate what works or not, or at least to help frame the debate about certain issues. Yet in many cases, despite the social science research, elected officials and policy makers tend to make choices as if in denial about the facts or about what the research suggests.

Overall, while policy making, especially at the state level, shows a capacity to change and innovate, the nature of that innovation is often understudied. Ignored is how much states act as copycats to replicate what has been done elsewhere, and also overlooked is how this type of policy making is often done unreflectively, adopting proposals that have been tried elsewhere and failed. Perhaps this is done either with ignorance of this fact or with the eternal hope of a Chicago Cubs baseball fan that this time or next year it will be different.

Failed policies and political myths

Failed public policies and political myths often appear to capture the imagination of political elites. By “failed public policies” is it meant policies that are repeatedly proposed and which continuously fail, even though there is social science research indicating that these policies would not work, or at least secure the sta...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction: If at First You Dont Succeed
• 1  States as Laboratories of Futility
• 2  The Truth about TaxesThey Dont Matter Much
• 3  SportsfareWelfare for Professional Sports
• 4  Welfare Queens, Calculative Criminals, and the Myth of Homo Economicus
• 5  Sending Signals: Illegal Immigrants and Teenage Sex
• 6  Democracy Is the Worst Form of Government
• Conclusion: Fool Me Twice, Shame on Me
• Bibliography
• Index