Is Government Too Political?

Alan S. Blinder

From Foreign Affairs, November/ December 1997

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Summary:  Those who say big government is the problem have it wrong. The real problem is that government is pushed and pulled by interest groups and partisan politicking, often at the public's expense. Washington could learn from independent agencies like the Federal Reserve. Shift responsibility for things like tax policy from the politicians to the experts; besides knowing more, they work in a politics-free zone. Tossing the ball to the technocrats won't weaken democracy -- Congress can always take it back -- but it will produce better policy.

Alan S. Blinder is Gordon S. Rentschler Memorial Professor of Economics at Princeton University and Director of Princeton's Center for Economic Policy Studies. In 1993-94 he served first on the Council of Economic Advisers, and in 1994-96 as Vice Chairman of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve system.

A QUESTION OF BALANCE

Since the 1994 congressional elections, America's central political debate has pitted "big government" against "small government." This is a sterile dichotomy that captures the concerns of few citizens. Americans abhor paying taxes and are constitutionally incapable of favoring "big government" in the abstract. Nevertheless, I suspect that voters want more government, not less, in certain key areas -- crime prevention, environmental preservation, job security, and education, to name just a few. Naturally, they want less government elsewhere.

The real source of the current estrangement between Americans and their politicians is, I believe, the feeling that the process of governing has become too political. Americans increasingly believe that their elected officials are playing games rather than solving problems. Political debate has too much "spin" and too little straight talk. The system is too argumentative and tied up in partisan and procedural knots. Most important, government appears excessively beholden to those with political clout, often at the expense of the public interest.

In return for these perceived vices, citizens exact retribution from professional politicians: witness the romanticized yearning for a man on a white horse (first Ross Perot, then Colin Powell), the meteoric rise and fall of the anti-politician Steve Forbes, and the growing pressure for term limits. Each of these rejectionist phenomena is a Bronx cheer for career politicians.

So what is the solution? Policy without politics? Of course not. But "politicalness" is not something that must be turned on or off like a light switch; it can come in shades, more like a rheostat. We could be having a different debate. It would not be about the scale of government, but about the scope of politics; not about whether government is too "big" or too "small" in some abstract sense, but about what things the government should and should not be doing. And it would be about how political the government's various decisions should be.

Although important, this last question is rarely mentioned. My contention is that one root cause of Americans' current distaste for government is that our system is too political. Short-term electoral considerations and political gamesmanship have fueled much voter resentment. Fortunately, we can do something about it.

It is, of course, neither possible nor desirable to depoliticize government. Policymaking in a democracy must be political -- that is, legitimized by popular support rather than by technical analyses. And American democracy, in particular, was designed to be messy and frustrating. But different arrangements for governance draw the line between political and technocratic decisions in different places, and every society must choose where that line should fall. I believe that Americans have decided, almost subconsciously, that we have drawn the line in the wrong place, leaving too many policy decisions in the realm of politics and too few in the realm of technocracy.

LEARNING FROM THE FED

This admittedly deviant thought occurred to me while reflecting on my recent experiences in two very different government positions. From January 1993 until June 1994, I ...

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