Powering down

FOR anyone interested in how a free society governs itself there is nothing quite as spectacular as an American election. The country has just spent nearly $4 billion on a fierce contest that has changed the balance of power in Congress (see article). Add to this the races for governors, statehouses, attorneys general, judges and so on—well over 10,000 offices in total—and it seems that America’s democracy is in fine fettle.

Furthermore, optimists believe the mid-term elections will usher in a period of compromise: Republicans, having captured the Senate and increased their majority in the House, will want to prove that they can govern; Barack Obama will have little choice but to work with them. Polls show that, in general, voters increasingly favour politicians who seek consensus over those who do not. Deals on things like trade and tax reform seem possible.

The next Congress could hardly accomplish less than its predecessor, which comes to a close in December and is likely to be remembered as one of the least productive in history (see chart 1). It has shut down the government once and flirted with a sovereign default twice. But the low standard by which progress is judged and the limited expectations of even the most cockeyed optimists are signs of deeper trouble in America’s political system. Designed to make legislating difficult, it has recently looked dysfunctional. In a new book, “Political Order and Political Decay”, Francis Fukuyama of Stanford University argues persuasively that America “suffers from the problem of political decay in a more acute form than other democratic political systems”, a statement that not long ago would have seemed ludicrous.

Sand in the cogs

There is no shortage of explanations for why this might be: the only thing generally agreed upon is that the trouble started at some point between 1787, when the Founding Fathers determined that their new creation would not be pushed around by an overmighty government, and 2010, when the Supreme Court loosened the rules on campaign spending. But two explanations for the sorry state of American politics stand out. The first is that small, increasingly partisan groups wield vetoes over the federal government, blocking it from moving forward or back except in exceptional circumstances, such as economic crisis or war. The second is that much of the federal bureaucracy was created at a point in the middle of the 20th century that was, in political terms, highly unusual. Under more normal conditions it struggles.

Begin with the vetoes. For reasons that include the sorting of the electorate into like-minded folks, redistricting and the cultural divide between cities and prairies, only 5% of the House’s 435 districts were truly competitive on November 4th. There were 69 congressional districts where the candidate faced no opponent. This means that the main threat to the jobs of congressmen comes from primary elections, in which fewer than 20% of the electorate vote, about the same proportion who describe themselves as holding consistently conservative or consistently liberal views. Few congressmen lost to primary challengers in 2014, but results like the defeat of Eric Cantor, the House Majority Leader, in Virginia’s seventh district remind them that such voters are not wild about anything that smells of compromise with the other side. These voters have the first veto.

Getting a bill safely through the House, something that has become harder since Republicans adopted the idea that bills should have the support of a majority of their caucus to pass, is straightforward compared with getting one through the Senate, thanks to the filibuster rule. Since a filibuster requires a bill to gain a 60-vote majority, a group of 41 senators can halt almost any piece of legislation. Even the smallest state has two senators, so those 41 sometimes represent a small chunk of the electorate: Larry Sabato of the University of Virginia has worked out that states that are home to just 11% of Americans can elect the senators needed to block legislation. This potent weapon gives the minority party in the Senate the second veto.

Other delaying tactics and procedural quirks enhance the power of small groups, and even individual politicians, to stall congressional action. These were once used sparingly, but the gulf between the parties and their policies has grown so wide that they are now wielded to block minor legislation. The founders feared such a development. “There is nothing which I dread so much as a division of the republic into two great parties,” wrote John Adams in 1780. “This, in my humble apprehension, is to be dreaded as the greatest political evil under our constitution.” In the decades since America’s two great parties were remade by the fight over civil rights in the 1960s, they have steadily become more ideologically consistent. Congressional Republicans and Democrats have withdrawn from each other, to the point where there is now hardly any common ground between them (see chart 2).

Voting patterns in Congress suggest that the parties are even further apart now than they were in the mid-1990s, when Republicans tried to impeach Bill Clinton, or the middle of the past decade, when Democrats denounced George W. Bush as a warmonger. Over the past 20 years, the share of Americans who express consistently liberal or consistently conservative opinions has doubled, according to a study by the Pew Research Centre. Most of these people now believe that the other party’s policies “are so misguided that they threaten the nation’s well-being”. The results of the mid-terms, far from repudiating this dynamic, have reflected it. The defeat of John Barrow in Georgia leaves just one white Democratic congressman in the deep South; most of the Senate seats picked up by Republicans were at the expense of moderate Democrats in states that voted for Mitt Romney.

This degree of political polarisation is often described as unprecedented, but that is mistaken. The parties were similarly divided at the end of the 19th century, following the civil war. The difference then was that Republicans won most federal elections, so the restraints built into the constitution did not resemble leg-irons, as they do now.

When Congress is stuck, presidents often try to get their way by issuing executive orders. Earlier this year Barack Obama announced that 2014 would be “a year of action” during which he would use his pen to get things done if Congress stood in his way. Nine months later, how has this action-packed approach to bypassing Congress transformed America? Aside from the designation of a large marine reserve in the Pacific, which costs nothing and offends no one, the president’s biggest solo accomplishment has been to issue an edict raising the pay of minimum-wage employees doing contract work for the federal government. The president can act with more freedom abroad and has done so in Libya, Iraq and Syria; by imposing sanctions on Russia and sending troops to west Africa to help contain the spread of Ebola. At home, though, his power to overcome an obstructionist Congress is limited.

For those who favour more limited government, all this might sound like a good thing. But the vetoes that hamper the passage of laws make it just as hard to stop the federal government from doing anything.

Birth of the kludgeocracy

The growth of entitlements is a good example. Spending on public pensions (Social Security) and federal health-care programmes (such as Medicare and Medicaid) increases automatically every year with no need for a vote. Without changes this bit of the budget will account for 14% of GDP by 2039, double the average level of the past 40 years, sending public debt to over 100% of GDP. Many countries face similar problems, but in America the preponderance of vetoes makes the mix of spending cuts and revenue increases needed to deal with it impossible. Maintaining some budgetary discipline while entitlement spending grows and revenues do not requires hacking back everything else, from scientific research to road building. Discretionary spending, the kind Congress does vote on every year, has shrunk to just 15% of the budget once military expenditure is taken out. Thus neither Congress nor the White House imposes much meaningful control over most of what the federal government spends each year.

The accusation, generally made by conservatives, that the federal bureaucracy is out of control is, in this sense, true. The federal government imagined by the founders was mainly responsible for running post offices, custom houses and giving away land, rather than the regulation of health care or the administration of the National Security Agency. One way to think about the federal bureaucracies now, and to understand their frequent failings, is as a collection of institutions put together when there was a lot of co-operation between parties, trying to function when there is very little. The New Deal and Great Society programmes of the mid-20th century were created by legislators with shared memories of two big national traumas, the Depression and the second world war, when party divisions were blurred. Lyndon Johnson may have been extremely cunning, but the kind of dealmaking he was able to practise was the product of a moment that, in political terms, was an anomaly compared with what went before or came after.

These mid-century institutions have subsequently been asked to run a plethora of new programmes, each layered on top of the next because Congress finds it so hard to undo legislation. The House budget committee reckons there are at least 92 separate federal anti-poverty programmes, which overlap in ways that are baffling. This patchwork approach to problem solving leads to what Steven Teles of Johns Hopkins University calls “kludgeocracy”. Mr Teles compares the government’s veto points to toll booths, with the toll-takers extracting promises of pork-barrel spending and the protection of favoured programmes in exchange for passage. Needing the approval of so many, often ideologically opposed actors makes it almost impossible to craft coherent policy. Inaction is often the result, but also the creation over time of confusing systems for education, health care, taxes, welfare, etc.

This complexity obscures the beneficiaries of federal policies—businesses, for example, gain more from abstruse regulations that favour them than from more obvious hand-outs—and makes it difficult for voters to pinpoint who is to blame for failures. The anger directed at the system is therefore diffuse, says Mr Teles, leading to a broad loss of trust in the public sector. From inside the machine that lack of trust feels oppressive. Each year the federal government’s employees are asked for their opinion on the agencies where they work. Only 56% say they are encouraged to come up with new and better ways of doing things; 36% report that creativity and innovation are rewarded where they work. The Pentagon, which has to produce more than one report a day for Congress, is frequently forced to buy kit it does not want and keep bases open that it would rather close. The urge to bind the bureaucracies, born of frustration at their inefficiency and waste, often makes them even worse.

Wasting time, too

Faced with a malfunctioning government, voters have concluded that the politicians in Washington are scoundrels. Trust in Congress has tumbled to 7%. This is unfair: compared with past occupants of Capitol Hill the current lot are strikingly uncorrupt and hardworking. But much of their effort is aimed at raising money for their next campaign, which for House members is just two years away. A presentation to incoming freshmen in 2012 by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee recommended that they spend four hours each day making fundraising calls. Republicans in tight House races this year were given similar instructions. There is a lot of misplaced anxiety about the corrosive effect of fundraising on politics—sacks of cash are rarely traded for votes; donors and their political beneficiaries tend already to be aligned—but what is unarguable is that the amount of time it takes up prevents congressmen from doing their jobs properly.

The shortage of time further increases politicians’ reliance on lobbyists, who thrive in part because congressmen are usually too pressed to think for themselves. In a city marked by a deep partisan divide, the one place in Washington where political foes will happily work together is in the city’s lobbying firms, many of which employ a senior Democrat and a senior Republican to maintain ties with both sides.

Even when government is stuck, lobbyists are able to prosper by heading off threats to incumbent firms. Comcast, the biggest provider of cable TV and broadband internet services, which is in talks to buy another media firm, Time Warner, employs 126 different lobbyists, according to the Centre for Responsive Politics, a watchdog. All but a handful of these people are former congressmen, congressional staffers or members of the executive branch. Lobbyists in turn donate to or organise donations for congressmen. Mr Fukuyama likens this reciprocal gift-giving to the kind of patrimonial politics seen in 18th-century France. No lobbyists are to be guillotined for their part in it, but there is something rococo about the business. A few months after the Treasury announced sanctions against Russian banks in July, Gazprombank hired two former senators, one from each party, to represent it in Washington.

One of the best things about democracies is that voters in each one seem to believe that their system is uniquely flawed. This is a helpful sort of paranoia, which usually prevents bad things from happening. America’s federal institutions have shown an ability to correct themselves before. The partisan warfare of the 1890s turned out to be a prelude to a triumphant century. This may take a long time, though, and there are no signs of it beginning yet. America has so many things working in its favour—new sources of energy, a tolerant society, the world’s most innovative companies—that progress will not be halted by the federal government. Yet no country can hand a fifth of its economy over to an authority that works only intermittently and not expect to suffer for it.