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| Opportunities & Exposures: Politics |
Attention-Deficit Democracy
Bryan D. Jones
01/01/2006
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Tom Korologos, a former Nixon aide who is now ambassador to Belgium, once said:
“The two things Congress does best are nothing and overreacting.” Congress, and
indeed the whole government, has an amazing capacity to ignore critical problems
for long periods of time, and then, sporadically, become obsessed with them.
This policymaking zeal generally does lead it to address problems, so that, yes,
they are solved. But frenetic urgency may also cause it to overshoot the mark,
resulting in too much government.
| What is desperately needed is a rebirth of the progressive spirit, led by civic reformers and businesspeople. |
In our new book, The Politics of Attention
(University of Chicago), Frank Baumgartner and I trace the dynamics of this
episodic policy lurching. Using a meticulously constructed database of
government attention to policy matters since World War II (which is available at
www.policyagendas.org), we show that
the policy overshoots stem from two sources. The first is the very nature of our
political institutions: Our constitution is designed to thwart unwarranted
action, and it does so very well. However, this system does not produce eternal
gridlock; breakthroughs do occur.
The second is how government officials
allocate a very scarce resource: their attention. Political scientists call this
“agenda setting.” Psychologists tell us that emotion governs attention. We know
that when we are attending to one problem, we find it difficult to shift
attention to a second one unless we feel a sense of some urgency. The same is
true of government. As we show, even the Enron scandal did not move Congress to
act on corporate corruption, perhaps because the agenda was consumed by 9/11.
But the WorldCom bankruptcy in June 2002 did create a sense of urgency. The
result was not just Sarbanes-Oxley, but also the McCain-Feingold campaign reform
bill, swept along because it seemed relevant at the time.
Alarmingly,
government agencies often focus only on one part of a difficult, multifaceted
problem—the problem that currently captures their attention. These agencies are
not necessarily wrong for tackling a given issue, but this approach throws their
priorities out of whack. For example, it became crystal clear after Hurricane
Katrina hit the Gulf Coast that FEMA had lost its traditional focus on natural
disasters when it was swept into the Department of Homeland Security, a huge
agency focused on terrorism. There is certainly nothing wrong with fighting
terrorism, but in FEMA’s case this drew attention away from disaster
preparedness—with horrible consequences.
When a sense of urgency hits,
officials invariably fall back on prepackaged solutions. They do not so much
search for the proper alternatives as grab off-the-shelf remedies, too often
pushed by self-interested policy advocates. Adopting poorly designed policy
remedies to solve new problems is a dangerous, but probably unavoidable, aspect
of democratic government.
Attention-deficit policymaking, combined with a
reliance on off-the-shelf policies, means that errors in policymaking accumulate
over time. Reality eventually crashes the party. We see this in play today as
federal spending and the overall size of the government continue to spiral
upward. Conventional wisdom—from both politicians and pundits—argues that we
should “starve the beast” of tax revenue to yield smaller government in the
future. But if we actually analyze government revenue data, we can easily show
that argument is flatly incorrect. Given our current political process, however,
we may well continue to starve the beast until critical indicators of prosperity
deteriorate to the point where people notice.
Today the great challenge to
democratic government is the need to correct errors more quickly than appears to
be happening today. What is desperately needed is a rebirth of the progressive
spirit, led by civic reformers and businesspeople. We are being inundated with
incorrect information, dishonest budget numbers and consequent overspending. The
pressure to reform these issues must come from America’s middle and upper
classes. Our politicians may be unable to do it.
 | Bryan D. Jones is the Donald R. Matthews Distinguished Professor of
American Politics at the University of Washington. |
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