State Capacity is a Net Positive
We need efficient and effective government—no matter who is in charge.
After a contentious election, it can be tempting for folks on the losing side to cling to all sorts of complicated policies and processes that make it harder to get things done in government as a way of stopping things they don’t like.
Let’s not.
In fact, we desperately need to go in the other direction. We need government that can get things done efficiently and effectively. As Jennifer Pahlka wrote earlier this year: “[W]e are in a crisis of state capacity, and that that crisis underpins all the others.”
The Niskanen Center’s Brink Lindsey wrote in 2021:
At stake is not just the prospect for effective public policy in a wide variety of important domains; at this point, the legitimacy and continued vitality of liberal democracy are implicated as well. The fact is, around the world the fortunes of liberal democracy rise and fall with its perceived effectiveness in improving the lives of ordinary people.
We need to make it a lot easier to hire and promote great employees, buy goods and services, and build digital technology. We need to make it easier to create, change, or scrap regulations and other policies. We need to close the gap between policy and implementation. The results of the election do not change my feelings about that one bit.
I want to highlight one thing in particular: state capacity is a net positive.
In May, Matt Yglesias wrote:
It’s important to acknowledge, at some level, that people actually do have reasons for not wanting to adopt ideas that would make the government more effective.
The main reason is that there’s a lot of substantive disagreement about what we would like the government to be effective at doing. Donald Trump, for example, has lots of ideas that I think are crazy or stupid or nonsensical or ridiculous. But he also has a handful of ideas that I think are just wrong and bad. Investing a large amount of resources in rounding up long-resident illegal immigrants seems to me like a big waste of time and money. I wouldn’t do that if I were president. But … In a country with a lot of “state capacity,” [Trump] would be able to accomplish that if he wins an election.
To me, this is an okay trade. I would rather have a government that is able to “get things done” on the basis of priorities set by democratically elected officials, even though roughly half the time the officials who win are the ones I didn’t vote for. But it is a very real trade. The first Trump administration genuinely did not accomplish very much, and part of the reason is accomplished so little is the same structure of delay and vetocracy that make it hard to build a zero-carbon electricity grid.
That last point is important: Throwing up roadblocks government’s ability to get things done doesn’t just stop the things you don’t like—it stops the things that you like too.
But Matt actually undersells the case for state capacity here!
The overlap on the Venn diagram
There’s a lot of work of government upon which there’s (more or less) widespread agreement that government should be doing a good job. Among many other things:
Enforcing the law
Responding to disasters
Building and maintaining basic infrastructure
Defending the country
Managing parks and public lands
Providing veterans’ benefits and healthcare
Having some version of a social safety net
Ensuring clean water and air, food and drug safety, etc.
Issuing IDs and passports
Of course there’s disagreement on the details. But at a high level, most people do not want to blow all of this up.
Despite the partisan bickering in Congress, there’s actually a lot of bipartisan stuff that gets done, in what Matt Yglesias and Simon Bazelon call Secret Congress. They write:
[T]he current trend really snapped into view in the final two years of the Obama administration. After years of gridlock, we suddenly—with little fanfare but large bipartisan majorities—got:
The Every Student Succeeds Act, a major rewrite of federal K-12 policy
An overhaul of the Department of Veterans Affairs, spearheaded by Bernie Sanders and John McCain
The FAST Act, which authorized $305 billion over five years in infrastructure spending
A ban on incorporating plastic microbeads into health and beauty products
Then, during the Trump era, there was:
The Anti-Money Laundering Act of 2020, which created tougher standards for shell companies and cracked down on money laundering
A $35 billion investment in clean energy research and development, and a reduction in the use of hydrofluorocarbons, a potent greenhouse gas
The basic math is that even if your side is only in charge half the time, a majority of what government does is likely still stuff that you agree with. Government that struggles to get things done is a net negative.
2 more reasons state capacity is a net positive
Some of the things we do that impair policy implementation and service delivery even hurt when one’s party is trying to implement its own agenda!
A great example is the “everything bagel” approach to buying goods and services that layers on too many requirements in a way that stifles accomplishment of the intended goal. It has held back a lot of the Biden administration and Democratic Congress’s legislative wins:
Finally: In a democracy, elections are supposed to have consequences. Improving state capacity helps make that happen. People who win elections need to be able to efficiently and effectively implement their agenda. You might not like the agenda, but let voters decide that at the next election.
I’ve got more to say on these issues—so subscribe to make sure you don’t miss my upcoming posts!
What areas of improving state capacity are you most animated about? What concerns you?
