Francis Fukuyama argues that a primary driver of inefficiency and dysfunction in the American government is the outsize role of courts and legislatures in controlling functions normally performed by executive bureaucracies:
The decay in the quality of American government has to do directly with the American penchant for a state of “courts and parties”, which has returned to center stage in the past fifty years. The courts and legislature have increasingly usurped many of the proper functions of the executive, making the operation of the government as a whole both incoherent and inefficient. The steadily increasing judicialization of functions that in other developed democracies are handled by administrative bureaucracies has led to an explosion of costly litigation, slow decision-making and highly inconsistent enforcement of laws. The courts, instead of being constraints on government, have become alternative instruments for the expansion of government. Ironically, out of a fear of empowering “big government”, the United States has ended up with a government that is very large, but that is actually less accountable because it is largely in the hands of unelected courts.
Meanwhile, interest groups, having lost their pre-Pendleton Act ability to directly corrupt legislatures through bribery and the feeding of clientelistic machines, have found new, perfectly legal means of capturing and controlling legislators. These interest groups distort both taxes and spending, and raise overall deficit levels through their ability to manipulate the budget in their favor. They use the courts sometimes to achieve this and other rentier advantages, but they also undermine the quality of public administration through the multiple and often contradictory mandates they induce Congress to support—and a relatively weak Executive Branch is usually in a poor position to stop them.
All of this has led to a crisis of representation. Ordinary people feel that their supposedly democratic government no longer reflects their interests but instead caters to those of a variety of shadowy elites.Ordinary people feel that their supposedly democratic government no longer reflects their interests but instead caters to those of a variety of shadowy elites.
Drum recommends the essay but quibbles:
There’s not much question that lobbying has exploded over the past half century, nor that the rich and powerful have tremendous sway over public policy. But do powerful interest groups really have substantially more influence in the United States than in other countries? Or do they simply wield their power in different ways and through different avenues? I’d guess the latter. Nonetheless, even if America’s powerful are no more powerful than in any other country, the fact that they wield that power increasingly via Congress and, especially, the judiciary might very well make their influence more baleful.
Andrew Sprung adds his thoughts:
Are other developed democracies better equipped to deal with today’s challenges, such as galloping inequality and slow growth? I imagine that fans of the U.S.’s highly participatory and less-than-majoritarian democracy, like, say, Jonathan Bernstein, would have something to say about that.
In Fukuyama’s telling, the three causes of democratic decay — undue power of interest groups, legislation through the courts, and vetocracy — feed on each other. Interest groups like recourse to the courts; the courts have further empowered interest groups; the courts themselves remain one powerful veto point in our legislative process. In this relatively short piece, however, it remains unclear why we’ve arrived at implied crisis now — why our system has muddled through to adapt to past challenges but now seems stuck. That may be a matter of degree: past reforms have been forced by crisis. But here Fukuyama seems to imply that Constitutional reform — a fundamental change in our structure of government — might be required if the U.S. is to address current challenges effectively.
The Dish 