Why Political Reform Is Not Enough
Tags: election reform, philadelphia, political reform, politics, reform.There has been much written about our political system being broken. But very little about the specifics, of what exactly has gone wrong and what are the systemic causes.
Mostly people describe how money has corrupted the process and call for election reform to fix it. Take, for example, Public Funding of Elections. While this certainly needs to be done, it also needs to be made clear that this is not enough. Otherwise, people are disappointed and become discouraged when they finally get reform and it doesn’t really solve the whole problem.
Worse still is when reform bills get passed and they don’t even achieve their intended result. Take the recent attempt by Democrats to curb the influence of lobbyists: Congress Finds Ways to Avoid Lobbyist Limits.
More unusual are articles like You Want to See Broken Politics: Just Look at the Casinos which spell out the problems with the political decision-making process itself. Here we get detailed analysis of what was wrong - 1. Last minute, haphazard decision-making . . . Unfortunately, there are just not enough articles like these that really try to define the problem. How can we expect to fix a problem if we don’t even know specifically what the problem is?
I read an article recently - Kaizen, That Continuous Improvement Strategy, Finds Its Ideal Environment - describing how high tech companies like Apple and Google are using Kaizen to rapidly and repeatedly improve their product. Kaizen “refers to a disciplined process of systematic exploration, controlled experimentation and then painstaking adoption of the new procedures. In the original formulation, kaizen was applied to manufacturing, where experimentation could determine whether a new process resulted in quality improvements or cost savings in a matter of months. It is much more difficult to apply kaizen to product design, since it can easily take years to design and market a new product.”
It made me ask, why can’t government take a problem, actually provide a solution for its customers and then actually begin a process of improving that solution?
The conventional answer, of course, is that government isn’t designed to work that way. But that is precisely what we need to do - to consider how it can be redesigned to work that way.
Obviously, this involves more than just reform - how to reduce corruption and influence so that the people have more say in public decision-making. Reform cannot make politicians accountable for actual results rather than rhetoric. Reform cannot assure us that solutions will be found - in fact, more democracy may actually be counter-productive. Many of our most flagrant failures are the direct result of voters insisting on conventional solutions that have persistently failed in the past (think “being tough on crime” or “the war on drugs”). Reform cannot assure us that once solutions are found they become permanent and automatic, or that these solutions are built upon and continuously improved.
What is needed is much more than mere reform.
2 Responses to “Why Political Reform Is Not Enough”
- 1 Trackback on Feb 11th, 2007 at 11:23 pm
The Philly Inquirer had an article once about someone who studied government programs to see which worked and which didn\’t. It is possible to do that, mostly. One of the useless programs was DARE, the anti-drug program. It provided some short term inprovement, but no difference in the long run. Unfortunately nobody wanted to cut off the tap of money to police forces around the country. It would have been better to have the officers on the street rather than talking to the kiddies.