Public agendas and elite alternatives
One of my grad school classmates used to grumble, contemplating Thanksgiving back home, that his relatives were going to hold forth on politics despite knowing little about how our political system works. “You and I have studied this stuff,” he would say. “If the subject of rocks came up, people would listen to the person with the geology Ph.D. But when it’s politics, everyone imagines he is the expert.”
My classmate’s belief has become less convincing over the years. I’ve read enough political science to conclude that declarations from members of a profession that claims Woodrow Wilson as its patron saint—our nation’s only (and hopefully last) president with a political science Ph.D—ought be regarded warily.
And maybe politics isn’t that complicated after all. We the people want things, and politicians promise us things. Every few years we tally up our opinions about whether the politicians in office remain more likely to give us those things than the politicians hoping to replace them. Toss in random uncontrollable events, life’s usual distractions, and basic human confusion about what exactly it is that we want, and you have a decent model of modern American politics. Control lurches back and forth between parties, we the people get some—but never all—of what we want, and the country generally fares better than autocratic regimes and free-for-all mobocracies.
At the risk of resurrecting political science, however, I’d like to share something I learned in graduate school that may be of use to the interested layman. And to professional pundits, for that matter.
Let’s begin with a common post-election dynamic: Leaders of the winning party claim a mandate to implement their policies, while the losers insist that their opponents are not, in fact, serving the will of the people. This is political jockeying of course, to be expected and perhaps even, in a checks-and-balances kind of way, something that’s healthy for the republic.
But what if I told you that these seemingly contradictory claims are both, simultaneously, true?
I credit this observation to my mentor John Kingdon’s masterpiece: “Agendas, Alternatives, and Public Policies.” He demonstrated that elected officials, if they want to keep their jobs, must address what voters care about. Public concerns, such as inflation, jobs, and crime, determine priorities. We know this is true because, as the most recent election illustrates, politicians who focus on priorities most of the public doesn’t care about will soon find themselves lobbying on K Street, lecturing at Georgetown, and penning their memoirs. Elected officials are given, in other words, a mandate of sorts: Do something about the concerns of we the people.
But now comes the turn. Because while you can’t tell average voters that transgender sports, for example, is a higher priority than inflation, those voters can’t offer much guidance regarding what, practically and realistically, should be done about inflation.
Thus both parties are correct in their post-election squabbles. The victorious party persuaded voters that its candidates will do something about their concerns. It has, therefore, something like the mandate it claims to have. Yet the opposing party frequently has a point that the winners’ solutions aren’t what the people actually want. This is because those solutions are shaped not by detailed analysis of voter desire (nor could they be, because most people lack policy and economics expertise), but by policy entrepreneurs within the winning party’s camp. Politicos graft the solutions—many of which they’ve cultivated for years—onto the immediate concerns of the public. The politicians take action on the things we care about by implementing the policies they care about. Sometimes they even believe those policies will address our concerns.
The way out of this trap is to push more authority to states and communities. Their leaders, being closer to the people, have greater odds of formulating solutions that yield results we want. Even if most of them fail, the success of just a few can demonstrate what works, creating pressure for other jurisdictions to follow suit.
Federalism can help close the divide, in other words, between public agendas and elite alternatives. We can’t expect many DC politicians to embrace this, but it’s time we start holding our state and local leaders to a greater responsibility for upholding federalism. That begins by reminding them that they work not for a party, but for we the people.
Tony Woodlief is State Policy Network’s senior executive vice president and senior fellow for SPN’s Center for Practical Federalism.
