Archive for August 24th, 2012

Government Gridlock a Bug or a Feature?

Posted August 24, 2012 By Dave Thomer

I posted yesterday about my efforts to learn more about the United Kingdom’s efforts to reform its House of Lords. At the moment, it looks like that effort is going nowhere, because a small number of Conservative members of Parliament are refusing to support it. Whether or not that’s a good thing depends in part on whether you think it’s important that a democratic government be responsive to its citizens. Should our elected officials see their job as going what the people want them to do? Or should they see it as doing whatever they think is right, and then hoping to convince the people later? The knee jerk reaction might be to say the latter, but America’s system, in part by design and in part by accident, is set up much more along the latter lines.

One reason for this is that in our government, it is almost impossible for a majority at an given time to actually elect a set of government officials who will follow their desires. Look at all of the roadblocks that exist between a popular majority and the final enactment of a law. (Some of this may be obvious or common knowledge, but I think there’s value in looking at all of htese peices of information as a total package.)

  • Lawmaking power is split between a legislative branch and an executive branch. Congress must pass a bill and the president must sign it before it becomes a law. If the two disagree, they can block each other, so neither one gets to enact its preferred policy.
  • This is exacerbated by the staggered terms on which these officials are elected. We vote for president every four years. These tend to be the highest profile elections we have with the highest turnout. But members of one chamber of Congress, the House of Representatives, are elected very two years. So every other House election happens in a year without a presidential election. These elections tend to have have lower turnout and often result in the party that doesn’t control the presidency gaining power in Congress. To compound the issue, members of the other house, the Senate, are elected to six year terms. Every two years, one-third of the seats in the Senate come up for election. So whatever the public wants at any given election, there’s two-thirds of the Senate that wasn’t necessarily elected with that goal in mind. If the public’s desires are consistent, that’s no big deal, but if the public changes its mind about something, it’ll be six years before the Senate will fully reflect that change.
  • The Senate also gives each state an equal number of votes, regardless of population. So even if the entire population of the state of California wants something, the states of Utah and Alaska could override that desire.
  • The president is not actually elected by a national popular vote, but by an electoral college that assigns a number of votes to each state in such a way that it is possible, although unlikely, that someone could lose the popular vote and still win the presidency.
  • On top of all of these built-in structural features, the Senate has developed a number of traditions and procedures that allow a minority to slow down or even block a bill. CHief among these are the filibuster, in which three-fifths of the senators must vote to stop talking about a bill before it can be voted on. So 59 out of 100 senators can support a law, and that law will not pass.
  • When a law is finally passed and signed, it can be reviewed and overturned by a Supreme Court whose members hold lifetime terms, meaning that a law passed today will have to meet the approal of justices appointed 20 or 25 years ago.

These structural and procedural systems make it very hard for any party or any president to make major changes in our system. Once those changes go through, it’s very hard to undo them. Some people say that this a strength of our checks-and-balances system – the government will not swing wildly from one policy to another based on which party has won the most recent election, but will be required to stay in a rough consensus area and only make changes after the voters have had a long time to think about and approve those changes. It is much harder to get a radical government when the government’s power is split, and if all those different power-holders agree on something then the public can have more confidence about it.

Other people call it a weakness, because not only is it hard to react quickly to changing circumstances, the voters have a hard time assigning responsibility for the good and bad results of the government’s policies. If they don’t know who gets the credit and who gets the blame, they can’t be sure of who to re-elect and who to get rid of.

I have my own opinions, which I’ve shared before and which I’ll probably share again when I look at the UK’s latest efforts for Lords reform. But for now I wanted to get this stuff down for future reference and invite your thoughts on that opening question: Should government officials be trying to do what the people want them to do, or do they have a different kind of responsibility?

Filed in Public Policy

Reading Parliament

Posted August 24, 2012 By Dave Thomer

I want to use contemporary media reports and current events in my teaching, but it doesn’t always work as well as I want it to work. Reading the British press last month gave me some ideas that might help out this year.

Let me set the stage. I like to keep track of efforts to improve the basic institutions and procedures of democratic governments around the world. It’s very easy to get used to the system and the institutions that you grow up with, and you stop asking the “Why do we do this?” questions. (For example, why do we usually vote on Tuesdays?) And if you don’t ask the ‘Why do we do this?” questions, you probably don’t get to the “Should we keep doing this?” questions. So I try to keep an eye on the ways that other democratic nations handle their elections and lawmaking. As a result, I was like a kid in a candy store last month when the House of Commons in the United Kingdom began debating a proposal to change the structure of the other house of Parliament, the House of Lords.

But I’m going to put off the discussion of the actual proposal for a day or so, because I realized that the process I was following to try to figure out what was going on was something I really needed to pay attention to. Like I said, I’m pretty used to the American system of government. So when I read a story in the newspaper or online about the American institutions, I have a ready store of information that I can use to add context and fill in the blanks. This is a good thing, because most of the time, the press is relying on its audience’s background knowledge so that each story doesn’t have to reinvent the wheel.

But a lot of my students don’t have that background knowledge, and it makes following the news a frustrating experience for them. And as I was reading the Guardian’s coverage of the House of Lords debate, I realized that I didn’t have that knowledge either. The British press was assuming I had the kind of day-to-day familiarity with British government that would come from, say, living in Britain. This gave me an opportunity – if I paid attention to how I filled in the gaps, maybe it would help me improve the process for my students.

One thing I realized is that I was skipping over some things that I didn’t understand completely. I had read several stories about the current British government’s effort to reform the House of Lords, but I had been reading them in the context of the relationship between two parties in the UK’s government, the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats. For a long time it didn’t matter to me that I didn’t fully understand the actual proposal – I registered that the two parties had different ideas about it, and that was enough to keep reading about how those different ideas would affect their ability to work together. So knowing what I was interested in was a big help in getting past the details that might have frustrated me.

Eventually, though, I became interested in the proposal itself. And the news reports generally did a good job of mentioning what the new changes would be. That makes sense, because what would be new pretty much meets the definition of news. But the news reports were not explaining how things are in the present. Why would they? It hasn’t changed, it’s not news. So I had to go beyond the news reports to get the full context. And I realized that I needed the full context in order to understand the importance of the story, because I realized that I could not give a clear answer to one important question: What power does the House of Lords have that makes reforming the House of Lords important? I knew I needed to go outside of the press reports to expand my background information, and I had framed a specific question to help guide my search. This was big, and I’m going to come back to this idea.

The search took longer than I expected it to take. Some online news resources, like the BBC, have a lot of articles of background information that they make available. I clicked on a lot of links, but could not find a succinct explanation of the House of Lords’ power.

I did a Google search for the House of Lords and found myself on the official site of the UK Parliament. Again, it took a lot of clicks to get through the simplified version of parliamentary procedure that they explained. And the answer to my specific question was hard to find – no one would nail down exactly what power the House of Lords has. I did a Wikipedia search, and finally, between that and the Lords site, I got together a working idea. But the only reason I could do that is because I had noticed a key term that kept coming up in my reading: the Parliament Acts. Those had sounded important, so I made sure to look for an explanation of the Acts in the articles I was reading.

Now here’s the thing – I spent about an hour doing this, at least. I would not have done well if this were a classroom assignment where I needed to find the answer before the end of the class period. So I have to remember to frame my questions and assignments properly.

One of the things I think I’m going to do to that end is to use the start of the year to build up the shared frames of reference. In the past I have had students read articles and answer questions about it or maybe paraphrase. I think what I want to do at first is emphasize the idea of the article as a launching pad. Have the students read it, tell me what they got from it, and then identify names, places, terms and so on that they didn’t fully understand. Maybe ask them to form one specific question they would like to get an answer to. Then, once they’ve identified a term or concept as a stumbling block, we can talk about it or review it. Hopefully as we go through this a few times, the students will start to form some connections and have an easier time with future articles.

I’m still working out the process here, but I’m really glad I had the experience. In retrospect it seems kind of obvious, but I missed it for a long time. When we stretch out of our comfort zone to learn something new, we should always keep one eye on how we’re learning it, so we can be prepared to use those techniques again in the future.

Filed in Education