On Hierarchy and the Civil Service
Some argument on a military history blog with good posts and terrible comments led me down a rabbit hole of talking about different models of how large, hierarchical organizations function.
The origin of this is that I’ve been reading the same things about military organization and the chain of command, in different variations. Here, via Quora, is the best encapsulation of how a multi-layer hierarchy works, on a submarine:
The CO never gives orders directly to watch standers. He works through the OOD or EOOW (officer of the deck and engineering officer of the watch). 99.9% of the time through the OOD. – He/She must re enforce their authority and not hijack it. It will cause confusion. If a Captain gives an order to a watch stander he/she assumes the conn. but not the deck. (See my other postings about this.)
The contrast is with personalistic managerial styles, in which the top person in the hierarchy constantly subverts and undermines their direct subordinates, by changing plans at the last minute, giving orders to low-rank people directly, or openly scolding the direct subordinates as out of touch. Think, for example, about the common cultural stereotypes of middle management; upper management that invoke such stereotypes against middle management is unlikely to be able to implement any long-term corporate culture, because the people responsible for implementing it know that they can be sniped by the top at any moment.
I bring this up here because populist politicians, or politicians in populist systems, love so undermining their own instruments of governance. The civil service is one such instrument, and is what’s relevant for infrastructure – but this undermining also includes other instruments.
For example, in the 2018 Senate race, Beto O’Rourke visited college students to induce them to turn out to vote for him and against Ted Cruz – and let people know that political consultants recommended against this move. Needless to say, O’Rourke uses consultants just like everyone else (and in US politics, at least for the Democrats, all candidates use the same pool of consultants – there’s no separation into, say, ones advising more left-wing and ones advising more centrist candidates). But he still felt it was necessary to scold his own instruments of campaigning.
So this isn’t even about the trend in the US, and in some countries with democratic backsliding, of replacing the apolitical civil service with party institutions. Personalistic politicians (and the US encourages personalism even in non-populists) undermine the instruments of ideological party governance, too.
The upshot of all of this is that a city like New York can have large civil service departments, but it won’t really have a strong civil service if the mayor keeps publicly undermining it. If planners know that whatever they work on will get sniped on a whim, they will not give their best; they’ll adopt punch-clock behavior, doing just the minimum until they qualify for a pension. If planners know that whatever they do, they’ll face a glass ceiling and have to answer to an inexperienced aide to a political appointee, they’ll leave as soon as they can. The most talented workers will go to the private sector, and everyone who can leave the city will as services atrophy.
Pedestrian Observations 
You are invoking a stereotype here: “everyone who can leave the city will as services atrophy”. Housing costs are revealed preferences. https://www.zillow.com/rental-manager/market-trends gives median rent for 3 beds (i.e two kids) in New York 3850. In Houston, 2126.
Its really telling how in this so-called “Neoliberal” era where government is told it should be more like the private sector, the main effect is to make the public sector….less like the private sector (or rather less like mature capital intensive large scale private sector) in its respect for experience, professionalism, cost-effectiveness etc etc.
It highlight how much the “free-market” rhetoric of the last 40 years is about High Boomer conservative attempts to induce misgovernance in order to inhibit social change or failing that punish it. And the abandonment of that rhetoric by Hard/Far Right is based on the betrayal felt by those constituencies that the “free-market” didn’t deliver on its social conservative promise.
Mind you not that the various species of the left have much to say on administrative or organisational practice, alternating between New Left suspicion of any formal power (and responsibility) or soft-left tendency to just believe government will work provided your intensions and will are good and sufficient.
Admittedly I’m projecting a lot of Anglo-especially British experience of governance.
Related to this subject, a few days ago George Monbiot put in his few pence on why HS2, or most big projects in the UK end up as disasters:
Notwithstanding that Monbiot has been against HS2 from the beginning and that many people disagree with him on that, he’s not wrong with the diagnosis. The phenomenon is intrinsically built into human behaviour and was first recognised in ancient Greek times. One of the biggest examples in the modern era is of course Tammany Hall in NYC.
Within self-imposed limits clearly a system/society can survive, even thrive, with it. It can be seen as a parasite-host relationship where the best outcome is commensalism. What I think we’ve seen in the past 40 years is the overlap with neoliberal overt anti-government policies is so extreme that it is now killing the host.
I don’t think that’s right. Greece is infamously clientelist, but has low construction costs; to an extent Italy is clientelist, too. The thing is, those countries know how much corruption they have, so they’ve taken steps to address it. Those steps are clearly incomplete – if they’d been successful, those countries would have Northern European or French productivity levels, which they don’t – but in engineering, they’ve been successful. Italy can’t get micro-firms to pay VAT, so its economy has an outsize proportion of unproductive family-scale micro-firms and GDP per hour worked is 25% less than in the US, but it did pass toothy anti-corruption laws in infrastructure, giving the civil service more control and politicians less.
The issue with the UK is not really clientelism. It’s that the country is run by generalist consultants and not by engineers. To the Oxford PPE grad, the engineer is the help. And then people wonder why I roll my eyes at all these “STEM without humanities is evil” posts…
Monbiot is part of that system, prep school, Brasenose, family part of local Tory establishments, writer for legacy institutions. Owns several homes across Southern England etc etc. He’s a Greenwashed degrowther Boomer Tory. Which presumably why Michael likes him and other reactionaries in the Guardian like Jenkins. He is a believer in hierarchy, tradition and suppression of social change (again like Michael).
I would point out that Oxford trains lots of Engineers, but not transportation and urban planning studies people. And its not as though people from the Red brick Unis or genuine working class backgrounds are interesting in replacing generalist dominations of the state either. I attended Oxford, SOAS and Sheffield i.e. high establishment, radicalised-failed establishment and provincial-counter establishment. I’ll let you guess which one was most self-aware, reform minded and internationally curious. I lost count of the number of times I had regurgitate basic economic history I learnt from taking British Economic History since 1850 at Oxford to “experts” in Sheffield (i.e. Sheffield steel industry had begun to collapse before Thatcher was born, was a non-entity when she became minister and was a shrunken zombie when she ascended to the Premiership).
I just spent an hour of my life reading Oldham economic recovery documents and its just constant whingeing while they have higher house prices than most Japanese cities and a lower vacancy rate than Paris.
One of the interesting details about the British style discretionary “development control” planning system is that its perfect for clientelism and corruption (Malta, Jamaica, Ireland, India* etc). “Plans” only dispense contradictory principles, decisions are made on the basis of individual micro-politics. But because land owners and NIMBYs are so much more powerful than developers in Britain you don’t get politicians extorting bribes that often. Heck when we do have clientialistic dicks they are giant NIMBYs (Tower Hamlets, Thurrock, Woking). And even in the other cases I mentioned above they consistently underbuild because NIMBYism is a political force there two (see Kingston Jamaica’s skyline good grief).
Amateur generalist domination of British body-politic comes from the fact that the state lacks legitimacy to delegate and create expertise. It lacks legitimacy because its a failed mini-Empire based on an ethno-racial hierarchy where the national majority are 2nd class citizens. Its more late Soviet than it is French or Nordic (or indeed American).
see Kingston Jamaica’s skyline good grief
Wikipedia says the population of the whole island/country is less than three million. The article on Kingston is squishy on deciding on the metro area or it’s population. And has a picture of the port. They have a few elevator buildings. What are you expecting, the Petronas Towers on the shore surrounded by Rockefeller Center?
I was thinking Montenegro, Malta, Albania, Cyprus. Heck most of the non-Anglo Caribbean/LA states of comparable size have more compact/walkable urban forms, some with less money than Jamaica. Heck there are plenty of Middle Eastern and Asian cities with less money and better buildings.
They didn’t ask you what it should like, circa 1900, and did their own thing. … well did what the British thought they should do up to independence. I’m sorry and they don’t care, that you are disappointed.
I don’t really disagree; seeing as I have written about the Oxford PPE problem here and other times on PO. But it is the combination of all these variously corrupt practices and political philosophies coming together to create such overwhelming dysfunction. The UK (and US) has had clientism forever and it ‘worked’ for ages. It’s even had PPEs for the last century. Normally the dysfunction would become self-correcting when it gets too bad, like Tammany Hall eventually being disbanded. But now the parasitic political zealots have gone beyond reason, and some of the more rational elements of these systems of corruption have lost control.
Apparently for HS2 they have never even spoken to the chair of the HS1 project. I mean that is bad.
And anecdotally no-one inside the HS2 project even accepts the costs are too high. Lots of whining about biodiversity and NIMBYs. I don’t think planting a few trees and paying for a few new village halls costs $150m/km.
Of course not. They don’t want to know anything. That’s why they were put in charge. Most people in Network rail and the advocacy community don’t know.
PPEism is such cope. (N/b I did not take PPE). The Guardian loves it because its columnists get to talk about themselves and vent about how someone with a Chelsea accent was mean to them.
Having actual expertise would be very corrosive to both main parties traditional ideologies and to major constituencies. What does a romantic revolutionary nationalist party need with a professional civil service? Much like Fianna Fail, Sinn Fein, and the Indian National Congress, Labour traditionally denigrates practical details as beneath them and their Imperial projects. And to the Tories Boomer base having things work means things change, property values stop growing so fast and they are shown up to be a generation of failures.
I don’t think HS1 was bad value given the basically essential urban tunnelling.
Don’t forget most European projects use legacy urban approaches.
According to the Shinkansen book the line from Ueno to Tokyo cost ¥36.7bn/km at 2005 prices vs ¥1.22bn/km for the West Coast Mainline upgrade and ¥9.54bn/km for HS1.
Matthew Hutton:
I agree, despite the added cost to bail out the private interests in the failed PFI (PPP). It also serves the freight component to Ebbsfleet and pax to Stratford and therefore the whole east London redevelopment plan even if that is being screwed up, just as the plan that the St Pancras terminus would eventually allow Europe-bound trains from the north but now those trains will stop 10km west of St Pancras, FFS.
Remember that HS1 (and Canary Wharf and Stratford redevelopments) were championed by Michael Heseltine, a rare old-style Tory nation builder, and it was achieved despite the vicious efforts of the Thatcherites. He was kicked out of the party when he refused to support Brexit.
Hey Alon, as a current student of Physics at Oxford, who engages with the political activities and has a few friends studying PPE and similar subjects, I’m unfortunately going to affirm your perception of this culture. In general terms, intellectual and non-superficial contact (i.e., not sports or socials) between STEM students and humanities students is pretty scarce. I am often the only one at any given meet-up. The low involvement of STEM students as “technical people”/”logic people”/”detail people” in discussions about policy or student government activities stems from some special characteristics of the university which include 1. the comparatively intense workload of STEM courses barely leaving time for that interaction, and 2. the fact that STEM study here is very narrowly focused on the subject, which attracts nerdy people whose interests do not branch out. Governance is just “not our work”.
Further, when discussing governance, pragmatic details are always lost because they are not exciting, and hesitancy does not lend itself to being elected. In my impression, being elected is the goal of study for many of these students, not learning good practice in governance (otherwise I would expect them to think more carefully). One PPE student (who is nonetheless a friend) said confidently to my face that the UK doesn’t have a problematic planning system (in the context of housing). Their lack of curiosity about the practices adopted in other countries, which you point out often in your posts, is hard to bet against. And that’s not to mention the PPE course itself, whose focus is scatter-shot (a natural problem with three subjects) and highly theoretical (think Problems in Game Theory rather than Oxford Handbook of Megaprojects) or at least focused on only the broad strokes of governance.
Actually in hindsight I wouldn’t say that most PPE students are like this, it just so happens that the students who are trying to get elected office schmoozing at events and building their image (so, the ones which leave a strong impression on me, my previous comment fell for this bias) tend to be the very same ones which are not thinking carefully about policy, and that is unfortunate, but quite natural when you look at the immense personal downsides of elected politics as a job. I can only think of one friend of mine who both thinks somewhat carefully about his ideas and is also at all engaged in the British elected political stuff, and he himself is actually an immigrant from eastern Europe whose family came over soon after he was born, rather than someone whose family had been in the UK for many generations.
You get taught that the UK doesn’t have a problematic planning system in ex-polytechnics like Sheffield Hallam university’s urban planning courses (or Newcastle’s ~shudder~). Oxford sits at the top of a system that is actually quite uniform in attitudes. Its not like there’s a YIMBY counter-elite in Leeds.
Sheffield had an academic who wrote a history detailing the British planning system’s failures and then ended saying the system simply hadn’t had a chance to show its value. UCL Bartlett school of Planning (the most prestigious in the UK) publishes papers talking about how the problem is the current systems is suffering from a non-existent “marketisation” and was working fine before the Tories returned in 2010 or before 1980 (big fat fucking lies, it never worked and never will).
Also land economics isn’t included in basic micro-macro economics globally anyway. Where would you put it in theory papers? Macro-representative agents for DSGE models? Even the LSE which has Paul Cheshire doesn’t teach the problems of land-planning its courses. Economics is going through a empirical revolution which produces lots of useful, but is very bad at collating this information outside people who don’t do land/urban economics specifically. Although economists the UK are the field most keen on planning reform (Nick Crafts, Tim Leunig, Christian Hilber, Peter Scott to add a few names) a lot of them don’t quite get how bad it is and economics hasn’t got a language let alone a gameplan for optimising land policy. But Labour is clearly listening to the professional planners around the RTPI who want to keep the current system.
And I could list the other related fields lacking stuff about land planning or transportation history (there is no historian who has studied railway electrification, whereas a dozen have studied railway advertising and historic station architecture). Academia is badly designed to produce useful knowledge outside the sciences in general.
Urban Planning is unusually bad among those fields because it lacks the relatively robust theoretical and empirical structures of economics let alone the experimental powers of hard sciences. The field is somewhere between 4 humours theories and germ theory. I had to literally educate my planning tutor at Sheffield on basic Austrian politics after he pushed Red Vienna as a model without knowing about all the ethnic cleansing involved or that the SPO/OVP spent 50 years in coalition.
(I didn’t hang out with Politics and Philosophy students while I was there, I did economics, history, Japanese and art history)
Also selfish schmoozers’ are gonna exist and suck no matter what you teach them. Its like people who think that top CCP officials most important experience is their year in the US not the decades they spent in the CCP ruling China.
N/B UK’s most prominent Japanophile Urbanist is Ant Breach who did…PPE at Oxford.
I’d point out that anti-Oxbridge elites within Britain generally replicate similar patterns in terms of planning policy of both humanities brain, reactionary conservativism and pathological insularity ; Celtic nationalists, BAME activist community, Northern Labour party machines, Brexiter outriders, Railway engineer establishment, even TFL etc etc. Its structural to the UK’s construction of Imperial nationalism since 1923. High Victorian England was a less intellectually insular place than Postwar UK because not having National dysphoria really helps your self-esteem.
Sorry to be so defensive, but its really a dum meme to think that a single degree explains the problems of a complex society. And the transport and urban planning “expert” communities inside the UK are really really really bad actors with few of them having gone to Oxford let alone done PPE. I’m usually the only Oxbridge posho in the room who talks about fancy details like what a timed overtake is, how France is a more market oriented society than the UK or why cut-and-cover is not an outdated technology of the mid–19th century. This is why I became a wacko radical English separatist, you need to kill the British ideology’s brain poison.
Thanks, that was interesting to read. Anyways, I’m not blaming all our woes on one degree course, just saying my living experience.
Well Bent Flyvbjerg is now at the Said school, so automatically Oxford has become the cost-progressive academic context in the UK.
Yeah, I was actually just reading How Big Things Get Done some days after reading the comment when I stumbled on this pleasant surprise. I have now started working on the Handbook of Megaproject Management.
I still haven’t read his stuff in detail (not current job). And getting on More or Less doesn’t get into Labour or Tory policy universes.
Big watcher of sci-fi (Star Wars, Star Trek, and The Expanse) and I can’t help but critique their portrayal of future uniformed “space navy” services in the speech, mannerisms, and procedures of the officers and crew — and you can tell that a lot of writers and directors have either not served in the military, merchant marine, or an airline… or watched a good well researched and directed naval film like the ‘Master abd Commander’; ‘Yangtse Incident: The Story of H.M.S. Amethyst’; ‘Tora! Tora! Tora!’; or ‘Greyhound’.
Star Trek Discovery was the worst, they went all out in having the landing party ‘away teams’ choreographed as SWAT fireteams, but then had completely unprofessional behavior and dialogue on the bridge of the Starship. Older Trek did better, the ‘Wrath of Khan’ doing a good job in creating the look and feel of a professional Starfleet.
I read a lot of sci-fi too, and besides Authur C Clarke the “space navy” operas of David Weber and Eric Thomson are quite good, particularly both their first novels featuring their heroines Honor Harrington in “On Basilisk Station’ and Siobhan Dunmoore in ‘No Honor in Death’, you can tell that both authors either served or really did their research into naval culture and daily operations. In both cases young captains take over old ships with dispiriteted and dysfunctional crews, and most of the two books are the captains rebuilding their crews by building up the leadership and professionalism of the officers and enlisted under their command.
In ‘On Basilisk Station’ there is even a point where Harrington gets so frustrated by her dispirited and resentful officers that she decides that she might just have to be a “bad captain” and directly order them what to do under threat of her wrath. In both books, eventually both COs are able to get their officers and crews to step up and exercise effective leadership of their own, to take responsibility and have initiative. Both captains in both books see a large part of a CO’s duties as being educators, as training up and encouraging the next generation of officers and petty officers.
In my own life at work, I’ve tried to take what I have read about how the navy “ideally operates” to be a good “petty officer” at my workplace, in my interactions with my fellow employees at the Good Ship Marriott. It be worthwhile for more in the civil service and politics to perhaps read these books and take applie some lessons in leadership to the organizations they oversee.
That quote: “The CO never gives orders directly to watch standers. He works through the OOD or EOOW (officer of the deck and engineering officer of the watch). 99.9% of the time through the OOD. – He/She must re enforce their authority and not hijack it. It will cause confusion. If a Captain gives an order to a watch stander he/she assumes the conn. but not the deck.” could have come right out of a Honor Harrington or Siobhan Dunmoore novel.
Ben 🙂
I’ve for years have seen the biggest hurtle to doing bigger things with intercity passenger rail in Upstate NY being organizational. To do something like Brightline, let alone Very High Speed Rail, you need a dedicated organization of experience professionals who are empowered to do the necessary planning, design, and management to do mega-project — and whose advice is publicly respected by both the elected and appointed the policy makers.
A point made in both space opera books and by Commander Data to Mr. Work in the TNG episode ‘Gambit’ S7 is that criticism and rebukes are to be done in private, not public, that the purpose is to correct misbehavior and educated on poor command decisions, not to embarrass or shame an officer in front of the crew. Data does this by asking Mr. Worf to see him in the Ready Room, where he corrects Mr. Worf’s unprofessional behavior in private. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vMKtKNZw4Bo
Honor Harrington comes from a written mil SF tradition that’s incredibly fussy about getting all the military details right, I think? Baen authors have a lot of that, for better and for worse (like the idiot who told nonwhite fans complaining about lack of diversity in SF that they all need to go through a Full Metal Jacket-style bootcamp).
I’ve heard about a couple of similar cases, one in this video about Portland ( https://youtu.be/tMmPWAC_eWQ?si=KLG6qtp8XjmnUj0R ) and in my hometown Barcelona ( https://twitter.com/bcnbici/status/1707150143877763146 ).
And all this reminds me of an old boss, who anytime she had something reported from client side (or from any side), would go overboard, screaming at people of all levels to get out fixed right now. The constant interruption and making a big deal of everything turned the department into chaos and in long term the project into disaster. But she looked good in front of the client.
Similarly, I think it’s easy for a politician to present themselves as the defender of the client (the voters) in front of “lazy and self-centered civil servants” (according to some prejudices), even if that means boycotting the same public service they were supposed to manage.
What do you exactly see as the role of elected democratic government? To make the big decisions and leave all the details and implementation to the civil service? If the concept of democracy is most important than a certain amount of inefficiency due to a de-empowered civil service is something that is just going to be.
That’s exactly what I see as the role of elected government. Micromanagement is not at all in the definition of democracy.
As long as no massive human rights abuses are involved, a bad decision with democratic legitimacy is better than a good decision without democratic legitimacy. Small l-liberal democracy is about the rule of the majority with adequate protections for minorities. The elected politicians are more important than the civil servants. Bad decisions and their consequences are an important part of people learning to rule themselves.
New Yorkers don’t rule themselves; they’re ruled by a political machine with very little legitimacy. The Wisconsin state legislature has more legitimacy than Eric Adams – around half of Wisconsin has a clear preference for a scorched earth partisan Republican state government, whereas the voter suppression in New York is such that Adams represents way fewer than half (and the NIMBYs represent, what, 8%?).
Wisconsin is a heavily gerry-mandered state and the Republicans cheat outrageously. New Yorker City residents might not show up because of apathy but the elections are fair. I mean only 35% of San Francisco residents can name one member of the Board of Supervisors. Most people not paying attention to politics, especially local and regional politics, is the norm. This is too their detriment but you can’t make people care when they don’t want to.
No, the elections in New York are not fair. The voter suppression there is horrific, it just doesn’t get noticed nationally because it has no interpartisan impact; for example, odd-year elections are designed to suppress turnout. And re the “oh well, people are apathetic” line – that’s a signal that people are not having any choice that represents them. Why would they? City Council represents the 8% of the city that works in-community board (the numbers may differ a bit for City Council districts but only a bit – they’re the same approximate size), with the member deference system. The mayor is beholden to a machine, which cheats in ways that PiS would salute if they knew – for example, the Brooklyn precincts had Adams’ picture with “borough president” on it, just as a reminder of who people were supposed to vote for.
Meanwhile, systems with civil service autonomy and politicians who don’t micromanage – say, the Nordic countries – get such high turnouts that 80% is considered a sign of dangerous levels of apathy. Is it somehow less democratic that the Moderates make high-level decisions like “don’t fund high-speed rail, we’re a pro-road administration” and leave the details of how to build roads to Trafikverket?
I’m familiar with NY election law. What is unfair about it? You have to be a citizen resident over the age of 17 without any of a few encumberances that stop you from voting. It’s relatively easy to register. The general election poll are open from 6 AM to 9 PM, which is unusually long and there is early voting. I don’t have to show any identification. My signature must match to the sample they have. Show up at the correct polling place, on election day and you aren’t on the rolls, you can still vote. It’s just that you can’t vote using the machine. What’s unfair?
With minor modifications, what you’ve described is also how elections vote in every country that international monitors consider to have such democratic backsliding that elections are not really free or fair, like Poland, Turkey, and especially Hungary. These aren’t the features that make elections free.
…and I have the right, under law not a constitutional right, to vote expeditiously. Longest I’ve waited is 15 minutes and that’s because it was a hotly contested election. When I passed by earlier in the day the parking lot was crowded. It was when I passed by again and decided a 10 or 15 minute wait was less effort than coming back. What’s unfair.
I have no idea how to vote in Poland and it’s very unlikely I will ever be in Poland. And very very unlikely I’d be eligible to vote. You said the NY elections aren’t fair. How? It’s easy to register, even if I’m not I can vote. I don’t have to show my papers or wait in long lines. What’s not free?
The Poles have an idea how to vote in Poland. And yet watchers of Polish elections who have little sympathy for socialism and the other bugbears of PiS rhetoric, like Anne Applebaum, find the upcoming election unfair, through election bribery, political control of public media, and political control of state-owned firms. Two out of the three are completely normal in American municipal and often state elections; the media is not politically controlled, but also people choose to read relevant (i.e. national) media and therefore there’s no real independent oversight of anything below the state level.
The action on the New York City level is the Democratic Primary because the other parties nominate whackjobs that have no hope of winning the general. That they nominate whackjobs isn’t the Democratic Party’s problem or the general electorate’s problem. And it’s closed primary because making it open violates my constitutional rights in a few ways. It’s too bad that most people understand the city government doesn’t so much beyond picking up the garbage and providing emergency services and it doesn’t matter a whole lot who gets TV interviews. From one point of view it’s good it’s on off years because it doesn’t distract from other elections. It’s too bad people have views that don’t agree with yours. Get over it.
Wasnt there basically a three way tie in the primary before Adams was chosen? That feels OK.
No, two-way tie between Adams and Garcia, in which every actor in the city machine, including the sitting mayor who’d hired Garcia and spoken highly of her before she became a serious threat to Adams, endorsed Adams and steered vote banks his way. (Note that in federal elections, the norm is that a sitting president does not endorse in open same-party primaries, like Democrats 2000, Republicans 2008, or Democrats 2016).
I mean the Labour MPs pushed Starmer pretty hard. I bet that happens in most other democracies too.
Yeah, and that’s fine, because in the UK, as in most democracies, there are functioning institutions of party governance. The Tories don’t even have primaries, and I don’t think their process of picking the party leader is undemocratic; Sunak sucks (will try blogging about HS2 tonight) but that’s because the Tories suck in general.
In contrast, in the US, candidates are picked in primaries in which every person who says “I vote for this party” gets to vote. Party institutions are weak, to the point that unlike the British party manifesto, the US party platform is written by the least influential people in the party and accordingly has little political significance. This means that politicians in the US feel free to run against their own parties; Adams, for example, is notable in how he constantly defines himself against the Democrats’ national message. Adams is atypically populist, but some of this self-definition is common even among non-populists, to the point that in the generation up until Obama, it was believed that governors made better presidential candidates than senators, because they could run against Washington and in effect attack their own party’s legislative work (Obama notably won without doing any of that bullshit).
EDIT: to clarify, the issue with the machine system in American cities is that, unlike the European leadership selection process, there’s no accountability. If Starmer fucks up, the entire Labour Party is to blame; Labour MPs know this, and are aware that they’ll be held responsible, and if Starmer blows this, the Corbynites will use that as an excuse to take over the party. In contrast, Adams on the surface claims the legitimacy of having been directly elected, rather than that of the party; when he fucks up, the Democratic Party is not blamed, and none of the actors who steered votes his way is genuinely subject to either competitive elections or party control.
The mayor of anywhere is not the U.S. president. Or city council whatever that is called. Or the state legislature. And party apparatchiks definitely aren’t. It’s too bad it’s not your idealized vision. It works perhaps not to well but it works. At least the Democrats and what there is of third parties have public discussions. The Republican Party, right now, is busy insisting we have always been at war with Eastasia. And that dead people in Arizona voted on Chinese paper and an Italian Satellite using a German Server altered their vote….
“To make the big decisions and leave all the details and implementation to the civil service?”
Er… what else do you have a civil service for? As the elected government, you spent public funds to hire them to do exactly that job, no? If you want to use a different method to decide the details and implementation, with more democratic legitimacy (and are willing to accept that you get worse decisions), then by all means use that method. But then… you don’t need a civil service and you can just fire them because their job is now done by that other method.
Separately, I’m confused as to how democratic legitimacy works. To whatever extent the government is legitimate, the civil service “inherits” that level of legitimacy because it’s the government that hires it, no?
@Basil Marte.
Precisely. It is only since the ascendance of neoliberalism that the function of the public service has been so degraded and corrupted (mostly in the Anglosphere but everywhere to an extent). Especially important where voters increasingly elect career-politicians with no direct experience in the real world outside politics or any relevance to the portfolios they end up controlling. Boris Johnson (and Trump) is perhaps the ne plus ultra of this class of know-nothing leaders who nevertheless refuse the counsel of those experienced in the relevant subjects. Here’s a confessional from former Tory minister Rory Stewart who fits the mould (Dragon School, Oxford; Eton; Balliol College–same as Boris!) but at least has wide experience around the world with the Foreign Office and other activities):
Oh, and those four (Cameron, Osborne, Miliband, Balls) are all Oxford PPEs. So Borners, no one is saying that this single degree is solely responsible for all ills, but there’s something wrong when a country’s entire leadership is drawn from such a narrow path. Most–not all–PPEs do share an econocratic quasi-neoliberal groupthink, in addition to the absolute belief that only they know the secret to …. everything. You don’t have to have a PPE to be a complete f-wit/f-up, but it helps (Liz Truss, PPE). Not to mention our very own, Oz PM Tony Abbott (Rhodie-PPE) and the biggest fish of all: Rupert Murdoch (Oxford PPE).
[if this gets double posted please delete one of the dupes]
@Basil Marte.
Precisely. It is only since the ascendance of neoliberalism that the function of the public service has been so degraded and corrupted (mostly in the Anglosphere but everywhere to an extent). Especially important where voters increasingly elect career-politicians with no direct experience in the real world outside politics or any relevance to the portfolios they end up controlling. Boris Johnson (and Trump) is perhaps the ne plus ultra of this class of know-nothing leaders who nevertheless refuse the counsel of those experienced in the relevant subjects. Here’s a confessional from former Tory minister Rory Stewart who fits the mould (Dragon School, Oxford; Eton; Balliol College–same as Boris!) but at least has wide experience around the world with the Foreign Office and other activities):
Oh, and those four (Cameron, Osborne, Miliband, Balls) are all Oxford PPEs. So Borners, no one is saying that this single degree is solely responsible for all ills, but there’s something wrong when a country’s entire leadership is drawn from such a narrow path. Most–not all–PPEs do share an econocratic quasi-neoliberal groupthink, in addition to the absolute belief that only they know the secret to …. everything. You don’t have to have a PPE to be a complete f-wit/f-up, but it helps (Liz Truss, PPE). Not to mention our very own, Oz PM Tony Abbott (Rhodie-PPE) and the biggest fish of all: Rupert Murdoch (Oxford PPE).
Exactly, Aidorondack. New York law also states that employers must give employees time off during the work day to vote or allow them to come in late or leave early to work. California’s universal voting by mail might be easier but the Democratic Party still dominates the state because the Republicans insist on nominating far right whack jobs that nobody wants. Everybody who is remotely interesting in governing votes Democratic regardless of whether they are professional technocrat sort or an activist or anything else.
Up here the action is on the Republican primary ballot. Which is why some people, up here, register Republican so they can vote for the whack-jobiest one. New York also has it’s weird fusion ballot and the least whackjob one, when it looks like a true believer is going to win the primary, can go on bended knee to one of the other parties and ask politely to be on their ballot line. The Supervisor ( equivalent of mayor ) in one of the towns up here, lost the primary, hadn’t pursued a secondary line and won a write in campaign. …. the machine vote went to the whack-job. Who immediately began to screech that it’s all fixed and rigged. At least one Republican and one Democrat, probably more and any qualified observer then opened the mail-in. Write-in won. There was more screeching that IT WAS ALL RIGGED and we have always been at war with Eastasia!
It’s far more vigorous and messy down on the ground than it is viewed from an ivory tower at NYU.
None of this is about vote by mail or any of the other reforms that Democrats think matter. Of note, the sort of systems I hold up as more democratic, as evinced by higher turnouts among other things, vary greatly on the voting reforms that are on the agenda in the US: Germany has vote by mail, but the Nordic countries do not except for citizens abroad; Sweden lets you vote by proxy, but Israel has no such thing.
Just because candidates you like don’t make it onto the ballot doesn’t make them less fair or less free. Or that ones that do make it onto the ballot don’t advocate for policies you like. Freedom is not the rest of us doing what you want, it’s telling you, you are full of shit and doing something else.
….Your authoritarian tendencies are showing. Again.
It’s not “candidates I don’t like.” It’s “candidates who keep ’em guessing.”
Compare this with Berlin. I’m livid that Kai Wegner got elected on a platform of ending road diets and making the city car-friendlier. He put that on the CDU election posters, and CDU came first, and between SPD being run by a politician who’s to the right of Schröder (who was in turn to the right of Blair and of every New Democrat from the 1990s) and the Greens running an unappealing campaign, he got to be mayor. So plans for installing bike lanes are being scrapped, and now the city is supporting reviving plans to build a new freeway segment through some high-density neighborhoods to make it easier for people to drive to a job center that has multiple rapid transit lines.
The difference is that Wegner is, in a way, exercising the popular will. The Greens really did run a bad candidate and, in the previous coalition, were fairly petulant (and shielded the even more petulant Die Linke – the SPD leader wanted to coalition with FDP but the Greens insisted on Die Linke instead). If people don’t like the cancelation of bike lanes, there’s a clear way to express this view in the election in two years, which is to vote for the Greens, or, if SPD decides to pick a leader who isn’t crap, SPD.
In contrast, Adams was not running on any of this. He’s not doing any of this as a matter of clearly expressed policy, the way the Tories keep saying that they want to make it easier to drive and accusing Labour of waging “war on the motorist.” He keeps ’em guessing. If New Yorkers are upset about the last-minute cancellation of bus lanes, they don’t have any alternative to vote for, because nobody runs on any clearly articulated policy in city elections except maybe de Blasio on universal pre-K and other than that he governed on the same keep-’em-guessing principle and not on any of what he’d won the election over (e.g. he might as well have not existed on matters of policing, even though in 2013 he did explicitly run on an “as a father of a black son, I will fight against police brutality” platform).
Policy is a separate issue from whether or not elections are fair and free. Elections are mostly a bookkeeping issue, not a policy issue. You get the right amount of signatures you can be on the ballot. Anybody who is registered – in the appropriate jurisdiction – can vote for you. There some issues around the edges of elections like gerrymandering and how difficult it is to register. I have a right to vote expeditiously in New York and I don’t know why people tolerate long lines. You are conflating issues. Want to give moving the goalposts next a whirl. Some no-true-Scotman might be good. Hoisting a straw man or two is popular.
Adirondacker: what purpose do elections serve, that makes it necessary for the elections to be fair and free in order to implement that purpose? Or in other words, what downstream harm does it cause when they aren’t fair and free?
My answer is that elections are the final feedback on policy. “We, the public, are overall dissatisfied with the job you did, thus at least for the next electoral cycle we are taking our business elsewhere.” The harm in distorting this feedback mechanism is worse policy (including things like a kleptocracy) because the politicians in power realize they can get away with it, in the sense of retaining power.
Elections exist to accurately count the vote. I, like Ms. Freeman and Ms. Moss, participate in being one of the Democrats or one of the Republicans, “counting”. The process is quite elaborate. Everyone, except Republicans, agree that the vote in the U.S. is accurately counted. (You don’t have to a Republican or Democrat to participate in the process. those regulations aren’t pertinent at the moment) Everyone, except Republicans, agrees the count is accurate and additionally that there is no significant fraud or abuse that changes the outcomes. That’s the very very basic baseline for elections.
It’s not fair that Republicans do many things that suppress the votes for the Democratic party. It’s unfortunate but not unfair that the choices being offered are ….. uninspiring.. You have to conduct the election in such a way that everybody …. rational…. agrees the count was accurate, as the baseline. And that almost always any …. anomalies…. identified don’t determine the outcome.
That the choices suck isn’t “election”.
I feel the your use of the Navy analogy conflates a couple of things. Whether or not the CO would undercut the OOD in front of the sailors is more like the elected politician criticizing the underlying bureaucracy as an institution. You do sort of touch on that, but then extend it to the idea that the underlying bureaucracy should be making implementation issues without interference from the politicians. But in the Navy example, the CO is going to be ultimately responsible for the ship and if they see something that they don’t like, the junior officer will be notified and expected to change it. So the CO retains complete substantive control of operations (even at a microlevel if that’s their style); the point is more about retaining respect for the command decisions of the subordinate officers when those officers do make their own decisions. Now, I don’t think micromanagement is very effective for many of the same reasons you do, but the Navy example isn’t really about micromanagement exactly, other than in a very limited timeframe.
Also, isn’t the Beto example just a matter of rhetoric? “My manager doesn’t usually allow me to give discounts, but I think we can make an exception for you.”
The consultants are not Beto’s manager – they worked for him. That’s the important difference.
The other answers in the Quora link get into the micromanagement issue, and there, too, the point is that the CO is expected to have high standards but, as you say, respect the command decision of subordinate officers. At higher level in the US Navy, there’s command by negation, to further reinforce the ability of officers to make their own decisions.