The Irrational Mob v the Heartless Ambitious Bureaucrat

I'm taking a class on Representation this semester from one of the leading experts on the topic. It's an opportunity to think about democratic theory while approaching it empirically. A lot of the research in American politics and public policy is spurred, though often only implicitly, by interest in democratic theory. And, therefore, it has become an interest of mine too, since I read so much about it.

One funny thing is, even though scholars often justify their empirical work with a half-assed appeal to its importance for democratic theory, they often fail to explain what angle they are taking. As a consequence, there seems to be two large camps of empirical research that more or less ignore each other. One side examines the extent to which public opinion influences policy makers and policy outputs, with the angle being, is government responsive to public opinion? The implicit stance is that responsiveness is a good and democracy-friendly thing. Another side examines the extent to which government is responsive to public opinion, with the implication being that irrational public opinion only "infects" good government and prevents the experts from doing their job.

So, here's one group, saying that normative democratic theory posits a government that is responsive to citizens, and here's another group saying that normative democratic theory posits "good government" that is insulated from cronyism, corruption, and the political whims of the day.

Of course, both of them are right to a certain extent, but what they fail to recognize is that these norms are in tension with each other. The techniques that make government more responsive to the public also make it more susceptible to corruption and the irrational whims of fervant factions. The same techniques to make public administration more professional, objective, and scientific make it less responsive to the public will.

One can think about his issue in terms of principal-agent theory. By far, the most common application of principal-agent theory to democratic governance involves how elected officials can control an unwieldy bureucracy hell bent on expanding its budget and its turf. On the other hand, there are times when it is obvious that a bureaucracy needs to be insulated from political will in order to fulfill its fundamental mission. This is known as "credible commitment" in the principal-agent literature. For instance, to provide confidence for foreign investors, governments have largely ceded responsibility for monetary policy to central banks. If monetary policy were responsive to political whims, politicans would have an incentive to make popular but bad policy (at least as far as this argument is concerned).

At this point, a good blogger would probably try to use the preceding analysis to make some trenchant point about the policy debates of the day. But I'm not going to do that. DEAL WID IT!!!