Volume 23, Issue 3-4 - Special issue: American Government and the Politics of Problem Solving; Guest Editors: Alan S. Gerber and Eric M. Patashnik

This special issue brings together essays by leading political scientists to provide insights on the politics of problem solving in the contemporary American state. This brief introduction summarizes the essays in the special issue and highlights common themes.

Good governance and effective problem solving are important goals for American government, and one branch of political science that focuses on them is research on the politics of public policy. This essay summarizes important insights from that literature and illustrates their relevance to two problems: housing unaffordability and public pension underfunding. With housing unaffordability, problem-solving politics is currently activated, whereas with pension underfunding, it is not. To understand why, it is important to consider the features of the policy, the organization of interests, and the politics of problem creation. In the problem-creation stage, the two cases share much in common: they feature lopsided interest structures buttressed by longstanding institutions. But for the activation of problem-solving politics and what problem solving looks like, there are meaningful differences between the two. One difference relates to how the problems are experienced by the broader public. The other is that in one of the cases, the side with vested interest in the status quo is a well-organized interest group. In both cases, problem-solvers tend to emerge from political offices with broader constituencies: state-level offices for housing, and executives (governors and mayors) for pensions.

From the mid-2000s to the mid-2010s, the politics of criminal justice took a sudden turn from highly politicized punitiveness, to lower-salience problem solving that led to a range of breakthroughs that reduced the growth in incarceration. This shift was driven by decreasing party competition at the state level, the increasing space for reform produced by lower public salience of crime, and the creative advocacy and political entrepreneurship of advocates. This period of problem solving appears to be over, driven by increasing public concern about crime and repolarization in response to social movement activism. Lessons are offered that advocates and funders can draw from this case, especially concerning the linkage between salience and problem-solving reform.

We examine the contributions Congress makes to problem solving in contemporary American government. We offer a more positive assessment of the institution than is the norm for political science. In terms of representation, institutional processes, and policy outcomes, the polarized Congress has underappreciated virtues. Congress’s membership and party composition do a credible job reflecting the political diversity that exists in the country, and its institutional processes show respect for that diversity. Congress’s policy outcomes typically command broad support across party lines. Amid the intense polarization of contemporary American politics, the contemporary Congress enacts as much or more legislation by sheer volume than it did in the 1980s and the 1990s, and it normally does so in ways that large majorities and both parties support.

A major development in the modern Congress is the increased centrality of fundraising. Although raising money has long been a component of members’ responsibilities, until recently it was a more moderate one. As this essay describes, numerous factors have contributed to the development, including the reduced role of seniority in determining committee positions, the rise of the internet as a medium through which challengers can raise funds from out-of-district donors, and reforms to campaign finance law that have handicapped parties’ ability to serve as the dominant fundraising organizations. These changes, individually and in combination, have been quite detrimental to congressional problem-solving. The increased amount of time needed for fundraising means that members have less time for problem-solving; donor opinion has an outsized impact on members’ policy behavior; and the types of members and candidates who are interested in problem-solving are now less willing to run for office. The essay concludes by offering potential reforms to the campaign finance system and congressional rules that would better incentivize problem-solving in the contemporary Congress, as well as suggestions for future research that would help us better understand the current dynamics.

At a time when there are calls to radically reform – or even eliminate – the civil service, understanding its relative strengths and opportunities for improvement becomes more important. This article considers the capacity of the civil service to engage in learning and problem-solving. While public employees are (sometimes justly) critiqued for their inability to learn and adapt, I review two examples of problem-solving that have been institutionalized into the United States federal government: performance management and reducing administrative burdens. Those examples and broader research offer a number of observations about problem-solving. Governments can build models of iterative adaptation and improvement that are tied to specific routines. While unflashy and incremental, a model of problem-solving that focuses on embedding an ethos of change into organizational routines is more likely to have lasting effect than top-down reforms that feel distant from the day-to-day work of civil servants. But for those routines to succeed requires other changes. Government needs to do a better job of hiring problem-solvers, and then shielding them from the twin threats of proceduralism – becoming bogged down in rules rather than goals – and politicization.

Agenda-setting shapes the problems that occupy the sustained attention of those who craft laws and policy, and the heuristics and solutions used to address those problems. An extensive political science literature has elucidated agenda formation, concluding that (1) policy change happens under the conjuncture of solution streams and policy streams (given a structure or moment of political opportunity), and (2) “there is an impressive congruence between the priorities of the public and the priorities of Congress across time” (Jones and Baumgartner 2004. “Representation and Agenda Setting.” Policy Studies Journal 32 (1): 1–24), conditioned upon wider legislative agendas than those for the public. I contend here that the rise of administrative government qualifies these conclusions. That delegation trades off expertise for agency preferences is well known, but it also embeds a second trade-off: between a forum with more open agendas (the legislature) and one that restricts them (administration). Indeed, delegation to administrative agencies presumes, if it does not favor, agenda closure  – a tightly constrained focus on a limited set of issues to which the legislature has entrusted the agency’s authority and resources, and a narrow set of methods and consiliaria (experts, lawyers, adversaries, commenters) from which the agency seeks and gets its information. Agenda limitation may be desirable but may also worsen the quality of public problem solving, and agenda democracy itself may be normatively desirable. This tension is ineluctable. Hypothetically, it might be ameliorated by (a) the development and embedment of greater expertise in law-making assemblies and/or (b) the restriction or deliberative aperture (or both) of administrative policymaking.

This discussion surveys changes in the world that might impact the ability to solve policy problems as outlined initially in Glazer and Rothenberg (2001. Why Government Succeeds and Why It Fails . Harvard University Press). While the basic premises of the original analysis hold, interrelated political and economic changes have occurred in ways that would produce a far different monograph than was authored roughly a quarter-century ago. Politically, four changes are highlighted: (1) growth in polarization; (2) rise of private politics; (3) heightened globalization; and (4) media diversification. Economically, three notable changes are discussed involving: (1) the changing nature of industrial organization; (2) the redesign of supply and value chains; and (3) the dramatic rise of artificial intelligence. While no universal statement can be offered, changes in these features, both individually and interactively, provide additional opportunities and new obstacles for policy successes to be realized and suggest areas for further scholarly investigation.

Are democracies better at solving problems than non-democratic regimes? If so, what elements of democracies make them better? How do different political systems monitor and manage problems that are long-term? In this paper I sketch the issues in making such comparisons, and report some of the major findings at present. Then I point to possible directions for making those comparisons by linking components of the problem-solving paradigm to specific elements of democratic institutions and governance.