Democracy Journal - Rethinking State Capacity
In this co-written essay, legal director Sandeep Vaheesan and chief economist Brian Callaci deliver the argument that today’s “state capacity” discourse wrongly blames democratic procedures for government failure, when the real solution is not deregulated, top-down speed but renewed democratic governance that balances effective state action with public participation and legitimacy.
State capacity is in vogue. For decades, scholars theorized and debated the concept in academic obscurity; now, talk of state capacity saturates popular policy and political discourse. And whereas the scholarship focused on states’ ability to pursue official goals autonomously from powerful social groups, today’s purported state capacity liberals in the popular press—including Ezra Klein, Derek Thompson, and Matthew Yglesias—diagnose a slightly different problem. Rather than underdeveloped state institutions, they focus on allegedly overdeveloped state institutions, specifically the procedural constraints that liberal democratic states have placed on themselves, such as environmental review for federal infrastructure projects and local planning approval for construction projects. Echoing the deregulatory mantra that they also advocate for the private sector, state capacity liberals argue that liberating the state from hidebound bureaucratic proceduralism will unleash newfound prosperity, or “abundance,” for the American people.
They rely on anecdotes to support the story of a state that obstructs the private sector and shackles itself. The paradigmatic example of government getting in its own way for these state-capacity liberals is California’s failure to build a high-speed rail system. Similarly, lengthy environmental review processes supposedly throttled the federal government’s capacity to fulfill a legislative mandate under President Biden to rapidly build out renewable energy. Meanwhile, public rules constraining the expansion of charter schools (rather than, say, gross inequalities in education funding) are to blame for poor school performance. But careful study, whether on high-speed rail or environmental review, contradicts this simple story of public regulations as barriers to abundance. In the case of California’s high-speed rail development, for instance, inadequate fiscal support and American inexperience in building such projects—in contrast to decades of experience in highway construction—have been the principal obstacles. But the anti-procedural narrative has taken hold, especially in elite circles.
Looming over the entire debate is a pervasive anxiety that China is (allegedly) beating the United States in economic and geopolitical competition because its authoritarian state is stronger, nimbler, and less encumbered by procedure than ours. In this regard, current state capacity discourse mirrors a similar anxiety liberals felt during the Great Depression, when Americans wondered if liberal democracy was too unwieldy and decadent to survive competition with a European fascism that, if nothing else, was purported to “make the trains run on time” (it didn’t, but people thought it did).
We are ardent believers in the power of government to improve people’s lives, and appreciate the frustration with unnecessary delays. In some cases, especially exclusionary zoning and other land use rules in wealthy suburbs, the current legal restrictions are in fact excessive. However, the proper answer to government dysfunction and the authoritarian threat at home and abroad is largely the same today as it was during the New Deal: Rather than railroad the public with top-down directives or megaprojects imposed by Washington and state capitols, we must renew our national commitment to democracy and public participation with ambitious acts of bold economic governance.
The Trump Administration’s ability to move with lightning speed to impose unwanted infrastructure like Alligator Alcatraz on unwilling host communities, militarize cities with masked police and troops, and increase surveillance of Americans makes clear the urgency of balancing the state’s capacity to act decisively with the need for democratic legitimacy. “State capacity” is not inherently good: The what and how of state action matter.
Read full article here.