The Governance Podcast

Fukuyama on Liberalism, Dignity and Identity: In Conversation with Humeira Iqtidar and Paul Sagar

Where are the fault lines in the modern liberal project? In this episode of the Governance Podcast, Dr Humeira Iqtidar and Dr Paul Sagar of King's College London tackle this question in a dialogue on Francis Fukuyama's new book, Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment. 

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The Guests

Dr Humeira Iqtidar joined King's College London in 2011. She has studied at the University of Cambridge, McGill University in Canada and Quaid-e-Azam University in Pakistan. Before joining King's, Humeira was based at the University of Cambridge as a fellow of King’s College and the Centre of South Asian Studies. She is a co-convenor of the London Comparative Political Theory Workshop. Humeira’s research explores the shifting demarcations of state, market and society in political imagination, and their relationship with Islamic thought and practice. Her current research focuses on non-liberal conceptions of tolerance. Her research has featured in interviews and articles in The Guardian, BBC World Service, Voice of America, Der Spiegel, Social Science Research Council Online, The Dawn, Express Tribune and Open Democracy. 

Dr Paul Sagar is a lecturer in political theory at King's College London. His recent monograph, The Opinion of Mankind: Sociability and the State from Hobbes to Smith, explores Enlightenment accounts of the foundations of modern politics, whilst also addressing contemporary issues regarding how to conceive of the state, and what that means for normative political theory today. He has also published a number of studies on topics such as: the political writings of Bernard Williams, so-called ‘realist’ approaches to political philosophy, the nature of liberty under conditions of modernity, and the idea of immortality. Paul is currently in the early stages of two major new projects. The first is a monograph study of Adam Smith’s political philosophy as rooted in his conceptions of history and commercial society. The second is an exploration of the idea of the enemy in the history of political thought. 

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0:55: Where do we see this book in Fukuyama's larger oeuvre? 

3:39: You can see Hegel's influence more in his previous work, more in terms of a teleological thrust through history, and the metaphysics in Hegel... I really understand to be a kind of battle of ideas. And Fukuyama takes that on, and his argument is more that if we are thinking about ideas that will triumph, then liberal democracy is the best idea.

8:55: I think what Fukuyama wants to say in this Identity book is, the same threats to the last man at the end of history, which is the desire for recognition, will overwhelm contentment with stability. Because even if liberal democracy... would provide all the comforts of life... and solve the economic questions, which we know now that it hasn't... but even back then Fukuyama thought that even if it does that, it will not solve the recognition problem, and if they don't get that recognition, they will break things, they will smash things.

11:14: I actually find the narrative that he tells pretty plausible. The idea that we exist not just with the desire for recognition, but a desire that each of us has an authentic self, an authentic identity, which may be at odds with wider society, and that society itself may be a structural mechanism of oppression. 

13:29: His account of the failure of multiculturalism, which... he doesn't actually spell it out in so many words... but he lays the blame on a certain kind of identity politics at the doorstep of the left. What is interesting is... I think there is a problem with thinking of it only as a left failure, partly because the left remains undifferentiated in his thinking.

16:30: I actually think that a huge missing part of the story is... I hate using this term, but the rise of neoliberalism- that what's often labeled as left wing identity politics is much, much more indebted to the intellectual victories of the right. What I mean by that is the rise of the view of the world that everything is about individual choice, every individual is a sovereign consumer who floats through the world unencumbered by structures, making market choices. 

19:02: Neoliberalism moves much more strongly towards freedom... or a particular understand of freedom which is entirely unburdened by a relationship to equality... and therefore to the economy and the state. It just becomes this abstract idea. 

23:40: If we take out Marx, who does try to bring together ideas and structures in a very kind of comprehensive way, we may disagree with his approach but it's an ambitious one and that's partly why I think he has traction today. But one of the problems we do have in the history of political thought is that the relationship between institutions and ideas is unclear. 

29:12: The entire narrative of the enlightenment as some kind of rejection of religion is just deeply deeply implausible... If you take almost all of the major Enlightenment figures, many of them were pious Christians.... the falling of religion in Europe is, if anything, a twentieth century phenomenon. 

37:47: There's this culture of Republicans and Democrats, top level politicians, who've perpetrated these wars for decades but of course, their class has not suffered the consequences of any of this. That area of identity, that sense of American betrayal, doesn't seem to get as much of a look in. And again it is very odd to point to America as an example of successful integration when you still have the persistence of these enormous racial divides which cut across the left-right spectrum in all sorts of complex ways. 

Migration and Economic Development: In Conversation with Volha Charnysh

How does migration affect economic development? In this episode of the Governance Podcast, Volha Charnysh (MIT) talks to Humeira Iqtidar (King's College London) about this complex relationship, drawing on extensive fieldwork and archival data on forced migration in Post-World War II Germany and Poland.

 

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The Guest

Volha Charnysh joined MIT’s Department of Political Science in the fall of 2018. In 2017-2018, she was a fellow at the Niehaus Center for Globalization and Governance at the Princeton University Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. She received her PhD in Government from Harvard University in May 2017.

Dr. Charnysh’s research focuses on historical political economy, legacies of violence, nation- and state-building, and ethnic politics. Her book project examines the long-run effects of forced migration in the aftermath of World War II in Eastern Europe, synthesizing several decades of micro-level data collected during a year of fieldwork in Poland, funded by the Social Science Research Council and Center for European Studies.

Dr. Charnysh’s work has appeared in the American Political Science Review, Comparative Political Studies, and the European Journal of International Relations. Her dissertation won the 2018 Ernst B. Haas Best Dissertation prize, awarded by the European Politics and Society Section of the American Political Science Association, as well as the Best Dissertation Prize, awarded by the Migration & Citizenship Section. Dr. Charnysh has also contributed articles to Foreign Affairs, Monkey Cage at the Washington Post, National Interest, Transitions Online, Arms Control Today, Belarus Digest, and other media.

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0:55: How did you get interested in these research themes?

2:15: One of the things that is less studied is the impact that World War II had in this particular way—Eastern Europe was transformed in a very profound manner. I saw in your research that you basically collected information at the municipality level—how easy was that? What was contained in that data?

4:47: You mentioned the Polish diaspora coming in from the USSR. I was curious, did the Polish diaspora speak Polish? Because one of the things that you talk about in terms of the composition of some of the more heterogenous municipalities later on – is there linguistic diversity as well?

6:13: Coming to your overall book project, I’m curious about the argument you’re building. What is the overall thesis and how does this microdata play into that?

8:15: So we have a picture of these different municipalities, some more heterogeneous than others, and as I understand it your argument is that in the short term, or at least initially, the more heterogeneous communities will have a deficit of social capital; certainly there’ll be less solidarity. And because of that, they are more likely to turn towards a third party for enforcement of norms—in this case, the state. But the next step is that the state actually builds capacity that at a later stage can allow for more economic development.

11:52: What does this mean, then, in terms of the development of the nation? Because we have these somewhat different communities – some that are more closely bound to each other and others that are not – how does that feed into your specific example? That is, Polish national identity and the making of the Polish nation?

13:40: Would you say that your argument now contradicts what you were saying earlier, which seems like there is a big regional difference in terms of these populations and Polish national identity is somewhat conflicted because of this division?

14:35: So you do make a distinction – depending upon the kind of state, this level of dependence upon the state may or may not lead to economic development. Do you work through different kinds of state responses to communities demanding or working closely with the state?

19:35: The larger implication that I drew from what you’re saying is that there is a more complex relationship between communities, diversity and economic development in particular than this singular notion that the more homogenous a community is, the more social capital there might be, and the more prosperity we may see there.

22:06: It’s interesting you mention the relatively small differences because the context that I work on—South Asia—one of the interesting things about South Asia is that there is just immense diversity that people contend with on a daily basis, in terms of religious, ethnic, linguistic diversity. So slightly out of scope, I was curious about the levels of homogenisation or diversity that are acceptable in the popular imagination, because it seems to me that within the European context there is greater acceptance of homogeneity whereas most other parts of the world contend with more diversity on a daily basis.

25:42: Going back to Poland, one of the questions I had was also whether you can see any patterns of support for a more homogenous Polish identity on the one side and integration with the EU on the other side?

28:46: With that I wanted to return to the question of state socialism, and I thought you said something very interesting about this idea that we see state socialism and we use it as a black box, putting a lot of things into it. With this particular example, how would you break down state socialism? What are the different stages and ve

The Politics of Order in Informal Markets: In Conversation with Shelby Grossman

Social science theories suggest that informal governance thrives when the state is weak. Shelby Grossman of Stanford University argues otherwise. In this episode of the Governance Podcast, she sits down with John Meadowcroft (King's College London) to discuss the relationship between markets, states and informal institutions in Lagos, Nigeria. 

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The Guest

Shelby Grossman is a research scholar at the Stanford Internet Observatory. She was previously an assistant professor of political science at the University of Memphis. Dr. Grossman’s primary research interests are in comparative politics and sub-Saharan Africa. Her research has been published in Comparative Political Studies, PS: Political Science and Politics, World Development, and World Politics.

Dr. Grossman was a Postdoctoral Fellow at Stanford University’s Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law from 2016-17. She earned her PhD in Government from Harvard University in 2016.

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00:28: Shelby, you're involved in a research project on the politics of order in informal markets. You're looking at informal governance in parts of Africa. Why did you choose to study Africa?

2:03: How do the markets in Lagos work?

5:18: Would most economic exchanges in Nigeria take place in this informal context?

6:05: You did extensive fieldwork in the Lagos markets. Tell us about that process.

9:20: You mentioned that these markets often exist on land owned by local governments. I imagine that introduces a lot of local politics into the equation. Could you give us an account of how local government works in this context?

12:44: What would be the key cleavages in Lagos or Nigerian politics?

13:28: That takes us to the heart of your work, which is the interaction between the politics and markets. What does the literature lead us to expect about that interaction in a place like Lagos?

16:45: Who writes the constitution in the market?

18:58: You mentioned that market leaders were responding to pressure from politicians-- what sort of pressures were they exposed to?

20:45: What then is the relationship between the market leaders and the politicians?

22:51: In the absence of those sort of political threats, how does a market leader tend to behave?

25:01: Did you have outliers at either end? Were there examples of having almost no formal governance but very good informal governance, or vice versa?

26:07: What were your overall conclusions vis a vis the relationship between formal and informal governance? 

26:57: How does this play out in other contexts? Have you observed other examples that seem to follow the same pattern? 

28:18: In one sense, what you're saying is that there isn't a simple downward sloping demand curve for informal governance... it's actually a U shape of sorts.

28:32: What are your next research pathways?

The Governance of Science: In Conversation with Terence Kealey and David Edgerton

How does science drive the economy? What are the origins of the creative sector, and how should it be governed? In this episode of the Governance Podcast, David Edgerton (King's College London) sits down with Terence Kealey (University of Buckingham) to discuss the counterintuitive role science plays, and should play, in society. 

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The Guest

Terence Kealey is a professor of clinical biochemistry at the University of Buckingham in the United Kingdom, where he served as vice chancellor until 2014. As a clinical biochemist Dr. Kealey studied human experimental dermatology. He published around 45 original peer-reviewed papers and around 35 scientific reviews, also peer-reviewed. In 1996 he published his first book, The Economic Laws of Scientific Research, where he argued that, contrary to the conventional wisdom,  governments need not fund science. His second book, Sex, Science and Profits (2008) argues that science is not a public good but, rather, is organized in invisible colleges, thereby making government funding irrelevant. Professor Kealey trained initially in medicine at Bart’s Hospital Medical School, London. He studied for his doctorate at Oxford University, where he worked first as a Medical Research Council Training Fellow and then as a Wellcome Senior Research Fellow in Clinical Science.

David Edgerton  is the Hans Rausing Professor of the History of Science and Technology and Professor of Modern British History at King's College London. He graduated from St John’s College Oxford and Imperial College London. After teaching at the University of Manchester he became the founding director of the Centre for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine at Imperial College London (1993-2003) where he was also Hans Rausing Professor. He joined the History department with the Centre on its transfer to King’s in August 2013. He was a Leverhulme Trust Major Research Fellow, 2006-2009, and gave the 2009 Wilkins-Bernal-Medawar Prize Lecture at the  Royal Society. 

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1:00: Terence, you and I have known each other for many years. You started off as a scientist, as I did, indeed, and we've both found our way to thinking about the place of science in society and in the economy. How did you start on this path?

3:53: Where did you develop your thoughts about science funding? It's very unusual for a scientist to be writing about the economics of science at all, especially from the positions you were taking. Where did you find the space to articulate your criticisms?

6:48: I imagine you were politically engaged in some way at this time. What were you reading outside science, what positions were you taking in this rather strained political atmosphere of the 1980s?

8:52: In the 1980s, you're pointing out that the university labs are getting fuller and fuller. Now I assume that most of the money that paid for all those new researchers was government money. Your argument, as it developed over the years, was that governments need not fund research in universities or elsewhere. So you were effectively saying that the Thatcher governments were spending too much on scientific research.

10:51: But the great bulk of the money going into universities from the so-called private sector is surely charitable money from the Wellcome Trust and Cancer Research and so on, and highly focused on the biomedical sector. 

11:44: Now the Thatcher governments presented themselves as wanting to reverse the British decline, and many of the people arguing for more investment in research argued that the British decline since the 1870s was caused by a lack of investment in research. So you might imagine that the Thatcher governments would in fact launch a program of such investments, and it's interesting today to see the Brexiters today including Dominic Cummings talking about increasing funding for research... Why weren't the Thatcher governments pursuing that policy of investment?

15:13: So you don't see her [Thatcher] as following through on the liberal arguments from Gladstone onwards.

15:57: Terence, let me put this to you: in 1979, the British R&D - GDP ratio was higher than it was in 1990, when Margaret Thatcher left office. That's to say, essentially the private sector, dominating overall R&D funding, was spending less on research as a portion of GDP at the end of the Thatcher period. That doesn't seem to square with your crowding out thesis. 

18:30: One could argue that the effectiveness of R&D productivity has declined since the 1970s-- obviously that is the case in pharmaceuticals; perhaps it's the case more generally.

21:41: I'd like to go back just a little bit to an issue that we both addressed in the 80s and early 90s, which is pertinent here. That is the relationship between national investments in R&D and national rates of economic growth. We both put forward the argument that there was no positive correlation between these numbers. And I think I recall correctly that experts in science policy and scientists were incredulous and thought that we'd lost a few marbles along the way. How did you come to this conclusion?

24:28: If you look at the industrially funded British R&D, it was relatively high into the late 1960s and the rates of British economic growth were low, and this wasn't because the British were bad at exploiting the research; I think that even there we had an element of an inverse correlation between national growth rates and national privately funded civil R&D.

26:49: One very striking conclusion you report in your first book, The Economic Laws of Scientific Research, is that the higher the GDP per capita of a country, the higher the R&D - GDP ratio. That's important because the richer the country is, the lower the rate of economic growth. 

29:52: If one were to put in the phrase 'economics of science' into google scholar, very quickly we'd be taken back to some foundation work in the late 50s and early 60s which treated science as a public good, and out of that a whole series of arguments about the need for the state to fund science.

38:37: So what you're saying is that that model of economics of science in the late 50s and early 60s which suggests that science is a public good misunderstands that science cannot be a public good in the same way that the light from a lighthouse is a public good... We can't all read a scientific paper and understand what it's about.

44:15: One of the new features of our public life is the centrality of a certain discourse about innovation and creativity; we're all supposed to be innovative and entrepreneurial. There's not a CV that doesn't claim innovation in some way... but you seem to be saying something rather interesting in that context, which is that what appears to be innovation is to a very considerable extent the result of learning, dare I say it, imitation. So what enterprises that want to create something new do is steal other people's ideas. That's very interesting. Another way in which your idea could be developed is to understand why creative institutions, far from being a universal feature of the economy, are in fact highly concentrated-- very particular firms have contributed very large proportions of innovation in the 20th century; very few universities account for a big chunk of Nobel Prizes. Could your model help explain this?

50:46: Terence, one of the many things you've done in your career is to become a Vice Chancellor. And you're clearly very committed to education and learning. Tell us a little bit about that role... that entrepreneurial drive to conquer the world of knowledge.

How Ideas Govern Public Life: A Conversation with Mark Bevir

What can we know about the social world, and how much of it can we control? How high are the stakes in the battle between positivism and interpretive social science? In this episode of the Governance Podcast, Mark Pennington (King’s College London) and Mark Bevir (UC Berkeley) discuss wide-ranging questions about the influence of philosophy and social science on public policy.

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The Guests

Mark Bevir is Professor of Political Science and Director of the Center for British Studies, University of California, Berkeley. He is also Professor of Governance, United Nations University (MERIT) and Distinguished Research Professor, Swansea University.

Born and raised in London, Mark moved to Berkeley in January 2000, having worked previously at universities in India and the UK. He has held visiting fellowships in Australia, Finland, France, Germany, India, Italy, Norway, South Korea, UK, and USA. Currently he is the general editor of The Oxford History of Political Thought, and he has been an editor of Journal of the Philosophy of History, associate editor of Journal of Moral Philosophy, President of the Society for the Philosophy of History, and Chair of the Interpretive Politics Group (PSA). Mark has done policy work for governmental organizations in Asia, Europe, and North America, as well as for the United Nations and its agencies.

Mark’s research interests in political theory include moral philosophy, political philosophy, and history of political thought. His methodological interests cover philosophy of social science, philosophy of history, and history of social science. His work on public policy focuses on organization theory, democratic theory, and governance.

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0:55: I wonder if you could start by what you’ve been working on most recently, perhaps the book on interpretive social science.

1:55: What is distinctive about the interpretive approach? We have the typical dichotomy between the interpretive or hermeneutic approach to social science and a more positivist view. And positivism is associated with some notion that you can read off almost in a mechanical way people’s behaviour by understanding background conditions, whether they’re economic incentives… or macro-structural influences.

5:29: It seems to me that if you adopt that approach--- I take the point that there’s a difference between particular epistemological foundations for social science and attachment to particular methods—but it seems to me nonetheless that if you do adopt this kind of [interpretive] approach, the implication is, to really get an appreciation of the meanings people attach to their actions or the beliefs they have or the traditions they’re situated in, you have to get up close with the actors. You have to try to be in their heads, and that does imply a more ethnographic approach.

8:48: One of the areas where you’ve applied this interpretive method to great effect is in trying to understand changes in governance relationships, especially within public sector organizations in the last 20-30 years. As I understand it, what your work points to is the influence of a particular set of social scientific beliefs about the problems that face hierarchical forms of state bureaucracy. And your argument is that initially this was questioned from a market-liberal perspective, public choice theory emphasising contracts and markets as an alternative to hierarchy, and then later we have the movement towards joined up governance approaches often associated with New Labour in the UK. And this is another set of social scientific ideas that markets produce excessive fragmentation and they need to be reintegrated in some sense. You make a very powerful claim that essentially it’s social scientific ideas that drove this change to the new governance arrangements that we see. Why do you think the actual social science has been important in the shift toward the kind of network governance arrangements we see in the world today?

14:30: You were saying that you’re interested in the way in which many of these policy reforms in the public sector have failed, and perhaps connect that to your interpretive method and approach. As I understand your argument, the problem with these various reform agendas, from whatever direction they come, whether it’s for markets or network governance or joined up governance, they fail to recognize that the actors who are required to implement the policies are going to be interpreting these policies in different ways, ways that are unpredictable to the actual reformer. Therefore we get all kinds of unintended or emergent outcomes.

18:26: Presumably this would also apply to evidence based public policy… or if you look at the recent focus on randomised control trials, would the kind of critique you’re applying transfer to these kind of ideas?

20:30: In your approach as I understand it, you do allow for the idea that there are patterns in the sense that particular traditions knit together in a certain way can create a certain regularity. But what you’re saying is there is no inherent necessity for that regularity to be there, that at some point there can be some kind of rupture or change in people’s beliefs, maybe some kind of exogenous event that breaks up what look like long-established patterns… It strikes me that would be what could happen to big data.

24:14: I wonder if we could say something about the tendency for social science (and I think arguably for some people this is the case for people who are using big data today) … people very much still believe that good social science should be able to predict in some sense. If we take the view that you’re presenting, there seem to be severe limits to our capacity to predict because there are always going to be these unexpected contingencies or developments… The financial crisis was not predicted by most economists and the rise of populist movements was not predicted by most political scientists. Why do you think so many people still want to cling to the notion that good social science is science that predicts?

29:43: What you just said there could be construed as quite critical of an expert-centered view of the world, the idea that there is a body of expertise which understands how societies function and how they can be controlled. In essence what you’re saying is that simply isn’t the case- other than that people might believe this to be the case. In some of your writings you propose what you call a de-centered approach to public policy. I understand that to be de-centered in two senses. It’s de-centered in the sense that you recognize the importance of local contingency, variety, unpredictability. But it’s also decentered in the sense that you’re wanting to, at least as I understand it, dethrone the power of experts and to empower citizens much more.

37:14: Aren’t politicians… almost inevitably going to look for quite simplistic kind of interpretations of what social science might say, or is it reasonable to expect that we could have a more nuanced understanding from politicians who ultimately are still involved in political battles? They’re trying to assert the value of their ideas versus what they see to be opposing sets of ideas.

41:24: It strikes me that there’s a sort of irony in that one of the things that you point out about Foucault’s work is… you emphasise that there needs to be a role for agency, some notion of creativity that people can resist dominant epistemes or forms of governmentality, that there has to be some scope for that in order to explain how change actually happens.

49:05: The centre here is within a department of political economy. So we’ve got people here from economics, political science and political theory backgrounds. Do you think some of the concepts that you use in the interpretive framework can say something to economists or the types of questions they’re interested in?

54:58: Perhaps this is unfair, I’m not sure, but I take to be a pretty significant implication of a lot of what you’re saying… is that people are looking for order in the world that really isn’t there. But the nature of a lot of social science is to try and find order. Why do you think people are so uncomfortable with the notion that maybe we just can’t fully understand what’s going on?

Self-Governing Social Orders, Economic Methods and Academic Women

In this special roundtable discussion on the Governance Podcast, we sit down with Jennifer Murtazashvili (Pittsburgh), Liya Palagashvili (SUNY Purchase) and Shruti Rajagopalan (Mercatus Center) to discuss their research on self-governing social orders outside the west, the future of economic methodology and the challenges women face in academic science.

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The Guests

Jennifer Murtazashvili (bio) is an Associate Professor in the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Pittsburgh. Drawing from diverse research methods including field experiments, public opinion surveys, and ethnographic fieldwork, Murtazashvili focuses her work on Central and South Asia, and the former Soviet Union. She also has experience advising for the U.S. Department of Defense, the United Nations Development Program, and UNICEF. Her work focuses on formal and informal political institutions, the political economy of development, decentralization and local governance, and post-conflict reconstruction.

Liya Palagashvili (bio) is an Assistant Professor of Economics at State University of New York-Purchase and a research fellow with NYU Law. For the 2018-2019 academic year, she was a Visiting Scholar in the Department of Political Economy at King's College London. She is currently investigating the regulatory and public policy environment for technology startups and is broadly interested in questions of governance, polycentricity, and the role of external influence and aid on institutions. In 2016, Liya was selected as a Forbes '30 under 30' in Law and Policy.

Shruti Rajagopalan (bio) is a Senior Research Fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, and a Fellow at the Classical Liberal Institute at NYU School of Law. She is also Associate Professor of Economics at State University of New York, Purchase College (currently on leave). Her research interests specifically include law and economics, public choice theory, and constitutional economics. Her research has been published in peer-reviewed journals, law reviews, and books. She also enjoys writing in the popular press and has a fortnightly column called  The Impartial Spectator in Mint. 

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0:45: When we talk about self-governing social orders, we use concepts like federalism, polycentric governance, constitutional governance, all of which tend to originate in western and specifically American empirical contexts, so we often assume a specific set of norms and institutions that may be absent or difficult to nourish in the developing world. 

Collectively, your research addresses really important questions about the nature and viability of self-governing social orders across almost every continent. Jennifer, you've been working on Central Eurasia, Shruti, you've been working on India, and Liya, you've been working on diverse cases in Africa and Native American groups in the US. I want to start with a couple of broad questions which you can take in whichever order and direction you want. 

Firstly, within your own research programs, what does a self-governing or polycentric social order look like? And what do you think are some of the biggest challenges to the emergence of polycentric social orders around the world? 

5:39: What functions do mahallas in Uzbekistan play in terms of the provision of public services or social order? Are they compensating for a lack of state infrastructure?

7:20: Liya, your work has looked at a different angle in which self governing communities have been sabotaged in both Africa and the US. What sorts of mechanisms are you observing that are undermining local and community governance?

11:26: Shruti, you've looked at a case on environmental governance in India where local communities following ancient traditions have been successful at managing the environment following a deep history of state-led control. What's behind the success of this community-led governance and are there downsides to it?

18:50: It seems that across your cases there is an emergent story which goes something like this: historical movements, whether colonisation, Sovietization, or any kind of centralization of power have devastated local communities and practices and the mechanisms communities have used to either maintain their natural resources or to resolve any number of collective action problems. But at the same time it seems there is also a danger when we pick the success cases... Is there a danger in going too far in a utopian direction and romanticizing self-governance as something that always leads to more accountable government or participatory government… ? How do you evaluate where to draw a line and say sometimes it can be problematic, but if that’s the case, what do you do about it?

28:35: I guess the benefit of paying homage or respect to self-governing systems is that you might end up with this vast array of experiments in living across countries, within countries, and you end up with a lot of variation in terms of public service provision, economic development, and people would in principle be free to vote with their feet in an ideal world… But often we do have a situation where you have the privilege of being included in a local council and if that represents your interests as a woman, you find that beneficial, but also you might be signing on to a very patriarchal order. So in some ways there is an unclean tradeoff and it’s hard to tell what kinds of governance to privilege.

31:00: Along with that, given that you’ve all done really interesting archival research and fieldwork and going into the details of case studies – which is not usual for economists to do – have you been surprised by what you’ve found in terms of the assumptions you’ve been using as an economist? Have you found interesting information that you’d bring back to the table, to theory? Have you changed the way you think about governance more generally?

43:09: It sounds like a lot of what your work entails is sociology and anthropology, what might be considered “softer” social science disciplines that aren’t doing RCTs and testing policy interventions with experimentation. And most people wouldn’t say you shouldn’t do one method or another, but why do you think this more fine grained sociological approach isn’t entering the economics profession? It’s not something you’d come across as an econ student. If you’re taking an econ course, you’re exposed to a lot of mathematics and formal modeling. Why is this kind of methodology not getting the attention it needs?

58:06: I want to drive in on the sociology of science itself… science gets better the more perspectives there are from the methods, conceptual frameworks, from the kinds of data that we look at, and also from the kinds of people who bring new ideas to the table… Speaking on one element of diversity, you are three successful women economists and social scientists, and I wanted to finish the podcast by asking you, how do we get more women into economics?

Forms of Domination in the Market: A Conversation with Elizabeth Anderson

Can employers wield dictatorial power over employees? Join us for a lively discussion between Mark Pennington (King’s College London) and Elizabeth Anderson (University of Michigan) on how power accumulates in the market, which institutions can ameliorate the problem, and how Philosophy, Politics and Economics (PPE) as a discipline helps us understand the human condition.

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The Guest

Elizabeth Anderson is the John Dewey Distinguished University Professor; John Rawls Collegiate Professor; Arthur F. Thurnau Professor and Department Chair in Philosophy at the University of Michigan.

Professor Elizabeth Anderson specializes in ethics, social and political philosophy, feminist theory, social epistemology, and the philosophy of economics and the social sciences. She is particularly interested in exploring the interactions of social science with moral and political theory, how we learn to improve our value judgments, the epistemic functions of emotions and democratic deliberation, and issues of race, gender, and equality. She is the author of Value in Ethics and Economics, The Imperative of Integration, and, most recently, Private Government: How Employers Rule Our Lives (And Why We Don’t Talk About It), as well as articles on value theory, the ethical limitations of markets, facts and values in social scientific research, feminist and social epistemology, racial integration and affirmative action, rational choice and social norms, democratic theory, egalitarianism, and the history of ethics (focusing on Kant, Mill, and Dewey).

Professor Anderson is currently working on a history of egalitarianism from the Levellers to the present. Professor Anderson is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and designed and was the first Director of the Program in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics at UM.

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1:10: How does it feel to be the recipient of a Genius award?

2:09: What is the ratio of women in major philosophy departments?

2:40: What do you plan to do with the MacArthur grant?

5:35: If I may, let’s discuss some of the things related to our work at the Centre, which is about governance arrangements, the relationship between formal and informal governance structures. And in your case you’ve done this interesting work on what I would describe as the governance of the employment relationship, and that work as I understand it really builds on your previous work thinking about what equality means or should mean.

9:05: You make some strong and provocative claims in the book arguing that some of the powers that employers have are equivalent to those you see in dictatorial regimes. I think at some point you say it’s almost as though the management of those firms resembles a communist dictatorship.

12:15: It really is challenging the way you list these kind of practices. Most people would have a gut reaction, that was certainly my sense when I read about this. But I was also thinking… how do you situate an understanding of the kind of abusive relationships that happen in these corporate environments with many other aspects of life? … I guess the argument would be, human beings aren’t always very humane. And this is true in all aspects of life. So if we’re thinking about the role of that private government plays in contributing to domination, we also need to have an understanding of the sources of domination outside of work. I didn’t feel you said all that much about that in the book.

16:39: Why on your account do you think that in this employment relationship we see these kinds of practices that lead to the domination of people?

19:25: Thinking about the arguments that economists would typically make in these situations, people would argue that if the employment relationship is really not working out for a worker or if there’s some kind of abuse… all that really matters is the existence of exit options. Is there competition operating in the labour market, etc.

24:35: Why do we not see greater movement to things like worker cooperatives?

27:27: Why do you take the argument that market forces themselves don’t lead to a sufficient treatment of workers? Is it basically that the labour market isn’t sufficiently competitive? Or is it a legal situation?

29:15: I think this is where you deliver a very powerful challenge to classical liberal or libertarian type arguments. Because people from that perspective are basically making arguments that we ought to focus on making constitutional limits on government power… but you’re actually saying that we should think about constitutional limitations on this private government power.

33:20: Do you see the solution just coming from the state itself through a democratic structure introducing regulation into these situations or do you see other vehicles?

37:22: How does co-determination address situations where part of the abuse is coming from other workers?

39:07: On the empirical side of this… you’re obviously quite sympathetic toward the German type co-determination model, but how do you compare the outcomes of that model with those of alternatives?

44:41: What I take from that is there isn’t a one size fits all model… this is very much a pragmatic search for a solution, and that there are multiple different types of approaches depending on the cultural context, which can interact with the functioning of the labour market.

45:46: It sounds like one reading of pragmatism could be an argument for a focus on quite decentralised arrangements to tackle these problems. One of the thinkers that inspires our work at this centre is Elinor Ostrom…. Although would the polycentric arrangements not be subject to some of the forms of domination you’re talking about?

47:22: So you’re not going to recommend that we roll out the German style model everywhere?

47:45: Do you think there are any insights from what you’re saying here about how we think about employment relationships outside the western context?

50:01: Thinking about your overall approach to political philosophy, what I really enjoy about your work is that you bring together insights from economics to inform political philosophy and vice versa. And that’s very much in what I would call a PPE tradition of research. Is that informing the kind of project you’ve been engaging with? How do you see the state of PPE research at this point in time?

Can We Trust the Polls? A Conversation With Roger Mortimore

In this special episode of the Governance Podcast, we're partnering with Andrew Blick of the KCL Centre for British Politics and Government to discuss all things public opinion with Roger Mortimore, Professor at King's College London and Director of Political Analysis at Ipsos Mori. As a leading social scientist behind the UK general election exit poll, Professor Mortimore takes us through the origins, mechanics and surprising realities of predicting election outcomes.

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The Guest

Roger Mortimore is Ipsos MORI’s Director of Political Analysis, and has worked in the MORI/Ipsos MORI political team since 1993. Since 2012 he has also been Professor of Public Opinion and Political Analysis in the department of political economy at King's College London.

Roger researches political and social attitudes, especially but not exclusively related to voting and elections; and he is responsible for the Political Monitor Aggregate, a data set consisting of more than half a million interviews stretching back to 1996. He is also the best point of contact for exploring any of Ipsos MORI’s historical archive of survey data, covering records of almost every survey which MORI and Ipsos MORI have conducted, on a wide range of subjects, since MORI was founded in 1969.  

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01:20: What is an exit poll?

5:51: You said that more money is spent on the one exit poll than is spent on polling through the whole campaign, which shows that the people paying for it obviously place a high premium on this but who are the customers? Who is paying for this?

7:28: In the end there is only one exit poll, or one publicly available exit poll that we know for certain exists.

8:12: In the context of the UK and what we call the 'first past the post' electoral system, what particular challenges does that system present as opposed to a proportional system?

10:20: What is success in the context of an exit poll?

14:12: I also suspect, for instance, that in 1997, whether you were 10, 20 seats out, when Labour were going to win a huge majority and that was pretty widely expected, doesn't really matter that much. It's in an era where, for the time being, results have been very tight and winning a workable majority is much more challenging. Suddenly you're expected to produce this pin point accuracy. 

15:46: If you have unlimited time, money, etc, what might be done differently?

19:53: General elections are obviously to a large extent about parties, so I want to ask about how this figures into what you're doing. If there are one or more parties that have not contested a general election before and they are now running a significant number of candidates, how do you deal with that?

28:47: So you must get to learn a lot about the geography and profile of the United Kingdom for this job.

30:25: There are historic examples of electoral pacts between parties. The most famous one is probably the 1918 election where Lloyd George and the liberals who followed him into his government, splitting from the Asquith liberals, had an arrangement with the conservatives that in predetermined seats they would not run candidates against each other. Were this to come up again in a future general election, how might an exit poll try and model that?

32:54: Again a similar question going back to the electoral system, we have a phenomenon of tactical voting... how do you account for it?

36:06: It'd be interesting to talk about how you came to be in this post. What was your path to who you are now?

37:40: When did exit polling start?

42:21: What actually happens on the ground on election day?

47:54: A word you mentioned a lot is 'computer.' I suppose in 1970 I suspect there was a computer of some kind involved, but even in the time you've been doing it there must have been some significant changes in the technology. Has it made it easier or has it just increased people's expectations?

49:21: Can you recommend a good book on exit polling for our listeners?

States as Laboratories for Policy Experimentation: In Conversation with Jenna Bednar

How do states learn how to solve problems? Does federalism create chaos or diffuse conflict in complex societies? Join us for this conversation between Hanna Kleider (King’s College London) and Jenna Bednar (University of Michigan) on the key challenges and benefits of multi-layered governance.

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The Guest

Jenna Bednar is the Edie N Goldenberg Endowed Director for the University of Michigan in Washington Program; Professor of Political Science, College of Literature, Science, and the Arts; Research Professor, Center for Political Studies and the Institute for Social Research at Michigan.

Professor Bednar’s research is on the analysis of institutions, focusing on the theoretical underpinnings of the stability of federal states.  Her most recent book, The Robust Federation demonstrates how complementary institutions maintain and adjust the distribution of authority between national and state governments. This book makes two theoretical contributions to the study of federalism’s design.  First, it shows that distributions suggested by a constitution mean nothing if the governments have no incentive to abide by them, and intergovernmental retaliation tends to be inefficient.  The book’s second contribution is that while no institutional safeguard is sufficient to improve the union’s prosperity, institutions work together to improve compliance with the distribution of authority, thereby boosting the union’s performance.

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1:08: The topic of federalism has gained a lot of attention, not only by academics but also by international institutions. Policymakers more generally often recommend federalism as a solution to conflict-ridden and heterogeneous societies. What do you think makes federalism so attractive in these contexts?

7:33: I really like this idea of retaliatory non-compliance by the states vis a vis the federal government. Can you give a recent example of how that would work?

11:50: You’re seeing this with climate change too, how states are taking the lead in challenging federal authorities.

16:41: Since we’re already talking about policy experimentation, that’s kind of an important part of federalism research. We think that state governments should take the lead in experimenting with new policies. What’s a good way federal governments can nudge the regional ones?

21:09: Going back to your work on the principles of federalism, you talk about institutional design, you don’t want to give one ideal federal system but you have some sort of design principles. If you were to give policy makers some advice on what those are, what would you tell them?

24:27: What do you think about this idea that if federations are linguistically homogenous, they will tend towards centralization? And if they’re heterogeneous, they’ll tend towards decentralization?

27:38: What’s the next stage in your research agenda?

30:08: How did you become interested in this area of research? Diversity, federalism, comparative institutions?

Post-Communism Derailed: A Conversation with Roger Schoenman

Thirty years since the fall of the Berlin Wall, how are post-communist nations changing their relationship with the west? Are right wing populists in Central Europe successfully proposing a new philosophy of governance? In this episode of the Governance Podcast, Roger Schoenman (UC Santa Cruz) sits down with Tomas Maltby (King’s College London) to discuss the ever-shifting political and economic trajectory of post-communist Europe. 

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The Guest

Roger Schoenman is an Associate Professor of Politics at UC Santa Cruz. Prof. Schoenman’s work explores three related topics: 1) the varieties of capitalism in the post-socialist countries, 2) the role of networks in political organization and 3) the conditions under which large and long-term political projects become possible.

Recent publications investigate the impact of party-competition on the politicization of the economy and institutional development. He has recently published a book titled Networks and Uncertainty in Europe’s Emerging Markets (Cambridge University Press 2014), that examines the impact of party systems and cleavages, business-elite origins, and the structure of business networks on institutional development in the evolving market democracies of the post-socialist area.

Current research examines the development of post-communist party systems after the financial crisis, the role of new media in mass protest and the politics of renewable energy across the European Union. Using computer assisted text analysis, he has also explored patterns of political debate in post-communist Europe.

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0:58: Let’s begin with your 2014 book Networks, Institutions and Europe’s Emerging Markets. Where did the interest and motivation come to study this topic and region? 

6:35: I think it’s very interesting that at least some of the literature suggests there is much more homogeneity among some of these countries and what your book has found is that there are actually significant differences in those varieties of capitalism within this region… In a country like Poland… one of the most successful examples of these post-communist countries in terms of developing these institutions… would you have a similar view of the country today given that we’ve had constitutional reform, attempts to change and pack the Supreme Court? 

12:48: Your more recent work has taken that regional and institutional focus and looked at how a series of regional governments have come to power and addressed these quite popular frustrations… they’ve come to power, they’ve said we need to do something about foreign direct investment, the value and redistribution of this wealth, and they’re also saying it has an impact on local businesses, local capital. How has FDI become a focal point of your research? 

15:40: So we have this puzzle, this real openness and real encouragement of FDI throughout the mid-late 1990s and through quite a lot of the 2000s, and there’s this change your article identifies around 2010 (not equally across the region) where suddenly there is this anti-globalisation discourse of the governing parties. 

21:45: It also seems that there are bursts of anti FDI policies and re-nationalisation of industries. In both Poland and Hungary, the years 2015 and 2016 seem to be marked by a matching of the rhetoric and the policy, but this seems to have dropped off in 2017-19. And you point out that some of those policies like bank and corporation taxes have been reversed. Why the reversal? 

28:01: It seems like the governing parties have rolled back some of their extreme positions to something more moderate but do you get the impression that they’ve managed to achieve a broader national consensus? 

30:46: It’s remarkable that both Fidecz and Law and Justice are both doing so well in the polls and at least in parliamentary elections—and it seems hard to envision a time when they’re not going to be in power… do you think the anti-FDI policy had an effect on local business that may have translated into economic benefits or electoral support? 

34:49: Particularly in Hungary, in the midst of the anti-FDI measures and rhetoric there was still a necessity to coopt FDI, and I’m thinking of this massive investment from Russia into the nuclear power plants back in 2014. More recently you see Orban saying the Chinese belt and road initiative is fully in harmony with Hungarian interests. It’s never been as extreme as to say all policies we’re going to enact are anti-FDI. 

40:23: On a more methodological point, how open have interviewees been in discussing these issues – network ties, political connections, both in private firms and government? In some ways this is something the governing parties want to project as a positive vision and yet in the past I can imagine there were controversies around the topic. 

What's Behind the London Housing Crisis? In Conversation with John Myers

Urban housing prices are skyrocketing in London and around the globe. What's behind the crisis and how do we fix it? In this episode of the Governance Podcast, John Myers of London YIMBY joins Sam DeCanio of King's College London for a discussion about the critical policy response we need to reduce costs and reinvigorate our cities.

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The Guest

John Myers is the Co-Founder of London YIMBY, a grassroots campaign to end the housing crisis with the support of local people.

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0:39: What is the London housing crisis and how bad is it?

2:39: Homes have not become more expensive or technologically different than they were 100 years ago—it’s bricks, mortar, the tech is the same. And at the same time, wages in London have been going up. Yet the housing situation is getting worse given both of these conditions. Why aren’t markets responding to these signals?

4:03: When you’re saying we’re not planning enough housing, these are political plans or market actors?

4:52: Is this problem especially acute in London relative to other cities?

5:28: London is a centre of productive capacity and you’re essentially disincentivizing people from moving here by making them face such commutes.

6:44: Do these problems have distributional effects as well? I imagine there would be certain economic groups that would be disproportionally harmed.

9:45: I suppose the natural question arises, how has this happened? Unlike these prior societies that you’ve mentioned, the UK is a democracy, we have elected officials that can make decisions that can influence the society. If the effects of the crisis are to replicate authoritarian political systems and these premodern societies, why hasn’t the political system responded to the crisis in a way that limits these distributional inequalities?

11:48: 2/3rds of the voters are home owners. I would also still think there are considerable numbers of voters that don’t own homes that are being harmed. Why aren’t they mobilising?

14:40: You mentioned that people are heavily invested in their homes. What would happen if the housing crisis were solved and the result of that was the construction of a large amount of houses that led to prices beginning to fall in areas like London?

17:51: Why isn’t that happening? Why aren’t we adding more urban density into London and building more vertically?

20:40: How would you respond to someone who was concerned that extra would alter the historical character of their neighborhood?

24:17: So if the companies that are constructing new homes are not as responsive to individual purchasers as before, who are they responsive to?

25:42: I wanted to ask you about foreign ownership of homes in London. One of the frequent explanations you hear for the crisis is that there are extremely wealthy global elites purchasing homes, often masked by limited liability corporations. To what extent is the crisis influenced by foreign property ownership?

28:33: You mentioned the estimates-- around 13 percent of London properties are owned by foreign purchasers, up to 50 percent of new sales in Central London.

32:06: Tell us a little bit about the role the green belt is playing in the London housing crisis.

36:09: Why couldn’t someone respond to this and say this is just the tradeoff for protecting nature? Aren’t there good reasons for preventing London from expanding beyond the current boundaries?

42:58: Given that there are all these problems, are there any simple solutions available to mitigate the crisis?

47:05: Which political actors do you think would be most suited to institute this kind of change? Would the Mayor have an easier time of it?

49:20: So it would actually be incredibly helpful if you could have a neighborhood do this, demonstrate that if you allow these smaller territorial units to have more control over housing permissions and planning, this actually could generate benefits?

Lessons from British Economic History: In Conversation with Gary Cox

What are the origins of constrained government? How did globalisation influence politics in Victorian Britain, and are there lessons for modern times? In this episode of the Governance Podcast, Gary Cox (Stanford) sits down with Anton Howes (King’s College London) to discuss his corpus of research in economic history and political economy from the 17^th through the 19^th centuries.

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The Guest

Gary W. Cox is the William Bennett Munro Professor of Political Science at Stanford University. In addition to numerous articles in the areas of legislative and electoral politics, Cox is author of The Efficient Secret (winner of the 1983 Samuel H Beer dissertation prize and the 2003 George H Hallett Award), co-author of Legislative Leviathan (winner of the 1993 Richard F Fenno Prize), author of Making Votes Count (winner of the 1998 Woodrow Wilson Foundation Award, the 1998 Luebbert Prize and the 2007 George H Hallett Award); and co-author of Setting the Agenda (winner of the 2006 Leon D. Epstein Book Award). His most recent book is Marketing Sovereign Promises (2016).  A former Guggenheim Fellow, Cox was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1996 and the National Academy of Sciences in 2005. He received his Ph.D. at the California Institute of Technology in 1983.

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2:38: There’s a book of yours from 1987, The Efficient Secret: The Cabinet and the Development of Political Parties in Victorian England. Could you summarize the thesis of that book?

10:37: You seem to have returned to that theme in your book on the US House of Representatives. Are you building up a corpus of case studies?

12:20: Sounds like things were particularly difficult in the eighteenth century to get any law through, which makes it more surprising that you do actually get a lot of members’ bills… you needed an act of Parliament to suspend limits on limited liability, to have things like canals, railways and so on.

12:52: The idea of Whig-Tory is really just alignments of which kids you’re sitting with in the cafeteria more than there being a party structure.

13:30: Did MPs run on party manifestos or personal manifestos?

16:47: Do you think that’s a structural result of the Great Reform Act?

20:13: I guess a striking thing there is the electorate changes as well. You’ve got the parties changing, but voters themselves are now seeing MPs not as these individuals to vote for, but as just a member of a party.

21:25: What are the effects of that process? With greater party control and party boss control, what are the effects on lobbying? What are the kinds of legislation that you start to see?

26:18: Countries with different constitutional processes like the US and UK still end up dealing with modern political questions rather similarly. They’re facing similar exogenous or external shocks to their political systems. What do you think are the sources of those external shocks across different countries?

27:46: Is that potentially similar to what happened in the Victorian era when you have that first big wave of globalisation? I’m interested in the fact that you said there’s this change affecting Britain between the 1830s-80s… then you’ve got this almost identical thing happening in the United States after the civil war from the 1860s through the 1890s. Is there something similar going on with exogenous shocks forcing these changes?

33:07: That’s a very interesting case, this idea that you’ve got this disenfranchised group who are seemingly enfranchised, or at least some of their representatives are enfranchised with the Reform Act, but it’s not quite coming to fruition.

40:23: Around when you came to Stanford, you joined your colleagues North and Weingast and started publishing in a similar vein to what they’d been doing. The classic paper was the 1989 one, Constitutions and Commitment. You’ve had quite a body of research building on that work.

56:11: I really like this idea of the state being split in half because it also explains why you have this idea of these ancient English liberties being maintained throughout this period, and really that’s just talking about the civil list being constrained whereas at the same time you have the extraordinary growth of the British state.  

Radical Solutions to Liberal Problems: In Conversation with Lea Ypi

Modern political life is fraught with difficult choices: cosmopolitanism or statism? Liberalism or socialism? Where do these debates stand and can political theorists help us choose? In this episode of the Governance Podcast, Carmen Pavel (King’s College London) sits down with Lea Ypi (LSE) for a conversation about the fundamental role of politics and radical democracy in current affairs.

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The Guest

Lea Ypi is Professor in Political Theory in the Government Department, London School of Economics, and Adjunct Associate Professor in Philosophy at the Research School of Social Sciences, Australian National University. Before joining the LSE, she was a Post-doctoral Prize Research Fellow at Nuffield College (Oxford) and a researcher at the European University Institute where she obtained her PhD.

She has degrees in Philosophy and Literature from the University of Rome, La Sapienza, and has held visiting and research positions at Sciences Po, the University of Frankfurt, the Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin, the Australian National University and the Italian Institute for Historical Studies.

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0:49: Global issues have become more salient in both public political discourse but also in political theory. You’ve made an important contribution with your book, Global Justice and Avant-Garde Political Agency (OUP 2011). I’d like to start by asking you some questions about your argument. I’m interested particularly in your contribution to a conversation that sees the role of the state as being outdated by current political problems and the evolution of political interactions at the international level. There’s one strong argument in the global justice literature that argues that states are obsolete forms of political association, and they’re inadequate at solving the problems of global injustice we’re confronted with. You argue against this position and defend statist cosmopolitanism.

6:27: How does your position in practice differ from a cosmopolitan position? Ultimately, you say the goal is to realize these global egalitarian principles.

7:26: Would you say that being a statist cosmopolitan makes a difference in terms of the time it might take to realise cosmopolitan justice? Or would you rather say that without states we couldn’t even get to the point where we realise cosmopolitan justice?

9:22: And I think this kind of argument reflects your particular view of the right way of doing political theory…. So how is your account of statist cosmopolitanism related to your view about the role of political theory?

14:00: It seems that you have a view of the political theorist as an agent with a distinctive contribution to political evaluation, political criticism and political debate where on the one hand the political theorist can provide some general principles or end points for reform but at the same time engage with the question of, how do we get from where we are to the principles we want to realise? … In your book with Jonathan White called The Meaning of Partisanship (OUP 2016), you discuss the foundational role parties play and ought to continue to play in modern democratic life. Can you tell us why you think parties are so irreplaceable?

20:39: Do you think there are costs associated with organising our political life around parties?

23:39: I think you take this point about public engagement as a political theorist very seriously as well. In your more recent work you’ve become more interested in reaching a wider audience as a political theorist and so you write in the popular press about contemporary issues in the UK and Europe. And I’m really interested in what your experience with that has been like. What are you learning as a political theorist?

25:57: One of the themes of your public engagement is the need to develop an alternative to liberalism. Can you tell us where contemporary liberalism fits in your view?

32:45: I think it’s very important to develop alternative visions of political society, both to test whether and why we value the kind of society we do, but also understand whether there are things wrong with it and change it. And so this kind of project I think is very valuable. It’s clear that there are problems within liberal society today that perhaps illustrate the tensions you talk about. And I think many self-professed liberals would say that these problems exist. What their reaction to these problems would be is not to say liberalism should die but to see those tensions as perhaps inherent in liberalism and try to work them out also within liberalism. It’s a much more gradualist approach to political reform. It sounds from the way you talk about recuperating this criticism of commercial society that you want to reject this gradualism… why move all the way to socialism as opposed to moving within the confines of existing political institutions?

37:37: Let’s pursue this question of the socialist alternative further. What would you say would characterise, not just at the level of principles, but in terms of actual institutions, what would be different in this alternative political world?

41:02: Socialism comes with a very distinctive vision, not just an end point in principles but also institutions and how they would be differently organised than current ones.

42:34: It sounds to me like you’re not persuaded by some socialist scepticism—and I mean scepticism in the following way –Jerry Cohen for example, who sees socialism as the right moral ideal, the best justified vision of political society… but he’s worried that we lack the institutional technology to realise that vision. Someone like Jerry Cohen became disenchanted particularly after the fall of communism that we might just lack the institutions to channel these radical forms of representation.

What's Wrong With Democracy? A Conversation with Larry Bartels

Larry Bartels and Chris Achen argue that we have a romanticised view of democracy. How is democracy letting us down and what can we do to reverse course? In this episode of the Governance Podcast, Sam DeCanio of CSGS sits down with Larry Bartels to discuss his book with Chris Achen, Democracy for Realists: Why Elections Do Not Produce Responsive Government.

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The Guest

Larry Bartels is the May Werthan Shayne Chair of Public Policy and Social Science at Vanderbilt University. His scholarship and teaching focus on public opinion, electoral politics, public policy, and political representation. His books include Unequal Democracy: The Political Economy of the New Gilded Age (2nd ed., Russell Sage Foundation and Princeton University Press, 2016) and Democracy for Realists: Why Elections Do Not Produce Responsive Government (with Christopher Achen, Princeton University Press, 2016). He is also the author of numerous scholarly articles and of occasional pieces in the New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, and other outlets. Bartels is a co-director of Vanderbilt’s Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions, a trustee of the Russell Sage Foundation, and a past vice president of the American Political Science Association. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and of the American Academy of Political and Social Science and a member of the National Academy of Sciences.

The Book

Democracy for Realists: Why Elections Do Not Produce Responsive Government was published by Princeton University Press in 2016.

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00:50: How did you come to write your book with Chris Achen?

2:17: What do you think are the key components of this romanticized vision of democracy? How would you characterize the folklore you’re responding to in the book?

2:54: What’s at stake with this depiction of democracy? What are some of the costs of adopting this depiction of democracy?

3:52: This is a fairly elitist depiction of democracy- not in the sense that you’re endorsing elite rule, but in terms of your understanding of how policy is actually drafted and implemented. You don’t see voters playing a very large role in the actual operation of contemporary democratic governance.

4:47: What is the evidence you use to critique this folk wisdom account of democracy?

8:59: I guess that’s an interesting example for two reasons: one is that political parties are typically seen as one of the vehicles that voters can use to come up with issue positions if they don’t have more detailed policy knowledge. But that seems to suggest that political parties may be able to manipulate preferences of voters in a way that is a top down model of opinion formation. This could have disturbing consequences for democratic theory and democratic responsiveness depending on the elites actually running the party.

11:20: At one level, the book describes problems with democratic representation that might occur with low information voters but the book also suggests that there also might be problems with voters that have large amounts of political information. Can you describe some of those problems?

13:03: Do you think that any proposals for direct democracy can help address some of these information problems – that is, involving voters through direct primaries, referenda or efforts to enhance democratic deliberations?

15:29: It strikes me that if democratic politics can be short circuited by voters’ poor understanding of causal relations between policies, when it comes to more technical situations where the linkage between a voter’s electoral decision and the consequences of that decision … is less clear or counterintuitive… it strikes me that that problem we see at this local level should be fairly concerning.

16:58: It seems as though complexity poses problems if electorates don’t have a causal understanding of issues. Although I guess the flipside to that question is whether elites making technocratic decisions themselves understand causal relationships in these issues.

18:28: One of the alternatives that academics have proposed for ensuring democratic responsiveness and accountability is what’s referred to as a ‘retrospective model’ of voting- the basic idea being that if the economy performs poorly, the incumbent party suffers in the next election cycle. What is the book’s argument about the potential shortcomings of retrospective voting?

21:06: One of the examples the book discusses involves shark attacks… How does that have implications for American presidential elections? What do they tell us about retrospective voting?

26:24: So the question is, whether or not voters’ understanding of politics is accurate enough to be able to discern whether the incumbent has done something that made them worse off… it strikes me that there is a second potential problem with retrospective voting. For retrospective voting to replace political parties whose policies are ineffectual… voters must have information about whether the other party they’re voting into power is proposing policies that will have better effects than the incumbent.

29:39: What are the solutions you propose to this problem?

32:04: I understand why information might create problems with voter selection of candidates, but why should we think that political elites are going to be better at selecting candidates or policies? What give you that faith?

33:35: It’s certainly the case that elites have specialized knowledge… but it is also the case that you can find well-intentioned elites that simply disagree about which technocratic policies are most efficient for dealing with social problems… the question then becomes, if elites that are more political sophisticated disagree among themselves… how do we know which elites should be selected to be in charge of policy decisions? Especially when the stakes are high?

37:17: I guess the concern here is … much of this book is a critique of how academics think about democracy. You are suggesting that professional political scientists… have adopted an incorrect and costly vision of what democracy entails… my concern is that if academics can make that kind of an error in their theoretical understanding of democracy as a system of governance, we should also expect to see similar errors occurring in their analysis of public policy.

42:18: Can you tell us a bit about your next project?

Brexit and the British Constitution: In Conversation with Vernon Bogdanor

How do we interpret the current political moment in Britain? Is Brexit changing Britain’s unwritten constitution? Tune in to our special Brexit edition of the Governance Podcast between Andrew Blick and Vernon Bogdanor.  This episode is co-hosted by the Centre for British Politics and Government at King’s College London.

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The Guest

Vernon Bogdanor is a Research Professor at the Institute for Contemporary British History at King’s College London and Professor of Politics at the New College of the Humanities. He is also Emeritus Professor of Politics and Government at the University of Oxford where he is an Emeritus Fellow of Brasenose College.

Since 1966, he has been Senior Tutor (1979–85 and 1996–97), Vice-Principal, and (in 2002–2003) Acting Principal at Brasenose College, Oxford. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, a Fellow of the British Academy and an Honorary Fellow of the Society for Advanced Legal Studies.

He has been a member of Council of the Hansard Society for Parliamentary Government, Specialist Adviser to the House of Lords Select Committee on the European Communities, Member of the Court of Essex University, adviser (as a member of the Council of Europe and American Bar Association delegations) to the governments of the Czech Republic, Hungary, Israel and Slovakia on constitutional and electoral reform, member of the Academic Panel of Local Authority Associations, member of the Hansard Society Commission on the Legislative Process, member of the UK Government delegation on Democratic Institutions in Central and Eastern Europe and Conference on the Protection of Minorities, Consultant to Independent Television News (ITN) on the General Election, member of the Economic and Social Research Council’s committee administering the ‘Whitehall’ programme, special adviser to the House of Commons Select Committee on the Public Services, member of the Swedish Constitutional Reform Project, member of the Advisory Group to the High Commissioner on National Minorities, adviser to the President of Trinidad on the Constitution of Trinidad, and member of the Economic and Social Research Council’s committee administering the devolution programme.

The Book

Beyond Brexit: Towards a British Constitution was published by Bloomsbury Press in 2019.

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1:12: Why did you write this book?

2:56: What is the main thesis of this book? What is the main impact of Brexit on the British Constitution?

5:08: Turning to the referendum, which as you say has become, since the issue of being in the EU came on to the agenda, a big part of our constitution and our way of taking decisions, as you show in earlier works you’ve written, we were actually arguing about whether or not we should introduce a referendum for a long while, as far as the late 19^th century… one important proponent of the referendum… wrote an important book on that in the 1920s. And one point he made was that although he was in favour a referendum… he said that “the referendum shall never be used in answer to abstract questions such as ‘are you in favour of a monarchy.’

8:09: What do you think is the reason for the political turbulence that has taken place? You could argue that two prime ministers now have seen their careers destroyed by the referendum. How do you account for that?

10:43: In your estimation do you think that David Cameron learned the lesson in 1975 and felt that he could replicate the same trick that Harold Wilson had pulled off then?

11:52: Moving on to your background, as I said in the introduction you’ve been talking about the constitution in the UK…for a long while… What first interested you in the constitution?

13:15: Who were your teachers? Who influenced you?

14:52: Would you describe yourself now as a political scientist, historian or something else?

15:36: You mentioned earlier this idea of the doctrine of parliamentary sovereignty – the theoretical and practical problems associated with it… and in your book you talk about the possibility that the UK will move towards a written constitution. I’m sensing you think that’s a good idea. Do you think it’s likely to happen?

18:01: In that kind of scenario, you could potentially see clashes between judges and elected politicians over who actually has the legitimacy to take these kind of decisions.

21:20: You mentioned earlier that one of the reasons for the political turbulence since the referendum was that the people … have a different view to most of the people in parliament and government.  Do you think there are ways to bring them back together?

23:45: We’re now on the brink of a new prime minister taking power. Do you see any reason to believe that, whoever that may be, will be more successful than the last two prime ministers were in managing the referendum and the European issue?

25:02: What are you working on next?

25:53: Is it fair to say that that period… the pre-first world war period, which was… a period of constitutional turbulence… is comparable to the one we’re in now?

Unipolarity and International Politics: In Conversation with Nuno Monteiro

When does political violence result in stability and order? Does realist international relations theory help us understand war and peace? Will the world remain unipolar for long? Join us for our latest conversation on the Governance Podcast between Samuel DeCanio (King’s College London) and Nuno Monteiro (Yale University).

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The Guest

Nuno P. Monteiro is Director of International Security Studies and Associate Professor of Political Science at Yale University. Dr. Monteiro’s research focuses on International Relations theory and security studies. He is the author of Theory of Unipolar Politics and Nuclear Politics: The Strategic Causes of Proliferation (with Alexandre Debs), published by Cambridge University Press in 2014 and 2017, respectively. His work has been printed in the Annual Review of Political Science, Critical Review, International Organization, International Security, International Theory, and Perspectives on Politics; and his commentary has appeared in numerous outlets including the Guardian, Foreign Affairs, the National Interest, and Project Syndicate. At Yale, Dr. Monteiro is also a research fellow at the Whitney and Betty MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies and a fellow of Branford College. He is originally from Portugal and earned his doctorate from the University of Chicago in 2009.

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00:52: How did you become interested in international politics?

01:42: Who influenced your thinking during your PhD at the University of Chicago?

03:28: John Mearsheimer falls under the general category of realism, and you identify to some degree with this label as well.

04:38: Are there themes in the classical realist tradition that you identify with? How do you place yourself in the umbrella of different realist IR approaches?

09:34: Your first book, Theory of Unipolar Politics, examines this concept of unipolarity. Can you give us an overview of the central argument?

15:25: I guess the elephant in the room for this argument would be the rise of China as both an economic and military power… how would you respond to someone who pointed to the rise of China as a counterpoint to your view?

21:01: I suppose the question that’s immediately posed by that is, if China isn’t trying to acquire a global power projection capability, why is it now investing resources in developing aircraft carriers?

27:04: That was your initial book project. You wrote on nuclear proliferation with Alex Debbs. Can you tell us a little bit about your current project?

35:10: In one sense I can see how this idea might have been influenced by the US’s counterinsurgency experience in Afghanistan and Iraq. But somebody might ask whether that limits the explanatory power of the argument because it’s not applicable to war between states. But it sounds like you’re offering a general framework that can incorporate both small scale insurgencies and war between states.

36:50: It almost seems as though it’s an account that would tell a more hopeful story about the possibilities for peace following wars between states.

37:52: I guess you’re suggesting that Waltz’s second level of analysis—the organizational level—matters in a way that perhaps a structural realist who’s emphasizing the role of anarchy in conflict between states might not necessarily take into account.

39:27: It does sound like you have some of the realist’s pessimism in that you’re suggesting that even if conflict among states becomes less frequent due to technological developments… insurgencies that exist don’t have simple tactical or strategic solutions, which I suppose is an accurate depiction of the world we’re currently in.

41:02: Couldn’t somebody say that what you’re suggesting is that we try to influence the organizational structure of insurgencies?

The Dark Side of Human Institutions: A Conversation with Sheilagh Ogilvie on the European Guilds

What role did guilds play in the economic development of Europe? Why do bad institutions persist throughout history? Join us for this conversation between Mark Pennington (King’s College London) and Sheilagh Ogilvie (University of Cambridge) for a discussion of her new 900-year history and economic analysis of the European Guilds.

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The Guest

Sheilagh Ogilvie is Professor of Economic History in Cambridge and a Fellow of the British Academy. She holds degrees from the University of St Andrews (1979), Cambridge (1985), and Chicago (1992). She has been successively Lecturer (1989), Reader (2000), and Professor of Economic History (2004) in the Faculty of Economics at the University of Cambridge.She is the author of State Corporatism and Proto-Industry (Cambridge, 1997), Women, Markets and Social Capital in Early Modern Germany (Oxford, 2003), Institutions and European Trade: Merchant Guilds, 1000-1800 (Cambridge, 2011) and the editor of European Proto-Industrialization (Cambridge, 1996), Germany: A New Social and Economic History (3 vols, London, 1996/2003), and Revolution des Fleißes, Revolution des Konsums? (Ostfildern, 2015). She has published journal articles on institutions and economic development, the economics of guilds, merchants, rural communities, serfdom, consumption, retailing, occupational structure, demography, proto-industry, banking, female labour force participation, regulation, the growth of the state, and social capital.

She is the winner of the Gyorgy Ranki Prize (1999), the Anton Gindeley Prize (2004), the René Kuczynski Prize (2004), and the Stanley Z. Pech Prize (2008). She has been the director of research projects on “Social Structure in Bohemia, 1500-1750” (British Academy, 2001-03), “Economy, Gender, and Social Capital in the German Demographic Transition” (Leverhulme Trust, 2005-07), and “Human Well-Being and the ‘Industrious Revolution’: Consumption, Gender and Social Capital in a German Developing Economy, 1600-1900” (ESRC, 2008-12). She held a British Academy/Wolfson Research Professorship (2013-16), during which she explored the relationship between human capital and long-term economic growth. Her book on the economics of guilds was published with Princeton University Press in March 2019.

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1:03: Sheilagh, why have you decided to bring your work together in a volume of this kind?

4:13: How would you define a guild? What are the key features of such an organisation?

8:40: The title of the book is The European Guilds: An Economic Analysis. Economists often disagree about things. One of the things they disagree about is the efficiency properties of these guilds. Some would argue that these guilds played an important function – they were efficiency enhancing, they might have been necessary for growth. I know that’s not a view that you hold. But could you give us an indication of what those arguments are?

14:22: These are basically arguments which are suggesting that some kind of market failures arise in these situations, and you have an institutional response to address the market failure. In this instance the guild is seen as the institutional mechanism to solve it.

15:32: Your view as I understand it is very much that guilds should be seen as rent seeking institutions which were actually seeking exclusive privileges for the members – and rather than solving a market failure, they essentially create a different sort of failure, which is that certain people are excluded from markets, there’s a lack of competition, you actually don’t get the quality control or professional certification that you might have gotten from an alternative institution. Is that a fair summary of your view?

20:14: So this is saying that guilds are about distributional matters; they’re institutions that are quite conflictual in terms of grappling with a part of the pie rather than increasing the size of the overall pie.

20:56: Can you say a bit more about the role of the state in your particular theory? Some of the work in this area that’s focused on guilds from a rosier viewpoint often depicts them as a kind of bottom-up private order institution that arises spontaneously to solve an efficiency problem. Whereas your view suggests that these institutions were embedded in political structures of power and authority which were used for these distributional purposes. Why do some people hold that rosier view?

26:45: I think in your first book you used the term ‘state corporatism.’ Would you describe guilds as corporatist institutions? They’re a kind of negotiation between a semi private organization and the state?

27:49: Given that you subscribe more to this view of guilds as rent-seeking or privilege-seeking organisations as opposed to efficiency enhancing ones, could you describe the ways in which guilds reduced efficiency?

36:02: Reading your account, this is quite a damning indictment of these institutions. There really is evidence of rent seeking—the scale of these markups is at a level where… how could anybody think that they have any beneficial properties? I guess the contrary view is that, OK, from today’s point of view, these were inefficient practices. But if you look at the context at the time, what was the alternative to providing the kind of mechanisms that would address market failures?

43:39: So in your view, you didn’t need guilds to address the kind of training market failures. What about asymmetrical information and quality controls? Did you find evidence of alternative mechanisms to deal with those?

49:41: This reminds me of a conversation I had with Barry Weingast – his argument is, yes, many of these kind of restrictions, when looked at through today’s lens, we would see them as inefficient and would want to get rid of them. But you have a slightly different take on them if you realize that the alternative might not be a free market type situation—it might actually be one where… you don’t have a market at all because you have societies embroiled in violence. And the various restrictions and privileges at least provide some rudiments of peace and order in a context where the alternative would be something worse than that… do you see cases where states seem to be able to avoid violence without having guild privileges or some of these distributional deals?

58:00: Why did guild institutions decline? As I understand your argument about why they persisted for so long, it’s basically a kind of public choice, rent seeking argument, which says that you’ve got relatively small organised groups…facilitated by public authorities through these corporatist deals, they gain privileges which are inefficient, but the reason why you don’t have …people challenging that is either because they’re politically disenfranchised or they face a huge collective action problem… If you take that kind of explanation, it implies that those privileges would be hard to break down.

01:06: I understand it’s a difficult question, but …I understand the explanation you’re giving there is a kind of accidental one. That is, by accident some factors come together and then we’re able to break free of guilds. I guess that’s not an unsatisfactory explanation in some ways, but I was wondering if you’ve thought of more positive explanations… I’m thinking of Deirdre McCloskey’s work on why we have the industrial revolution, and that’s a more ideas-based explanation…. Do you have any sympathy with that kind of view?

01:12: I want to ask you about a theme closely related with our research centre, and that’s thinking about the relationship between informal and formal institutions and how that can sometimes go wrong… there’s a tendency to see community as providing certain kinds of services in a singularly romantic view rather than seeing it as double edged, where you can recognize that there’s a positive side to traders getting together but at the same time recognize the dark side- the exclusion as the flipside of community.

Morality in Bureaucracy: In Conversation with Bernardo Zacka

What do the working conditions of street-level bureaucrats tell us about the nature of democratic governance? What new moral questions do we start asking when political theorists go into the field? Join us for the latest episode of the Governance Podcast on Bernardo Zacka's (MIT) new book: When the State Meets the Street: Public Service and Moral Agency.

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The Guest

Bernardo Zacka is an Assistant Professor of political science at MIT. He is a political theorist with an interest in ethnographic methods. His research focuses on the normative challenges that arise in the course of public policy implementation. He is interested in understanding how the organizational environment in which public officials are situated affects their capacity to operate as sound and balanced moral agents. Zacka is also interested, more broadly, in normative political theory, architecture and urbanism, and 20th century European political thought.

Zacka’s first book, When the State Meets the Street: Public Service and Moral Agency, was published by Harvard University Press in 2017. It explores the everyday moral lives of the frontline public workers, or “street-level bureaucrats”, who act as intermediaries between citizens and the state. It won the 2018 Charles Taylor book award from the Interpretive Methodologies and Methods group of the American Political Science Association, and it builds on Zacka’s doctoral dissertation, which won the 2015 Robert Noxon Toppan prize for the best dissertation on a subject of political science at Harvard University.

Prior to joining MIT, Zacka was a junior research fellow at Christ’s College, Cambridge and a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Ethics in Society at Stanford. He holds a B.S. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from MIT (2005), and received his Ph.D. from the Department of Government at Harvard University in 2015.

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0:32: What drove you to write this book and what’s the overarching argument?

3:20: The empirical focus of the book is on the street level bureaucrats, the front-line workers. Who are those people?

6:02: Why do street level bureaucrats determine the way you interact with the state?

8:04: What is the size of street level bureaucracy? How many people are you talking about?

12:07: You undertook some original ethnography inside a bureau. Can you tell us a bit about that experience?

15:54: How did the other bureau workers respond to you, knowing you were a researcher?

17:57: Your background first and foremost is as a political theorist. How do ethnography and political theory fit together?

20:49: I can’t help but think of Rawls there—the most influential political theory work of the second half of the 20^th century – the Theory of Justice is a book in which there are no implementation problems whatsoever. The state just makes decisions and they’re implemented without difficulty.

21:59: Let’s think about some of the moral dilemmas that street level bureaucrats encounter. In the book you describe three pathologies of street level bureaucracy… You describe how street level bureaucrats take on a role of indifference, a role as a caregiver, and a role as an enforcer. What are those three roles and how do they emerge?

26:52: There are pressures of resources, of time, of money, on the street level bureaucrats. There’s psychological pressure as well. My personal reaction is that the bureaucrats’ responses seem perfectly reasonable. They’re how I would react in those situations.

29:56: Another striking thing is that these people aren’t well paid. The bureaucrats themselves are struggling.

31:16: There’s also ambiguity at the high level. You describe the overall manager of the organization who’s got a particular view of how the centre should be run… her aim was to create a welcoming environment different to other governmental agencies.

34:25: This description of the importance of the personal in public service delivery, and how people’s personal decisions may determine people’s outcomes made me think of another literature which you don’t really discuss in the book but is very present at the moment – and that’s the work on behavioural economics…. For example, the time of day you see a judge can determine the sentence you receive. Is that complementary to what you’re doing?

37:24: That raises one of the boldest claims in the book. You write that street level bureaucracy erodes and truncates the moral responsibilities of the workers. I think later in the book you may be less bold in the claim, but I wonder, would the bureaucrats and clients you met with agree with that?

41:52: What do you advocate we change in the system to help prevent these moral distortions at the street level?

44:45: This is one of the big questions for me reading the book—at times you’re advocating a moral craft.

48:34: As a political theorist, the final set of questions must relate to how this should make us think about democracy and the state.

Don't Look for Big Pictures: In Conversation with Jon Elster

What can social scientists tell us about the world? How do psychology and history enrich economics? In this episode of the Governance Podcast, Jon Elster sits down with Mark Pennington to discuss the essential tasks and limitations of social science.

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The Guest

Jon Elster is the Robert K. Merton Professor of the Social Sciences at Columbia University. Before coming to Columbia, he taught in Paris, Oslo and Chicago. His publications include Ulysses and the Sirens (1979), Sour Grapes (1983), Making Sense of Marx (1985), The Cement of Society (1989), Solomonic Judgements (1989), Nuts and Bolts for the Social Sciences (1989), Local Justice (1992) and Political Psychology (1993). His research interests include the theory of rational choice, the theory of distributive justice and the history of social thought (Marx and Tocqueville). He is currently working on a comparative study of constitution-making processes from the Federal Convention to the present and on a study of retroactive justice in countries that have recently emerged from authoritarian or totalitarian rule. Research interests include Theory of Rational Choice and the Theory of Distributive Justice.

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0:57: You’re giving a talk at our Centre called ‘Emotions in History.’ Can you explain the argument?

3:54: A lot of your work in the past has been engaged with rational choice models or economic models applied to various social phenomena in one form or another. You’re now mentioning the role of psychology. What role should psychology play in relation to the kind of rationality-oriented work you’ve done in the past?

6:04: So you’re saying that common sense rationality can play a role in understanding political institutions or economic institutions, or individual behaviour within them?

7:38: You say that about some of the Chicago-school understandings of institutions which imply that the institutions that are chosen are efficient in some sense—because if they weren’t, rational agents would change them. Then it’s hard to account for any sort of institutional change because equilibrium is built into the model.

8:50: If we don’t explain the origin of institutions through a rational choice model, or at least if that model has quite serious limitations, is there any way in which a model that focuses on the psychological dimension or the emotional dimension provides a better explanation?

10:38: Would your view of institutions be more along the kind of model that recognizes that institutions are often the products of accidents that arise from conjunctions of all kinds of eventualities that really don’t necessarily have more universal implications?

11:32: What can we say—or can we say anything—about whether certain kinds of institutions have beneficial properties relative to other kinds of institutions?

13:54: If we go back to this role of emotion: if emotion is an important factor in shaping institutions, the way they’re formed and perhaps even the way they persist, that strikes me to imply that… people, because of emotion, create certain institutional structures that could be inefficient or malfunction in various ways…

16:49: What I was wondering was whether you were working with a model where emotional choice influences the way in which institutions are originally created, but then within that set of rules, is that the level at which a more rational choice type model kicks in? Or is it emotions all the way down?

18:26: I want to come to some of what you’ve written on the role of prediction within social science… but what I take from what you’ve just said there about the importance of specific cases and not generalizing too much is that you would be against the idea that even if we recognize the role of emotions in forming institutions, we can have a notion of institutional design to deal with the effects of emotional decision making …

21:52: Would it be fair to say that we might not know necessarily what are good decisions – certainly not in some optimizing sense, but can we say about what might be bad decisions?

23:23: So the next question I wanted to ask you is, given the role of indeterminacy, can you say a bit more about what you think are the excessive ambitions of contemporary social science? This is a theme that you’ve developed in your recent work: a lot of social science is about prediction… much of what you’re saying is pushing back against that.

26:50: If prediction is limited, can we nevertheless have a model of social science which is based on understanding in very context-specific circumstances?

28:38: I think that one of the interesting things to think about regarding uncertainty is that there are different views within political economy about this. As I understand, Keynes’ view was that uncertainty was very much with us and that the role of statecraft is to manage that uncertainty in a creative way…

30:25: Can we speak a little more about the importance of history? One of the pieces that some of our students read in one of our courses on political economy has some criticisms that you made of the analytic narrative model in political economy—and that’s often an attempt to use rational choice type models to understand particular historical episodes. And the argument you made there, as I understand it, is that they are sort of retrofit models. People are picking the history to fit the rational choice type explanation.

34:46: So that sounds very much to be part of what I take of what you’re saying here, which is that there needs to be a lot more humility from various analysts about what they claim for their particular models, given the nature of the subject matter.

36:28: One of the authors we’re studying at our research centre is Elinor Ostrom and her account of common pool resource management. She is famous for challenging some of the implications that came from one simple model of rational choice: the idea that there is a commons problem—that whenever you don’t have ownership rights of some kind, you have a tragedy of the commons.

40:23: Earlier, you were reflecting on areas where you think you’ve been wrong over what’s been a very distinguished career…

42:41: One of the areas where you’ve applied this notion is giving micro-foundations to Marxist-style explanations. You’re one of the influencers behind the analytical Marxist movement. Did that turn out to be a fruitful research paradigm or not?

43:48: In what sense does the early part of Marx remain with us? What’s the residual power of the insight?

46:28: Are there any other areas you’d like to talk about where you think what you were writing about in the past wasn’t right?

47:40: What are you working on at the moment?

The Erosion of American Governance: In Conversation with Stephen Skowronek

Stephen Skowronek (Yale) and Karen Orren (UCLA) argue that the institutional fabric of American government is crumbling. Why is this happening? Is the American political system facing an unsolvable predicament? Tune in to the latest episode of the Governance Podcast featuring Samuel DeCanio (King's College London) and Stephen Skowronek.

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The Guest

Stephen Skowronek is the Pelatiah Perit Professor of Political and Social Science at Yale University. He has been a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and has held the Chair in American Civilization at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris. His research concerns American national institutions and American political history. His publications include Building a New American State: The Expansion of National Administrative Capacities, 1877-1920 (1982), The Politics Presidents Make: Leadership from John Adams to Bill Clinton, (1997), The Search for American Political Development (2004, with Karen Orren), and Presidential Leadership in Political Time: Reprise and Reappraisal (2008). Among other activities, he was co-founder of the journal Studies in American Political Development, which he edited between 1986 and 2007, and he provided the episode structure and thematic content for the PBS miniseries: The American President (Kunhardt Productions).

About The Book

Policy is government’s ready response to changing times, the key to its successful adaptation. It tackles problems as they arise, from foreign relations and economic affairs to race relations and family affairs. Karen Orren and Stephen Skowronek take a closer look at this well-known reality of modern governance. In The Policy State they point out that policy is not the only way in which America was governed historically, and they describe the transformation that occurred as policy took over more and more of the work of government, emerging as the raison d’être of the state’s operation.

Rather than analyze individual policies to document this change, Orren and Skowronek examine policy’s effect on legal rights and the formal structure of policy-making authority. Rights and structure are the principal elements of government that historically constrained policy and protected other forms of rule. The authors assess the emergence of a new “policy state,” in which rights and structure shed their distinctive characteristics and take on the attributes of policy.

Orren and Skowronek address the political controversies swirling around American government as a consequence of policy’s expanded domain. On the one hand, the policy state has rendered government more flexible, responsive, and inclusive. On the other, it has mangled government’s form, polarized its politics, and sowed deep distrust of its institutions. The policy state frames an American predicament: policy has eroded the foundations of government, even as the policy imperative pushes us ever forward, into an uncertain future.

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0:58: How did you become interested in the historical study of American politics?

3:49: When you initially went to graduate school as a political theorist, were there specific theorists you were interested in studying?

5:18: Do you remember when Theda Skochpol wrote States and Social Revolutions? She was also one of the editors of Bringing the State Back In, published in 1995… Do you remember when that volume came out? How did people view it in political science at the time?

6:40: What led you to write the Policy State?

10:00: Are the conflicts over Obamacare emblematic of the policy state?

11:11: In a certain way you see the form of governance that the policy state is displacing is a stable administrative organization?

13:49: Why do you think this transition to the policy state happened?

18:01: On the one hand, it’s good that rights are expanding, more people have access to them, but do you see any potential downsides to this?

20:05: Why couldn’t a skeptic just respond and say what you’re describing is a responsive, democratic polity?

21:57: Do you see any problems with the expansion of policy, the fact that so many decisions are influenced by so many different actors, do you see that as a problem for democratic legitimacy?

23:40: Do you see any solutions to this problem?

28:54: Given that diagnosis of the contemporary American political scene, do you have any predictions about what’s in course?

31:35: Is deliberative democracy a practical solution to the rise of the policy state?

32:37: Where is your research going next?