I’ve been reading far too much forced rationalization of “maybe tariffs aren’t actually that bad” and “see, Hungary got rid of Orban after 16 years of a state media monopoly and broad authoritarianism, so global and local Democracy is perfectly healthy”, so I thought I would spend an entire post explaining why tariffs and authortarianism are bad. But then I thought it might be better to not write the most obvious post entirely redundant with everything every good economist has ever written.
Instead, let’s talk about a core element of US political economy that I got completely, 100% wrong for the last 20 years.
In my (and, I suspect, most people’s) public choice model of our democratic republic, election officials were always modeled as power and vote maximizing. It never occurred to me, until the last few years, that those outcomes might ever be mutually exclusive. There’s been no shortage of handwringing over Congress abdicating it’s authority, most notably the power of the purse, to the executive branch. For all that posting and scolding, I don’t recall anyone saying why Congress has abdicated that power.
The overly simplistic explation is that vote maximization dominates power maximization in the utility functions of most legislators. The thing about power is that it makes it that much harder to dodge responsibility and, in turn, blame. So much of politics depends on the currency of credit and blame. Abdicating power may impoverish you of credit, but it also insulates you from blame. If incumbency, name recognition, and partisan brand identity are sufficient to carry your next election, power brings more risk than opportunity. Better to hide behind gridlock while a second term executive branch does whatever it pleases.
So yeah, I never in a million years expected a whole branch of elected US representatives to become uninterested in their own political power. It was anathema to how I conceived of the individuals selected into running for office and their objective functions. But here we are. I was wrong. I wonder what I’ll be wrong about next?
Economist Writing Every Day 