Evaluation

 

The purpose of creating a professional review and decentralizing government was to increase the rate of innovation. As innovation is measured against the true but unknown common weal the first question to consider is whether the proposed design would improve the estimate of the common weal.

The criterion for a good estimate of the common weal is that it have the properties of general benefits, consistency and efficiency. As all levels of government would be subject to a professional review, such reviews would provide voters with easy to understand measures of political performance. But the extent that the professional review creates incentives for elected and appointed governmental officials depends on the political organization of towns. Under the proposed design, towns in promoting compatible lifestyles would tend to become relatively homogeneous and develop a strong sense of community. Hence, each town would organize politically in order to promote its common interests. Operational informational policy would make it much easier for politically active towns to monitor officials in higher levels of government. Because publicly funded elections would deny incumbents an overwhelming advantage over challengers, incumbents would have very strong incentives to avoid professional reviews.

Strong monitoring of politicians changes the nature of political factions trying to influence the political process through influence pedaling. As all elections would be publicly funded, factions would have few legal financial inducements for politicians. They would promote their interests by analytically demonstrating that their proposals had the properties of general benefits, consistency and efficiency while those of their opponents lacked the requisite properties. Thus an astute politician would use the rivalry of factions to ensure that his proposals would pass a professional review.

Greater decentralization would increase the property of general benefits because the proposed organization promotes homogeneity within political units and heterogeneity among political units. With homogeneous interests in subordinate governments the general benefits criterion is much easier to satisfy than the same criterion on legislation at the federal level. This is especially true at the level of the towns which were designed to promote lifestyle issues. To the extent that towns promote compatible lifestyles then promoting the lifestyle of the majority would have general benefits in most cases.

In as much as consistency has up to now not been considered a desirable property of government the imposition of a consistency criteria in the profession review would lead to more consistent estimates of the common weal than currently.

The driving force for efficiency in the decentralized government would be obtained more from competition between political units than the professional review. Because decentralization of governmental tasks places them in a more competitive political environment, efficiency considerations increase with decentralization. And the organization of elections and the prerelease of cost data on governmental services would make voters very concerned if their costs for government services were out of line with their competitors.

The proposed organization of a more decentralized government would improve the estimate of the common weal. This in itself would improve the rate of governmental innovation. The second aspect of improving innovation is improving the implementation strategy for innovation. In the proposed design the implementation strategy is made much more systematic than currently.

In the proposed strategy the federal government assumes the research and development strategy for innovation for all subordinate governments. The federal government through scientific information policy and grants for research promotes discoveries leading to governmental innovation. Where possible the federal government conducts experiments as the basis for innovation. For this governmental task the implementation strategy would become a separation strategy. However, as many aspects of social policy are not amenable to systematic experimentation, the empirical knowledge would be gained by the natural variation in objectives and policies of subordinate governments. The federal government would systematically analyze these variations and would offer incentives for pilot studies which explore new alternatives.

The proposed design would improve governmental innovation for three reasons. First, senators responsible for the federal research and development tasks would campaigning for reelection by extolling the merits of the innovations they had sponsored. In this regard the separation of federal research and development efforts from the operational control by subordinate governments creates a check on such senators. For a senator to claim an innovation, subordinate governments would have to adopt these potential innovations. Given the more competitive environments of subordinate governments, this would put a tremendous stress in innovation on cost effectiveness. But since Senators would have a six year reelection cycle, they would have a long enough planning horizon to accomplish significant improvements.

Second, the design and freedom of location encourages the heterogeneity between subordinate governments at each level. This would encourage diversity between governmental ends and means. Differences among ends and among means would be tested simultaneously rather than sequentially. Thus innovation would be accelerated because of the greater diversity between subordinate governments.

Third, the cost of mistakes would be decreased by greater decentralization. In selecting objectives and policies governments at all levels frequently make grave mistakes. Because of the proliferation of professional talent it is assumed that the states and metropolitan governments would have access to competent experts as well as the federal government. Thus it is assumed that the federal government would not have superior talent. Currently when the federal government makes a mistake, it is a colossal mistake. The greater diversity made possible by greater decentralization would mean that major mistakes would generally be localized to the subordinate government that made them.

Notes and References 9