Another dispatch from Fred Thompson:
Writing in The
New York Times, Duke University Professor Aaron Chatterji slams the
states’ performance as “laboratories
of democracy,” arguing that they look ever less likely to generate the innovative
policies we need to address “the grand challenges of the day.”
IMHO Chatterji is talking out of his hat. Clearly, he
doesn’t know much about the scope of state policy experiments. Moreover, I
think he misunderstands what Louis Brandeis meant by laboratories of democracy.
Frankly, I am
interested in how state policies affect outcomes. This kind of learning is
relevant to state practice and can often be extrapolated to the federal level.
That states adopt different policies and practices makes it possible for us to
suss out how they work. For example, much of what we know about the effects of
minimum-wage policies comes from the study of interstate variations in minimum-wage
levels and their consequences for employment, prices, etc. In fact, my research
relies heavily on interstate policy differences.
However, policy learning wasn’t
Brandeis’ main concern when he identified the states as laboratories of
democracy. His project was the democratic process itself. Like John Dewey, Brandeis wanted to create governing
institutions that would promote dialogue and social learning and, thereby,
individual intelligence, empathy, and “civic courage,” which he believed could
develop only where discussion and responsibility are present in politics and
everyday life. He also believed that rigid hierarchies, combined with excess
size retarded progress by repressing dialogue and learning. State and local
governments were the natural venues for his project. As Oregon Professor Gerry Berk explained:
Like the populists, [Brandeis] stressed the effects of
corruption and power on the rise of big business… Like the progressives, [he]
stressed the dynamic nature of applied science in modern industry…. The
reformer’s task, Brandeis thought, was to weave these strands together into a
coherent vision of the future. In this narrative, republican ends (equality,
citizenship, and democracy) would be realized through scientific means
(experimentation, measurement, and evaluation). But scientific ends
(efficiency, invention, and technical mastery) would also be realized by
republican means (deliberation, individual development, and honorable rivalry).
This was the republican experimentalist solution to the conflict between the
populist and progressive positions.
Berk argues that
Brandeis’ agenda reached its peak during the 1920s via the associational
movement, but with the possible exception of the Department of Agriculture’s
system of cooperative extension, that movement is dead and largely forgotten.
The view of the states
as policy laboratories, challenged by Chatterji, owes more to journalist David
Osborne’s highly publicized 1988 book, Laboratories
of Democracy, than to
Brandeis. And, indeed, in the era preceding the Great Recession, the states were
clearly the main source of public-policy innovation in America. While
Washington was mired in gridlock, the states tackled tough problems across a
whole range of policy areas. For example, Washington copied the states on
welfare and Obama-care is largely Massachusetts’ Romney-care writ large.
The Great Recession
hammered the states hard. As a result one very careful observer of state
policy, Alan Ehrenhalt, Governing magazine’s senior editor,
concluded that: “it may be unrealistic to consider states major innovators
in public policy any time in this decade … the ‘laboratories of democracy’ will
be closed, or at least inactive, for quite a while.” But, by May 2013, only a few years later, he
was forced to eat his words, announcing that: “there is no denying that the past few years
have seen extraordinary events in state government…; the states have been
innovating. Some of them have been innovating like mad.”
Ehrenhalt cited three
major innovations in his article: California’s Proposition 2, which amends the state
constitution to require the Governor to deal with revenue volatility by
smoothing state spending, making mid-term spending and revenue targets part of
the state budget process, requiring the state to set aside revenues each year –
for 15 years – to pay down specified state liabilities, and substantially
revising the rules governing the state’s rainy day fund; Wisconsin’s rewriting
of its labor compact with public employees; and Kansas’s cockeyed decision to
phase out the state income tax. But he could have just as easily cited state
leadership on gay-marriage, state carbon-tax and marketable emissions rights
schemes, or Oregon’s experimentation with weight-use-mile commercial-fuel taxes
and GPS monitoring of highway usage. State policy innovation is not simply a
matter of cutting taxes and spending, redirection of education funds to private
or charter schools, or even repudiating policies handed down from Washington.
It is also a matter of boosting minimum wages and using IT to improve service
quality at DMV offices and to reduce tax evasion and even over payments. It is
widespread and protean.
Brandeis’ ideal may
have never been realized, but state level policy experimentation remains alive
and well. The important fact remains: one need not like a policy experiment to
learn from it.
