Sense, Sound and Fury in Public Choice

When can we expect good sense to be the outcome of political contestation? Amidst much noise, the Hegelian dialectic seems over-optimistic; the Marxian variant overtaken by history, present day network theorists ambivalent on structure, Professor Moore and his ‘public value’ notwithstanding. I look to the dogs for enlightenment.

Sitting on the sidelines, attempting to understand what is now fashionably referred to as the discourse of politics and public management, one cannot but be aware that the voices of ‘those set in authority above us’ are sometimes more convincing, sometimes less, sometimes apparently triumphant, at other times intent upon self-defence. I here explore the idea that advancing the public good or what is now referred to as increasing public value, is a risky business. From the sidelines such lofty notions are about making sense of the many difficult things that seem to crop up to disturb our neighbourly or worldly complacency. Making sense is the business of politics. Making sense work out in practice is the business of public management. These are overlapping spheres with plenty of room for ‘things’ to go wrong, evoking the old adage ‘You win some, you loose some’, bringing to mind ‘Where there is risk there will blame’. Regardless of the issues, success, risk and blame are close bedfellows. Can we expect good sense to prevail?

Prime Minister’s Question Time in the UK House of Commons is well known as an occasion for gladiatorial exchanges between PM and Leader of the Opposition. Others are permitted to exercise their oratorical skills at each other’s expense on the same occasion, but exchange between PM and Leader of the Opposition is the main attraction. But what does it amount to? It is an event of sound and fury, sometimes humour, but seldom light. Citizen participants in the village assembly in Botswana that I experienced many years ago employed high oratorical skills but would have been astonished at the manner or rather, to them, bad manners of the exchange in the self-styled mother of parliaments. For village elders, contestation might well be required but the main task was to interpret and elucidate the current public interest and find sensible solutions to social problems. Their task they saw as finding the form of words that would capture the sense of the situation that would work for them and gain support; what the French would term ‘Le mot juste’. Such support could lead to action. What, I ask myself, governs the manner of exchanges in such arena and how is it that in some occasions or contexts they are so apparently more about noise than sense? En route to an answer I come across a paradox. Rhetoric is most extravagant when the initiator is actually most constrained, least so when least constrained.

My underlying question is about the workings of democracy when confronted by the big issues of our day. Issues such as climate change, terrorism or banking crises on a world scale or, on the domestic scene, substance misuse and gang warfare, do not seem, on the face of it, to lend themselves to polarised argumentation. They are complex. There is room for serious doubts about present interpretations of cause and effect. Current remedies have obvious shortcomings. Even if positions can be taken for or against particular propositions it is not clear how their reconciliation into something sensible can be expected to emerge from the heat of parliamentary debate. What I want to explore here is the possibility that the development of new understandings out of old arguments is more likely to take place out of the heat, in draughty corridors, bars, or outwith the institution entirely, amongst peripheral members or networks of loosely linked concerned citizens. This is an issue that has been widely explored by Rod Rhodes[1], amongst others, but without clear resolution.

If I may be permitted a parallel that I know would be quite unacceptable in many cultures, my opening observation about extravagance actually came to me while observing dogs. Two dogs on leads will tear at each other in full voice, to their owners’ consternation but without damage to each other – given that their owners have strong right arms. One dog on a lead and another free will put a note of anxiety into the barks of the tethered animal and, in probability, an air of indifference in the free. Two dogs free and un-pestered by their owners will circle each other with sniffs and exchanged signals. A wide repertoire of possible outcomes can follow but not usually involving loss of hair.

To draw a parallel with the House of Commons requires an extension of the usual anthropological assertion that institutions frame the thought patterns that are permitted within social settings. The extension is this: under constraint, the more that institutionally permitted logics are at apparent variance with free floating observations or facts the more there will be a need for dogmatic assertion [excuse the pun] or artful deviation from the question.

People with other disciplinary backgrounds, or of a commonsensical turn of mind, may find this starting point in anthropological analysis - that thinking is constrained by institutional setting – to be rather far fetched. Without wanting to claim that it always works, the theme is well illustrated by UK politics. The party structures and leadership roles of bi-partisan politics require a confrontation of ideas. Interpretations become polarised. Fact is constructed in such a way that it can be contradicted by an apparent opposite. What is right for one party then has a fair chance of being deemed wrong by the other and a game of reassuring familiarity can take place. A free trade party has historically been opposed by one arguing for protection. Climate change recognition by one party encourages climate change denial by another; or if that is difficult to defend, carbon trading advocacy will be challenged by technical fix advocacy, with ‘facts’ assembled appropriately to support the opposing arguments. In times or on issues of extreme uncertainty of course there may be a polka-like changing of sides and partners, as well as stealing of opponents ideas, but debate still has to be expressed in oppositional terms.

To put predictability into proceedings MPs are expected to take the appropriate side in debate and ‘tow the party line’. Certain party members on either side are appointed as ‘whips’ to ensure compliance. Most members do comply but sometimes they struggle to do so. After all, the issues that we, the citizens, expect them to resolve for us are seldom simple, but politics without some simplification of understandings would be without resolution. The fact that MPs are, on rare occasions, allowed a ‘free vote’ – unrestricted by the party whips - on what are deemed to be ‘matters of conscience’, [to do with sex, death and religion mostly], clearly shows that for other matters, conscience; perhaps even consciousness, is expected to be subordinated to party discipline.

Polarisation nevertheless oversimplifies. Political analysis that is presented as a matter of black and white – or left and right – is often actually rather grey. A promise to achieve outcome x turns out on implementation to be x - or x +, or something else entirely. When the PM stands at the Dispatch Box he is constrained by past commitments to policies and practices that will almost certainly have not all turned out as intended. His/her opponents are less constrained, since, by definition their ideas have not been put to the test. Time is unkind to politicians. Harold Macmillan (UK PM 1957-1963) only had part of the story. It is not only “events, dear boy, events” that challenge stable government but also the inevitable misfit of polarised ideas with the churn of everyday reality. Gordon Brown’s much criticised performance in the Commons is as much the result of time catching up on New Labour promises as it is of his leaden, perhaps too honest, style. Tony Blair was more witty as well as more devious and surrounded by more dexterous spin merchants but was also lucky to be on the delivery end rather than the receiving end of New Labour promises.

When least challenged? Back to the dogs

But before we conclude that all politics is morally compliant with bipartisan norms we should explore the possibility that it is simply the voting climax that reduces the matter to a contest of opposites. The other half of my opening hypothesis about behavioural extravagance is that it is least so when least challenged. Are there parts of the political arena that allow less extravagant, more flexible modes of political interaction? Might it be that full-on confrontation between gladiatorial champions[2] actually allows non-champions some freedom of thought and action.

Allow me to go back to the dogs for a moment. Doggie confrontation in a dog walking context can actually have positive consequences for human sociability[3]. Some forms of parliamentary discussion might do likewise. On visits to relatives on the South coast I am sometimes admitted to a charmed sphere of early morning dog-walking sociability. Chit-chat breaks out spontaneously between strangers about the supposed charms of their respective mutts. This may have little bearing on the actual appearance or behaviour of the animals. ‘He is really very friendly’ can be an opening gambit, even when the evidence is to the contrary. Stranger status is rapidly abandoned in favour of a permissive dog-walker companionship. You may become known initially as ‘owner of so and so’, but that too can give way to an easy exchange of first names and mutual gifts of treats to respective dogs. Walking the same way awhile can lead to tacit ‘same time same place assignments’, safe in the assurance that conversation can always return to canine behaviour and, of course, also assured by the doggie chaperone. For the charmed hour, I noted, workaday restrictions of class and gender disappear and behaviours that might be quite threatening in another institutional context – such as marriage [‘to him/her back home’] – have special licence[4].

It is difficult to know how far the ritual displays of the leaders across the Dispatch Box in the House of Commons actually allows lesser members of the house to have a sphere of informal exchange in which the big battles are put aside. Having brayed in support of their principals from the backbenches at Prime Minister’s Question Time, do backbenchers from either side then sit down together in one or other of the innumerable places of refreshment in the House and lighten the debate with the odd joke? There is certainly some room for relatively friendly exchange. If one tunes into the House of Commons TV channel at odd times of the day or night one is quite likely to find an ongoing debate being sustained by a handful of MPs from across the parties. Each contributor may be seeking to ensure that their contribution is recorded in Hansard, as a loyal follower of their party leader, but they will readily allow points of information or order from opponents. More than once I have encountered situations in which one speaker from across the floor seems to be encouraging another along. For some issues, particularly perhaps those being advanced in support of individual member’s legislative proposals, the contributors from all points of the house may be people who have a special interest in the subject and have conducted research into it. While their views may differ they share a depth of knowledge that others within their parties do not share. Probably such occasions of openness are rare but they do point to a possible route for non-polarised policy change.

The Select Committees through which MPs carry out their scrutiny of government policy are another potential location for non-confrontational policy or performance investigation. The primary dividing line in this context is not between parties but between the executive – the government of the day - and the legislature. Members of different parties sit together, sometimes chaired by an opposition member, to examine documents, cross examine witnesses and draw up reports. Theirs is a scrutiny function in which the aim is to take a policy issue, examine programmes and other measures through which implementation has been pursued, consider outcomes and pronounce on policy effectiveness. But while such scrutiny can be very effective in finding weaknesses in governmental performance it does not necessarily take debate beyond polarisation.

A problem in knowledge about knowledge

An underlying problem in knowledge should be recognised here. The Hegelian model of argumentation, to which my title alludes, sounds simple but isn’t. Thesis opposed by antithesis should, in theory, lead to a third condition that is a synthesis of the two. But the social or intellectual process that should have this outcome has always been difficult to pin down. Even Karl Marx had difficulty envisioning what would be the outcome of antagonism and class conflict between the working classes and the bourgeoisie. Looking backwards he could give a somewhat persuasive account of the emergence of this new bourgeois class out of the contradictions of feudal relations; merchants, traders and professionals breaking free from the restricted social contracts that bound peasants and artisans to their overlords. Looking forwards his imagination failed him. He could give no clue as to what would happen when the worker immiseration that he predicted eventually led to the overthrow of the capitalist class. His sole contribution was the weak idea that all would be free to hunt in the morning and fish in the afternoon (German Ideology, 1845) – a remarkably pastoral, even pre-pastoral view of the material conditions of post-industrial revolution society. Without clearer prophesy or prescription the way was free for Lenin, Trotsky, Rosa Luxemburg, Stalin and others to come up with their own prescriptions, state power and big bureaucracy eventually winning the argument. But this was in no way the logical outcome of the dialectic.

The interesting thing about Marx’s use of the dialectic is that it is not about argumentation or what we now call discourse at all, but about how people respond to changing material conditions. There may well be struggle as the newly dominant social forces carve out a sphere of power and influence but the self-justificatory ideas by which they cement their power do not necessarily emerge from previous understandings. To a capitalist it matters that property is conceived as being unfettered by social obligations. This idea does contrast with the prior European feudal notions of entitlement and obligation that bound together master and servant or Lord of the Manor and serf. It also contrasts with Hindu notions of jajmani relations that survived into recent times, or, from my own field experience, the social obligations that one could find underlying ‘traditional’ society in Botswana. But the supporting logic of capitalism – market economics - cannot really be said to have emerged out of pre-capitalist relations. It needs no backward referral to any system of productive relations that went before.

If we turn to Hegel himself (1770 – 1831), whose ideas Marx borrowed and inverted, we find that the dialectic was supposed to take place in the sphere of consciousness. It was conceived to be a matter of ideas. Do we find a model here upon which to hang our discussion of progress or change in political ideas? According to Wikipedia, Hegel himself did not like the idea that the dialectic was interpreted by some of his contemporaries as debate between the bearers of opposed ideas that would somehow be synthesised through argumentation. What he thought was that internal contradictions within propositions would lead logically to a rethink. He was a bit of an idealist, it seems to me. Human agency disappears almost entirely. We are looking for ‘Deus ex machina’ or a ‘hidden hand’. This is all far away from the sound and fury of debate in the House of Commons. Debate there is. Debate there has to be, because no one packaging of ideas and no attempt to counter a hegemonic establishment with another package can avoid disagreement. What we are looking for is the process or processes whereby new interpretations of conditions and new solutions to problems can emerge out of interaction between human agents. This is about people as promoters of ideas. So we have to go back to the forums and processes of decision making to find our answer.

The already mentioned Professor Rhodes would take us even further away from the Prime Minister in Parliament. His major contribution to the discourse on how decisions get taken in the public weal has been to move the locus out from parliament, cabinet and PM or the civil service into centre-less networks. He and other network theorists[5] find that public policy outcomes are the result of intense exchanges within informal networks that cut across formal government structures and link with non-governmental institutions. Through such networks many actors are able to exercise an influence upon policies. Such nets are not entirely unstructured - although the world-wide web is a close approximation. There are nodes within the nets. The innumerable think tanks that have set themselves up in all quarters of the political spectrum aim to be such nodes. NGOs, lobbyists and pressure groups are others. Prominent individuals in the media, sport, cultural institutions, universities, also know how to network and through such networks aim to make their mark. In UK ‘the Great and the Good’ emerge as such precisely by looking after their personal reputations, by knowing other Great and Good, by ‘having a word’ in the right place but also by thinking the right thoughts and knowing when and how to register an alternative thought. They network; nothing new in that: just a new expression of the old dirge; “Lloyd George knew my father, father knew Lloyd George”[6]. Such linkages have known value in securing personal advantage. But can such network links add public value or advance the public good?
Politics, Public Value and the Perversities of both

Mark Moore, an American professor of entrepreneurial spirit, would answer; yes, as long as the actors use their initiative and network contacts to promote ‘public value’. Moore borrows a market notion to put forward ideas about the potential of plural agency within the public sector[7]. He argues that public value will best be advanced if many public managers with sound public values act in pursuit of such values. His definition of public manager is broad, including not only civil servants and professional appointees to public office but also lobbyists and others who seek to exercise influence, so he is inclusive of most of the networkers that Rhodes asks us to include. By using the term public value rather than public good he is also getting us used to the idea that the good things that we, the public, value are many rather than one. It is not just the decisions of the Prime Minister that matter.

If his logic fits the facts Moore provides a model of public decision making that legitimates a plural field of influence. As long as all these people are pursuing good ends through good values the outcome for society should be good. This however is a big IF. Critical commentators suggest Moore idealises and sanitises the behaviour of public managers and may even be ignoring the role of elected politicians[8]. The many voices advocating public values of one kind or another may be promoting quite contradictory things. The real world of politics and public management is full of mendacious behaviour and deliberate misrepresentation of opponents’ views. Furthermore, in public management as in all things ‘Sods Law’ applies: ‘if it can go wrong it will go wrong’[9]. So who should have the final say?

Professor Rhodes, with colleague John Wanna, now comes back into the discussion, this time arguing for the primacy of politics over administration and influence seeking networkers, thereby reverting to a suspiciously conformist view of legitimate decision making. In Westminster type government, they argue, the managerialist bias behind Moore’s interpretation of how public value is produced denies politicians their role and hierarchical priority in deciding which public values amongst the many to pursue. Is Rhodes now seeking to squeeze the debate back into a conventional separation of politics and administration and into a formal hierarchy?

Moore is accused of naivety in thinking that creating public value is a matter of good will or intent and that administrators can do it uninhibited. He does not acknowledge that administrators doing it might marginalise politicians, pushing them into particularist representation – i.e., allowing them to favour friends and causing them to behave badly in relation to the public good. Rhodes / Wanna, on the other hand now seem to be suggesting that separation of powers is sufficient; an old theme in constitutional theory which British practice fudges and American defines and then subverts[10].

Part of the Westminster fudge that applies to all UK governance institutions is the fiction that politicians and civil servants maintain separate powers and functions. Under this construct Ministers / Leaders ‘do’ policy but have ‘oversight’ [a term which once meant neglect and now means supervision] of administrative effectiveness while administrators administer but can be creative advocates of different feasible policy options. There are also specific overlapping accountabilities [Section 151 officers in Local Government]. Similarly the boundaries between formal institutions of governance and ‘outside’ influences such as the think tanks or the press tend to be fluid; open to active flows of information but subject to continuous negotiation or legal testing, usually around sensitive issues. Pushing these boundaries from different sides can allow for creativity; defending their integrity should ensure the primacy of public value. Systems that would simply disempower this plurality make for trouble.

The Rhodes / Wanna article uses case studies of some notorious failures in public management - the handling of the UK mad cow disease, the outing of David Kelly over the Iraq dossier and a number of Australian cases - to illustrate the fact that no part of any government can be trusted to focus solely upon ‘advancing public value’. Their point seems to be about the danger of allowing muddled responsibilities. But to me a broader point is raised by these notorious cases. They are evidence of Sods Law. Even with the best of intentions and the best laid schemes, things will go wrong. When things go wrong; through unpredicted risk, or simply ‘events’, one side will tend to blame the other and reinterpret the situation to protect their own ‘butt’ and seek to ‘kick ass’ elsewhere. A sophisticated theory of public management needs to recognise blame as well as risk and the tendency of each party, politicians, officials, and others to defend itself against blame.

Conclusion

How to conclude? The conclusion seems to be that constitutional structures and formal systems are unlikely to guarantee good behavioural outcomes. Decision making in the public realm is inevitably a bit messy. There is no trace of a clean-cut dialectic here. Moore’s insistence on the idea of individual responsibility in adding value is based upon a moral assertion. Individuals should be committed to public values and should be judged by others on this basis. There has to be some virtue in this position. Certainly one cannot, from the sidelines, advocate a Machiavellian scepticism about approaches to responsibility in public life. My quarrel with the concept is that it makes out that all actors are only good actors if angels. Where the public good is threatened the solution is - yes - advanced by something that is valued but only if it also ‘works’. This in fact was Machiavelli’s point. It will be valued in part because it works. So when Gordon Brown, facing the worst banking crisis for nigh on a hundred years, stands at the dispatch box to announce - completely contradicting hitherto prevailing public values - the effective re-nationalisation of the banks (October 2008), suddenly his bite is as powerful as his bark. Sign of a true statesman?

[1] RAW Rhodes ‘Governance and Public Administration’, Ch 4 in John Pierre 2000 Debating Governance, OUP
[2] Roman gladiators were of course constrained by their slavery: denied the freedom to shake hands and make up, so for them it had to be to the death.
[3] As noted in Buster’s Diary [Roy Hattersley]
[4] I am not sure if dogs are the key to this. It may be the hour. Early morning is also the time when old men in China gather with their caged canaries but most Chinese achieve the same boundary breaking intimacy through their tie-chi gatherings in which no pets mediate. However it is achieved, the fact is that behavioural patterns differ in different social contexts.

[5] Kickert WJM, Erik-Hans Klijn and Joop FM Koppenjan 1997, Managing Complex Networks London New Delhi, Sage
[6] Sung repetitively to the tune of ‘Onward Christian Soldiers’; though out of fashion now.
[7] Moore M 1995 Creating Public Value Cambridge, MA :Harvard University Press

[8] Rhodes, RAW and John Wanna, 2008 ‘Bringing the Politics back in’ in Bennington J and Moore M From Private Choice to Public Value Basingstoke and New York, Palgrave, Macmillan; Gains, Francesca and Stoker, Gerry, (n.d.) ‘How Politics Works: Understanding the New Realities of the Political Process in Public Management’ Paper for the Work Foundation

[9] The Scottish poet Robert Burns put it more eloquently in his famous address to a mouse.
But, Mousie, thou art no thy lane / In proving foresight may be vain: / The best laid schemes o' mice an' men / Gang aft a-gley, / An' lea'e us nought but grief an' pain, / For promised joy
[10] See my ‘Constitutionalism and rolling roads’.