Utopianism on the right: Walling in "the nation"

It is interesting to me that so much of right wing social visions today is about security and keeping us safe from things. It would seem that the world is a dangerous place (in spite of all the data showing that the world has become a much safer place over the last century) and that there is an urgent need to protect us. Much of that concern is focused on "securing the borders" from "illegal immigration" and to ensure that those who receive welfare "do not abuse the system". We hear that from politicians across the democratic world, particularly in relation to the ongoing refugee situation in Europe, during the Brexit debate and certainly during the American election campaign. It would seem that immigrants and poor people are dangerous.

The Fatalist Way: Management by mistrust

Key Values: Mistrust, suspicion, security, rule enforcement

The right wing narrative about the dangerous world is based on the assumptions that inform Fatalist management, which I often refer to as management by mistrust, namely that solidarity is impossible to achieve and that every system invites fraud, free-riding and opportunism. To counter that, governments need to take protective steps. Some of those are random controls, like the breath-tests used by traffic control law enforcement.

The management model is clearly top-down but there is also little coordinated action, because trust levels are so low. This is rational within this system. Since actors fear each other, they don't dare enter into partnerships, because if they do, their ideas might be stolen by others. Alternatively, they have to work a lot while others don't work at all, just free-riding on others' efforts. Anyone who's done group work in school will recognize it. For those who do the work, there's just too little benefit for the high cost involved.  Under such circumstances, people stop collaborating.

That becomes a substantive problem when it occurs throughout society. Democracy builds on trust. Almost 200 years ago, the French thinker Alexis DeToqueville described why American democracy worked: because people spontaneously came together, formed mutual aid groups and helped each other. Putnam later called this "social capital" and found, in a classic study, that Southern Italy's socioeconomic challenges could be tied to the lack of trust prevailing there. Citizens did not get organized and work together, because they did not trust each other. At a certain level, the lack of cooperation - the lack of social networks, social capital - becomes a problem and undermines democracy.

Keeping people in poverty: Workfare schemes

A very common Fatalist policy is the workfare program. It has been adopted for social welfare services across the democratic world in the last couple of decades and frames social welfare users as untrustworthy opportunists. To make sure recipients don't "abuse tax payer dollars", applicants are put through all sorts of rigorous tests, including drug use or literacy. Sometimes case officers force them to complete public work before giving them their welfare remuneration. The negative effects on the user have been well documented and they certainly don't do anything to get people off welfare or closer to self-sufficiency (Herd, Mitchell, & Lightman, 2005; Lightman et al., 2006; Lightman et al., 2006). In some cases, clients were unable to provide all the requested information and thus were disqualified (Herd, Mitchell, & Lightman, 2005). In one study, interviewed welfare recipients described how the system was “dominated by suspicion and a mentality of policing” (Herd et al., 2005, p. 13). Civil servants end up caught in the middle; they do not like having to treat clients this way. Senior managers complained that the system had been turned into an “eligibility machine” (Lightman et al., 2006, p. 137), which meant that they could not do what they wanted to, to support clients towards an improved life situation. The case demonstrates how destructive management by mistrust can be, particularly in social policy areas.

Walling in the nation to "keep it safe"

By now, it should be easy to spot the consistency between the values of the Fatalist Way and what conservatives in all democratic countries are saying about immigrants and refugees: "They are here to abuse our generous system and we have to keep our borders safe from free-riders and people who might be criminals". That sentiment clearly builds on mistrust and a treatment of these categories as potential free-riders and opportunists whose primary motivation is to abuse "our hospitality/system". While there is little new to say about him, Donald Trump's plan for immigration reform constitutes a good example of a Fatalist framing of immigration. The below identifies some typical Fatalist analysis in the plan.

Here is the free-rider frame: "Current immigration policy costs taxpayers $300 billion a year." Note how Trump ignores the contributions immigrants ("legal" or "illegal") are making to the US economy by adding their productivity to the overall workforce. They could make even greater contributions if they could work without fear of deportation, so their status as illegal is actually a drag on the American economy, but Trump ignores that possibility, too.

The crime-frame is referred in nine of ten bullets. Notably, most research shows that crime rates among immigrants in the US are lower than among the native born population, so this is incorrect, but it's essential to build the impression of a dangerous world that the Fatalist approach to governance thrives in. The point (no. 5 in Trump's list) about tripling the number of border control agents also supports that perspective, as does the now-famous proposal to build a wall. Trump wants to emphasize policing, rather than reform laws that are costly in both humanitarian and economic terms.

Consequences

The consequences of applying Fatalist policy as widely as Trump (and many other nativist, nationalist politicians want to) would be a decline in trust and cooperation in society as a whole. When that happens, we see a decrease in the formation of voluntary organizations, and a lack of capacity to do things together. Withering away trust on such a wide level risks undermining the political culture needed to support democracy itself.

When Utopian dreams meet reality...

Politics has Utopians of many stripes; the radicals, the ones who want to stop "middling through" and change the whole system or just dump it and replace it with something else. Such attitudes can seem appealing, particularly for voters who think that most political parties are so similar that they are merely quibbling about technicalities, or just pretending to quibble about technicalities. Now, I do have some radical political ideas myself. For instance, I'm in favour of open borders. I am thus no alien to the appeal of radical solutions as such.

Radical ideas become problematic, however, when they are based on powerful wording, but little consideration of the practicalities of implementing the idea or its possible consequences. For a political vision to be meaningful, it has to be possible to do it, to put it in practice, too. That means having a notion for how it should be organized. Who should do what, when, with what mandate, and under what accountability? To answer those questions, we land right in the issue of public administration, which many consider to be the least sexy of all topics in politics (I know, I thought so once). However, the questions cannot be avoided for anyone who wants to do anything political.

It thus behooves those who want to change society to understand public administration and how it works. Those who don't will not be able to assess the potential consequences of moving a political vision from words to action.

Grid/Group Cultural Theory is very helpful for this type of work. It was developed to categorize different forms of bureaucracy based on their a) level of regulation and b) how socially coherent they are as a unit:

From Hood, Table 1.1(9) Four styles of public management organization: Cultural theory applied, in Hood, C (2000) The Art of The State: Culture, Rhetoric and Public Management, Oxford: Clarendon
		Group (Social cohesion)
		Low	High
Grid (Rule-boundedness)	High	The Fatalist Way Low-co-operation, rule-bound approaches to organization. Example: Atomized societies sunk in rigid routines.	The Hierarchist Way Socially cohesive, rule-bound approaches to organization. Example: Stereotype [sic] military structure
	Low	The Individualist Way Competitive approach stressing  negotiation and bargaining. Example: Chicago-school doctrines of ‘government by the market’ and their antecedents.	The Egalitarian Way High-participation structures in which every decision is ‘up for grabs’. Example: ‘Dark green’ doctrines of alternatives to conventional bureaucracy.

The four types of administration are:

The Hierarchist Way

This is the classic bureaucracy. It is top-down organized, has clear ranks with senior managers, middle managers, and frontline clerks and case officers who are supposed to act on orders. In political science, it's known as Weberian bureaucracy. The military is the most clear example of it, but it has been so popular that it has been the go-to model for how to structure a government agency since World War II, if not longer.

It's good at decision-making and allocating responsibility. The buck stops in a clear location (the top) and the pyramid structure makes it easy to quickly take a decision and send an order down the ranks. It's bad at allowing for bottom-up impulses and flexibility for local needs. I.e. if the front-line case officers notice that the order makes little sense for conditions in their area, they have little recourse, and little chance of making their concerns heard in upper levels.

The Fatalist Way

This is the go-to model for catching cheaters. It's not necessarily as rigidly structured as Hierarchism, but builds on the assumption that the world is a hostile place and people are out to get you. For that reason, it introduces randomized controls to catch free-riders and rule-breakers and makes sure that the staff rotates so they can't form cliques that could undermine the top's control.

Those randomized controls does make it a decent model for catching cheaters, as evidenced by its prolific use in, for example, traffic controls or by revenue agencies. But like Hierarchism, it's bad for flexibility and also tends to systematically destroy trust among the people involved, so it quickly stifles innovation ("what's the point?") and undermines cooperation ("too much work and risk if the others will just rip me off"). It's generally incapable of responding to rapidly changing conditions.

The Egalitarian Way

This is the classic communitarian way of management, where the objective is to eliminate the difference between producer and user entirely. It has been seen in a range of experiments by "alternative" communities for the last century, including, of course, hippies and deep green environmentalists. We saw similar attempts when the Occupy Wall Street wanted to eliminate the leadership cast. In short, the organization should be as flat as possible. Unlike the Hierarchist and Fatalist Ways, which are both top-down, this model is bottom-up, decentralizing decision-making to provide grassroots with much more power. Likewise, accountability is exercised through peer pressure. Versions of this model has been practiced in mainstream politics as well, and includes collaborative models that see public agencies partner with community groups - for instance law enforcement collaborating with the neighbourhood watch, or parent-school councils and so on.

The strength of this model is that when decisions are made, they have strong buy-in or legitimacy from the membership. Among small groups of like-minded, it can thus work very well  However, if the group fails to reach consensus or if factionalism develops, it can very quickly grind to a complete halt because the discussion never ends. As such, if there is disagreement, it can be very hard to get a decision made at all, and that has often been the Achilles heel that made Utopian community experiments come crashing down.

The Individualist Way

This is the classic free-market solution. The most recent incarnation that made a big impression and triggered a global reform wave was New Public Management (the implementation of which is a whole can of worms in itself, requiring a separate blog post). The idea is to use the free market to make the public administration more cost-effective and less burdened by red tape. "Let managers manage" and "let users vote with their feet" were two typical slogans for this management type. Like the Egalitarian Way, it is designed to have considerable space bottom-up flexibility. Vouchers or procurement could be used where the public sector bought services from professional service deliverers, and users would then pick the provider they felt most comfortable with. Thus, users have power over service delivery.

It's good at presenting users with more than one type of service, and can work when there are plenty of service delivery producers who compete with each other for the user's favour. It doesn't work well when in-depth cooperation is needed, however, because the competitive nature of the model undermines stable networking.

What's the point of all this?

What, indeed, is the point of this theory? There are a couple of points, really. First, organizational theory scholars (the research field where this typology was developed) have shown that there is only a limited number of models that have been used to organize public agencies and what they do in history. There's just so many ways of doing things, in other words. Second, every organizational type has its strengths and weaknesses. There are good ways and bad ways of doing things, but there is no silver bullet, no magical formula, no one-size-fits-all solution. They are good at some things and bad at others, and the public management literature has a lot of material about when they succeed and fail. The difficulty, when implementing a policy, is to know which type of organization that actually can have a hope of delivering the desired outcome. Choosing a screw-driver when you need a hammer will set you up for failure. It's the same thing in politics. Unfortunately, very few pundits, activists or politicians seem to be aware of this - or at the very least they neglect to discuss how they want to achieve their goals.

In future posts, I will use these four types to evaluate political platforms on the left and the right in terms of what they imply about public administration and thus what effects they would have if carried out as actual politics.