The Real Cult of Personality

Matt Yglesias wrote a short blog post the other day asking why an advanced democracy like the United States bothers with term limits. The obvious objection to term limits is that they often force the most desirable and capable candidates out of office. They’re inherently undemocratic, because if the candidate weren’t the most electable, he or she would be ousted through the political process.

The second, more subtle and insightful objection he makes is this: term limits are undemocratic because they empower unelected staffers and unelected lobbyists who will be there even after the office changes hands. All the institutional memory, all the industry ties, and all the insider knowledge of the legislative process remains in a democratically unaccountable class of well-educated and politically connected civil servants.

My point in drawing attention to Yglesias’ post is not that we necessarily need to abolish term limits. (Although that’s certainly a conversation worth having.) The point I’m getting at, which the second objection highlights, is that a candidate’s attributes—whether personality or policy preferences—often matter far less than the institutional structures into which she’s elected.

One of the most striking observations in Pierson and Hacker’s excellent Winner Take All Politics is that the real locus of power in American government has been obscured by our obsession with election- and personality-driven politics. (See my longer review here.) Since the 1970s, the two major political parties in the United States have invested in institutional structures and political organizations that wage full-time lobbying and campaign efforts. These well-funded party organizations, bolstered by think-tanks, PACs, nonprofits, and media affiliates, engage in full-time agenda setting. They are expert at rotating people in and out of the country’s highest offices. Links to special interests and campaign contributors are a constant presence, and their media-access and agenda-setting power is massive.

Americans need to stop putting their hope in lone individuals, who they believe can “change the way Washington works.” The expectation that an elected official would disrupt the organizational structure and vote his or her conscience, or even reflect the electorate’s political preferences, is simply implausible. Such expectations overlook the institutions within which our representatives operate. (There is more on this point at Crooked Timber).

The game in American politics is not the game that most people think it is. Changing who is in office matters, but it is by no means the only thing with which Americans should be concerned. Republicans recognized this in the 1970s and began building a party apparatus and organizational structure that can reliably set the country’s political agenda even when Republicans are not in office. If Americans (and Democrats in particular) care about seeing their policy preferences realized, they need to focus on more than who’s name goes on the door.