Tag: deregulation

Ideas and Political Entrepreneurs: Explaining Institutional Change

None of my entries this week has directly discussed Wayne Leighton’s and my new book, Madmen, Intellectuals, and Academic Scribblers. This post briefly conveys the book’s motivation and argument. A follow up post will illustrate the argument with the case of airline deregulation.

Alex describes Madmen as “revolution without romance,” analogous to Jim Buchanan’s account of public choice as “politics without romance.” It’s an apt comparison because although Madmen is rooted in public choice, we explain why public choice cannot account for political change without incorporating ideas and entrepreneurship.

To do so, we focus throughout the book on three questions:

1. Why do democracies generate policies that are wasteful and unjust?

2. Why do failed policies persist over long periods, even when they are known to be socially wasteful and even when better alternatives exist?

3. Why do some wasteful policies get repealed (for example, airline rate and route regulation) while others endure (such as sugar subsidies and tariffs)?

Traditional public choice answers question #1 (concentrated benefits & diffuse costs) as well as question #2 (transitional gains trap). Yet wasteful institutional arrangements do sometimes get repealed or reformed. In addition to airlines, other network industries such as trucking and energy pipelines were significantly deregulated in the 1970s, followed by income tax reform in the 80s, spectrum license auctions and welfare reform in the 90s, and more.

Madmen argues that better institutions derive from better ideas, through a political process that is driven by key players: madmen, intellectuals, and academic scribblers.

The academic scribblers originate ideas, which must then face off with vested interests and long-held beliefs in the status quo. The “intellectuals” (Hayekian traders in ideas) propagate the ideas they think are best. When political opportunity strikes, it then becomes in the interests of the madmen in authority (those who grip the levers of political power) to implement the new idea and change the rules of the game (that is, to change the institutions). New rules reshape people’s incentives, which in turn directs people’s decisions toward different outcomes—for better or worse.

The process can be revolutionary, creating new institutions through a crisis such as war or depression. Lenin and the Bolsheviks come to mind; so do the American Founders and Franklin D. Roosevelt. At other times, this process can be evolutionary, not born out of a crisis but emerging as part of a nonviolent battle of ideas.

At the end of the day, ideas do not surmount established interests on their own; nor do ideas automatically shape new institutions when political opportunity strikes. Instead, institutions change when political entrepreneurs notice areas of weakness in the structure of ideas, institutions, and incentives, and then find ways to implement different rules in those areas. The entrepreneurs in political change may be philosophers, opinion makers, political leaders, or other types of influencers. What they have in common is access to a stock of ideas, a knack for perceiving times when a different idea can take hold, and the grit to drive madmen in authority toward changing institutions accordingly.

That’s stating things generally. Alex’s post gives flavor to the argument in the case of spectrum license auctions. And tomorrow I will follow up to show how Alfred Kahn and Teddy Kennedy were political entrepreneurs who revolutionized the airlines by implementing a different idea.