Political Order and Political Decay (22 page)

The British middle classes chose to advocate universalistic, merit-based standards of advancement in all institutions. They did this out of self-interest, but as a general social class rather than as individuals. This stood in sharp contrast to the less entrepreneurial middle classes in southern Italy, who were co-opted by the local oligarchy and incorporated into its patronage networks.

Publication of the Northcote-Trevelyan Report in 1854 did not lead to the immediate adoption of its recommendations. Changing the conditions for entry into the civil service threatened the interests of the incumbent officeholders and the upper classes from which they came. In 1855, an Order of Council established a Civil Service Commission that authorized competition for a small number of jobs.
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Enactment of the proposals in the full report by Parliament was delayed until 1870, when Gladstone had become prime minister. As the report had proposed, the new law divided the civil service into halves, an administrative one that would require a liberal humanistic education for entry, and a lower executive class whose qualification was a less exalted “English education” in English language and modern subjects. This two-tier system opened up employment for the offspring of both the upper and middle bourgeoisie while also preserving places for the old aristocracy that could use their Oxbridge educations to pass the new examination.

Contributing to the momentum for an overhaul of the civil service was the Crimean War (1853–1856). Operations of the British army were badly mismanaged, and in 1855 a Select Committee of Inquiry reported on the poor organization of the army in intelligence, strategy, and logistics. This caused a furor in the press, with demands for an overhaul of both the military and the civil service. Thus, even in a country that was nowhere as militaristically inclined as either Prussia or Japan, war and the risk of life to soldiers and civilians created pressures for reform that could not be generated in peacetime.
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It is critical that this reform of the British public sector took place before expansion of the franchise. There were three great reform bills passed during the nineteenth century that transformed Britain from an oligarchy to a genuine democracy (although full franchise expansion to women and minorities did not occur until the twentieth century). The 1832 reform eliminated certain gross abuses in the electoral system, such as rotten boroughs (electoral districts with few or no voters that became sinecures for elite politicians). Up through the 1860s, only one out of eight British citizens could vote.
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Expansion of the franchise to include most householders had to await the 1867 and 1884 reforms, after which some 40 percent of British adult males, including lodgers, tenants, domestic servants, soldiers, and sailors, were still not permitted to vote. The comparable number of disenfranchised in the United States at the time was 14 percent.
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(I will return to the question of why those bills passed in Part III below.) Thus the mobilization of voters that had occurred already in the United States by the 1830s, and the development of mass political parties, did not get under way in Britain until the 1870s, by which time the groundwork for an autonomous civil service had already been laid. At the point when British parties might have been tempted to use the mass distribution of government jobs as vote-getting opportunities, this avenue had already been closed off.

Even after the franchise was expanded, British parties were slow to marshal large numbers of voters. The most clientelistic party in this period was the Conservative or Tory party, many of whose leaders were influential landowners who could draw on support from their nonelite rural constituents. Indeed, one of the reasons why the Conservative prime minister Benjamin Disraeli, himself an inveterate user of patronage appointments, supported the 1867 Reform Bill was that he believed his party could keep control over an expanded voter base. The party was split over the next decades, however, between the older landed elite and a new elite of middle-class supporters, many of whom were incorporated into the party through the award of honorific titles rather than government jobs.
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The opposition Whig or Liberal party was the party of the middle class, and again not inclined to broaden itself into a mass party.

It was the British Labour Party that would mobilize the working class and eventually replace the Liberals as the second party in British politics. The Labour Party was the political arm of the Trades Union Congress, which was organized in the late 1800s, and was founded in 1900. Growing out of various left-wing movements, and with a strong Socialist ideology, the Labour Party was an externally organized party that had to rally its supporters around programmatic issues like working conditions, wages, and state control of industry rather than through doling out government resources. When it first joined the government during World War I and finally came to power on its own in 1924, it had no access to the bureaucracy and was in any event already institutionalized as a modern party.
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While the Northcote-Trevelyan reforms constituted the most dramatic break with the traditional patronage system, it is fair to say that the British public sector has been undergoing a continuous series of incremental reforms from at least 1780 up to the present. There were many subsequent reform commissions, including the Playfair Commission of 1874–1875, the Ridley Commission of 1886–1890, the MacDonnell Commission of 1912–1915, the Reorganization Committee of 1919–1920, the Tomlin Commission of 1929–1931, and the Priestly Commission of 1953–1954.
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The last major public-sector reform effort was undertaken during the 1990s by Tony Blair under the heading of New Public Management.
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While reform of the British public sector was a prolonged and, in some sense, uncompleted process, elimination of the patronage system was relatively straightforward. Intellectuals and social critics made the case for reform, a case that was propagated and argued in the media in response to events like the Crimean War. An expert commission then studied the question in depth and came up with a series of recommendations, which were enacted into law by Parliament. The most important actors in the process were all part of a small elite based for the most part in London (though with common roots in British India). All had similar educations and knew one another personally; indeed, some were related. The British Westminster system is heavily biased toward rapid decision making because it has very few checks and balances: in the 1850s there was no federalism or decentralization, no supreme court to invalidate legislation, no separation of powers between executive and legislature, and strong party discipline (control of rank-and-file MPs by the party leadership). When the composition of the British elite began to change and middle-class actors began to displace the older oligarchy, their wishes could be reflected in legislation relatively quickly.

The same was not true in the United States, whose constitutional system of checks and balances makes large changes in public policy very difficult and time-consuming. But more important were social differences: there was no single cohesive elite in the United States, and indeed the democratic basis of its founding guaranteed that existing elites would be constantly challenged by new social actors. For this reason the United States did not go straight from an elite patronage system to a modern civil service; rather, it took a century-long detour through party-dominated clientelism. The American experience in contrast to the British suggests two things: first, that patronage and clientelism are not culturally specific phenomena, nor do they represent premodern practices that somehow survived as societies modernized. Rather, they are the natural outgrowth of political mobilization in early-stage democracies. Second, the experience of a more democratic America suggests that there is an inherent tension between democracy and what we now call “good governance.”

 

9

THE UNITED STATES INVENTS CLIENTELISM

How America is different from other modern countries; the nature of early American government and the rise of political parties; the Jacksonian revolution and American populism; the patronage system and how it spread; clientelism and American municipal government

Since the era of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s, it has been common to contrast “Anglo-Saxon” capitalism to its continental variety. The former celebrates free markets, deregulation, privatization, and a minimal state, while the continental version, exemplified above all by France, is dirigiste and regulatory, and supports a large welfare state. But while the United States does indeed share many political characteristics and policy preferences with its English progenitor, this view lacks historical perspective and hides some important differences between British and American political development. In many ways Britain's political system is closer to its continental neighbors than it is to the American one.

In the second chapter of
Political Order in Changing Societies
, titled “Political Modernization: America vs. Europe,” Samuel Huntington identified the “Tudor” character of American politics.
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According to Huntington, the Englishmen who settled North America in the seventeenth century brought with them many of the political practices of Tudor, or late medieval, England. On American soil these old institutions became entrenched and were eventually written into the American Constitution, a fragment of the old society frozen in time.
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Those Tudor characteristics included the Common Law as a source of authority, one higher than that of the executive, with a correspondingly strong role for courts in governance; a tradition of local self-rule; sovereignty divided among a host of bodies, rather than being concentrated in a centralized state; government with divided powers instead of divided functions, such that, for example, the judiciary exercised not just judicial but also quasi-legislative functions; and reliance on a popular militia rather than a standing army.

Huntington argued that after the Tudor period, England went on to develop the concept of a unified sovereignty and a centralized state in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. As we saw in the preceding chapter, England was slower to develop a rational, modern bureaucracy than either Prussia or France, but by the late 1800s this had occurred. The local governing bodies of medieval England evolved into parliamentary districts, with authority increasingly centralized in London; in the years following the Glorious Revolution, Parliament came to be understood as the sole source of sovereignty. While the Common Law remained sacrosanct, England never developed a theory or practice of judicial review by which the courts could invalidate an act of Parliament. Americans, by contrast, clung to Tudor institutions: “Political modernization in America has thus been strangely attenuated and incomplete. In institutional terms, the American polity has never been underdeveloped, but it has also never been wholly modern … In today's world, American political institutions are unique, if only because they are so antique.”
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Huntington's observations echo those of a long tradition of writers on American exceptionalism who have described the ways the United States differs systematically from other developed democracies. This begins with writers such as Louis Hartz and H. G. Wells, who raised the question “Why no socialism in America?”
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through Seymour Martin Lipset, who wrote extensively on American exceptionalism throughout a long scholarly career.
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The United States was different, according to Hartz, because it lacked the inherited feudal class structure of Europe. As an area of new settlement (at least for Europeans), North America appeared as a land of equal opportunity where one's station in life reflected one's own work and talents. With few inherited inequalities, there was no demand for a strong state that would redistribute wealth, but rather widespread belief in a Lockean liberalism where individuals were free to help themselves. The one group that did face castelike restrictions to its mobility, African Americans, were therefore the most likely to favor a strong state to advance their interests, much like the white working class in Europe.
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There was another factor as well. Lipset noted that the United States was born in a revolution against the concentrated power represented by the British monarchy. Hence liberty, understood as antistatism and animated by strong distrust of government, was one of what he identified as five key components of American political culture.
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America inherited from Tudor England traditions of the Common Law and, following the Glorious Revolution, accountable government based on the principle of no taxation without representation. What it did not inherit was the strong central state, which in England had always incipiently existed since the Norman Conquest and that had evolved into a powerful unified sovereignty by the beginning of the eighteenth century. The very struggle for independence from Britain amplified the American antistatist tendency and ensured that a host of constraints on government power would be enshrined in the new nation's Constitution in the form of multiple checks and balances. Nor did the physical conditions of the early United States encourage state building: America faced no powerful neighbors that could threaten it, and its physical size and dispersed rural population meant it would almost inevitably have to be governed on a decentralized basis.

FRIENDS OF GEORGE WASHINGTON

While Hartz was correct that the white population in America was not divided into sharply demarcated social classes as in Europe, there were in fact class distinctions in early America based on education and occupation, such as the merchant-banker elite in New York and Boston and the planter aristocracy in Virginia. The elite at this time was a small and homogeneous group, “descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government, very similar in their manners and customs,” in the words of John Jay in Federalist No. 2. In the period immediately following ratification of the Constitution in 1789, the national public service at its upper levels has been described as a “Government by Gentlemen” and it did not look too different in certain respects from the one that existed in early-nineteenth-century Britain.
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One might also label it government by the friends of George Washington, since the republic's first president chose men like himself who he felt had good qualifications and a dedication to public service.
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Under John Adams, 70 percent, and under Jefferson, 60 percent of high-ranking officials had fathers who came from the landed gentry, merchant, or professional classes.
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Many people today marvel at the quality of political leadership at the time of America's founding, the sophistication of the discourse revealed in the Federalist Papers, and the ability to think about institutions in a long-term perspective. At least part of the reason for this strong leadership was that America at the time was not a full democracy but rather a highly elitist society, many of whose leaders were graduates of Harvard and Yale. Like the British elite, many of them knew each other personally from school and from their common participation in the revolution and drafting of the Constitution.