Governing Magazine/November 2003

ASSESSMENTS

MACHINE POLITICS

By Alan Ehrenhalt

There was a small news item in last month's issue of this magazine.
The Business of Government section reported on a new online program in
Missouri that gathers disease data from 50 labs and hospitals and
tells the Health Department almost instantly if something resembling
an epidemic is loose in the state. Health Department employees used to
have to call those hospitals regularly to find out what was going on.
Now they just know.
 Things like this are happening all over the place these days in
American government. Vital information that used to be collected
slowly, expensively and unreliably is now available without much
effort 24 hours a day. Lives are saved as a result.
 I've always been skeptical about dramatic claims of governmental
breakthrough, and I don't think I'm a sucker for them now. But even a
registered skeptic can't help noticing all the ways information is
making government function much better--at every level of the system.
 In the same issue as the Missouri item, we ran a story about the way
Philadelphia dealt with a snow emergency earlier this year. The city
desperately needed to clear its storm drains, but there was no way
workers could get to all of them. So they asked for citizen
volunteers. The drains were invisible under two feet of snow, but it
was easy to find out exactly where they were, because each drain was
pinpointed on an electronic map available to anyone with a computer.
 These are nice stories. Technology is starting to make government
look good. Meanwhile, however, politics is making it look terrible.
 The same month that I learned about disease monitoring in Missouri
and drain clearing in Philadelphia, I was also pondering a collection
of political horror stories sufficient to discourage even the most
determined optimist. California was conducting a clownish and
fundamentally illegitimate recall campaign against a governor whose
only real offense was mediocrity. The Texas legislature was paralyzed
by efforts to redraw congressional districts for no purpose other than
blatant partisan gain. Alabama voters were repudiating a tax reform
program that would have transferred money to most of them--including
most of those who voted against it.
 It's hard to think about all of this without coming to a stark
conclusion: The sharpest division in American civic life these days
isn't between factions, or ideologies, or between competence and
incompetence. It's between government, which is getting better, and
politics, which is getting worse.
 It may be arguable whether medical data-sharing and geographic
information systems are creating profound changes in everyday life.
But other governmental innovations made possible by technology clearly
are. When you had an emergency at your house three decades ago, you
rummaged around for the phone number of the police department and
hoped you were picking the right extension. The introduction of 911
has been an immense improvement. The COMPSTAT system of tracking crime
patterns electronically--rather than just responding to incidents as
they occur--is at the heart of the decline in violent crime that took
place in almost every major American city in the 1990s.
 Information technology is not only refashioning government, it is
breeding a generation of bureaucrats who are irrepressibly
enthusiastic about its use and impatient to move to new levels of
sophistication. They are at conferences and on the Internet, comparing
notes about the newest techniques in performance measurement, "smart"
transportation, homeland defense and on and on. In this way, at least,
the first decade of the new century is beginning to look a little like
the Progressive Era in the years before World War I, a time when
idealistic technocrats and civil servants argued that scientific
management promised a bright new era of governmental efficiency.

It's no mystery why that kind of enthusiasm exists. Quite a few of the
problems of government are ultimately problems of information. We're
slow to recognize epidemics because we don't know who's getting sick
at the other end of the state. We fail to prevent homicides because we
don't have precise data on when and where they are occurring. These
are problems against which breakthroughs in information technology can
work wonders. And in the past decade, our sophistication in
information technology has grown by multiples almost too large for
most of us even to grasp.
 Wherever problems in the public realm are largely the consequence of
scanty or inaccurate information, we are making genuine progress in
solving them. That's why government is getting better. But where
information isn't the problem, it can't be the solution, either.
That's why politics is getting worse.
 Unfortunately, the more skillful we become at gathering and massaging
data, the more we are tempted to apply the same techniques to problems
that information can't really solve. The technocrats of the
Progressive Era thought that if they could perform enough time-and-
motion studies on the public workforce, they could usher in a
revolution in worker productivity. That turned out not to be true. The
architects of the No Child Left Behind Act believe that if they can
compile enough data on school performance, they can prevent students
from failing. That won't turn out to be true, either.
 So one of the unpleasant side effects of the current boom in public
technology is an inappropriate and often naive extension to maladies
it can't cure. But there's an even more sinister side effect. It's the
capacity of technological innovation, when unaccompanied by societal
restraint, to make the political system even worse than it was before.
 Think about some of the grossest excesses of this very gross
political year. Drive-by gerrymanders, for example, unrelated to the
regular reapportionment that follows the decennial census. These used
to be extremely rare, and for a couple of very good reasons. First,
new district maps were troublesome to produce. Second, the statistics
on voting behavior were problematic. Partisan mapmakers could easily
scheme to draw two seats for their party in a legislature, and find
out later they had cost the party two seats.
 Computers and geographic information systems have changed all that.
It's still impossible to predict the future voting habits of any
constituency, but it is possible to draw districts on a map with
considerably greater confidence about how they will behave in the real
world. That's a temptation to mischief, and it's a temptation that
ambitious politicians all over the country are increasingly unable to
resist.
 Then there is the link between technology and negative campaigning.
Televised campaign slurs have been part of American politics for half
a century, but until the 1980s, they were held at least partially in
check by the time required to produce and distribute them. It could
take several days to create an ad, several more to respond to it, then
a few more to respond to the response. This in itself didn't make
politics any more sportsmanlike, but it made the pace slower.
 Electronic tape editing cut the response time almost to zero. If I
want to, I can slander you tonight, and you can slander me by tomorrow
morning. This increases the pacing and intensity of the whole
enterprise, and gives campaigns the quality of an escalating arms race
in which the immediate use of almost any lethal weapon is justified.
It's hard to see how anybody benefits from this.
 Finally, there is polling. It would be foolish to argue that trimming
one's convictions is a weakness that old-time politicians never
indulged in. Nevertheless, old-timers with a weakness for pandering--
even the smartest among them--couldn't always be sure how large a
majority they were pandering to. In the absence of modern polling
techniques and data-crunching technology, it wasn't easy to know where
public opinion stood on every issue every day of the year.
 In general, this was a good thing. I sometimes find myself thinking
back to the congressional elections of 1970. The overriding issue was
the Vietnam War. For the most part, candidates either supported it or
opposed it. Many of them would have taken the same position regardless
of what the voters thought, but I can't help thinking that the
inability to gauge public sentiment in precise detail helped free them
to say what they really thought. Maybe they were on the side of a 53
percent majority, or maybe it was a 47 percent minority. Nobody knew.

Contrast this to the gyrations of Democratic presidential candidates
and congressional leaders over the past year on the subject of the
Iraq war. Most of them have shown an impressive ability to match their
beliefs to the cross-tabulated poll numbers of the moment. It remained
for the octogenarian U.S. Senator Robert Byrd, a pre-modern politician
if there ever was one, to remind everyone what taking a stand and
sticking to it used to be like. The unpleasant truth is that in modern
politics, technology and courage are often inversely related.
 Thus the paradox: Information is remaking government for the better,
at every level from city hall to the federal civil service. At the
same time, it is helping to drain the political process of fairness
and integrity. This is not because technology is a bad thing, but
because the most important problems of politics are beyond its reach.
 The state of American politics will improve when it reclaims a
measure of public trust, so that leaders are allowed to lead--not
undercut by spurious recalls and initiatives and trash-talk
campaigning. I have no idea when--or if--this will happen. I know it's
something that machines and data are powerless to fix.
 In the short run, perhaps we should take some satisfaction in the
growing number of public problems that machines really can help us
with: tracking epidemics, responding to emergency calls, pointing the
way to city drains that citizens can help unclog. I don't know about
you, but I'm grateful for small favors.

Note: This version corrects a typographical error in the 13th
paragraph.

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