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The US system is designed to do nothing.
So that means to get something passed and
to become a law you need a majority in the house.
You need a super majority in the senate, and
you also need the President to sign it.
Right? And that's aside from
other institutional constraints, like the committee system, and so on, right?
So when the Democrats hold the majority, and the Democrats hold the White House,
the US system is gonna restrain their agenda, right?
That's just the way the system is, that's the way the founders intended.
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What we do in this study, is to try to ask the question, why?
Why has the institution evolved to look the way it does?
And so what we do is we examine two much maligned aspects of the U.S.
political institution,
they are supermajority role and the delegation of authority to bureaucrats.
Now both of these can be seen as undemocratic.
The filibuster rule and that it's not respecting majority rule,
it's not representing the people as well as it should.
And the delegation to bureaucrats who are unelected, all right?
So it's often asked why is authority delegated to these sorts of
people who aren't elected by the people?
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What we find is that,
these two components, the super majority filibuster rule and the delegation of
authority to unelected bureaucrats, on their own have seemed very undemocratic.
Put together, all right?
They work in such a way that the interdependence actually leads to
better policy outcomes than we otherwise would achieve.
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What most analysis or most commentary on the gridlock misses is
that there's a lot of action happening in the background.
And what we're trying to point out is a lot of this action
is happening via delegation.
So Congress may fight.
They may be able to, may not be able to agree about whether the tax rate should be
a little higher or a little lower.
But what they can agree upon, in a world that's changing over time,
is that they want policy to be smoothed out in a sense,
to not change too much as the world changes, to react to the changing world.
All right?
Because one thing that politicians like,
particularly incumbent politicians is, they like the status quo.
All right?
They like the world to not change because that world is what got them elected.
And so, as much as they can, they'd like to keep the world the way it is.
Gridlock serves that purpose.
And so, to that extent, it's kind of locking down the world or
locking down some policies for the interests of these policymakers.
That allows deals to be made in Congress.
And what we're trying to show in this research is that delegation is
a way that Congress can overcome the problems of gridlock and get deals done.
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So to take a recent example, we can look at the Dodd-Frank Bill where a lots of
authority was reg, delegated to the financial regulators.
Now, that may have been a puzzle.
Why didn't Congress think there's nothing more [UNKNOWN] or
nothing more important in the last five years than financial reform?
Why didn't Congress figure out the answer themselves?
What they did was, they delegated authority to the regulators,
because they didn't know how the world was going to change.
What Congress people could agree upon is that they wanted to find a solution.
And I didn't know what it was, and I didn't know what it would be tomorrow, but
the deal they struck was to delegate that authority to a regulator,
who had different preferences to them.
So it may seem undemocratic, but
it's those different preferences that allow the deal to happen.
Yesterday, Democrats and Republicans agreed something needed to be done.
I didn't know what it was, but
they could agree to delegate authority to that agency.
Tomorrow, when the agency starts figuring out what the answer is, Republicans or
maybe Democrats don't like it, but
they can't back track, they can't roll it back, precisely because of gridlock.
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Gridlock has its pluses and has its minuses.
All right?
It does stop things from happening and it frustrates a lot of people.
What we're trying to show here is the gridlock may not be as bad as it,
bad as it seems.
And that other aspects of the political institution go a long way to
solving the problems or solving the inefficiencies of gridlock.
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