Self-important politicians make for better government

I’m reading a really excellent book at the moment called The United States of Ambition. The author, Alan Ehrenhalt, tries to figure out what sort of person runs for public office in modern America, and thereby determine to what extent the government Americans receive is a product of the unique personalities of these individuals. I’m quite fond of thinkers who analyze politics from such an explicitly human perspective, as opposed to the standard economic-sociological-ideological stuff you get everywhere else. As the book notes, It’s very easy to take the political process at face value, and simply view politicians as empty vessels of ideologies or interests that carry the agenda of some faction of the electorate. Much less frequently do we bother to analyze politicians as a faction unto themselves.

Anyway, some of Ehrenhalt’s conclusions are quite interesting in regards to how they relate to the topics I’ve been discussing in some of my previous blog posts, namely how different systems of government generate different political cultures.

One of his main arguments is that the independence of legislators — which is to say, the ability of congressmen or senators, at either the state or federal level, to vote however they want on all legislation put before them — is  a direct byproduct of the growing “professionalization” of politics. We all know that longer legislative sessions, higher pay,  larger staffs, and more grandiose election campaigns have steadily turned the holding of elected office into an increasingly demanding and complex full-time career, but less commonly do we appreciate what this means from the politician’s personal perspective. In essence, if you’re the sort of person willing to devote the vast amounts of time and energy necessary to pursue politics as a long-term occupation, then damn right you’re going to feel entitled to do the job on your own terms, and not someone else’s. It’s this professional, self-assured attitude, Ehrenhalt writes, that has effectively destroyed the idea of politicians beholden to the interests of anyone but themselves. Oh sure, congresspeople are beholden to money and so forth, but again, we always view the power of money from the perspective of the interest group donating it, and not the politician receiving it. No one signs up for a career in politics to be the puppet of someone else, they sign up to do what they want. Money is obviously an end to a more robust political career, or no one would take it.

It’s particularly interesting to analyze the book’s conclusions from a Canadian perspective, because the case can easily be made that Canadian legislative democracy is essentially stagnated in the political culture of pre-1960s America, the era prior to the flourishing era of legislator independence that Ehrenhalt documents.

There was a time when most legislatures in the States, from Congress to the city hall, were run very hierarchically, usually by a handful of domineering “boss” figures. Sometimes the bosses were the party chairmen, sometimes the House speakers or majority leaders, sometimes some other powerful community figure who may have not held formal political office at all. In any case, these men were the guys who decided which bills passed or failed, which legislators got appointed to which committees, and who was guaranteed re-nomination come election time. Americans are now taught to regard this period of their history as a very corrupt and undemocratic era, but we Canadians, with our political system that enshrines the office of “party leader” as a formal, authoritative office with sweeping powers, are still living it.

Reading about the American evolution, it’s tempting to think that the end of boss-driven Canadian politics could come, as it did in the States, through fairly gradual changes to the culture and identity of our politicians, rather than via the sort of headache-inducing constitutional overhauls we tend to presume. Even more counter-intuitively, since legislative reform in Canada is often thought of as a fairly conservative thing, such reforms would probably go in the direction of more government, rather than less.

The Canadian Parliament sits for an average of 100 days a year, while the average session of the American Congress lasts around 300. Any Member of the House of Representatives is permitted to have a staff of up to 18 full-time employees, and many do (there’s no limit at all for Senators). A non-cabinet Member of the Canadian House of Commons, by contrast, usually has two or three. Small surprise, then, that MPs’ websites, campaign fliers, and community newsletters always look so bland and cookie-cutter; the Party hierarchies in Ottawa do most of the heavy media and campaigning (to say nothing of actual policy) work on their behalf. Perhaps this saves time and money, but the more immediate result is a push in the direction of less professionalism. Since Canadian MPs work fewer hours with less resources than their American counterparts, the Ehrenhalt thesis would argue, they are ultimately incapable of taking their jobs seriously enough to be effective, independent-minded legislators.

Granted, institutional change will need to come as well — the lack of open, public primaries in Canada, for instance, severely limits the ability or need for an MP to cultivate a support base outside of the tiny group of local party insiders who dominate the average riding’s nomination process — but in the meantime promoting greater professionalism among MPs is probably worthwhile. I’m reminded of the “as if” theory of Christopher Hitchens: sometimes change only comes when you act as if your goal was already reality. If more MPs acted as if they were important, influential players in the legislative process, perhaps the legislature’s current culture of subservience would begin to subside somewhat.

In any case, we have to start somewhere.