Is politics cyclical?

I attended a fascinating class at the Kennedy School yesterday delivered by David Gergen, who talked about the cyclical nature of American politics. Essentially the argument goes something like this:

Although both Democrats and Republicans have occupied the White House over the last couple of hundred years, the political centre of gravity has never strayed too far from the centre. This is because each presidency has been constrained by a prevailing set of ideas and norms, concerning the role and size of the state.

Every once in a while, a rupture occurs to the established order, where the prevailing ideas and norms are challenged. Examples include the radical expansion of the state under FDR in the 1940s (which ended with the 'New Deal') and the "Reagan Revolution" during the 1980s, which sought to radically repeal the power of the state.

Most presidencies though tend to fall within these broad cyclical shifts and therefore either confirm or consolidate prevailing ideas and norms, rather than challenging them. So despite winning power for the Republicans in 1953 President Eisenhower did not fundamentally challenge the prevailing view of the state's role established a decade earlier under FDR. Similarly Bill Clinton, who's presidency interrupted twenty years of steady Republican rule, did not seek to challenge the established conservative consensus established under Reagan. Indeed Clinton is famous for stating "the era of big government is over".

The question now is whether the election of Obama in 2008 represented a break from the established order or whether in fact it was merely a temporary blip in an otherwise conservative-dominated cycle. It is probably too early to say but it is worth nothing the following: although most of the US media have for months dismissed the Tea Party as an extremist fringe of Republican thinking the election of several Tea Party-backed candidates over more established Republican figures and the expected outcome of the mid-terms suggests they are not as far from the political mainstream as has been assumed.

It would be interesting to compare this account with an analysis of recent British political history. Are we still living in an essentially Thatcherite cycle or does the existing coalition government represent a break from the established order? Discuss!

Calculating the cost of punishment

Judges in St Louis are to be given new information when sentencing convicted criminals: how much a given punishment will cost the state. So for a convicted thief, a judge will now learn how much imprisoning that thief would cost, compared to the cost of punishing them in the community.

Pressure on criminal justice budgets has fuelled an explosion of innovative penal reforms across the US, from New York's experiments with drug courts to Michigan's decision to actually close down prisons. However, Missouri is the first state to systematically provide information about the costs of punishment to judges.

Its a bold move. Many would argue that justice should remain independent of cost considerations and that a criminal's fate should not be determined by a bureaucrat's interpretation of what is 'affordable'. A more nuanced concern might also be over the methodology used to calculate such costs. There is lots of data telling us what the average cost of imprisonment is but this tends to be pretty generic and smoothes over some important variables. For example, the cost of punishing an offender depends, not just on the cost of administering a particular punishment, but on that offender's likelihood of re-offending and therefore of being re-convicted. If the offender breaches a community sentence and is re-sentenced to prison, the state has paid twice over. Perhaps you could get around this by also publishing the likely re-offending rate of a particular offender, but this would open up a whole other range of methodological uncertainties.

On the other hand, supporters of such a move would argue, as they have in Missouri, that nobody is forcing the judge to do anything he or she doesn't want to: this is just more information being made available to them when making their decision. Economic considerations play roles in all sorts of important public policy decisions, so why not sentencing? Justice has a price, just like anything else.

These debates are obviously live within the UK right now, with the forthcoming spending review around the corner and the justice department being one of the unprotected departments. Ultimately though, this is unlikely to be a panacea to the problem of prison over-crowding, at least in the UK. That's because, contrary to widespread perception, the huge rise in the prison population has not been caused by an over-incarceration of non-violent offenders, such as shop-lifters for whom prison might not be the obvious answer, but by a general harshening of sentencing practice for more serious crimes, such as sexual offences and violence against the person. And even in Missouri, they do not envisage the cost of punishment being a consideration in the most violent cases.

The wisdom of Warren

One of the unexpected joys of living in America is being able to watch the Fox Soccer Channel, whose coverage of the English Premier League is comprehensive and has been keeping homesickness at bay. 

On tuning in, I was amused to discover that the show is co-hosted by former Wimbledon and Newcastle defender Warren Barton, who is effectively the show's sole pundit. In the late 1990s, Barton was briefly famous for being England's most expensive defender, but he had long since disappeared into relative obscurity, or so I had thought.

Initially, I felt sorry for Barton, assuming that his appearance on American TV was evidence of a career gone wrong. Clearly his punditry was not considered insightful enough for him to have been given a job by any of the major English broadcasters - a sad indictment when one considers the truly appalling state of football analysis. The more I watched though, the more I realised I had been wrong.

First of all, Barton is actually quite good at what he does. Ok he's not going to win any awards for eloquence but unlike many of his counterparts on English TV, he actually tries to dissect the game he's just watched and thinks about what he says before saying it.

Second, despite football not being as popular here as it is in the UK, Fox Soccer still achieves respectable ratings, pulling in around half a million viewers for the big matches - and the figures are increasing year by year. And here's the thing: unlike the average football pundit in England, Barton has the limelight to himself, which lends him a certain air of authority and omnipotence.

In fact, the more I think about it, the more Warren Barton looks shrewd and entrepreneurial when compared to his fellow English pundits. Millions of young Americans will grow up with Warren Barton as their single point of reference for English football, the market for which is growing at breakneck speed. Alan Hanson, take note...

The practitioner-academic

What is it about former UK Prime Ministers and New England universities? First it was Tony Blair teaching at Yale, now it turns out that Gordon Brown will be a visiting fellow at Harvard.

Perhaps it is a universal truth that ex-leaders – often unpopular at home by the time they leave office - are faced with more appreciative, open-minded audiences when speaking abroad, particularly in countries with as close historical ties as the US has to the UK. It might also appeal to their sense of history: some memorable speeches have been delivered by ex Prime Ministers at American Universities, the most obvious being Churchill’s Iron Curtain speech in 1946 at Fulton, Missouri.

Whatever your view of Blair and Brown, they undoubtedly have skills and experiences that will be of interest to students of government, politics and leadership, which brings me to a wider point. It seems to be a feature of Harvard that the experienced practitioner – whether they be a politician, a judge or a lawyer – is highly valued by the academic establishment, perhaps, more than they would be in the UK.

To give an example, the Kennedy School describes itself as “a place where ideas meet practice” – a principle embodied in the fact that its faculty hosts leading practitioners from around the world. I have also come across this in my own research. Later this afternoon I’ll be attending a fascinating sounding class (on the prosecution of organised criminal networks) taught by Philip Heymann, who, before becoming a professor of law at the Harvard Law School, held a number of top government posts, including Deputy Attorney General in the Clinton administration.

Perhaps what I'm saying is obvious. Close partnerships between practitioners and universities help to ensure academic research and teaching is informed by hands on experience, which benefits the students. There can also be benefits in the other direction: for example, a closer relationship between government and academia can improve the policy making process, putting ideas to the test and helping governments to prioritise scarce funding towards policies where the evidence base is strong.

But I would speculate that while the UK university system continues to produce excellent research, its interconnectedness with practitioners is weak and classes like Professor Heymann’s (see above) would be rarer than they are here. (The one exception to this may be medicine where the concept of the “practitioner-academic” is well established in the UK). Johanthan Shephard, at Cardiff University, has argued along similar lines in relation to criminal justice and education policy research.

In any case, I’d be interested in others’ thoughts.

A week in America

Welcome to my blog. I’m on a career break from the UK civil service in order to take up a visiting scholarship at Harvard. Each week, I’ll use it to set out some thoughts on a range of policy issues and reflect on my experiences at Harvard.


Aside from book-burning the biggest policy issue of the last week has been the economy. Following the release of another set of sluggish employment figures (unemployment remains at just under 10%) president Obama was forced to admit that the economic recovery had been ‘painfully slow’.


As you would expect, there are opposing views on how these figures should be interpreted and what the government’s response should be. Very crudely, Obama's team are arguing that the figures show that further stimulus is needed to boost demand and create jobs. The Republicans, on the other hand, believe that the latest figures are proof of the failure of Obama’s fiscal stimulus plan and that, rather than burdening the economy with more debt, the priority should be to cut spending.


Whichever of these versions you believe, it is interesting to observe how tame this all sounds in comparison to the economic debate within the UK. For example, even the most vocal Republicans are only proposing to cut government spending back to pre-2008 levels i.e. before the fiscal stimulus and bank bailouts. Compare this to the radicalism of the UK coalition government’s approach, which is planning to bring spending back to 1990s levels - and it puts it into perspective a bit.


Meanwhile at Harvard, a quick scan of the courses on offer for Autumn 2010 reveals some interesting trends in American public life:


“Nudging” is as popular in the US as it is in the UK with numerous courses promising to help students apply the principles of behavioural economics to a whole range of public policy issues from addiction to gender equality.


Education policy research is enjoying something of a renaissance, partly as a result of the Obama administration’s promise to promote “what works” in its Race to the Top schools program, which offers federal grants to states that raise academic standards and improve teacher quality. Harvard is awash with courses offering to share the latest cutting edge research on education policy.


The influence of television extends into every facet of American public life. When flicking through the Harvard coursebook I was amazed to read that the Faculty of Arts and Sciences will be offering a course on ‘HBO’s The Wire and its contribution to understanding urban inequality’. I once read that following the release of the powerful French film La Haine the Prime Minister ordered his entire Cabinet to watch it. I wonder whether The Wire is now set to have a similar impact on the American political and cultural establishment.


That’s it for today. My daughter has cabin fever and needs to have a go on the swings so I’m off to the local park. ‘Till next week.