American government and politics are extraordinarily complex. The United States has many levels of government: federal, state, county, city, and town—to say nothing of a host of special and regional authorities. Each of these governments operates according to its own rules, has the authority to make its own laws, and is related to the others in complex ways. In many nations, regional and local governments are appendages of the national government. This is not true in the United States, where state and local governments possess considerable independence and autonomy. Each level of government, moreover, consists of an array of departments, agencies, offices, and bureaus, each with its own policies, jurisdiction, and (sometimes overlapping) responsibilities.
At times this complexity gets in the way of effective governance, as is often the case when governments must respond to emergencies. The United States’ federal, state, and local public safety agencies seldom share information and frequently use incompatible communications equipment, so they sometimes cannot even speak to one another. For example, on September 11, 2001, New York City’s police and fire departments could not effectively coordinate their responses to the attack on the World Trade Center because their communications systems were not linked. While communication between different levels of government has improved in the last two decades, many security and policy agencies, ranging from the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), still maintain separate computer operating systems and databases, which inhibits their ability to cooperate.
However, the complexity of the U.S. government is no accident. Complexity was one element of the Founders’ grand constitutional design. The framers of the Constitution hoped that an elaborate system of power sharing among national institutions and between the states and the federal government would allow competing interests to have a voice in public affairs across a variety of decision-making arenas—while preventing any single group or coalition from monopolizing power. One set of interests might be active in some states, other forces could be influential in the national legislature, and still others might prevail in the federal executive branch. This dispersion of power and opportunity would allow many groups to achieve at least some of their political goals. In this way, America’s political tradition associates complexity with liberty and political opportunity.
Although this arrangement creates many avenues for political action, it also places a burden on citizens who wish to achieve something through political participation. They may be unable to discern where particular policies are actually made, who the decision makers are, and what forms of political participation are most effective. This is one of the paradoxes of political life: as opportunities increase for citizens to influence the government’s use of its power, it becomes less clear how to take advantage of these opportunities. Indeed, precisely because the United States’ institutional and political arrangements are so complex, many Americans are mystified by government. Many Americans have difficulty making sense of even the basic features of the Constitution.
If the U.S. government seems complex, its politics can be utterly bewildering. For most Americans, the focal point of politics is the electoral process. As we will see in Chapter 11, tens of millions of Americans participate in national, state, and local elections, during which they hear thousands of candidates debate a perplexing array of issues. Candidates inundate the media with promises, charges, and countercharges, while pundits and journalists (whom we will discuss in Chapters 10 and 14) and even political scientists like us add their own clamor to the din.
Politics, however, does not end on Election Day. Long after the voters have spoken, political struggles continue in Congress, the executive branch, and the courts; they embroil political parties, interest groups, and the mass media. In some instances, the participants and their goals seem fairly obvious. For example, it is no secret that businesses and upper-income wage earners strongly support tax reduction, farmers support agricultural subsidies, and labor unions oppose increasing the eligibility age for Social Security. Each of these forces has created or joined organized groups to advance its cause by influencing members of government. We will examine some of these groups in Chapter 13.
In other instances, though, the participants and their goals are not so clear. Sometimes corporate groups promote environmental causes not for their own sake but rather to increase regulatory burdens on competitors. Other times, groups claiming to want to help the poor and downtrodden seek only to help themselves. And worse, many government policies are made behind closed doors, away from the light of publicity. Ordinary citizens can hardly be blamed for failing to understand bureaucratic rule making and other obscure procedures of government.