Tag: Authority

City Power

Posted on by jabittan
Where does power and authority come from? I think this is an interesting question to ask ourselves. What is it that makes a nation, a state, a city, or an institution powerful and authoritative? Thousands to hundreds of years ago we solved this question by outsourcing – we decided that a divine being had vested power and authority in a single individual. Today, what creates authority for our mayor, the supreme court, and our nation is not divine, but public trust, cooperation, and economic prospects. Building society with these blocks isn’t always perfect, but it has managed to work for humans for a few hundred years now.

 

Bruce Katz and Jeremy Nowak look at the implications of the authority and power philosophy I described above in their book The New Localism. They write, “The power of cities and counties is not like the power of nations or states. It is grounded in markets and civics more than in constitutions or charters.” The authors make a split between the local and national in terms of how power and authority play out to create a social structure of trust. Nations and states tend to be based on written charters agreed to by relatively diverse populations. Cities and local counties tend to be based on shared values, experiences, and backgrounds with shared economic prospects and motives being the ultimate binding glue.

 

I think there are two things that we can understand about national versus local systems from the description provided by Katz and Nowak. Nations and states, with authority grounded in written constitutions and charters, have a more permanent and stable feel to them. changing something in a drastic manner requires a change to the written founding documents. This gives national and state governments more structure and a form that is more likely to endure longer into the future, but at the cost of making them rigid and hard to adapt to changes in the economy, in social preferences, and other trends.

 

As a contrast, city and local governments, which are based more on shared interests, engaged civic actors, and local economic contexts are more flexible and adaptable to trends, changing social preferences, and new economic developments. This gives local and state governments the flexibility that is needed to take advantage of new innovations and technologies. It allows the governments to solve problems through the power of collective action, but it also leave them vulnerable to wild swings in economic fortunes and broader sociopolitical forces.

 

While nations are able to define their populaces and establish binding rules for citizens across decades or centuries, cities often find it hard to create structures and institutions that are guaranteed to last as long. City populations are more prone to leave when things go south, and the strength of institutions can be greatly diminished when the population falls and a few actors exert undue influence in local decision making. Nevertheless, humans seem to be drawn toward cities and seem to be willing to reinvent cities on a continual basis. This creates the dynamic power that cities are exerting today to solve problems and address global challenges that seem to be paralyzing nations.

Institutional Vehicles

Posted on by jabittan
In a public policy class, I had a professor once ask, “What is an institution?” One student responded that another professor once answered that question by stating that an institution was something you could kick. That’s true for some institutions (you can kick the supreme court, the city hall, and the local police department), but not all. We recognize marriage as an institution but you can’t kick it, and you certainly can’t kick equal protection under the law even though you theoretically could kick the actual paper on which the 14th amendment was written. Our institutions are sometimes physical buildings (or housed in them), but they are often processes, ideas, and systemic structures that guide our interactions, thoughts, and societies.

 

Our institutions only exist and function because we chose to place both trust and authority in our institutions. They can only operate when those within them and those who recognize them from the outside are aligned and coordinated together to recognize and legitimize action and outcomes from our institutions. In the book The New Localism, Bruce Katz and Jeremy Nowak explain what this means as problem-solving and initiative-taking move from Federal levels of governance to local levels of governance. They write, “New Localism refers to multi-sectoral networks that work together to solve problems, as well as the institutional vehicles they invent to get things done.”

 

Coalition building is an important part of politics, but it is also just an important part of life in general. If you want your family to go to Tahiti for the holidays instead of Grandma’s house, then you need to build the right family coalition to get everyone to agree. If you want to work on a specific project in the office, if you want to do a job a certain way, and if you want to reorganize the workplace, you need to build coalitions to get people on board to follow your direction. Coalition building is super complex at the national level, but at the local level where a smaller handful of actors can generate a bigger (relative) push, then coalition building is possible and creating or inventing institutional vehicles to move policy can be a powerful tool.

 

Networks are key in new localism because they open the possible avenues for movement via new institutional vehicles. Connections and shared goals behind key stakeholders make new localism possible with coalitions created through networks of like-minded community leaders. Those who have an interest in seeing reinvention, seeing successful policy development, and seeing adaptable and resilient communities can come together to form new coalitions, pulling people from varying public, civic, and private sector organizations. These groups can then think about the structures shaping our lives, our decisions, and our interactions, and how new institutions can alter the status quo to solve problems in new ways that are unique to a given city, metro, or region.

Conflicting Views of the Continental Army

Posted on by jabittan
The American Founding Fathers and the citizens of the American Colonies had a lot of conflicting views about government and governance at the time of the American Revolution. Post war, the states existed as effectively autonomous sovereign nations tied together by shared yet distinct histories. During the war, the citizens needed an army capable of defeating the British, but also feared the power that a strong standing army would hold. Throughout the revolution and post-war period, the states understood that they would need to pay the army and pay for the support they received, but no one wanted to have a central authority collect monies to pay the soldiers and mercenaries who fought against the British. Joseph Ellis captures the conflict in his book The Quartet and writes,

 

“The unspoken and unattractive truth was that the marginal status of the Continental Army was reassuring for the vast majority of Americans, since a robust and professional army on the British model contradict the very values it was supposedly fighting for. It had to be just strong enough to win the war, or perhaps more accurately not lose it, but not so strong as to threaten the republican goals the war was ultimately about.”

 

The Continental Army at points was barely holding together with minimal supplies and food. Robert Morris, a private citizen, stepped in and paid the soldiers and army himself, from his own private funds, and was viewed as a war profiteer. The Colonies sought independence, but fears of a strong standing army and a history of abuses by a central authority created fear among the colonies that hampered their efforts to build a robust force to bring them the independence they desired.

 

The conflict within the mindset of the colonies is a phenomenon we still see happening within American politics today. Foreign policy and healthcare are two arenas where similar conflicts still emerge and are quite visible. We want stability, positive outcomes, and assurances that we will not be bothered with inconveniences, but we are barely willing to pay for it. We expect our government to be farsighted and to operate perfectly, but we refuse to fund it fully and look for any abuse of power and any misuse of money as an example of why we cannot trust and cannot fully fund our government. Healthcare eats an enormous amount of total spending (governmental, private, and individual) in our country, but we don’t seem to actually work toward the things that make us healthier. The government spends less that 1% of total budget on foreign affairs, but people assume we spend much more. In both of these areas, spending more directly to assist health and foreign aid would reduce the problems that arise later on and become our excuses and examples of why we cannot trust government. From our founding through today it seems that our distrust of government has been less in line with reality, and more in line with our fears and the stories we tell ourselves about what we need and what values we should try to live up to as a nation.