Ford School faculty have been among the experts helping the public make sense of some of the key questions about political developments in DC: What actions are the new Administration taking? What do these actions mean for various stakeholders? What steps might come next among the complex set of players in our political system? How can we put the Administration's actions in historical and international context?
Four faculty members share their expertise with State & Hill readers on four pressing topics, as of March 2025: tariffs, executive action, state capacity, and populist far-right expansions in established democracies.
By Donald P. Moynihan, J. Ira and Nicki Harris Family Professor of Public Policy
Excerpted from the Association of Public Policy and Management Presidential Address, November 2024. Full paper forthcoming in the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management.
"State capacity” is hard to define and measure, and is perhaps seen as boring, but capacity is the hidden glue that holds public policy together, or, when debased, causes public policy to fall apart. If you care about the quality of government and its ability to design and deliver public services, you should care about capacity, that is, the potential for governments to do something.
One threat to state capacity is a tendency towards proceduralism: the tendency to add layers of rules and constraints that stop government from achieving its goals, both large and small.
But while proceduralism is a creeping threat—imagine termites slowly eating away at the foundation of your house—the outcome of the 2024 U.S. presidential election has made politicization the more pressing threat—imagine that your house is on fire. Proceduralism is something that states stumble into, the result of blind spots. Politicization is a choice made by elite political actors.
From about the 1970s until relatively recently, politicization of the U.S. federal government describes a president using two basic strategies: (1) centralizing policy expertise within the White House and (2) using political appointees to strategically manage agencies. Both political parties applied such strategies, to varying degrees, within a certain equilibrium. The president was assumed to value a balance between loyalty to his policies and administrative competence in delivering those policies. The civil service system was assumed to be a stable source of institutional capacity, with basic workforce protections for employees. Within that equilibrium, the number of political appointees has gradually increased, from about 3,000 in 1990 to about 4,000 today, even as the number of career federal employees they super- vised remained relatively stable since the 1960s.
That equilibrium no longer exists. The new model of politicization reflected in President Trump’s approach relies on three additional features: (1) a personalist presidency that reorders the legal infrastructure of public administration around loyalty to the leader; (2) the deployment of rhetorical attacks and threats on institutions by those tasked with running the same institutions; and (3) a frontal attack on the separation between political appointees and civil servants, achieved by weakening civil service protections and purging those deemed to be disloyal.
Research evidence suggests that politicization erodes both state capacity and performance, but that research predates the change in equilibrium described above."
Donald Moynihan
There is a clear and pressing need to better understand if indeed a meaningful change is occurring, as well as the scale, nature, and consequences of that change. This implies the need for credible research that is descriptive, documenting changes as they occur, as well as causal, identifying how politicization affects the capacity of government (as measured in terms of variables such as employee skills, morale, and turnover) and outcomes (such as the cost and quality in the design of public policy and delivery of public services and other public values such as honesty, and responsiveness).
By building a clearer knowledge base, we are better positioned to not just respond to threats to that capacity, but to find ways to adapt and improve the ability of governments to serve the public in the future.
Moynihan is documenting and analyzing changes to state capacity on his blog, Can We Still Govern? donmoynihan.substack.com
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