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Ethiopia Sows the Seeds of Growth with Flower Power How to Measure Federal Development How Can Democrats Win? Start with big ideas and long-term vision By Rick Perlstein
hen social scientists render conclusions at odds with their own data, it is reasonable to wonder why. Again, one reason may be generational. Dissenters who do call for a bolder Democratic Party—one thinks of Robert Borosage of the Campaign for America’s Future—are sometimes dismissed as throwbacks to the ’60s. Well, I can’t be dismissed as a throwback. The ’60s ended when I was less than three months old. The traumas that shaped the worldview of a Teixeira, a Greenberg, a Judis were the post-’60s backfirings of left-of-center boldness. The same goes for Al From, whose formative political experience, he has told me, was McGovern’s loss in 1972. The traumas of my own political generation, conversely, were the backfirings of left-of-center timidity. Which may be why, when I read these writers’ stories about the history of the past 25 years, I don’t know what they’re talking about.
hen Al From sent out the memo to potential members announcing the formation of the Democratic Leadership Council in 1985 he blamed the Democrats’ decline on “consistent pursuit of wrongheaded, losing strategies” such as Walter Mondale’s “making blatant appeals to liberal and minority interest groups in the hopes of building a winning coalition where a majority, under normal circumstances, simply does not exist.” As a historian, I looked up the record. And what I learned was that Walter Mondale’s grand strategy for his general election campaign was a promise to cut the deficit by two thirds in his first term through $92 billion of spending cuts and a tax hike. He also promised $30 billion in spending to restore some of Ronald Reagan’s cuts in social services—the money coming from other cuts elsewhere. Now I’m not sure what kind of strategy it would have taken to beat Ronald Reagan’s “Morning in America” in 1984. But deficit reduction surely was not it. Deficit reduction was also not a direct appeal to liberal and minority interest groups. Cut to 1988 and the Dukakis campaign, the inspiration for the famous 1989 DLC monograph by William Galston and Elaine Kamarck The Politics of Evasion: Democrats and the Presidency, which argued that the Democrats had degenerated into “liberal fundamentalism.” But the closer I studied the actual content of that campaign, the more I trusted the assessment of Sidney Blumenthal in his book on the 1988 election, Pledging Allegiance: “Dukakis’s very inability to offer any definition of liberalism was taken as perhaps his most encouraging trait” by Democrats that year, he writes. “It was seen as an enormous shrewdness, a form of wisdom. Dukakis’s politics of lowered expectations, his career of slashing budgets and tax cuts, made him seem a new kind of Democrat, a man of his time.” Thus, under the slogan “This election is not about ideology, it’s about competence,” did Dukakis, incompetently, run. I will buy anyone a steak dinner who can, without a trip online or to the library, come up with a single “liberal fundamentalist” program that Dukakis advocated that year. And what about Bill Clinton in 1992? I once interviewed a liberal political activist who explained to me that the DLC loses every election but always manages to win the battle to interpret every election. It’s an exaggeration with more than a grain of truth. “Bill Clinton would not have been able to win the election if he had not run as a New Democrat, addressing the problems of cultural breakdown, the perceived practical failures of government, and public doubts about the welfare state,” the New Democrat historian and loyalist Kenneth Baer writes. As for cultural breakdown, any American who read a newspaper in 1992 knew that Bill Clinton had tried marijuana, violated the sanctity of his marriage vows, and dodged the draft. They voted for him anyway. And anyone who heard Bill Clinton speak during the 1992 general election season knows that a constant refrain was a promise of $50 billion a year in new investments in cities and $50 billion a year in new funding for education—and, what’s more, a first hundred days to rival FDR’s, culminating in the passage of a plan to deliver health care to every American. He also, of course, made noises about his toughness on crime, his commitment to beat down government bloat, his (vague) pledge to “end welfare as we know it.” He made rhetorical flourishes about issues like school choice. But the argument that DLC talking points won him the election cannot be sustained. It would also be wrong to argue that nobody-shoots-Santa-Claus-style liberalism did it. It was Ross Perot who won the election for Clinton, taking away many votes that ordinarily would have gone to Bush. Bush, with the economy as it was, had the lowest approval rating of any president seeking reelection in history. My little mutt Buster could have beaten George H.W. Bush in 1992. Revisionism might seem a knottier course as our story progresses. Wasn’t it Clinton’s turn to a paleoliberal plan for universal health care that slew the Democrats in the 1994 Congressional elections, his neoliberalism that allowed him to get, as the subtitle of Dick Morris’s memoir Behind the Oval Office puts it, “Reelected Against All Odds”? But isn’t it also logical to hypothesize that the Democrats lost Congress not for proposing health care, but for losing on health care? A suggestive piece of evidence comes from Greenberg, who had his focus groups write imaginary postcards to President Bush and his Democratic opponent. The most poignant comes from a Florida swing voter, who wrote, plaintively: “Dear Democratic Nominee, What can you actually do better. What happened to the health care programs you promised us 8 years ago?” The point is supported by an argument of the political scientist Martin Wattenberg, who has demonstrated that “registered nonvoters in 1994 were consistently more pro-Democratic than were voters on a variety of measures of partisanship.” This suggests that the real triumph of the Republicans in 1994 was not ginning up any kind of new national consensus on their issues, but in motivating their own core voters to create a temporary mirage of such a consensus. And thus, when the Republican congress tried to legislate, radically, based on this purblind “mandate,” the more massive electorate in the presidential year 1996, more reflective of the ideological predilections of registered voters as a whole, found the Republican Senate leader Bob Dole easy to reject. “Whereas the credit for Clinton’s comeback in 1996 is often given to the triangulation strategy designed by his pollster Dick Morris,” Wattenberg concludes, “these results suggest that another plausible factor was the increase in turnout from 1994 to 1996.” Let me clear the decks, and let me do it bluntly. There is a more elegant explanation for why the Democrats succeeded in every election of the 1990s but one. It is, simply, that the core Democratic message of economic populism appeals to people—despite, not because of, the Democrats’ retreat from that selfsame message. And that the old ’60s bugaboos no longer keep people from voting for Democrats because so many voters are too young to remember, or care. Look at the data on the white, working-class counties of the industrial North that at mid-century were once so reliably Democratic but whose Wallace-Nixon-Goldwater Democrat turn so traumatized liberal confidence by the 1980s. Jefferson, just south of St. Louis, went 57 percent Democratic in 1960, 42.6 percent in 1968, 38.6 percent in 1972, and 36.71 percent in 1984. Macomb, north of Detroit: 63 percent for JFK, 66 percent for Ronald Reagan in 1984. They’re all now safely back in the Democratic column. Ninety percent of former Reagan-Democrat counties returned to the Democrats for Clinton’s first presidential run. They’re still Democratic.
ow to point this out is to grant part of the DLC’s point: that this is testament to Clinton’s success in making the Democratic Party worthy of these people’s trust again. But I’d like to call a witness on my behalf. His name is . . . Bill Clinton. “The more they believe that you’re careful with tax money and responsible in the way you run the programs and require responsibility from citizens,” the former president told The American Prospect in an important interview last fall, “the more the public in general is willing to be liberal in the expenditure of tax money. . . . The Democrats ought to all pocket some of the gains I made.” To believe deep down that white, blue-collar voters might somehow slip back into an atavistic pining for George Wallace is to insult these voters and traduce Bill Clinton’s accomplishment. The Democrats need to start trusting that their 1990s gains were real, and that people vote for Democrats bcause they’re attracted to economic populism, not repelled by it. Another place where Democrats need to start trusting these gains is in the realm of foreign policy. Recent events—the testimony of Richard Clarke, the spectacle of stonewalling from the Bush White House that followed, the stalemate in Iraq—point out just how threadbare the old stereotypes about wimpy Democrats and muscular Republicans remain. In polls, people still claim to trust the Republicans over the Democrats to keep them safe. But the numbers are becoming softer all the time. After the disasters of the 2002 off-year elections, Bill Clinton lamented in an address to the DLC, “When people feel uncertain, they’d rather have somebody who’s strong and wrong than somebody who’s weak and right.” Here is an example in which the Democrat who can’t trust that Bill Clinton’s gains were real is Bill Clinton. George W. Bush has recently been serving Democrats a campaign issue on a platter: that an appearance of strength, when rooted in incompetence, strategic blindness, and ideological obsession, is weakness. If Democrats can’t convert the distrust produced by George Bush’s numbskull unilateralism into a trust in Democrats on this issue, perhaps they don’t deserve to win elections.
understand why it might be hard for baby-boomer Democrats to shed the sense that they have to look a little more like the Republican Party in order to restore voters’ trust: getting spurned by Reagan Democrats was the shock that defined their political lives. Bill Clinton is an outstanding example of this reaction: from his gubernatorial loss in Arkansas in 1980 “he drew the lesson that he could not actively push a liberal agenda in the face of a dominantly conservative and racially polarized state.” Same for Joe Lieberman, Indiana Senator Evan Bayh (now DLC chairman)—who watched his father get strangled by Ronald Reagan’s coattails—and Stanley Greenberg, who, holding focus groups in Macomb County, Michigan, in 1985, found voters raging that “blacks constitute the explanation for their vulnerability and for almost everything that has gone wrong in their lives” and that the Democratic Party was in thrall to them. No wonder he is careful not to offend those same folks now. But Greenberg presents no evidence in his latest book that any of that vituperation remains. Instead, when Greenberg asks voters to describe the Democratic Party, he doesn’t get back a description of the party of hippies, welfare queens, and gays; he gets a description of the party of . . . nothing at all: “I think they lost their focus,” says one informant. “I think they are a little disorganized right now,” answers another. “They need leadership.” “On the sidelines.” “Fumbling.” “Confused.” “Losing.” “Scared.” Which brings us back to the question of stock tickers and super jumbos? Who wants to identify with an unfocused, disorganized, leaderless, sidelined, fumbling, confused, losing, scared organization? Vote with it sometimes, maybe, but identify with it? No one I know. Even if that institution happens to offer more of what people say they want. If people don’t know what you stand for, they won’t identify with you. Change your message to try to win each passing election, and soon you may start losing them all. So what’s the alternative? What should the Democrats’ consistent, long-term message consist of? I will avoid prescribing what it should be, other than to note that for reasons of history and structure it must tend to the work of economic equality. There are really two reasons to stay away from details. First, they would distract from the real point of this essay, which is not about programs but about structure. Second, there are lots of possibilities for programs, and it would be misleading to focus on some favored set. It could be universal single-payer health care. It could be free college education or universal pre-kindergarten or both. It could be a program to make the government the employer of last resort, putting the underemployed to work rebuilding infrastructure. It is not the work of a day, a month, or even a year to settle on what the course should be. I argue here only that there must be a course. Why must these programs tend to the work of economic equality? One reason is structural (or “path-dependent,” as the social scientists say): the modern Democratic Party’s strongest store of cultural identity, of value built over time—its “brand identity,” as the marketers put it—is in its work to producing economic equality. Abandoning it makes as much sense as McDonald’s deciding to drop the hamburgers and remake itself into a chain of pancake joints. Another reason is simpler—numbskull simple. Any marketing executive will tell you that you can’t build a brand out of stuff the people say they don’t want. And what do Americans say they want? According to the pollsters, exactly what the Democratic Party was once famous for giving them: economic populism.
n The Two Americas Greenberg presents a fascinating chart that records his subjects’ rankings of our country’s problems. It reads like the score for an Old Democrat symphony. Of the top eight concerns, only one, by the traditional reckoning, helps the Republicans: “Rogue nations, like Iran and North Korea, armed with weapons of mass destruction and working together with global terrorist organizations.” It’s ranked in second place, designated “extremely serious” or “very serious” by 72 percent of respondents. But before that, in first place, is the biggest problem: “the state of healthcare in America,” a major concern for 77 percent. Four through eight read thus: “two-parent families spending 22 or fewer hours with their children every week in order to work and earn enough”; “the state of education in America”; “the middle class being squeezed, because their incomes are stagnant while prices are skyrocketing for housing, college tuition, and health care, with employers contributing less each year”; “big corporations having too much influence”; and “the growing inequality of income in America.” (The issue in third place, “rapidly rising federal deficits,” represents a tactical disadvantage for the Bush administration.) All these are rated major problems by 52 percent or more. When you get near the bottom of the list, you start getting Republican issues: “out-of-control government spending and programs”; “outdated government regulations”; and “the high taxes on businesses and individuals.” That would be the crown jewel of the Republican agenda, which only 15 percent rate an “extremely serious problem” and 15 percent call “very serious.” All three of the above are worried over by less than 45 percent of respondents. Greenberg asks a group of voters what they think about “big corporations”: “They spit out, ‘money,’ ‘greed,’ and ‘Enron.’ They ‘try and run the little guy out’ and ‘have too much control over the little people.’ . . . ‘They want more and more and more.... ‘It really makes me question and just lose faith in everything that we are supposed to believe in.’” It is a topic, he concludes, that one of his focus-group subsets approaches “with revulsion formerly reserved for Hollywood.” These people do not come from one of his swing-voter subsets. They are “Country Folks,” rural men and women without a college education, a demographic that went for Bush over Gore almost two to one. It’s a story you find again and again, buried in his pages. Fifty-two percent of elderly non-college-educated men call themselves Republicans, only 39 percent Democrats—and only 37 percent of them believe that regulation does more harm than good. As for his national sample as a whole, “a 55 percent majority favors a larger government effort to reduce the differences between high- and middle-income people. The majority reaches 65 percent to aggressively shut down corporate loopholes and shelters. . . . More than 60 percent of Americans say CEO wrongdoing is a ‘widespread problem’ in a system that is failing”—a figure “well in excess of the percent getting ‘very angry’ about the federal government spending the social security surplus, as a modest point of comparison.” From this, Greenberg makes an extraordinary admission: “The anti-corporate reaction is not the strongest among the Democratic loyalists; it is not a ‘base strategy’ in conventional political terms. The anti-corporate appeal reaches into the contested world, and even the Republican loyalist world.” So why aren’t these people Democrats?
suspect that in part it has to do with the fact that responding to these concerns would require a commitment to economic liberalism, which means a commitment to the kind of time horizon that Democrats, so fixated on the two-year election cycle, don’t even know how to think about. If you can’t see beyond the two-year election cycle, you certainly can’t be thinking about a commitment as serious as “a larger government effort to reduce the differences between high- and middle-income people.” That simply takes a while—in the conception, in the execution, and, not least, in the political promotion. Instead—to take a notorious Dick Morris idea that made it into Clinton’s 1996 State of the Union Address—the voters get the federal promotion of school uniforms. It’s not that any Democrat ever sits down and says, I only care about what happens in the next two years. The sentiment has been displaced. It is expressed every time a Democrat fetishizes the problem of reaching “swing voters” above all else. Those who vote neither habitually for Democrats nor habitually for Republicans are, of course, important voters: there are many of them, more of them all the time, and without a sizable number of them, neither party would win any pluralities. But what, structurally, is a swing voter? We return to the example of Boeing. Swing voters are like short-term stockholders. They are attracted to one position or another because of what’s in it for them at any particular moment. When that position no longer pays, it is abandoned. Try to woo a bloc of swing voters—“soccer moms,” “NASCAR dads,” whatever—who are by definition fickle, and a political party hollows itself out by ignoring stakeholders who aren’t short-term: activists, institutions like labor, minorities whose commitment to the Democratic Party is historic. By this theory, the analogue to T. Boone Pickens or “Chainsaw Al” Dunlop is . . . Dick Morris.
ill Clinton hired Dick Morris to prevent what was seen, in the context of a single career, as an unacceptable horror: a looming reelection loss. Morris persuaded him that the modern Democratic Party’s founding principle—long-term investment in programs to create more economic equality—was unacceptably inflexible. For Clinton and Morris, the solution was plain. The Democratic Party had to shed everything that was slow-moving and lumbering in its ideological presentation. They had to turn a dinosaur into a lean, mean short-term vote-producing machine. The Congressional losses of 1994 touched Clinton’s deepest anxieties, and made him willing to weaken the institution that made him, for personal survival. Dick Morris did it the way a CEO would. By showing indifference to any stakeholder but the swing voter, he gladly risked the loyalty of those who had been willing to stick with the institution through thick and thin. “The fact that it would anger Democrats was not a drawback but a bonus,” Stephanopoulos recalls of Morris’s strategy—just as angering long-term stakeholders is a bonus for a corporate manager looking to prove to Wall Street his macho bona fides. It gives the stock a goose. The only risk being, of course, the long-term health of the institution. Political scientists, having established that party identification is the best predictor of voting behavior, need to study how many party identifiers the Democrats lost specifically because of this kind of thinking. They need to measure the opportunity cost of doing what Dick Morris said needed to be done to win the 1996 election and the opportunity cost of the Morris-like habits that currently saturate Bill Clinton’s party. Now that Dick Morris has been disgraced, it’s easy to laugh at him. But we all know what happens to those who laugh imperiously in parables. He lost the battle. However, did his legacy of stock-ticker thinking also lose Democrats the war? Ethiopia Sows the Seeds of Growth with Flower Power
n a flat, 20 hectares site south-west of Addis Ababa, dozens of women in straw hats and men in baseball caps dig trenches, laying the groundwork for the latest entrant in a multimillion-dollar industry that is starting go bloom in the Horn of Africa. In just a few months, orange and pink roses should be poking thought the art and another farm will be up and running, part of a horticultural sector emerging in a nation more often associated with famine than business. Ethiopia’s flower industry is a success but many more are needed, says a western diplomat. Just to “stop the boat sinking” will take 10 years, and billions of dollars of investment will be needed to bring the country to African standards, says Ishac Diwan, the World Bank’s country director. Twenty years after pictures of Ethiopian famine were beamed around the globe; the country still has much to do to shake off its image as a nation of starving children. Ethiopia is an extreme example of the development challenges facing Africa, with at least 5m people needing food aid to survive. Donors also acknowledge that they have made mistakes, belatedly realizing that simply giving food ignores the root causes of the problems, undermines domestic markets and often creates an environment of dependency. But as Paul Wolfowitz, the new president of the World Bank, tours Africa for the first time, hopes are rising that Ethiopia and its poor neighbors may be at a turning point. At the weekend, the Group of Eight wealthy industrialized nations agreed to wipe out more than $40bn of the debt that 18 African countries, including Ethiopia, owe the World Bank, International Monetary Fund and African Development Bank. But even with debt relief and recent increases in aid, billions more dollars will be needed to build infrastructure and generate sustainable growth. Equally important, the Ethiopian government needs to do more to stimulate the private sector and improve the investment climate. Horticulture is one area where private sector reforms have succeeded. Three years ago there was only a handful of flower producers. Now the Ethiopian Horticulture Producers and Exporters Association has 32 members, 45 per cent of who are foreign investors, says Tsegaye Abebe, the group’s chairperson. He runs the flower farm in Sebeta, south of Addis. Ababa with Dutch Company, It is being set up with high-technology French greenhouses and an Israeli irrigation system. Flower producers can import goods duty-free, enjoy a five-year income tax exemption and lease and from the government at competitive rates. Mr. Tsegaye expects more foreign companies to take advantage of the good climate, cheap land and freight rates and, crucially, better investment conditions. The government, in power since 1991, has been praised for reforms in a nation blighted by mass poverty, under-development and perennial drought. But it has also been criticized for being over-cautious, retaining too much economic control and refusing to shed the Marxist-Leninist ideology that surrounds many of its leaders, including Meles Zenawi, Prime minister.
n most indicators, Ethiopia lags far behind the rest of the continent. It has a mere 50cm of road per head compared with the continent’s average of five meters; water storage capacity is only 42 cubic meters a head against an African norm of 600. Mr. Diwan, the World Bank’ country director, concedes the environment is difficult. “To have just good policies is not enough here … you have to have very good policies,” he says. Donors have shown their willingness to support the reforms by lifting funding to $900m from $600m three years ago. The goal is to raise it to raise it to $2bn in three years, says Mr. Diwan. But progress is slow, with average per capita income still $100 a year. The workers at the flower farm earn less than $1 a day. In spite of serious questions about the government’s human rights record, the assistance is still flowing. This year, under a $190m-a-year cash and food-for-work programme, about 5m people living in unsustainable areas will work on state projects in return for money or food. Government officials acknowledge progress on development has been slow blaming political divisions, the war with Eritrea and magnitude of the task. They say the country is now on the right path but needs more support. Says Ato Mulugeta, representative for the agriculture ministry “We have labour but it is illiterate. We have nautral resources but they are not tapped. Do we have money? No.” How to Measure Federal Development By Franz Thedieck Abstract The following report describes the development of FeSAT – the Federal Systems Analysis Tool. The elaboration of FeSAT took place within the activities of the Ethio-German development cooperation. It has been encouraged and financed since the beginning of 2001 by the GTZ supported Federal Governance Development Project. FeSAT is the result of an iterative working process, which continued for more than two years. The author in an intensive reflection and discussion process has developed the different versions of the analysis tool with the experts of the Ethiopian Ministry for federal Affairs, the House of Federation and the Federal Development project. The GTZ project expert has contributed most important ideas. The author wants to express his gratitude to the before-mentioned institutions and persons. They offered outstanding intellectual and logistical working conditions. The report is structured in the following way: The first section is about the use and utility of such a tool. It draws attention to the international development aid debate and to the development of good governance and its assessment. The second section describes the development process itself, the elaboration of FeSAT in view of the Ethiopian federal system and the questions it poses. This point also explains the interrelation of FeSAT with other assessment tools and its basic structure and methodology. The third section reveals how and on which basis the content of the analysis tool was defined. The fourth section discusses the strong and weak points of FeSAT. Special attention is drawn to the question of how traditional societies can deal with the civil society paradigm and individual fundamental rights. The fifth and last section sheds light on the implementation perspectives of this tool. Why Measures Federal Development? There are several reasons why measuring federal development makes sense. One is linked to the international debate about the poor outcome of development assistance project. A consequence of this debate has been that focus has shifted by the state. The influence of the organization of public administration and state institutions on the development process and its effects has been discussed intensely1 and efforts have been made to link these framework conditions to the development activities. I would like to explain this debate more exhaustively, because it reveals why the state organization can be a relevant object of development policy and why the assessment of such development programmes has to follow new guidelines. In the 90s of the last century, the unsatisfactory results of development assistance became increasingly evident with the gap between rich and poor countries widening and a general aggravation of global crises concerning food, environment, health and population. Convention approaches to development cooperation planning, management and evaluation were considered insufficient. The view shifted from projects to programmes, from punctual, isolated operations to framework conditions for development. It was also the time when the ‘governance’-concept was underlined in the public discourse. It meant that isolated solutions, which do not take the state organization and the social activities sufficiently into consideration in most cases, cannot provide sustainable help. Without regarding and affecting the structures of the whole complex system (e.g. The state machinery) only isolated reform steps could be undertaken, which could bring – in the best of the cases – partial relief. What was wrong with the neat and precisely planned development projects? They had the strong point that these projects sprang from real problems in the partner country. This is an advantage because the project did not refer to a mere theoretical problem or to a question interesting only from a donor’s point of view. The selective approach to assistance has its rational if emergency relief programmes or similar specific situations are concerned. But there is much doubt about the general usefulness of isolated projects that concentrate on very specific items like fish farming. There have been too many project islands, which – if perceived on a small scale – could have had positive results, but finally have had no effects on the general development environment.2 traditional project planning, management and evaluation were based on routines and ways of thinking derived from the management of engineering projects. Their logic consisted in monitoring and controlling project activities in order to guarantee deadlines, resources and cost planning. The elements of this technical planning were to investigate the financial and technical feasibility of the project, to elaborate a comprehensive and detailed project design and to set up a management system that indicated and took countermeasures against any deviation from the project plan. The hierarchical, control-oriented and mechanistic way of project management is unsuitable for non-technical projects, especially for complex programmes that touch the general conditions of society and state organization. This is the case e.g. in decentralization as well as in poverty relief programmes, which need a certain amount of flexibility in order to react to unforeseen and unpredictable changes in their environment. Other similar assistance programmes concern the organization of constitutional institutions and systems like the judiciary power or the federal system. Thought the reform may be realized in small steps3, the elaboration of the overall reform design has to take into consideration the entire complex reform environment, e.g. the federal system as such. Only with a systematic understanding of reform processes can sustainable solutions be brought about. Consequently, the international donor institutions have developed analysis tools for the assessment of good governance. An institutional reform programme destined to develop a federal system is highly complex. It cannot be understood, steered and evaluated without previous and continued systematic analysis. This perception has stimulated the development of the above-mentioned assessment tools.4 the management of such a programme needs to be organized in an iterative, interactive and flexible way. Involving a continuous adjustment to the reform programme, it requires an anticipating and dynamic approach, not simply a reacting one. The programme will start with a systematic analysis that will continuously accompany its whole execution. It is clear that the analysis has to be updated regularly. There are more reasons why measuring federal systems makes sense. Practitioners of federal systems throughout the world are discovering that sharing experiences and lessons learnt from other federal countries is useful. The objective is obviously not only an academic comparative exercise. Sharing knowledge on key federal questions – how fiscal equalization or the management of cultural diversity can be organized – helps to understand the problems of one’s own system better5 and to find new ways how to improve it. Analytical investigation is a necessary precondition for systematic improvement. Only on the basis of an in-depth analysis can challenges, institutional strengths, weakness and priority reform areas in the context of federal development be identified. In this way, it will become possible to formula and implement country-specific strategies for action. Whoever wants to compare systems has to ‘measure’ the different items that he investigates. Measuring complex systems that go beyond subjects of natural science cannot be confined to mere figure counting.6 To assess federal systems comprises elements of evaluation connected to subjectivity. For this task, an instrument is needed that allows one to observe and comprehend its complexity from different angles. Such a tool helps to provide information about a country’s actual federal situation and its necessities and potentials for further federal development. It has been developed for the needs of institutions and experts who design and implement federal reforms.7 As this assessment tool refers to subjective elements it is not meant to serve as a basis for a ranking list. FeSAT provides the choice between self-evaluation and external evaluation by an independent institution or investigator. The tool itself is indifferent in this respect and leaves the choice to the decision-makers. Before concluding this section, it might make sense to agree on a common understanding of federalism. The effort spent on a definition of federalism will facilitate further communication:
“Federalism is a mode of political organization that unites sovereign states in an overarching political system that allows the member states to maintain their fundamental political integrity. Federal systems distribute power among general and constituent governing bodies in a way designed to protect the existence and authority of all. In a federal system basic policies are made and implemented through negotiation so that all member states can share in the system’s decision-making process.”8 This definition is applicable without doubts to federal systems, which have been set up by former sovereign states. But is it as well valid for a system transforming from a Unitarian into a federal states? 9 The definition stresses the fact that sovereignty is shared between the federal state and the member states, the federation forming an ‘overarching political system”. The essential characteristic of federal systems in both above-mentioned cases is the shared sovereignty between the federal and the member states, whatever had been the reason for this power sharing arrangement.10 Though the differences between the ‘coming together’ – and the ‘splitting off’ – federal systems shall not be denied, Daniel Elazar’s definition covers both phenomena. The Ethiopian case shows how near both types of federal systems are; On the hand the member states have been created by devolution, on the other hand they posses according to Article 39 of the Ethiopian Constitution the right to secession. This resembles the case of a federal system set up by aggregation. Thus the right to secession “is the affirmation of the consensual basis of the federal union”11. How Can an Analysis Tool for Federal Systems be developed? From the beginning, it was clear that meaningful assistance to the Ethiopian federal system has to start with a systematic exploration of the constitutional, political, cultural and social environment. And there was do doubt that is was useful and necessary to develop an analysis tool in order to facilitate the exploration, to steer the debate and to conduct and de-emotionalize the exchange of arguments. The tool has been developed sur place, in view of the real research object, the Ethiopian federal system. This work was done very close to the problem, not at a far-away desk of a European university or research institute. This exposure to reality was not coincidental, but part of the chosen methodological approach, which should help to identify the reality of the partner country. The development sur place can be regarded as one of FeSAT’s strengths. Mover, how to develop the analysis tool needed to be defined. A new creation generally starts with a challenging idea. Many times this idea is launched by an exterior impulse. In the case of FeSAT the impulse came from several Governance Assessment Tools, which have been developed for similar fields of investigation.12 These tools have been made to evaluate the ‘governance’ –situation, of which the state organization is part.13 Therefore the first step consisted in studying these tools, hoping that some of their elements would be useful for the development of the Federal Systems Analysis Tool. The ‘arenas’, for example, stem from this context. They replace the former category ‘dimensions of federalism’. Arenas have some advantages compared to other forms of structuring, e.g. those used for juridical purposes. Arenas permit the structuring of ideas in a way different from linear logic, linear in the sense that one item possesses a strict logical dependence and order in relation to the other. Arenas are characterized by a modular structure that permits one to begin with and to combine with any module of the analysis tool. So it is possible to proceed with the analysis flexibly in accordance with the professional or political opportunities. There is a wealth of ideas and influences that have contributed to the development of the Federal System Assessment Tool – FeSAT. They have mainly come from four sources:
There was a plan to formulate hypotheses on the Ethiopian federal system. This is certainly a viable and interesting approach. The outspoken qualification, in a way the pronunciation of prejudices on the research object, can lead to lively reactions, fruitful debates and surprising findings and insights. Nevertheless, this method has the disadvantage that premature comments are not serious enough, can hurt and lead to a rapid end of the discussion. Therefore, the decision was made not to use this method. The whole development process was characterized by experimenting with trial and error. At the same time, the method was not pure coincidence. The process was rather iterative, every result and development step was revised, its arguments and logical order rethought, solutions were altered and dropped. The researchers neither groped their way to solution, which was constructed in way using linear logic nor founded directly according to an abstract theory. The dominating attitudes were realism and pragmatism. An iterative learning and development process thrives on debate with critical interlocutors. The international expert, his collaborators, the employees of the partner institutions, practitioners and scientists who were able to contribute some essentials to the analysis and discussion of the federal state organization have been invited to give their comments. Another important element was the author’s critical self-reflection and his readiness to revise and change his own positions. The second step consisted in elaborating a schematic overview that visualized and designed the arenas. In that respect, one question was how to define the federal systems arenas. Another question was which contents the arenas had and how these could be identified. The first trial was imbalanced: The arena of the political system and government suffocated almost all the other arenas. So the arenas had to be balanced out. This exercise, too, meant a lot of trial and error. ‘Sub-arenas’ were developed, some suggestions derived once more from the other analysis tools. Equally important as the development and extension of the analysis tool was its limitation, because the new tool should be clear and avoid any sort of complication. The result should be as simple as possible taking into consideration the complexity of federal systems. For this purpose, the relevant subjects had to be separated from the irrelevant ones. Following this logic, the first rather extensive list of subjects, items and ideas was reduced by eliminating the less important aspects. The sub-arenas received their own characteristic structure. The standard structure of each sub-arena should limit the quantity of collected data and evaluations to a manageable and digestible size. Like the arenas, the sub-arenas were subdivided into objectives, indicators and sources for data collection and verification. The objectives indicate the aim of an arena’s or sub-arena’s development. In this sense, one of the objectives of public administration in a federal state is that adequate and effective service is delivered on all levels of government. The indicators define the situation, as it should be after a desired reform or change. For example, an efficient public administration is revealed by the fact that health or water service and school education is available throughout the country. A source of verification indicates the place, document etc. where the necessary data for checking the indicator can be found. That may be the data on public health collected by the national statistics office – like infant mortality. If those statistics do not yet exist, it might perhaps be necessary to collect the data by means of a sample survey. In order to make FeSAT’s realization easier and viable, it is always a good idea to use data that are already collected by other institutions than to start a new investigation. Additionally, for each sub-arena a catalogue of relevant questions was established. In respect to public administration, some questions referred to the following topics:
After having set up the structure of the tool, the result was transformed into a complete text. The sober and rudimentary scientific language had to be streamlined into plain English, i.e. into comprehensive language and style. Further, on abstract findings had to be explained and made clear by facts, realistic examples and graphic visualization. As German scholars tend to have a specific ability to express their thoughts in a sophisticated and complicated way, the exercise of writing a plain, simple and understandable text entailed considerable effort. The outcome was naturally the subject of critical discussion, verification and change. This exchange of arguments essentially took place with the experts collaborating with the Ethio-German Federal Governance Development Project. Actually, the first test of FeSAT is being prepared; this test will certainly result in a number of improvements, which will be integrated into an updated version of FeSAT. It is a matter of fact a scientific and practical tool like FeSAT will always remain a construction site and never be complete. Reference:
To be continued in the next issue |
