Why Politics Is Failing America

Fortune, Katherine M. Gehl, Michael E. Porter

Mar 09, 2017

Beware the political–industrial complex. They rig the game for their benefit. The public interest is the loser. Here’s how to fix it.

By nearly every measure, America’s political industry is thriving. Campaigns are now seemingly endless and put to work an immense roster of canvassers, pollsters, and staff; top consultants are in high demand; media interest is bottomless; and when it comes to elections, overall spending (a normal proxy for an industry’s success) is near an all-time high.

There’s just one problem. The people who are supposed to benefit from this booming enterprise—the American public—have never been more dissatisfied. The share of Americans who say they have at least a “fair amount of trust in political leaders” hit its nadir last September, according to Gallup. And in February, nearly one-fifth of Americans (19%) said dissatisfaction with government was the single biggest problem the country faced. By contrast, just 9% of those surveyed by Gallup felt “the economy” was America’s most pressing concern.

Why is the political-industrial complex flourishing while its customers are less satisfied than ever? To answer that question, we’ve applied the tools of business analysis to American politics. Our conclusion: U.S. politics is an industry—a duopoly that’s about as anticompetitive as you’re likely to find these days. The result, as a prominent 2014 study by Princeton’s ­Martin Gilens and Northwestern’s Benjamin Page shows, is that the preferences of the average voter have a near-zero impact on public policy.

It wasn’t always that way. America’s political system was long the envy of the world. The system advanced the public interest and gave rise to a grand history of policy innovations. Today, however, it serves as only a barrier to solving nearly every important challenge our nation needs to address.

The Harvard Business School’s project on U.S. competitiveness found that Washington has made virtually no progress on any of the essential policy steps needed to restore prosperity and growth. A broken political system has suddenly become the greatest threat to our nation’s future.

Read more at http://fortune.com/2017/03/09/why-politics-is-failing-america/.