Rethinking the Welfare State: The prospects for ... - e-Library

Conclusion 211
considering the promise of the voucher instrument, it is clear that both ideas and interests
matter, 1 and one should avoid the temptation of assigning a weight to one or the other
that over-determines their role in the policy process. We elaborate briefly on different
schools of thought on the relative roles of ideas and interests in the policy process in
liberal democracies.
Ideas
According to an oft-cited claim of John Maynard Keynes, sooner or later, it is ideas, not
vested interests, which are dangerous for good or evil. 2 While not denying the importance
of self-interest in the political process, Steven Kelman argues 3 that the economist’s
(Public Choice) view of the political process dramatically underestimates the role of what
he calls “public spirit” or “civic virtue” or simply non-self-interested ideas in the political
process. He invokes many examples to substantiate this view, such as the enactment of
extensive consumer protection and environmental legislation in the 1960s and early
1970s in the US and many other countries over the protestations and resistance of
concentrated and entrenched interests, and de-regulation, privatization, and tax reform in
the late 1970s and 1980s in the US and many other countries, again over the protestations
of many powerful and deeply entrenched interests. Indeed, the so-called paradox of
voting—why so many citizens choose to vote in national elections at some cost to
themselves and usually with minimal chance of influencing the outcome—suggests a
powerful notion of civic virtue at work. In this respect, ideas or values that are likely to
be influential will extend well beyond maximizing the total social surplus and correcting
for market failures in a welfare economics framework, and are likely to include notions
of distributive justice, corrective justice, communitarianism, gender and racial equality,
due process, etc. To attempt to reduce civic commitments to these ideas or values to
direct or indirect pursuit of self-interest is often quite unpersuasive. For example, some
argue, on quasi-Marxist grounds, that the reason why a majority of citizens in most
industrialized countries favour various forms of social safety nets, such as social
assistance and unemployment insurance, when many of them face a very remote
probability of ever having to resort to these systems, is that this is an attempt by a wellendowed
majority to negate the possibility of civil insurrection by an impoverished
minority which might threaten the formers’ endowments. This seems intuitively a
completely unpersuasive explanation of why most citizens are committed to some notion
of distributive justice, even if they do not perceive themselves as likely to be direct
material beneficiaries of these policies.
Thus, in Kelman’s view, politics, to an important extent, is as much about what are
thought to be good ideas as what are thought to be salient political interests. In other
words, persuasion has important currency in the political process, in a reciprocal sense:
voters, interest groups, scholars and policy commentators may persuade politicians,
bureaucrats and regulators of the virtues of a position or idea; similarly political leaders,
bureaucrats, or regulators, may persuade interest groups and voters of the wisdom of an
idea (a form of civic republican view of government). Just as in private markets where
entrepreneurs engage in a ceaseless process of innovation and attempt to persuade
consumers of the virtues of their innovations, which necessarily assumes that preferences
are not innate and immutable, it seems equally plausible that preferences are not fixed