We’re looking forward to participating in a panel at the upcoming annual conference of the American Society for Public Administration (ASPA) about Trust in Government. With that in mind, we’re devouring anything we can read about that topic (though we’ll be focusing on states and localities at the conference).
No surprise that an article jumped out at us from The New York Times that said early on: “Voters across the political spectrum are disillusioned with a government that has become synonymous with “Groundhog Day”-esque spending battles, slow public works projects and political gridlock.”
Since we’ve spent our professional careers focusing on management and policy, not on politics, it dismayed us to see that two of the three reasons the Times cited for wide-spread disillusionment had to do exclusively with politics. The real work of government -- delivering services like health care, transportation, education and public safety – seems to have taken a back seat.
Now, we’re going to take a leap forward and theorize that to many Americans, government – and not just in the federal government -- has become understood as equivalent to politics. At least that’s the impression you’d get through the kind of social media upon which many Americans rely to get their news.
A few decades ago, when we were being interviewed about articles we had written about state government, reporters would sometimes ask: “And what’s the governor’s party?” Believe it or not, we often had no idea. It didn’t seem important to us at the time.
Perhaps there was some naiveté attached to that approach, but we wish that we could go back to the good-old-ignorant days.
Fortunately, even to this day, we’re able to have many conversations with people who work behind-the-scenes to make government work. It’s extremely rare for politics – and political preferences – to enter in. They may be democrats or republicans themselves, but they’re very happy to talk about the improvements they’re making in operations and services.
We don’t want to make the bulk of this column a screed about our woes, but we’ll go on a little more and let it be known how frustrating it is for us when people ask what we do for a living. Our one-line answer is that we “analyze, research and write about state and local government.” If their eyes haven’t glazed over by this point, the next question they ask is almost always about the politics of their city, council or state – not how well they are managed or what exciting new programs they are developing.
The problem here is that when Americans think it’s all about the politics, they can easily lose track of all the efforts that are made on a daily basis to try to make life better for residents of cities, counties and states. What’s more, we fear that agency heads and staff in states where the political sky is murky, will be reticent to boast about their accomplishments out of fear that this can make them targets of politicians who want to attack rather than to encourage.
We’re not making this stuff up. We were recently at a conference and had a great conversation with an agency head in a state where the politics are rageful, and asked her if she’d like to write a guest column for this website about the good work she’s been doing. She said that wasn’t something she’d be able to do these days because she wanted to just go about her work, without getting publicity for it, thus keeping out of the line of fire of one of the two parties.
This kind of thinking leads us to fear that if the people in government who are doing the hard work are reticent to talk about it, then we’ll be caught in a downward spiral in which government is equivalent to politics. And the work of the civil servants will recede ever further into a shadowland of stuff that only self-described wonks know or care about.
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