92       Democratic Governance
built. Many of the capabilities used in politics are nominally developed outside the political system. "Wealth, knowledge, physical energy, and orgaruzationajl capacity are_pj^ducts_oJ_ari economic_and social system. That system cannot be controlled precisely by political action, but it can be influenced.
Varieties of Capabilities
Among the many capabilities created, distributed, and maintained by democratic polities, we can distinguish four^broad types particularly rdeyantjo.^gQygmaneg; /rights and authorities, [political^resources, p ohticaLcgmpetencieSj anľpŕJ^ZĽĎ^apacity. Rights and authorities empower citizens and officials. They provide discTe4pjMWjjrr&-sources and actions. Officials need legitimate authority, and citizens need autonomy. Authority to levy taxes is granted to a legislature. Authority to make certain decisions and allocations, to take certain actions, is granted to an official. By exercising valid authority and having that exercise certified by political institutions and culture, officials establish their existence as officials. The right to vote, the right to engage in free speech, and the right to hold property are granted to a citizen. By making valid claims of rights and having those claims confirmed by political institutions and culture, citizens establish their
existence as citizens.
Rights and authorities are capabilities easily enshrined in formal rules but more difficult to maintain in day-to-day political life The modern terrain of political regimes is populated by impressive legal arrays of rights for citizens and authorities for officials, but many regimes with comprehensive systems of legal protections are models of tyranny in whic i citizens are routinely mistreated and officials routinely bullied. Rights and authorities are protected, interpreted, and. enforced by a structure of norms and institutions that depend almost entirely oh public support for their ability to function. Any protection can be ignored and, being ignored, does not exist. Support by any one citizen depends on expectations of support from others, expectations that depend on the perception of those rights and authorities as meeting shared standards of appropriateness. Both the strength and the occasional fragility of rights and authorities stem from this reflective property of legitimacy. And while the
Developi/tg Political Capabilities       93
process maintains the norms and institutions that assure stability, it also provides arenas in which rights and authorities are continually being negotiated and renegotiated, interpreted and reinterpreted. Controversies over and discussions about legitimate rights and authorities constitute an important part of the democratic political process.
The second type of capability includes the resowrges^available to individuals and mstitutions. By resources we mean the assets that make it possible for individuals to do (or be) things or to make others do (or be) things. Those assets include money, property, health, tirne^aw_materials, information, facilities^ and equipment. They also include such individual attributes as social standing, location, physical size and energy^ ethnicity, gender, and ageTThey include such institutional attributes as size and location. Individuals and institutions vary in their wealth, in their access to other material goods, and in the time they have for (or choose to spend in) politics. They vary in their access to irJormation. Hospitals without bandages cannot function as proper hospitals. Libraries without books cannot function as proper libraries.
Although modern enthusiasms for competitive markets tend to remove normative constraints on the exchange of assets across institutional sectors, democratic polities have traditionally tried to make assets institution-specific. Much of democratic governance involves building and protecting barriers to trade or formulating conversion rules across the borders of institutional spheres. Physical strength cannot legitimately be used to threaten political representatives, bureaucrats, judges, or fellow citizens, but it can be used to work long hours. Money cannot legitimately be used to buy a desired court decision directly, but it can be used to buy the best legal expertise available. Money cannot legitimately be used to have a desired public policy adopted, but it can (within some constraints) be used to support political parties and candidates, professions, or newspapers J who work for that outcome. There are few direct rules against spending time in politics, and usually the complaint is that many citizens attend too little, but systems of representation and various access rules tend to constrain the political value of free time and j?j energy. Likewise, inalienable rights and autonomous institutions t|tend to limit the political value of being a majority.
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m
I If
m
94       Democratic Goven ance
The third type of capability includes the competencies and knowledge possessed by individuals, professions, and institutions. Individuals   have   competencies   gained   from  education,   trair^g,_juid experience that effect their ^effectiveness in political settings -JThey know things. To act appropriately as a translator from Arabic to English requires knowledge of both languages. To act appropriately as a police officer requires knowledge of police procedure. Citizens without resources of education cannot function as proper citizens, they have dunculty resisting the sloganized election appeals purchased by campaign spending (Kenny and McBurnett, 1994). Institutions encode knowledge in traditions and rules. They sustain those capabilities through socialization and systems of knowledge reten-,  tion and retrieval. They have educational systems, libraries, archives,
/   and traditions;.
Knowledge is a foundation for poUtical capabilities in most democratic polities (Crozier, 1964; "Weber, 1978), but the value of specific knowledge depends on such things as changing poUtical agendas,, changing beUefs in poUtical means, and changing competition from groups with alternative knowledge and experiences. For instance, the development of the [welfare state increased the poUtical releyancejof „ some professional groups. Medical doctors, nurses, teachers, and their associations became more valued participants. Shifts in professional beUefs also change the poUtical relevance of professional competencies^ In many countries during the 1970s and 1980s, Keynesian economists had to surrender poUtical positions to monetarists and supply-side economists. Likewise, one profession may face competition from another. When government by rules is replaced by government by objectives, lawyers and other experts on rules tend to lose positions to economists and other means-end experts.
The poUtical capabiUties generated by knowledge axe contingent rather than absolute. Democratic grants of authority to experts are constrained by fears of meritocracy. PoUticians know that they depend on bureaucrats but try to avoid bureaucratic dominance. In a similar way, the poUtical capabiUties of institutions of knowledge, such as the | university, vary over time. The ebbs and flows are tied to changing as-
isessments of the risks of ignorance and dependence and are orchestrated by accounts arguing for the self-governance of universities or for their control by poUtical authorities and market forces.
Developing Political Capabilities       95
The fourth type of capabiUty is the organizing capacity that aUows effective utiUzation of formal rights and authority, resources, and competencies. Democratic poUtical thought has long focused on the dangers of organized factions (Hamilton, Jay, and Madison, 1964) and well-organized military or police forces; such concerns have been echoed in more recent discussions of the organizing rights of antidemocratic parties or movements and of the democratic contributions and threats stemming from corporative representation in democratic pontics (Schmitter and Lehmbruch, 1979; Lehmbruch, 1984; Rothstein, 1992). Nevertheless, an important part of the development of democratic poUties has been the granting of rights and capacities of organization to deviant groups (Dahl, 1966). Without organizational talents, experience, and understanding, the other capabiUties of democracy are likely to be lost in problems of coordination and control, logistics, scheduling, aUocation and mobilization of effort, division of labor and speciaUzation, motivation, planning, and the mundane world of meeting deadlines, budgets, and collective expectations. Attention must be focused; activities must be meshed to produce combined effects; people must be consulted and involved; resources must be conserved and expended in a timely fashion.
CapabiUties for organizing are partly created by the poUty. Legal
rights to constitute an organization and to exercise its privileges are
typicaUy granted, protected, and regulated by the state. Organizing
capabiUties in modern democracies are, however, less dependent on
poUtical regulations and constraints than on the availability of other
poUtical resources and competencies, such as money and knowledge.
Although democratic history shows that strong mass organizations
have sometimes been developed on a basis of sparse formal knowl-
dge, modest practical organizational experience, and little money,
irgamzational capacities often feed upon and contribute to other
JoUtical resources and competencies.
■»ŕ
the Dynamics of Capabilities
capabilities can often be created by deliberate action. Wealth can be
edistnbuted. Education can be made available. Rights to participate
^poUtical processes can be granted. Organizational capabiUties can
^created. The welfare state is an experiment in creating, regulativ' K
96       Democratic Governance
ingj and reallocating capabilities in a democratic context. But capabilities have a dynamic of their own. Some capabilities are depleted by use; others are augmented by use.
Capabilities That
Are depleted by use
Many capabilities are expendable. Capabilities that are used at one time or in one place are unavailable for use at another time or place. Many kinds o: financial or physical resources fit this description. Spending mon:y or extracting oil leaves less money to spend or oil to extract. Resources devoted to one project are not available for another. Expending energy or political power leaves less energy or political power to expend. Energy used to execute one set of rules is
not available for another.
One of the more common complaints about political systems is that legislators fail to consider those opportunity costs. They overload implementing agencies, imposing new obligations without providing resources adequate to fulfill them (Bardach, 1977). They waste their material and political resources on unimportant projects, leaving fewer resources for more important ones. In particular, they devote resources to coping with current crises rather than to reducing the likelihood of future crises. The current political generation taxes future generations by borrowing for current consumption.
Certain kinds of power, rights, and authority also are depleted through exer rise. The claim of a right or authority may make its future exercise less feasible because of the sense of imposition that it makes on those responding to the claim. Rights and authorities sometimes draw on a "credit" of tolerance and can exhaust that credit when ased repetitively. Similarly, rules of reciprocity are based implicitly on notions of capability depletion. Relationships of friendship, trust, or alliance provide political capabilities. If they assume reciprocity, however, use of the poUtical capabilities provided by the relationship reduces the amount of poUtical capability available for future use (in the absence of reciprocal favors).
CAPABILITIES THAT ARE AUGMENTED BY USE
Some capabilities are augmented by use. Many kinds of technical and organizational skills fit this description, as do some forms of po-
Developing Political Capabilities       97
litical power. The more frequently a task is performed, the more competently it is done. The more often an organizations faces a problem, the more effectively it deals with it. The more often power is exerted, authority is claimed, or rights are asserted, the more they are conceded to exist. The more claims that are made on (nonrecip-rocal) friendships, the greater the friendship and the possibility of further claims.
The "learning-by-doing" characteristic of some kinds of capabiU-ties has consequences for governance. On the one hand, it suggests that political capabiUties profit from exercise. Even if early experience with a program demanding new competencies or rights results in failure, subsequent experience may be more favorable. The returns from new projects or legitimacies are likely to be disappointing at first, more satisfying later. Insofar as democratic institutions respond to immediate pressures, there is a tendency to abandon activities, rights, or authority before competence is gained, thus a tendency to abandon potentially good initiatives prematurely.
On the other hand, "learning-by-doing" also leads poUtical institutions to become overcommitted to what they have done and are doing. Since current performance depends on both the potential return from an activity and present competence at it, performance shows increasing returns to experience (Arthur, 1984). Each increase in competence at an activity increases the likelihood of rewards for engaging in that activity, thereby further increasing the competence and the likelihood (Argyris and Schön, 1978; David, 1985). It is quite possible for competence in an activity to become great enough to make activities with greater potential unattractive in the short run (Hernott, Levinthal, and March, 1985; Levinthal and March, 1993). The argument extends beyond technical competencies to experience with the rules of a poUtical institution. Experience with a particular • combination of rules, rights and authorities tends to develop compear tence within existing frameworks and makes experimentation with f- other combinations less likely.
The argument has been used to explain some of the stability in Dhtical systems. Proponents of a British parUamentary-cabinet gov-■nment system in the United States or of an American separation of awers systems in the United Kingdom recognize that the accumu-ted experience of each country with its own institutions makes a
98       Democratic Governance
change unlikely. The accumulation of competence is one reason for the difficulty of moving to a democratic political system after an extended period of centralized authority. It is also one possible partial explanation for the persistence of welfare policies in states where there has been extensive experience with the welfare state and the persistence of market-based policies in states where there has been extensive experience with markets. The technical and political skills required by either system are so developed and refined by experience with them that e hifting to another technology of economic and social policy and rights leads (at least for an extended period of time) to a substantial decrease in performance.
Just as political competence is augmented by experience in using it, it atrophies through disuse. "When societies do well, settling political issues without effort, or when they are buffered from problems by slack resources, those political capabilities that are susceptible to augmentation through use tend to wither. For example, the political skills involved in forming coalitions, negotiating compromises and deals, and adapting to a changing world may wither when one group or party has an extended period of unchallenged power or when broadly shared values or abundant resources reduce experience with conflict and its effective resolution. "When the world is forced to adapt to a dominant actor over an extended period, the capabilities of that actor for adapting to the world are degraded—a traditional problem of dominant cultures, technologies, firms, nations, and religions (Deutsch, 1966; Levinthal and March, 1993).
Nearsightedness in
Building Capabilities
Some political capabilities are particularly difficult to build and nurture in a democracy. The difficulties stem from the nearsighted nature of democratic political processes. Democracy has difficulty seeing costs and benefits that are distant, either in time or in space, from the locus of political action. It responds to current and local pressures more easily than to future or distant ones.
NURTURING FUTURE CAPASTLmES
Some capabilities
require investments of time and other resources
that are well priof to the realization of their benefits. The demands
Developing Political Capabilities       99
of current problems exhaust current capabilities, leaving nothing to invest in extending capabilities. The political necessities of immediate problems overwhelm the capabilities of political institutions to sustain a longer-term perspective. This is a direct consequence of the temporal distance, uncertainty, and diffuseness of the returns on investment in capability development. Much of the infrastructure of a polity fits such a description. Returns are diffuse and in the future; costs are immediate and focused.
Since long-run survival depends on sustaining and augmenting capabilities, those tendencies to increase the utilization of current capabilities and reduce investment in capabilities that might be needed in the future make democratic political processes potentially self-destructive. It invites some kinds of governance of intertemporal exchanges. A democratic political system based on bargaining and exchange among self-interested citizens is poorly equipped to deal with those problems. In particular, it is poorly equipped to deal with exchanges between current citizens and future citizens. The problem is not a problem of responsiveness, but a problem of representation, [n practice, democracy represents the living better than the unborn. A. competitive democratic political system makes the long-run interests of future generations vulnerable to the short-run interests of the current generation of political actors.
In order to deal with those problems, the democratic imperative is to develop some way in which future citizens obtain political representation. The political voice of future citizens must be found by enhancing the political capabilities of those current citizens who might speak for them. To some extent, of course, a political system can commission an explicit spokesperson for future citizens. It can create an agency with responsibility for defending the rights of the unborn. It can also create a climate of concern, guilt, or shame—the traditional way in which the weak have mobilized the strong in their defense.
,-The main mechanism for strengthening the political position of
'e unborn, however, is the mstitutionalization of political action.
ytthe mstitutionalization of political action, we mean two things.
e.„mean (1) that there are key social institutions that are viewed as
sung over time, enduring through generations of individuals,
^accumulating a collection of practices and rules that reflect gen-
100       Democratic Governance
erations of social and political experience. And we mean (2) that individuals act within the poUtical system as trustees of those institutions, rather than as autonomous individuals. "When a farmer sacrifices current crops to maintain the water table for future generations of his family, he acts as a trustee of his family. When a poUtical official refuses to increase the pubUc debt even though it would
'-'-----~f '-"-«oTTinlrwTTipnt. ineauity, or in-
ameUorate immediate
ameliorate ímmeaiaiei problems of unemployment, inequity, or injustice, he acts as trustee of the future community. The erosion of institutionaüzed responsibility through the breakdown of institutions of intergenerational continuity, such as the family, and through the ideological glorification of the individual self have weakened the representation of the unborn and have made democratic politics systematically less attentive to the problems of nurturing future capabilities.
Nurturing Diversity dm Capabilities
PoUtical myopia across time is matched by myopia across distance. Democracy tends not only to be unduly attentive to the pressures of the moment. It also tends to be unduly attentive to pressures exerted at the locus of decision. Some institutions and the capabiUties associated with them are more valuable than they are powerful. They have to be nurtured by the self-restraint of a poUtical system. We shaU n   ..—-----;c_ cnrTrtt, rif distance myopia in democracy:
[he seit-resnrauiL ui a. ťwUUbw __,----
mention briefly two specific forms of distance myopia in democracy: The first is the case of institutions whose value to the poUtical system arises from their removal from poUtics. The second is the case of institutions whose va.ue to the political system Ues in their deviance and variety.
Eunuchs, judges, ani scientists. Eunuchs are particularly valued in a seragUo because they pose no threat to the sexual order. At the same time, they are vulnerable because they have no basis for protecting their position within that order. Eunuchs who try to protect them selves by seeking autonomous position in the sexual order of the sul tanate will probab y fail and wiU compromise the irrelevance that is vital to their being tolerated. If they are successful, they wiU become sexuaUy significant, but the significance itself makes them socially less useful.
Developing Political Capabilities       101
\H
m
&
i
In a similar way, democracy depends on the removal of certain institutions from an active role in poUtics—the courts, universities, and civil service. Their value is augmented by their disengagement from poUtics. They defend poUtical institutions and rules, thus are important parts of the poUtical process, but they are separated from party poUtics and partisanship. That disengagement, however, makes them, vulnerable. Judges, teachers, scientists, and civil servants often are tempted to try to protect themselves by improving their capabiUties for affecting poUtics, Whether they succeed or fail, the effort itself compromises their capabiUties for serving the poUtical community.
On the other hand, as long as institutions Uke the courts, universities, and civil service are not present in the poUtical process, they are dependent on self-restraint on the part of others in poUtical arenas. Self-restraint ís not always characteristic of poUtical actors. Recent history, in particular, suggests that local poUtical exigencies easUy overcome traditions of poUtical support for the eunuch institutions of democracy. The community of science is a case in point. This community can be imagined to be an association of autonomous, independent scientists, autonomous servants of an international conglomeration of poUtical democracies. Professional standards provide the basis of authority. Scientific opinion is formed in overlapping networks of critical judgment (Polanyi, 1962). Scientific advice is provided to poUtical participants as a basis for poUcy actions. Such a L   vision of eunuchry is rather distant from the reaUties of contempo-3f rary science. PoUtical institutions are often mired in unsuccessful at-~ - tempts to control the processes, directions, and conclusions of *L science. Governments have often tried to strengthen or control sci-^ ence or the networks of science to further social and poUtical polili Jcies (Sorlin, 1994), but the hopes of poUtical authorities to shape cience have generaUy been no more satisfied than have the hopes of cientists to do so.
At the same time, science is often deeply compromised by involvement in poUtics. Scientists exaggerate their knowledge to secure political support. They twist scientific results to justify further ippropriations for their institutes and for poUtical programs they jke. They confound their science with their ideologies. They seek public approbation and use their scientific reputations as instructs of poUtical pressure (March, 1980). Those perversions are

102       Democratic Governance
not accidents. They stem from the underlying instabilities of the eunuch role. The authority, the autonomy, and the innocence of the eunuch are unstable. An effective partnership between eunuchs and their masters is vulnerable to the short-run local advantages either can gain by exploiting the relation. As a result, it is also vulnerable to the consciousness on the part of each of the threat that the other will act exploitatively. The required mutual self-restraint is difficult to sustain.
Requisite variety. Poli deal pressures are Janus-faced with respect to coherence. On the one hand, they tend to be practical. They are directed toward solving immediate problems, particularly problems in maintaining political coalitions. They are more likely to invest in answers than in questions, more likely to adopt reliable procedures than experimental ones. Their horizon is local and current. At the
■ ..i-- j^r.Q„^^i;,Bf4 Thev focus on
same time, however, problems in the neari
■es. lneir iiuluuu » luw-----__
they tend to be decentralized. They focus on problems m tne neari neighborhood of the political arena, and each arena looks at a different set of problems. They respond to the concerns of people who are present more than to those of people who are absent, and the participation patterns change over time and over
place.
The result is a continual struggle between centripetal and centrifugal forces in politics. The multiplicity of political arenas, the many semi-autonomous institutions, and the difficulties of coherent political mobilization of interests all conspire to produce a cacophony of policies, actions, and pressures. Those forces are, however, counterbalanced by political, administrative, and mimetic tendencies toward consistency. The id;as of a state, of systematic political programs, and of legal consistency all work against inconsistency. The social construction of legitimacy and the imitative processes by which practices, forms, and rhetorics diffuse through a society lead formally autonomous processes to converge (March and Olsen, 1983). '   "' --*■—c ™v„»»-b wrp Hiuniss some t
As we shall noteiin Chapter 6, where we discuss some of these issues further, determining the optimal level of diversity is itself an exercise in balancing conflicts across time and space, and it is possible that the balance resulting from political struggles may indeed often be fairly sensible. That result, however, would be mostly a happy accident. In addition! the struggle over variety is complicated by strate-
Developing Political Capabilities       103
gic exploitation of it. An old principle of organization theory is that each manager wants decentralization (diversity) down to his or her level and centralization (unity) up to it. As one would expect from such a principle, high-level authorities tend to see the short-run advantages of coherence more clearly than the long-run advantages of experimentation, though they may, in the face of adversity, pursue a policy of decentralized autonomy in order to spread responsibility for poor outcomes. Subordinate authorities, on the other hand, seem able to see somewhat more clearly the social advantages to inconsistency, heterogeneity, and variety.
Thus, although many would applaud the variation advantages of pluralism and decentralization, those advantages are often reduced by self-serving exploitation of the resulting independence from control and coordination. Developing semi-autonomous institutional frameworks, for instance, can become not so much a device for protecting variety as a technique for protecting agencies against parliamentary review and influence. And an institutional structure that protects variety runs the danger of fragmenting society into powerful veto groups, representatives of partial interests that use claims of diversity to justify their pursuit of self-interest and prevent a policy directed more to the common good (Willke, 1989, p. 229).
Links Between Capabilities and Identities
The ordinary requirements of survival tend to match identities to the capabilities necessary to sustain them. We can imagine capabilities and identities to arise autonomously and to come together in a match. Inconsistent combinations tend not to endure. Inconsistencies between the two can be seen as failures of a diffuse matching process. Sometimes, however, the links between capabilities and identities are more direct. Capabilities create identities, and identifies create capabilities.
i
i _
r&arrrrms create capabilities
jVIost discussions of democracy, appropriately, emphasize the distribution of political capabilities as a factor in the distribution of power. However, capabilities are not independent of identities. The ability