Institute For The Future

On the Failures of Government: Speakers from the ReConstitutional Convention

Why are our governments failing us and failing the future?

If, as Sandy Levinson argues, our current system is “at least inefficacious and at worst imbecilic,” then we need a deeper understanding of what Barbara Heinzen called the “politics of systemic invention.” 

In our second session of presentations at the Reconstitutional Convention, a stellar line-up of activists, officials, and academics outlined many of the structural limitations and failures of our current institutions. And, emphatically, these institutions are not failing forward. 

Stephen Duncombe discussed Occupy Wall Street as both a sign of deep disenchantment and generalized disappointment with government, but also as a manifestation of the will of people to participate in fundamental actions to call attention to and improve government failures. 

These failures are not only being felt by the people affected by government, but by people working in government as well. Andrea Schneider discussed the need to anchor changes within the system, and to look for real collaboration between the public and government that goes beyond civic apps: “there is no app for substantive systems change.” Kiran Jain, city attorney for the city of Oakland pointed out the double whammy in her city of reduced working hours (down a full month of working days since 2008), plus increased citizen-service requests (up 25% since 2008). But these constraints are forcing officials to re-think every aspect of the way they deliver service, and many new experiments are on-going to involve citizens in budgeting and directly funding local micro-businesses. 

The most common way people get involved in government is voting, and it is ripe for a re-invention. Micah Sifry laid out 4 relatively straight-forward ways for voting to be improved. One is the inclusion of a binding, “none of the above” box on the ballot. If no candidate has more votes than “none of the above,” then the election is null and a new one called. Next is what Sifry calls bipolar voting, the alternative to vote against a candidate, instead of only for one. Third is to “open up the exit poll,” so that people could add comments to their vote, and those comments could be processed and analyzed to add a deeper layer of insight about what voters are thinking. And finally, the proposal to “deregulate the ballot” so that more options that the two-party duopoly could be given a fighting chance. 

Clem Bezold identified three key parts that are missing from government as it's practiced today: fairness, shared vision, and the future. And with his eye firmly focused on the future, Jim Dator called for governance design that moves us beyond the cradle of Earth, and out into the solar system! What would good governance look like on Mars? 

In order to build it, we have to imagine it. Stuart Candy called for a “structure of participation” to allow for collective imagining, a public dreaming. 

The limitations and failures of government come from structural problems with the architecture of the system, but they also come from failures of imagination and a fear of the untried. It is our goal at the Governance Futures Lab to help create structures of participation to allow millions, maybe billions, of people on Earth to imagine together, and then invent new social institutions and better ways of living together.