The Governance Podcast

Subscribe to the Governance Podcast on iTunes and Spotify today and get all our latest episodes directly in your pocket.

For more information about our upcoming podcasts and events, follow us on facebook, twitter or instagram (@csgskcl).

Roger Schoenman is an Associate Professor of Politics at UC Santa Cruz. Prof. Schoenman’s work explores three related topics: 1) the varieties of capitalism in the post-socialist countries, 2) the role of networks in political organization and 3) the conditions under which large and long-term political projects become possible.

Recent publications investigate the impact of party-competition on the politicization of the economy and institutional development. He has recently published a book titled Networks and Uncertainty in Europe’s Emerging Markets (Cambridge University Press 2014), that examines the impact of party systems and cleavages, business-elite origins, and the structure of business networks on institutional development in the evolving market democracies of the post-socialist area.

Current research examines the development of post-communist party systems after the financial crisis, the role of new media in mass protest and the politics of renewable energy across the European Union. Using computer assisted text analysis, he has also explored patterns of political debate in post-communist Europe.

0:58: Let’s begin with your 2014 book Networks, Institutions and Europe’s Emerging Markets. Where did the interest and motivation come to study this topic and region? 

6:35: I think it’s very interesting that at least some of the literature suggests there is much more homogeneity among some of these countries and what your book has found is that there are actually significant differences in those varieties of capitalism within this region… In a country like Poland… one of the most successful examples of these post-communist countries in terms of developing these institutions… would you have a similar view of the country today given that we’ve had constitutional reform, attempts to change and pack the Supreme Court? 

12:48: Your more recent work has taken that regional and institutional focus and looked at how a series of regional governments have come to power and addressed these quite popular frustrations… they’ve come to power, they’ve said we need to do something about foreign direct investment, the value and redistribution of this wealth, and they’re also saying it has an impact on local businesses, local capital. How has FDI become a focal point of your research? 

15:40: So we have this puzzle, this real openness and real encouragement of FDI throughout the mid-late 1990s and through quite a lot of the 2000s, and there’s this change your article identifies around 2010 (not equally across the region) where suddenly there is this anti-globalisation discourse of the governing parties. 

21:45: It also seems that there are bursts of anti FDI policies and re-nationalisation of industries. In both Poland and Hungary, the years 2015 and 2016 seem to be marked by a matching of the rhetoric and the policy, but this seems to have dropped off in 2017-19. And you point out that some of those policies like bank and corporation taxes have been reversed. Why the reversal? 

28:01: It seems like the governing parties have rolled back some of their extreme positions to something more moderate but do you get the impression that they’ve managed to achieve a broader national consensus? 

30:46: It’s remarkable that both Fidecz and Law and Justice are both doing so well in the polls and at least in parliamentary elections—and it seems hard to envision a time when they’re not going to be in power… do you think the anti-FDI policy had an effect on local business that may have translated into economic benefits or electoral support? 

34:49: Particularly in Hungary, in the midst of the anti-FDI measures and rhetoric there was still a necessity to coopt FDI, and I’m thinking of this massive investment from Russia into the nuclear power plants back in 2014. More recently you see Orban saying the Chinese belt and road initiative is fully in harmony with Hungarian interests. It’s never been as extreme as to say all policies we’re going to enact are anti-FDI. 

40:23: On a more methodological point, how open have interviewees been in discussing these issues – network ties, political connections, both in private firms and government? In some ways this is something the governing parties want to project as a positive vision and yet in the past I can imagine there were controversies around the topic. 

Subscribe to the Governance Podcast on iTunes and Spotify today and get all our latest episodes directly in your pocket.

For more information about our upcoming podcasts and events, follow us on facebook, twitter or instagram (@csgskcl).

John Myers is the Co-Founder of London YIMBY, a grassroots campaign to end the housing crisis with the support of local people.

0:39: What is the London housing crisis and how bad is it?

2:39: Homes have not become more expensive or technologically different than they were 100 years ago—it’s bricks, mortar, the tech is the same. And at the same time, wages in London have been going up. Yet the housing situation is getting worse given both of these conditions. Why aren’t markets responding to these signals?

4:03: When you’re saying we’re not planning enough housing, these are political plans or market actors?

4:52: Is this problem especially acute in London relative to other cities?

5:28: London is a centre of productive capacity and you’re essentially disincentivizing people from moving here by making them face such commutes.

6:44: Do these problems have distributional effects as well? I imagine there would be certain economic groups that would be disproportionally harmed.

9:45: I suppose the natural question arises, how has this happened? Unlike these prior societies that you’ve mentioned, the UK is a democracy, we have elected officials that can make decisions that can influence the society. If the effects of the crisis are to replicate authoritarian political systems and these premodern societies, why hasn’t the political system responded to the crisis in a way that limits these distributional inequalities?

11:48: 2/3rds of the voters are home owners. I would also still think there are considerable numbers of voters that don’t own homes that are being harmed. Why aren’t they mobilising?

14:40: You mentioned that people are heavily invested in their homes. What would happen if the housing crisis were solved and the result of that was the construction of a large amount of houses that led to prices beginning to fall in areas like London?

17:51: Why isn’t that happening? Why aren’t we adding more urban density into London and building more vertically?

20:40: How would you respond to someone who was concerned that extra would alter the historical character of their neighborhood?

24:17: So if the companies that are constructing new homes are not as responsive to individual purchasers as before, who are they responsive to?

25:42: I wanted to ask you about foreign ownership of homes in London. One of the frequent explanations you hear for the crisis is that there are extremely wealthy global elites purchasing homes, often masked by limited liability corporations. To what extent is the crisis influenced by foreign property ownership?

28:33: You mentioned the estimates-- around 13 percent of London properties are owned by foreign purchasers, up to 50 percent of new sales in Central London.

32:06: Tell us a little bit about the role the green belt is playing in the London housing crisis.

36:09: Why couldn’t someone respond to this and say this is just the tradeoff for protecting nature? Aren’t there good reasons for preventing London from expanding beyond the current boundaries?

42:58: Given that there are all these problems, are there any simple solutions available to mitigate the crisis?

47:05: Which political actors do you think would be most suited to institute this kind of change? Would the Mayor have an easier time of it?

49:20: So it would actually be incredibly helpful if you could have a neighborhood do this, demonstrate that if you allow these smaller territorial units to have more control over housing permissions and planning, this actually could generate benefits?

Subscribe to the Governance Podcast on iTunes and Spotify today and get all our latest episodes directly in your pocket.

For more information about our upcoming podcasts and events, follow us on facebook, twitter or instagram (@csgskcl).

Gary W. Cox is the William Bennett Munro Professor of Political Science at Stanford University. In addition to numerous articles in the areas of legislative and electoral politics, Cox is author of The Efficient Secret (winner of the 1983 Samuel H Beer dissertation prize and the 2003 George H Hallett Award), co-author of Legislative Leviathan (winner of the 1993 Richard F Fenno Prize), author of Making Votes Count (winner of the 1998 Woodrow Wilson Foundation Award, the 1998 Luebbert Prize and the 2007 George H Hallett Award); and co-author of Setting the Agenda (winner of the 2006 Leon D. Epstein Book Award). His most recent book is Marketing Sovereign Promises (2016).  A former Guggenheim Fellow, Cox was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1996 and the National Academy of Sciences in 2005. He received his Ph.D. at the California Institute of Technology in 1983.

2:38: There’s a book of yours from 1987, The Efficient Secret: The Cabinet and the Development of Political Parties in Victorian England. Could you summarize the thesis of that book?

10:37: You seem to have returned to that theme in your book on the US House of Representatives. Are you building up a corpus of case studies?

12:20: Sounds like things were particularly difficult in the eighteenth century to get any law through, which makes it more surprising that you do actually get a lot of members’ bills… you needed an act of Parliament to suspend limits on limited liability, to have things like canals, railways and so on.

12:52: The idea of Whig-Tory is really just alignments of which kids you’re sitting with in the cafeteria more than there being a party structure.

13:30: Did MPs run on party manifestos or personal manifestos?

16:47: Do you think that’s a structural result of the Great Reform Act?

20:13: I guess a striking thing there is the electorate changes as well. You’ve got the parties changing, but voters themselves are now seeing MPs not as these individuals to vote for, but as just a member of a party.

21:25: What are the effects of that process? With greater party control and party boss control, what are the effects on lobbying? What are the kinds of legislation that you start to see?

26:18: Countries with different constitutional processes like the US and UK still end up dealing with modern political questions rather similarly. They’re facing similar exogenous or external shocks to their political systems. What do you think are the sources of those external shocks across different countries?

27:46: Is that potentially similar to what happened in the Victorian era when you have that first big wave of globalisation? I’m interested in the fact that you said there’s this change affecting Britain between the 1830s-80s… then you’ve got this almost identical thing happening in the United States after the civil war from the 1860s through the 1890s. Is there something similar going on with exogenous shocks forcing these changes?

33:07: That’s a very interesting case, this idea that you’ve got this disenfranchised group who are seemingly enfranchised, or at least some of their representatives are enfranchised with the Reform Act, but it’s not quite coming to fruition.

40:23: Around when you came to Stanford, you joined your colleagues North and Weingast and started publishing in a similar vein to what they’d been doing. The classic paper was the 1989 one, Constitutions and Commitment. You’ve had quite a body of research building on that work.

56:11: I really like this idea of the state being split in half because it also explains why you have this idea of these ancient English liberties being maintained throughout this period, and really that’s just talking about the civil list being constrained whereas at the same time you have the extraordinary growth of the British state.  

Subscribe to the Governance Podcast on iTunes and Spotify today and get all our latest episodes directly in your pocket.

For more information about our upcoming podcasts and events, follow us on facebook, twitter or instagram (@csgskcl).

Lea Ypi is Professor in Political Theory in the Government Department, London School of Economics, and Adjunct Associate Professor in Philosophy at the Research School of Social Sciences, Australian National University. Before joining the LSE, she was a Post-doctoral Prize Research Fellow at Nuffield College (Oxford) and a researcher at the European University Institute where she obtained her PhD.

She has degrees in Philosophy and Literature from the University of Rome, La Sapienza, and has held visiting and research positions at Sciences Po, the University of Frankfurt, the Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin, the Australian National University and the Italian Institute for Historical Studies.

0:49: Global issues have become more salient in both public political discourse but also in political theory. You’ve made an important contribution with your book, Global Justice and Avant-Garde Political Agency (OUP 2011). I’d like to start by asking you some questions about your argument. I’m interested particularly in your contribution to a conversation that sees the role of the state as being outdated by current political problems and the evolution of political interactions at the international level. There’s one strong argument in the global justice literature that argues that states are obsolete forms of political association, and they’re inadequate at solving the problems of global injustice we’re confronted with. You argue against this position and defend statist cosmopolitanism.

6:27: How does your position in practice differ from a cosmopolitan position? Ultimately, you say the goal is to realize these global egalitarian principles.

7:26: Would you say that being a statist cosmopolitan makes a difference in terms of the time it might take to realise cosmopolitan justice? Or would you rather say that without states we couldn’t even get to the point where we realise cosmopolitan justice?

9:22: And I think this kind of argument reflects your particular view of the right way of doing political theory…. So how is your account of statist cosmopolitanism related to your view about the role of political theory?

14:00: It seems that you have a view of the political theorist as an agent with a distinctive contribution to political evaluation, political criticism and political debate where on the one hand the political theorist can provide some general principles or end points for reform but at the same time engage with the question of, how do we get from where we are to the principles we want to realise? … In your book with Jonathan White called The Meaning of Partisanship (OUP 2016), you discuss the foundational role parties play and ought to continue to play in modern democratic life. Can you tell us why you think parties are so irreplaceable?

20:39: Do you think there are costs associated with organising our political life around parties?

23:39: I think you take this point about public engagement as a political theorist very seriously as well. In your more recent work you’ve become more interested in reaching a wider audience as a political theorist and so you write in the popular press about contemporary issues in the UK and Europe. And I’m really interested in what your experience with that has been like. What are you learning as a political theorist?

25:57: One of the themes of your public engagement is the need to develop an alternative to liberalism. Can you tell us where contemporary liberalism fits in your view?

32:45: I think it’s very important to develop alternative visions of political society, both to test whether and why we value the kind of society we do, but also understand whether there are things wrong with it and change it. And so this kind of project I think is very valuable. It’s clear that there are problems within liberal society today that perhaps illustrate the tensions you talk about. And I think many self-professed liberals would say that these problems exist. What their reaction to these problems would be is not to say liberalism should die but to see those tensions as perhaps inherent in liberalism and try to work them out also within liberalism. It’s a much more gradualist approach to political reform. It sounds from the way you talk about recuperating this criticism of commercial society that you want to reject this gradualism… why move all the way to socialism as opposed to moving within the confines of existing political institutions?

37:37: Let’s pursue this question of the socialist alternative further. What would you say would characterise, not just at the level of principles, but in terms of actual institutions, what would be different in this alternative political world?

41:02: Socialism comes with a very distinctive vision, not just an end point in principles but also institutions and how they would be differently organised than current ones.

42:34: It sounds to me like you’re not persuaded by some socialist scepticism—and I mean scepticism in the following way –Jerry Cohen for example, who sees socialism as the right moral ideal, the best justified vision of political society… but he’s worried that we lack the institutional technology to realise that vision. Someone like Jerry Cohen became disenchanted particularly after the fall of communism that we might just lack the institutions to channel these radical forms of representation.

Subscribe to the Governance Podcast on iTunes and Spotify today and get all our latest episodes directly in your pocket.

For more information about our upcoming podcasts and events, follow us on facebook, twitter or instagram (@csgskcl).

Larry Bartels is the May Werthan Shayne Chair of Public Policy and Social Science at Vanderbilt University. His scholarship and teaching focus on public opinion, electoral politics, public policy, and political representation. His books include Unequal Democracy: The Political Economy of the New Gilded Age (2nd ed., Russell Sage Foundation and Princeton University Press, 2016) and Democracy for Realists: Why Elections Do Not Produce Responsive Government (with Christopher Achen, Princeton University Press, 2016). He is also the author of numerous scholarly articles and of occasional pieces in the New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, and other outlets. Bartels is a co-director of Vanderbilt’s Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions, a trustee of the Russell Sage Foundation, and a past vice president of the American Political Science Association. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and of the American Academy of Political and Social Science and a member of the National Academy of Sciences.

Democracy for Realists: Why Elections Do Not Produce Responsive Government was published by Princeton University Press in 2016.

00:50: How did you come to write your book with Chris Achen?

2:17: What do you think are the key components of this romanticized vision of democracy? How would you characterize the folklore you’re responding to in the book?

2:54: What’s at stake with this depiction of democracy? What are some of the costs of adopting this depiction of democracy?

3:52: This is a fairly elitist depiction of democracy- not in the sense that you’re endorsing elite rule, but in terms of your understanding of how policy is actually drafted and implemented. You don’t see voters playing a very large role in the actual operation of contemporary democratic governance.

4:47: What is the evidence you use to critique this folk wisdom account of democracy?

8:59: I guess that’s an interesting example for two reasons: one is that political parties are typically seen as one of the vehicles that voters can use to come up with issue positions if they don’t have more detailed policy knowledge. But that seems to suggest that political parties may be able to manipulate preferences of voters in a way that is a top down model of opinion formation. This could have disturbing consequences for democratic theory and democratic responsiveness depending on the elites actually running the party.

11:20: At one level, the book describes problems with democratic representation that might occur with low information voters but the book also suggests that there also might be problems with voters that have large amounts of political information. Can you describe some of those problems?

13:03: Do you think that any proposals for direct democracy can help address some of these information problems – that is, involving voters through direct primaries, referenda or efforts to enhance democratic deliberations?

15:29: It strikes me that if democratic politics can be short circuited by voters’ poor understanding of causal relations between policies, when it comes to more technical situations where the linkage between a voter’s electoral decision and the consequences of that decision … is less clear or counterintuitive… it strikes me that that problem we see at this local level should be fairly concerning.

16:58: It seems as though complexity poses problems if electorates don’t have a causal understanding of issues. Although I guess the flipside to that question is whether elites making technocratic decisions themselves understand causal relationships in these issues.

18:28: One of the alternatives that academics have proposed for ensuring democratic responsiveness and accountability is what’s referred to as a ‘retrospective model’ of voting- the basic idea being that if the economy performs poorly, the incumbent party suffers in the next election cycle. What is the book’s argument about the potential shortcomings of retrospective voting?

21:06: One of the examples the book discusses involves shark attacks… How does that have implications for American presidential elections? What do they tell us about retrospective voting?

26:24: So the question is, whether or not voters’ understanding of politics is accurate enough to be able to discern whether the incumbent has done something that made them worse off… it strikes me that there is a second potential problem with retrospective voting. For retrospective voting to replace political parties whose policies are ineffectual… voters must have information about whether the other party they’re voting into power is proposing policies that will have better effects than the incumbent.

29:39: What are the solutions you propose to this problem?

32:04: I understand why information might create problems with voter selection of candidates, but why should we think that political elites are going to be better at selecting candidates or policies? What give you that faith?

33:35: It’s certainly the case that elites have specialized knowledge… but it is also the case that you can find well-intentioned elites that simply disagree about which technocratic policies are most efficient for dealing with social problems… the question then becomes, if elites that are more political sophisticated disagree among themselves… how do we know which elites should be selected to be in charge of policy decisions? Especially when the stakes are high?

37:17: I guess the concern here is … much of this book is a critique of how academics think about democracy. You are suggesting that professional political scientists… have adopted an incorrect and costly vision of what democracy entails… my concern is that if academics can make that kind of an error in their theoretical understanding of democracy as a system of governance, we should also expect to see similar errors occurring in their analysis of public policy.

42:18: Can you tell us a bit about your next project?

Subscribe to the Governance Podcast on iTunes and Spotify today and get all our latest episodes directly in your pocket.

For more information about our upcoming podcasts and events, follow us on facebook, twitter or instagram (@csgskcl).

Vernon Bogdanor is a Research Professor at the Institute for Contemporary British History at King’s College London and Professor of Politics at the New College of the Humanities. He is also Emeritus Professor of Politics and Government at the University of Oxford where he is an Emeritus Fellow of Brasenose College.

Since 1966, he has been Senior Tutor (1979–85 and 1996–97), Vice-Principal, and (in 2002–2003) Acting Principal at Brasenose College, Oxford. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, a Fellow of the British Academy and an Honorary Fellow of the Society for Advanced Legal Studies.

He has been a member of Council of the Hansard Society for Parliamentary Government, Specialist Adviser to the House of Lords Select Committee on the European Communities, Member of the Court of Essex University, adviser (as a member of the Council of Europe and American Bar Association delegations) to the governments of the Czech Republic, Hungary, Israel and Slovakia on constitutional and electoral reform, member of the Academic Panel of Local Authority Associations, member of the Hansard Society Commission on the Legislative Process, member of the UK Government delegation on Democratic Institutions in Central and Eastern Europe and Conference on the Protection of Minorities, Consultant to Independent Television News (ITN) on the General Election, member of the Economic and Social Research Council’s committee administering the ‘Whitehall’ programme, special adviser to the House of Commons Select Committee on the Public Services, member of the Swedish Constitutional Reform Project, member of the Advisory Group to the High Commissioner on National Minorities, adviser to the President of Trinidad on the Constitution of Trinidad, and member of the Economic and Social Research Council’s committee administering the devolution programme.

Beyond Brexit: Towards a British Constitution was published by Bloomsbury Press in 2019.

1:12: Why did you write this book?

2:56: What is the main thesis of this book? What is the main impact of Brexit on the British Constitution?

5:08: Turning to the referendum, which as you say has become, since the issue of being in the EU came on to the agenda, a big part of our constitution and our way of taking decisions, as you show in earlier works you’ve written, we were actually arguing about whether or not we should introduce a referendum for a long while, as far as the late 19th century… one important proponent of the referendum… wrote an important book on that in the 1920s. And one point he made was that although he was in favour a referendum… he said that “the referendum shall never be used in answer to abstract questions such as ‘are you in favour of a monarchy.’

8:09: What do you think is the reason for the political turbulence that has taken place? You could argue that two prime ministers now have seen their careers destroyed by the referendum. How do you account for that?

10:43: In your estimation do you think that David Cameron learned the lesson in 1975 and felt that he could replicate the same trick that Harold Wilson had pulled off then?

11:52: Moving on to your background, as I said in the introduction you’ve been talking about the constitution in the UK…for a long while… What first interested you in the constitution?

13:15: Who were your teachers? Who influenced you?

14:52: Would you describe yourself now as a political scientist, historian or something else?

15:36: You mentioned earlier this idea of the doctrine of parliamentary sovereignty – the theoretical and practical problems associated with it… and in your book you talk about the possibility that the UK will move towards a written constitution. I’m sensing you think that’s a good idea. Do you think it’s likely to happen?

18:01: In that kind of scenario, you could potentially see clashes between judges and elected politicians over who actually has the legitimacy to take these kind of decisions.

21:20: You mentioned earlier that one of the reasons for the political turbulence since the referendum was that the people … have a different view to most of the people in parliament and government.  Do you think there are ways to bring them back together?

23:45: We’re now on the brink of a new prime minister taking power. Do you see any reason to believe that, whoever that may be, will be more successful than the last two prime ministers were in managing the referendum and the European issue?

25:02: What are you working on next?

25:53: Is it fair to say that that period… the pre-first world war period, which was… a period of constitutional turbulence… is comparable to the one we’re in now?

When does political violence result in stability and order? Does realist international relations theory help us understand war and peace? Will the world remain unipolar for long? Join us for our latest conversation on the Governance Podcast between Samuel DeCanio (King’s College London) and Nuno Monteiro (Yale University).

Subscribe to the Governance Podcast on iTunes and Spotify today and get all our latest episodes directly in your pocket.

For more information about our upcoming podcasts and events, follow us on facebook, twitter or instagram (@csgskcl).

Nuno P. Monteiro is Director of International Security Studies and Associate Professor of Political Science at Yale University. Dr. Monteiro’s research focuses on International Relations theory and security studies. He is the author of Theory of Unipolar Politics and Nuclear Politics: The Strategic Causes of Proliferation (with Alexandre Debs), published by Cambridge University Press in 2014 and 2017, respectively. His work has been printed in the Annual Review of Political Science, Critical Review, International Organization, International Security, International Theory, and Perspectives on Politics; and his commentary has appeared in numerous outlets including the Guardian, Foreign Affairs, the National Interest, and Project Syndicate. At Yale, Dr. Monteiro is also a research fellow at the Whitney and Betty MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies and a fellow of Branford College. He is originally from Portugal and earned his doctorate from the University of Chicago in 2009.

00:52: How did you become interested in international politics?

01:42: Who influenced your thinking during your PhD at the University of Chicago?

03:28: John Mearsheimer falls under the general category of realism, and you identify to some degree with this label as well.

04:38: Are there themes in the classical realist tradition that you identify with? How do you place yourself in the umbrella of different realist IR approaches?

09:34: Your first book, Theory of Unipolar Politics, examines this concept of unipolarity. Can you give us an overview of the central argument?

15:25: I guess the elephant in the room for this argument would be the rise of China as both an economic and military power… how would you respond to someone who pointed to the rise of China as a counterpoint to your view?

21:01: I suppose the question that’s immediately posed by that is, if China isn’t trying to acquire a global power projection capability, why is it now investing resources in developing aircraft carriers?

27:04: That was your initial book project. You wrote on nuclear proliferation with Alex Debbs. Can you tell us a little bit about your current project?

35:10: In one sense I can see how this idea might have been influenced by the US’s counterinsurgency experience in Afghanistan and Iraq. But somebody might ask whether that limits the explanatory power of the argument because it’s not applicable to war between states. But it sounds like you’re offering a general framework that can incorporate both small scale insurgencies and war between states.

36:50: It almost seems as though it’s an account that would tell a more hopeful story about the possibilities for peace following wars between states.

37:52: I guess you’re suggesting that Waltz’s second level of analysis—the organizational level—matters in a way that perhaps a structural realist who’s emphasizing the role of anarchy in conflict between states might not necessarily take into account.

39:27: It does sound like you have some of the realist’s pessimism in that you’re suggesting that even if conflict among states becomes less frequent due to technological developments… insurgencies that exist don’t have simple tactical or strategic solutions, which I suppose is an accurate depiction of the world we’re currently in.

41:02: Couldn’t somebody say that what you’re suggesting is that we try to influence the organizational structure of insurgencies?

Subscribe to the Governance Podcast on iTunes and Spotify today and get all our latest episodes directly in your pocket.

For more information about our upcoming podcasts and events, follow us on facebook or twitter (@csgskcl).

Sheilagh Ogilvie is Professor of Economic History in Cambridge and a Fellow of the British Academy. She holds degrees from the University of St Andrews (1979), Cambridge (1985), and Chicago (1992). She has been successively Lecturer (1989), Reader (2000), and Professor of Economic History (2004) in the Faculty of Economics at the University of Cambridge.She is the author of State Corporatism and Proto-Industry (Cambridge, 1997), Women, Markets and Social Capital in Early Modern Germany (Oxford, 2003), Institutions and European Trade: Merchant Guilds, 1000-1800 (Cambridge, 2011) and the editor of European Proto-Industrialization (Cambridge, 1996), Germany: A New Social and Economic History (3 vols, London, 1996/2003), and Revolution des Fleißes, Revolution des Konsums? (Ostfildern, 2015). She has published journal articles on institutions and economic development, the economics of guilds, merchants, rural communities, serfdom, consumption, retailing, occupational structure, demography, proto-industry, banking, female labour force participation, regulation, the growth of the state, and social capital.

She is the winner of the Gyorgy Ranki Prize (1999), the Anton Gindeley Prize (2004), the René Kuczynski Prize (2004), and the Stanley Z. Pech Prize (2008). She has been the director of research projects on “Social Structure in Bohemia, 1500-1750” (British Academy, 2001-03), “Economy, Gender, and Social Capital in the German Demographic Transition” (Leverhulme Trust, 2005-07), and “Human Well-Being and the ‘Industrious Revolution’: Consumption, Gender and Social Capital in a German Developing Economy, 1600-1900” (ESRC, 2008-12). She held a British Academy/Wolfson Research Professorship (2013-16), during which she explored the relationship between human capital and long-term economic growth. Her book on the economics of guilds was published with Princeton University Press in March 2019.

1:03: Sheilagh, why have you decided to bring your work together in a volume of this kind?

4:13: How would you define a guild? What are the key features of such an organisation?

8:40: The title of the book is The European Guilds: An Economic Analysis. Economists often disagree about things. One of the things they disagree about is the efficiency properties of these guilds. Some would argue that these guilds played an important function – they were efficiency enhancing, they might have been necessary for growth. I know that’s not a view that you hold. But could you give us an indication of what those arguments are?

14:22: These are basically arguments which are suggesting that some kind of market failures arise in these situations, and you have an institutional response to address the market failure. In this instance the guild is seen as the institutional mechanism to solve it.

15:32: Your view as I understand it is very much that guilds should be seen as rent seeking institutions which were actually seeking exclusive privileges for the members – and rather than solving a market failure, they essentially create a different sort of failure, which is that certain people are excluded from markets, there’s a lack of competition, you actually don’t get the quality control or professional certification that you might have gotten from an alternative institution. Is that a fair summary of your view?

20:14: So this is saying that guilds are about distributional matters; they’re institutions that are quite conflictual in terms of grappling with a part of the pie rather than increasing the size of the overall pie.

20:56: Can you say a bit more about the role of the state in your particular theory? Some of the work in this area that’s focused on guilds from a rosier viewpoint often depicts them as a kind of bottom-up private order institution that arises spontaneously to solve an efficiency problem. Whereas your view suggests that these institutions were embedded in political structures of power and authority which were used for these distributional purposes. Why do some people hold that rosier view?

26:45: I think in your first book you used the term ‘state corporatism.’ Would you describe guilds as corporatist institutions? They’re a kind of negotiation between a semi private organization and the state?

27:49: Given that you subscribe more to this view of guilds as rent-seeking or privilege-seeking organisations as opposed to efficiency enhancing ones, could you describe the ways in which guilds reduced efficiency?

36:02: Reading your account, this is quite a damning indictment of these institutions. There really is evidence of rent seeking—the scale of these markups is at a level where… how could anybody think that they have any beneficial properties? I guess the contrary view is that, OK, from today’s point of view, these were inefficient practices. But if you look at the context at the time, what was the alternative to providing the kind of mechanisms that would address market failures?

43:39: So in your view, you didn’t need guilds to address the kind of training market failures. What about asymmetrical information and quality controls? Did you find evidence of alternative mechanisms to deal with those?

49:41: This reminds me of a conversation I had with Barry Weingast – his argument is, yes, many of these kind of restrictions, when looked at through today’s lens, we would see them as inefficient and would want to get rid of them. But you have a slightly different take on them if you realize that the alternative might not be a free market type situation—it might actually be one where… you don’t have a market at all because you have societies embroiled in violence. And the various restrictions and privileges at least provide some rudiments of peace and order in a context where the alternative would be something worse than that… do you see cases where states seem to be able to avoid violence without having guild privileges or some of these distributional deals?

58:00: Why did guild institutions decline? As I understand your argument about why they persisted for so long, it’s basically a kind of public choice, rent seeking argument, which says that you’ve got relatively small organised groups…facilitated by public authorities through these corporatist deals, they gain privileges which are inefficient, but the reason why you don’t have …people challenging that is either because they’re politically disenfranchised or they face a huge collective action problem… If you take that kind of explanation, it implies that those privileges would be hard to break down.

01:06: I understand it’s a difficult question, but …I understand the explanation you’re giving there is a kind of accidental one. That is, by accident some factors come together and then we’re able to break free of guilds. I guess that’s not an unsatisfactory explanation in some ways, but I was wondering if you’ve thought of more positive explanations… I’m thinking of Deirdre McCloskey’s work on why we have the industrial revolution, and that’s a more ideas-based explanation…. Do you have any sympathy with that kind of view?

01:12: I want to ask you about a theme closely related with our research centre, and that’s thinking about the relationship between informal and formal institutions and how that can sometimes go wrong… there’s a tendency to see community as providing certain kinds of services in a singularly romantic view rather than seeing it as double edged, where you can recognize that there’s a positive side to traders getting together but at the same time recognize the dark side- the exclusion as the flipside of community.

What do the working conditions of street-level bureaucrats tell us about the nature of democratic governance? What new moral questions do we start asking when political theorists go into the field? Join us for the latest episode of the Governance Podcast on Bernardo Zacka's (MIT) new book: When the State Meets the Street: Public Service and Moral Agency.

Subscribe to the Governance Podcast on iTunes and Spotify today and get all our latest episodes directly in your pocket.

For more information about our upcoming podcasts and events, follow us on facebook or twitter (@csgskcl).

Bernardo Zacka is an Assistant Professor of political science at MIT. He is a political theorist with an interest in ethnographic methods. His research focuses on the normative challenges that arise in the course of public policy implementation. He is interested in understanding how the organizational environment in which public officials are situated affects their capacity to operate as sound and balanced moral agents. Zacka is also interested, more broadly, in normative political theory, architecture and urbanism, and 20th century European political thought.

Zacka’s first book, When the State Meets the Street: Public Service and Moral Agency, was published by Harvard University Press in 2017. It explores the everyday moral lives of the frontline public workers, or “street-level bureaucrats”, who act as intermediaries between citizens and the state. It won the 2018 Charles Taylor book award from the Interpretive Methodologies and Methods group of the American Political Science Association, and it builds on Zacka’s doctoral dissertation, which won the 2015 Robert Noxon Toppan prize for the best dissertation on a subject of political science at Harvard University.

Prior to joining MIT, Zacka was a junior research fellow at Christ’s College, Cambridge and a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Ethics in Society at Stanford. He holds a B.S. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from MIT (2005), and received his Ph.D. from the Department of Government at Harvard University in 2015.

0:32: What drove you to write this book and what’s the overarching argument?

3:20: The empirical focus of the book is on the street level bureaucrats, the front-line workers. Who are those people?

6:02: Why do street level bureaucrats determine the way you interact with the state?

8:04: What is the size of street level bureaucracy? How many people are you talking about?

12:07: You undertook some original ethnography inside a bureau. Can you tell us a bit about that experience?

15:54: How did the other bureau workers respond to you, knowing you were a researcher?

17:57: Your background first and foremost is as a political theorist. How do ethnography and political theory fit together?

20:49: I can’t help but think of Rawls there—the most influential political theory work of the second half of the 20th century – the Theory of Justice is a book in which there are no implementation problems whatsoever. The state just makes decisions and they’re implemented without difficulty.

21:59: Let’s think about some of the moral dilemmas that street level bureaucrats encounter. In the book you describe three pathologies of street level bureaucracy… You describe how street level bureaucrats take on a role of indifference, a role as a caregiver, and a role as an enforcer. What are those three roles and how do they emerge?

26:52: There are pressures of resources, of time, of money, on the street level bureaucrats. There’s psychological pressure as well. My personal reaction is that the bureaucrats’ responses seem perfectly reasonable. They’re how I would react in those situations.

29:56: Another striking thing is that these people aren’t well paid. The bureaucrats themselves are struggling.

31:16: There’s also ambiguity at the high level. You describe the overall manager of the organization who’s got a particular view of how the centre should be run… her aim was to create a welcoming environment different to other governmental agencies.

34:25: This description of the importance of the personal in public service delivery, and how people’s personal decisions may determine people’s outcomes made me think of another literature which you don’t really discuss in the book but is very present at the moment – and that’s the work on behavioural economics…. For example, the time of day you see a judge can determine the sentence you receive. Is that complementary to what you’re doing?

37:24: That raises one of the boldest claims in the book. You write that street level bureaucracy erodes and truncates the moral responsibilities of the workers. I think later in the book you may be less bold in the claim, but I wonder, would the bureaucrats and clients you met with agree with that?

41:52: What do you advocate we change in the system to help prevent these moral distortions at the street level?

44:45: This is one of the big questions for me reading the book—at times you’re advocating a moral craft.

48:34: As a political theorist, the final set of questions must relate to how this should make us think about democracy and the state.

Subscribe to the Governance Podcast on iTunes and Spotify today and get all our latest episodes directly in your pocket.

For more information about our upcoming podcasts and events, follow us on facebook or twitter (@csgskcl).

Jon Elster is the Robert K. Merton Professor of the Social Sciences at Columbia University. Before coming to Columbia, he taught in Paris, Oslo and Chicago. His publications include Ulysses and the Sirens (1979), Sour Grapes (1983), Making Sense of Marx (1985), The Cement of Society (1989), Solomonic Judgements (1989), Nuts and Bolts for the Social Sciences (1989), Local Justice (1992) and Political Psychology (1993). His research interests include the theory of rational choice, the theory of distributive justice and the history of social thought (Marx and Tocqueville). He is currently working on a comparative study of constitution-making processes from the Federal Convention to the present and on a study of retroactive justice in countries that have recently emerged from authoritarian or totalitarian rule. Research interests include Theory of Rational Choice and the Theory of Distributive Justice.

0:57: You’re giving a talk at our Centre called ‘Emotions in History.’ Can you explain the argument?

3:54: A lot of your work in the past has been engaged with rational choice models or economic models applied to various social phenomena in one form or another. You’re now mentioning the role of psychology. What role should psychology play in relation to the kind of rationality-oriented work you’ve done in the past?

6:04: So you’re saying that common sense rationality can play a role in understanding political institutions or economic institutions, or individual behaviour within them?

7:38: You say that about some of the Chicago-school understandings of institutions which imply that the institutions that are chosen are efficient in some sense—because if they weren’t, rational agents would change them. Then it’s hard to account for any sort of institutional change because equilibrium is built into the model.

8:50: If we don’t explain the origin of institutions through a rational choice model, or at least if that model has quite serious limitations, is there any way in which a model that focuses on the psychological dimension or the emotional dimension provides a better explanation?

10:38: Would your view of institutions be more along the kind of model that recognizes that institutions are often the products of accidents that arise from conjunctions of all kinds of eventualities that really don’t necessarily have more universal implications?

11:32: What can we say—or can we say anything—about whether certain kinds of institutions have beneficial properties relative to other kinds of institutions?

13:54: If we go back to this role of emotion: if emotion is an important factor in shaping institutions, the way they’re formed and perhaps even the way they persist, that strikes me to imply that… people, because of emotion, create certain institutional structures that could be inefficient or malfunction in various ways…

16:49: What I was wondering was whether you were working with a model where emotional choice influences the way in which institutions are originally created, but then within that set of rules, is that the level at which a more rational choice type model kicks in? Or is it emotions all the way down?

18:26: I want to come to some of what you’ve written on the role of prediction within social science… but what I take from what you’ve just said there about the importance of specific cases and not generalizing too much is that you would be against the idea that even if we recognize the role of emotions in forming institutions, we can have a notion of institutional design to deal with the effects of emotional decision making …

21:52: Would it be fair to say that we might not know necessarily what are good decisions – certainly not in some optimizing sense, but can we say about what might be bad decisions?

23:23: So the next question I wanted to ask you is, given the role of indeterminacy, can you say a bit more about what you think are the excessive ambitions of contemporary social science? This is a theme that you’ve developed in your recent work: a lot of social science is about prediction… much of what you’re saying is pushing back against that.

26:50: If prediction is limited, can we nevertheless have a model of social science which is based on understanding in very context-specific circumstances?

28:38: I think that one of the interesting things to think about regarding uncertainty is that there are different views within political economy about this. As I understand, Keynes’ view was that uncertainty was very much with us and that the role of statecraft is to manage that uncertainty in a creative way…

30:25: Can we speak a little more about the importance of history? One of the pieces that some of our students read in one of our courses on political economy has some criticisms that you made of the analytic narrative model in political economy—and that’s often an attempt to use rational choice type models to understand particular historical episodes. And the argument you made there, as I understand it, is that they are sort of retrofit models. People are picking the history to fit the rational choice type explanation.

34:46: So that sounds very much to be part of what I take of what you’re saying here, which is that there needs to be a lot more humility from various analysts about what they claim for their particular models, given the nature of the subject matter.

36:28: One of the authors we’re studying at our research centre is Elinor Ostrom and her account of common pool resource management. She is famous for challenging some of the implications that came from one simple model of rational choice: the idea that there is a commons problem—that whenever you don’t have ownership rights of some kind, you have a tragedy of the commons.

40:23: Earlier, you were reflecting on areas where you think you’ve been wrong over what’s been a very distinguished career…

42:41: One of the areas where you’ve applied this notion is giving micro-foundations to Marxist-style explanations. You’re one of the influencers behind the analytical Marxist movement. Did that turn out to be a fruitful research paradigm or not?

43:48: In what sense does the early part of Marx remain with us? What’s the residual power of the insight?

46:28: Are there any other areas you’d like to talk about where you think what you were writing about in the past wasn’t right?

47:40: What are you working on at the moment?