Understanding national government through the lens of Growth Machine and Urban Regime theories

It's frustrating for me to read the "local" newspaper's coverage, in this case the Washington Post, of structural failure in organizations for a couple reasons. First, they don't seem to have an understanding of how organizations work generally. Relatedly, they don't understand that organizations are systems and have processes to produce their output(s).

I rail about this all the time and won't repeat myself here, too much. Basically, journalists focus on individuals and have a kind of bias that the "system" (which they don't understand) "works" and when it doesn't it's an aberration that has been corrected and will not occur again.

The former director of the media watchdog FAIR (Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting) describes this as the "bias of the center" and it is discussed in this article, "Propaganda from the middle of the road: the centrist ideology of the news media," which was published in 1989, and which I still remember, because of importance of the concepts it discussed.

While Jeff Cohen was talking (this was a speech originally) about reporting on national and international politics, the trope is relevant to local news reporting too.

Second, newspapers and journalists for the most part fail to think about the intersection of politics and business and how it works in practical terms.

Regular readers are probably bored about my constant mention of the Growth Machine and the Urban Regime. From "A superb lesson in DC "growth machine" politics from Loose Lips (Washington City Paper)":

... the Growth Machine thesis, first laid out by sociologist Harvey Molotch, in the seminal article, City as a Growth Machine: Toward a Political Economy of Place. From the abstract:

A city and, more generally, any locality, is conceived as the areal expression of the interests of some land-based elite. Such an elite is seen to profit through the increasing intensification of the land use of the area in which its members hold a common interest. An elite competes with other land-based elites in an effort to have growth-inducing resources invested within its own area as opposed to that of another. Governmental authority, at the local and nonlocal levels, is utilized to assist in achieving this growth at the expense of competing localities. Conditions of community life are largely a consequence of the social, economic, and political forces embodied in this growth machine.

Political scientist Clarence Stone, a professor at University of Maryland has a competing thesis, that of the "urban regime." I don't think these theories are competing so much as different sides of the same coin. "Growth Machine" theory explains the motivation of "the land-based elite," and "urban regime" theory explains in detail how the land-based elite operates and functions.

Professor Stone was kind enough to send me his recent paper, "Now What? The continuing evolution of Urban Regime analysis," from 2005. He writes:

An urban regime can be preliminarily defined as the informal arrangements through which a locality is governed (Stone 1989). Because governance is about sustained efforts, it is important to think in agenda terms rather than about stand-alone issues. By agenda I mean the set of challenges which policy makers accord priority. A concern with agendas takes us away from focusing on short-term controversies and instead directs attention to continuing efforts and the level of weight they carry in the political life of a community. Rather than treating issues as if they are disconnected, a governance perspective calls for considering how any given issue fits into a flow of decisions and actions. This approach enlarges the scope of what is being analyzed, looking at the forest not a particular tree here or there. (emphasis added, in this paragraph and below)

In discussing Atlanta, Stone writes: "Land use, transportation, and housing formed an interrelated agenda that the city's major economic interests were keen to advance;" and

By looking closely at the policy role of business leaders and how their position in the civic structure of a community enabled that role, he identified connections between Atlanta's governing coalition and the resources it brought to bear, and on to the scheme of cooperation that made this informal system work. In his own way, Hunter had identified the key elements in an urban regime – governing coalition, agenda, resources, and mode of cooperation. These elements could be brought into the next debate about analyzing local politics, a debate about structural determinism.

Extending the Growth Machine and Urban Regime Concepts to the National Arena

The reality is that things function similarly at the national level of government too. It's just that the Growth Machine is not organized in terms of place. Instead, it's organized by "capital" and business sector, and "the governing coalition"is made up of business people and their representatives, elected officials, and government workers and appointees. This coalition focuses the regulatory structure on managing the regulatory function in ways that maximize business success and profits by minimizing regulatory cost and rules and regulations.

The tension is between representing the people, what Foglesong in Planning the Capitalist City calls the "democracy" contradiction, and representing the interests of capital, what Foglesong called "the property contradiction" in terms of local urban planning and zoning practice, and what in this context I would call the "capital" contradiction.

As industrial sectors have been reorganized on a global scale and the extra-normal profits that used to be generated by oligarchic and monopolistic participants in home markets once relatively free of competitors from outside the home country have dissipated, industries have worked to significantly reduce costs and eliminate slack costs, ranging from labor to the cost of complying with rules and regulations.

To make profits in a hypercompetitive arena, many companies choose to take significant risks as well in terms of the health and safety of their operations figuring that either they will luck out and things won't go catastrophic, or that they can afford the cost if it does. (see Union Carbide and Bhopal, BP and its refinery in Texas, BP and drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, GE and the Love Canal, GE and its practices with its appliance division, that peanut processor that went out of business due to contamination, mining disasters in Appalachia, etc.)

Industrial companies do this through trade associations and big lobbying budgets, and through the revolving door of people working for government then working for industry then working for government (e.g., Dick Cheney and oil industry policy, his sojourns in government bridged by working for Halliburton, the oil services firm).

So while the Washington Post believes that its expose of the U.S. Department of the Interior's branch which "regulated and promoted"--which yes is a contradiction that should have been fixed a long time ago-- the oil exploration and production industry is so significant that it deserves to be the top story of today's edition, for me it says very little that I don't already know. See "Lessons from oil agency's ties."

How is this any different from the so-called "iron triangle" described by political scientists in the 1970s with regard to policymaking (see this entry from Wikipedia, from which this image is also taken). Or the concerns that President Eisenhower raised about the growth of the military-industrial complex?

The real issue is the linking of politicians, government agencies and workers, and capital as organized by industrial sector or issue group as the governing coalition or "Growth Machine" that sets a common agenda and system for working together and provides the resources in people, money, and legal representation necessary to make it all happen.

What happened with the Minerals Management Service happens with virtually every federal government agency. Hey editors of the Washington Post, did you notice yesterday's front page article about the egg recall? ("Most eggs produced by a few firms : Safety inspections fall through cracks as industry consolidates ") Do you think this is a systematic problem with industry as it is organized in the United States or just happenstance, a number of freakish coincidences?