When Government Becomes an Incumbent, Pt 3

Every institution develops incentives.

Businesses seek stability because stability makes planning easier. Universities seek larger endowments to expand their programs and ensure their future. Charitable organizations seek continued donations to fulfill their missions. Bureaucracies naturally seek larger budgets and broader responsibilities because additional resources increase their ability to accomplish their objectives. None of these tendencies necessarily arise from ill intent. They arise because institutions, like the people who comprise them, adapt to the incentives that surround them.

Government is no different.

One of the assumptions underlying representative government is that elected officials remain representatives of the people who sent them to office. They are expected to identify public problems, exercise sound judgment, enact laws that serve the common good, and ultimately return to the voters for approval or rejection. Elections are intended to ensure that public officials remain accountable to the citizens they represent.

Yet representation and incumbency are not the same thing.

The longer an individual remains within a political institution, the more that institution inevitably begins to shape the incentives surrounding them. A newly elected legislator often arrives focused upon the concerns of constituents back home. A legislator serving a fifth, sixth, or eighth term must also consider committee assignments, party leadership, fundraising, relationships with regulatory agencies, interactions with lobbyists, legislative strategy, and the practical realities of maintaining political influence. None of those concerns are inherently improper. They simply become increasingly important as time passes.

This transformation requires no conspiracy. It requires only incentives. The incentive of a candidate is to win office. The incentive of an officeholder gradually becomes remaining in office.

Those objectives overlap, but they are not identical. Solving difficult problems often involves taking political risks. Remaining in office frequently encourages caution, coalition-building, and the preservation of existing relationships. Over time, maintaining political influence can quietly become as significant as exercising it.

History demonstrates that this tendency is neither modern nor uniquely American.

Throughout much of medieval Europe, political authority became concentrated within hereditary aristocracies. Positions of influence frequently remained within the same families for generations, creating systems in which existing power naturally reinforced itself. Those already inside government possessed advantages that outsiders could rarely overcome. While modern representative democracies reject hereditary rule, the underlying principle—that established institutions tend to preserve their own influence—has proven remarkably persistent.

The American republic confronted similar challenges in a different form during the nineteenth century. Following elections, victorious political parties frequently distributed government positions through what became known as the spoils system. Public employment was often awarded on the basis of political loyalty rather than professional competence. The result was an extensive network of patronage in which government employment and political success became closely intertwined. Civil service reforms eventually sought to reduce those incentives by replacing patronage with merit-based hiring, yet the episode illustrated an enduring truth: political institutions naturally generate relationships that reinforce existing structures unless counterbalanced by deliberate reforms.

Even the Progressive Era, which introduced many reforms intended to reduce corruption and professionalize government, illustrates this same dynamic. Independent regulatory commissions were created to insulate important decisions from day-to-day political pressure. Many achieved genuine successes in improving public administration. Yet over time, some agencies developed close working relationships with the industries they regulated, giving rise to what later economists and political scientists described as regulatory capture. Institutions created to restrain concentrated power sometimes found themselves increasingly influenced by the very interests they were established to oversee.

Modern representative government continues to exhibit similar incentives, although in subtler forms.

Long-serving legislators accumulate institutional knowledge that newer members cannot immediately match. They build relationships with committee chairs, agency officials, policy experts, journalists, donors, and advocacy organizations. Seniority often determines committee leadership, legislative influence, and access to procedural tools unavailable to freshman members. Lobbyists understandably devote greater attention to legislators capable of shaping legislation than to those with little institutional authority. Interest groups similarly concentrate their resources where they believe they can have the greatest influence.

None of these relationships are inherently unethical. Taken individually, each can contribute to more effective governance. Experienced legislators often possess valuable knowledge of complex policy issues. Long-term working relationships can improve cooperation between institutions. Consultation with experts frequently produces better legislation than decisions made in isolation.

The concern lies elsewhere.

When these relationships accumulate over decades, they gradually create an institutional ecosystem in which each participant develops a stake in preserving the existing arrangements. Businesses seek predictable regulation. Regulatory agencies seek stable authority and reliable appropriations. Interest groups seek favorable legislation. Professional associations seek continued influence. Legislators seek reelection.

Each participant acts rationally according to his or her own incentives. None need harbor malicious intentions. Yet together they may produce a political environment that becomes increasingly resistant to meaningful structural reform.

Economists frequently describe a related phenomenon as concentrated benefits and dispersed costs. A particular regulation may impose relatively small costs upon millions of citizens while providing substantial benefits to a comparatively small number of organized interests. Those who benefit possess every incentive to defend the regulation vigorously. Those who bear the costs often experience them individually, gradually, and almost imperceptibly. The political result is predictable. Organized interests remain highly engaged, while the broader public often lacks the time, information, or resources necessary to oppose them effectively.

Political incumbency amplifies this dynamic. Legislators who have spent decades working alongside the same agencies, industries, trade associations, and advocacy groups naturally become familiar with those institutions. Familiarity builds trust. Trust encourages cooperation. Cooperation can improve governance.

It can also narrow perspective.

The voices heard most consistently within government are rarely those of ordinary citizens managing small businesses, balancing household budgets, or raising families. More often, they are policy specialists, regulatory experts, attorneys, lobbyists, economists, trade organizations, and advocacy groups whose professional responsibilities place them in continual contact with public officials. Their expertise is often genuine and valuable, yet proximity inevitably shapes perspective.

Again, this observation should not be mistaken for an accusation of corruption.

The greater danger is not corruption.

It is convergence.

Over many years, legislators, regulators, major industries, and organized interest groups may gradually begin approaching public problems through increasingly similar assumptions. Solutions involving expanded administrative authority, additional regulation, or larger programs become more familiar because those are the tools most commonly discussed within the institutional environment. Alternative approaches that rely upon decentralization, competition, civil society, or market adaptation receive comparatively less attention, not necessarily because they are inferior, but because they are less familiar to those operating inside government.

This is how institutional consensus often develops. No conspiracy is required. Only repeated interaction. Only familiarity. Only incentives.

James Madison anticipated this tendency long before the modern administrative state existed. In Federalist No. 51, he argued that constitutional government should be designed with the expectation that power naturally seeks to preserve itself. The separation of powers, checks and balances, federalism, and regular elections were not expressions of cynicism toward any particular officeholder. They reflected a realistic understanding of human nature. Madison did not expect virtue alone to restrain power. He expected ambition to counteract ambition through institutional competition.

That insight extends beyond the Constitution itself.

Competition is not merely an economic principle.

It is a constitutional principle.

Free markets depend upon competition because competition disciplines private power. Constitutional republics likewise depend upon political competition because competition disciplines public power. Just as competitive markets discourage monopolies, competitive political institutions discourage the accumulation of unchallenged authority.

This does not mean long-serving public officials cannot be honorable. Many undoubtedly are. Experience carries genuine value. Institutional knowledge matters. Statesmanship often develops through years of public service. The question is not whether experience benefits government. It unquestionably does.

The more important question is whether our institutions possess sufficient safeguards to ensure that experience does not gradually become entrenchment, and that stability does not quietly become stagnation.

Healthy republics continually renew themselves. They welcome new ideas, encourage peaceful political competition, and remain willing to reexamine institutions that have grown comfortable with their own permanence. The same principle that preserves competitive markets also preserves constitutional government: power should never become so insulated that it no longer expects to be challenged.

For institutions, as for markets, competition is not a defect.

It is one of the principal safeguards of liberty.