Low-information lawmakers: why today's congress can no longer cope with complex problems.

• Author: Drutman, Lee

The Politics of Information: Problem Definition and the Course of Public Policy in America

Frank R. Baumgartner and Bryan D. Jones

University of Chicago Press, 264 pp.

We humans have a hard time with complexity; our brains are only capable of paying attention to one thing at a time. Once we start weighing different sides of a problem, trying to make trade-offs across multiple dimensions, keeping all kinds of facts straight, our heads start to hurt. We are quickly overwhelmed. When Herman Cain promised that, if elected president, he would not sign any bill longer than three pages, he was tapping into something deep in the human psyche. At three pages, we might feel in control.

We are what psychologists call "cognitive misers." We naturally conserve our mental energy, and prefer the simple (less taxing) over the complex (more taxing). That's why politics is easier when there are two parties, which can organize issues into simple binary choices: more government spending or less government spending; Wall Street or Main Street; good or evil.

With simplicity comes clarity; with diversity comes loss of control. Yet clarity, appealing as it may be, has some harmful consequences for our political institutions. It limits the ability to examine problems creatively, from multiple angles, and makes it harder to change anything. Good luck solving health care or energy or immigration or global trade in three plain-language pages. But once you allow in more angles and dimensions, you inevitably open up the process to who knows what.

This conflict is at the heart of a fascinating new book by the political scientists Frank Baumgartner and Bryan Jones called The Politics of Information: Problem Definition and the Course of Public Policy in America. Baumgartner and Jones are grappling with a fundamental question of governance: How do we collectively solve problems whose complexity exceeds the cognition of any one person? And what happens when we attempt to impose simplicity on complex problems that defy such control?

At the risk of oversimplification (inevitable within the confines of a book review), we have two basic choices for how we orient our political institutions, particularly Congress. We can try to impose control and clarity on the chaos by clear top-down jurisdictions (for example, non-overlapping committee structures with powerful leaders). Or we can allow institutions that will look at problems differently, embracing the value of diversity in...