A new agenda for political reform: instead of trying to weaken the pressure of corporate money in Washington, let's try strengthening Congress's capacity to resist it.

• Author: Drutman, Lee

America's political institutions are suffering from profound decay. The political parties--especially the Republicans--have become so constrained by their activists and addicted to short-term one-upmanship that they are incapable of governing together. At the same time, the political power of the very wealthy and organized business interests has reached levels that undermine our legitimate expectations that the political system should be able to solve big problems and generate shared prosperity.

These twin phenomena are part of the same basic pathology--the capture of our governing institutions by concentrated interests and the weakening of the structures that aggregate and balance public preferences and channel expertise toward workable consensus.

They also have a similar cause: more than three decades of disinvesting in government's capacity to keep up with skyrocketing numbers of lobbyists and policy institutes, well-organized partisans, and an increasingly complex social and legal context. Instead, policymakers have increasingly turned to the information and analytical capacity provided for them by those with the biggest material and ideological stakes in the outcome. This dependence has created a power asymmetry crisis that has been quietly building for almost four decades.

Like many crises, it has been allowed to build because it has escaped our attention. Political reform advocates have largely ignored it, in large part because it doesn't fit into the keep-the-money-out-of-politics narrative that has gripped the political reform community since Watergate. The classic political reform move is to deflate the pressure that powerful interests can bring to bear on government by reducing their campaign spending, or to counter that pressure by getting the elusive saviors of our democracy--"the people" or "moderate voters"--to pay attention and demand accountability, or even just to show up to vote.

Yet it's hard to escape the conclusion that these strategies have failed. Every year, more and more money floods into the political system (and conservatives on the Supreme Court dismantle more controls on such money that reformers had managed to erect). Every year, civic leaders bemoan low levels of voter turnout, and the control of primary elections by the most ideologically extreme voters. It's still worth fighting to limit corporate money in politics and to boost voter participation; the right tactics and the right political moment may someday meet. But the truth is that in a liberal democracy that deeply values freedom of participation, it is all but impossible to quash malign forces by constraining their ability to exert "pressure" on our government institutions--and it's extremely difficult to meaningfully increase the participation of the diffuse and unmobilized.

Rather than obsess over reducing the pressure of corporate money in politics, or countering it with democratic mobilization, reformers should open up a third front: increase government's capacity to withstand that pressure. Government, after all, is not simply a passive strand of rope in a game of policy tug-of-war. Properly resourced, organized, and motivated, the institutions of government can develop the knowledge to think independently, and the resources to push back against the claims of the mobilized and wealthy in the name of the unmobilized. Government cannot do this if its capacity to collect and process information has been systematically dismantled. Yet this decimating is exactly what has happened to the institutions of the United States in the last few decades. With few exceptions, our policymaking institutions are losing the ability to think for themselves. In some cases, it's already gone.

In an earlier era of wealth inequality and highly partisan politics much like our own, progressives succeeded in partially insulating the executive branch from partisan and business pressure. They did it through the creation of a civil service system that professionalized government in a way that allowed it to build up the capacity and expertise necessary to tame some of the excesses of Gilded Age capitalism.

In the intervening years, our faith in government has waxed and waned in an almost cyclical fashion. We invested in government capacity to win two world wars and counter a great depression, and then in the 1960s and 1970s to address a range of market failures dealing with the environment, and workplace and consumer safety issues.

Then sometime around 1980, government capacity just flatlined. Congress stopped hiring, then began cutting. Today, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) and the Congressional Research Service (CRS), which provide nonpartisan policy and program analysis to lawmakers, employ 20 percent fewer staffers than they did in 1979. The same pattern of diminished in-house expertise is true throughout government. As the University of Pennsylvania political scientist John Dilulio has noted, the number of federal bureaucrats declined about 10 percent between 1984 and 2012. At the same time, business lobbying, political polarization, and wealth inequality all started their steady and unmitigated increases. Put simply, the pressures have increased. The ability of the government to deal with them has not.

If we can't reduce the pressure, then we have little choice but to arm our institutions to resist it. The first step is to--finally--make Congress a place where policymaking can be informed by meritocratic expertise. America is one of the only countries in the world with a real, working legislature that is a peer to the executive. But it is hampered by a level of patronage that would make Boss Tweed or Richard Daley blush.

Reversing that pattern does not mean remaking congressional staff in the image of the executive branch bureaucracy--which itself is in need of significant reform. Given that Congress is and probably always will be organized by parties, it also does not mean creating a totally nonpartisan staff. But it is possible to retain partisanship while bringing greater professionalism, deeper expertise, and some of the features of a civil service system to Congress.

So long as we have a congressional staff that lacks a high level of expertise, and that constantly cycles through the institution, often on their way to becoming lobbyists to help out the next class of legislative neophytes, no amount of campaign finance reform or electoral noodling will make a difference. If we can't figure out how to give Congress back its brain, we may wake up to realize that we are more like Brazil and Mexico than Germany or Denmark. We may already be there.

Policymakers do not just act; they also think. To deploy their significant capacities to tax, spend, and regulate, legislators and regulators must be able to acquire comprehensive information about social problems, weigh the merits of claims presented to them, consider a range of solutions, and anticipate the ways in which their designs could go off track. The more complexity policymakers have to deal with, the greater the strain on their ability to intelligently think before they act. With each year, the strain gets greater, because the social, political, and legal complexity all continue to grow.

As Adam Smith knew, specialization is the handmaiden of economic growth. But as societies become more specialized, they also become harder to comprehend. With each passing year there are more products and services; there are new technologies; there is more relevant scientific knowledge. Take almost any subject matter--finance, medicine, any technology--and think what it would take to have an informed opinion about it now, as opposed to in 1980. To legislate intelligently on any subject--or even to intelligently consume policy analysis--requires considerably more information and conceptual sophistication than it did at the dawn of the Reagan administration.

In 2012, there were about 1.9 million articles published in 28,000 scholarly peer-reviewed academic journals. Most of those articles are available with a few clicks of a keyboard. But information is not knowledge, which requires a high level of training in the various disciplines of social science, along with a humanistic understanding of history and a good bit of experience. You can type a question like "How do we fix copyright law?" into Google. In less than one second, you will have more than 43.1 million results--more than enough to consume the rest of your life. Google is no substitute for trained judgment.

The complexity of political demands is also increasing. The number of organizations with Washington representation more than doubled between 1981 and 2006, from 6,681 to 13,776. All of these organizations are in Washington for a reason: they have policies...