Here I am on CBS News, talking about youth voting:

We’ve been doing a lot of press work, and reporters’ main questions seem to be: “Why are young people disconnected?” and “What will the decline in their enthusiasm mean for the Democrats?” The implied baseline is usually 2008, when more than half of young people voted, two-thirds of them supported Barack Obama, and more than four percent said they had volunteered for a campaign. You don’t need polls to demonstrate that youth enthusiasm is lower today than it was then: in fact, we could have predicted that years ago.

Consistently, 25-30 percent of young people vote in midterm elections–half as many as in presidential years. Thus I think the appropriate baseline is 2006. Compared to that year, I am not sure that youth enthusiasm is down now. We’ll have to wait for the actual election to know.

In any case, it makes good strategic sense for the president–and the newly energized libertarian right–to try to engage young people. Young adults will not vote at the rates we expect in presidential years, but their turnout could range from, say, 23-33 percent, and that difference would matter for the election’s outcome. Rigorous research shows that young people’s decision to vote is sensitive to whether they were contacted by campaigns. The Obama moderate left, the libertarian right, or both could build lasting constituencies by enlisting significant numbers of young people.

“Transparency” means making the government’s decisions public–along with all potential influences on government–so that the results will be better: less corrupt, more fair, wiser. “Sunlight is the best disinfectant,” said Louis Brandeis, and his theory has many proponents today.

One thing that has changed since Brandeis’s day is the sheer volume of decisions and possible influences. In 2004, federal administrative agencies published 78,851 pages of proposed rules. That does not count determinations by federal administrative law judges, provisions in contracts between federal agencies and grantees, or the policy decisions that those contractors make. The legislative branch, meanwhile, produces reams of policy in the form of appropriations bills and riders, earmarks and other detailed instructions in statutes, and committee reports. And flowing into government are countless campaign contributions, uncoordinated campaign expenditures, bids, lawsuits, and lobbying contacts.

It was not always so. The government during the New Deal and the Great Society made much more momentous decisions, but far fewer of them. For example, the Federal Register (which presents proposed federal rules) was 30 times longer during the supposed anti-regulatory regime of George W. Bush than it had been during the first term of Franklin D. Roosevelt, who was rapidly changing society. From the 1930s through the early 1970s, Congress was almost always considering some kind of “landmark” legislation, whether conservative or liberal, that drew the attention of the nation and that plausibly promised to change America. Only a few such bills have even been seriously considered since 1980. Yet routine decisions are made off the the floor of Congress at an enormous rate and with great cumulative effect.

This trend is no accident. It serves the interests of professional politicians, administrators, and lobbyists to avoid big, public decisions in favor of routine administration, negotiation, and deal-making. Also, the public lacks the political will for difficult choices and real changes of course. I strongly supported the health reform of 2010, but in its tentativeness, its delegation of hard choices to agencies and panels, and its internal compromises, it exemplifies modern lawmaking. And yet it seems to have been bold enough to exhaust the whole system.

The standard “transparency” agenda is to disclose all of the routine decisions and possible influences on them. Since the volume is astounding, no individual and no mass movement can possibly pay attention. The two solutions appear to be:

1. Crowdsourcing. Get thousands of eyes on the minutiae of federal decisions and campaign finance data to reveal evidence of corruption (or simple inconsistencies and gaps in policy). These are “bugs,” and the programmer’s adage is probably right: “Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow” (or fixable). But our worst problems aren’t bugs. They are not corrupt acts or even patterns of corruption, but official, public policies that are shortsighted, unfair, or wasteful. It doesn’t take great masses of data to show what’s wrong with them. It does take public pressure to promote solutions, and there is no evidence that transparency drives such pressure.

2. Specialization: Most people cannot pay attention to all the details of policy, but experts on watersheds can watch the EPA, reporters on Capitol Hill can scrutinize congressional office expenditures, and civil libertarians can keep an eye on Guantanamo. The problems are: (1) wealthy special interests can watch regulators at least as effectively as public interest groups do; and (2) knowing that something is wrong doesn’t do any good unless lots of other people care.

This has been a pessimistic post so far, but I actually believe there is a solution. We must free government from the morass of routine decision-making so that Congress and the president can make really consequential reforms in the form of landmark statutes. Such acts will be transparent virtually by definition. People will care about them. And they have a chance of addressing our problems. Routine decision-making cannot do that, even if it is fully transparent and thoroughly scrubbed for “bugs.”

Making data public is fine, but is not likely to make a big difference. Process reforms should emphasize codification, simplification, and new rules against the delegation of crucial decisions to administrative agencies. No thanks to the Supreme Court, campaign finance reform will now require a constitutional amendment, but at least that means that our proposals in that domain should be radical. Meanwhile, social and environmental policy should be made through large, relatively simple, landmark statutes. Even though Congress may choke on such bills, they belong high on the agenda so that people can judge what passes and what fails to pass.

I have been reading or re-reading fine scholarly books about the way citizens relate to their national government.* These books provide persuasive empirical evidence, but I don’t think any is as perceptive as Ward Just in his Washington novels, such as Echo House, Jack Gance, and City of Fear.

A common theme is the shift from Washington as the seat of government to the modern city of dealmakers and negotiators. Ward Just (who was the Washington Post‘s lead reporter in Vietnam) certainly does not regard the old Washington as unproblematically benign. It was a city of power, and the powerful sometimes lacked wisdom and ethics. Yet their job was to govern. Their titles, their powers, and their paychecks were federal. They made big decisions that were public, subject to popular approval or rejection. For instance–and this is my example, not Just’s–in a mere two years from 1963-4, Congress passed and the president signed the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964 (launching the War on Poverty and creating Head Start, Job Corps, and many other programs), the Food Stamp Act (institutionalizing food stamps as a permanent federal welfare program), the Federal Transit Act (providing federal aid for mass transportation), the Library Services and Construction Act (offering federal aid for libraries), the Community Mental Health Centers Act (de-institutionalizing many mental health patients), the Clean Air Act (the first federal environmental law allowing citizens to sue polluters), the Wilderness Act (protecting nine million acres of federal land), the Equal Pay Act (addressing wage discrimination by sex), the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (ending de jure racial segregation in the United States), and the Tonkin Gulf Resolution (rapidly escalating the Vietnam War).

Some of those bills were good. Some were very bad. But all were landmark statutes, widely publicized, driven by national political leaders and large constituencies, consistent with general philosophies.

That whole style of governance soon ended. In 1997-8, 70 percent of the issues Congress considered went nowhere at all, and The Washington Post decried “the barrenness of the legislative record” at the end of the session.

But that did not mean that the government stopped governing. Washington still faced innumerable choices about which activities and programs to fund, purchase, permit, require, measure, ban, and punish. Those decisions were no longer made in major bills, widely publicized, debated on the floor of Congress, and signed or vetoed by Presidents. Instead, the decisions were negotiated behind the scenes by people in and (mainly) outside the government. “Governance” now meant the regulations issued by administrative agencies, the determinations of administrative law judges, the outcomes of lawsuits against federal agencies, the appropriations bills, riders, and earmarks passed by congressional subcommittees, the policies adopted by federal contractors, and the memoranda of understanding (and even the unwritten agreements) that bound various “stakeholders.”

It was a city, then of dealmaking instead of lawmaking, where the least important people might hold elected or appointed positions and the real power belonged to well connected negotiators. Always awash with money, it was now a city in which turning private money into power was legitimate, professional. Meanwhile, expectations faded that anything really important would happen as a result. No more War on Poverty, but plenty of targeted tax breaks and regulatory negotiations.

In Jack Gance, Ward Just’s eponymous narrator recalls the end of the sixties:

The clamor and racket ceased, but the echoes were still in the ears of the population; many in the capital were ashamed and stricken, comforting each other as family members customarily do in times of great grief. It seemed that not everything was possible after all. The capital turned a sullen face to the country, stung by the accusation that it had failed and was unworthy of trust, that it had lost its nerve. That was the result of the flunked war and the squalid, inexplicable scandal, all of it so mercilessly public …

It was difficult to thrive on a civil servant’s salary in the new Washington. But opportunities were everywhere, most of them indistinguishable from government itself; it was the same work, the difference being that the money you got for it was colossal, and growing. The city was rich and it grew richer as its political authority declined. The flow of easy money became a flood , irresistible, saturating, and softening everything it touched.

*Theodore Lowi, The End of Liberalism: The Second Republic of the United States, second edition (New York: Norton, 1979) ; Theda Skocpol, Diminished Democracy: From Membership to Management in American Civic Life (University of Oklahoma Press, 2003); Matthew A. Crenson and Benjamin Ginsberg, Downsizing Democracy: How America Sidelined its Citizens and Privatized its Public (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002); and others.