A few years ago, I spoke with a Nepalese member of parliament about the challenges he faced in trying to improve the lives of his constituents.
“What do they need?” I asked.
“I bought a cow from somebody before,” he replied firmly.
“Why did you buy him a cow?” was the obvious next question I asked.
He looked at me intently. “Because I needed the cow,” he said.
The exchange highlighted a fundamental truth of politics in many places: When the state is failing to meet its people’s needs, the blame always falls on lawmakers. For just about everything.
Over the past 20 years, I have worked with hundreds of politicians in over 60 countries, from Iraq to Albania to Nepal to Uganda, to strengthen their nations’ systems of governance. Elected politicians in each country tell us a long list of pressures they face: finding jobs for their people, ensuring access to basic services like electricity and running water, paying for everything from school fees to medical care, ensuring they don’t break the law, paying for funerals, and even transporting deceased relatives from the hospital to the cemetery.
Often, that just means giving people money. Or buying cows.
To Western eyes, many of these practices seem strange, peculiar, and perhaps corrupt. They are hardly to be found in political science books, institutional procedures, or formal explanations of the role of parliamentarians in the country’s constitution. It is commonly assumed that when politicians give money to people, it amounts to bribery, but the truth is more nuanced than this.
Attempts to improve governance in the world’s most troubled countries have been based on the rational design of formal institutions rather than the behavioral logic of individuals operating within them.
Over the past three decades, huge amounts of international aid have been spent on strengthening democracy and governance in these places, with little effect. In Afghanistan, for example, the international community spent $65 billion over two decades trying to bring the country closer to Western democracies, but ultimately left it in much the same state as when aid began in 2001.
The problem is that attempts to improve governance in some of the world’s most troubled countries are based more on the rational design of formal institutions than on the behavioral logic of the individuals operating within them.
They can understand the underlying objectives. Stronger formal institutions are essential to the development of such states, and they can certainly help politicians better manage the intractable problems they face. But that led to outcomes like Iraq and Afghanistan. Because they failed to grasp the political realities and the social norms that underpin them, many of the existing problems remained. And many of them got worse.
This approach to state-building is similar to many of the assumptions that underlie traditional economic theory, such as the belief that if you get the rules right and provide enough resources, politics will work just like it does everywhere else. But it relies on politicians acting like the “rational actors” of classical economics textbooks. But parliamentarians are not economists, they are human beings.
Here, the experience of driving in an unfamiliar city illuminates the problem and shows why traditional approaches have often had limited effectiveness.
How driving in different countries explains politics elsewhere
To understand this difficulty, consider how traffic works in different countries. Road facilities are fairly similar around the world, and the “rules of the road” follow the same basic principles everywhere: there is usually a white line down the center of the road, traffic lights at busy intersections, and stop signs warn drivers to slow down. But learning to drive in different countries is much more about understanding the informal norms and assumptions that all local drivers consider to be the standard than any formal structure or rules.
This affects nearly every aspect of driving, from entering roundabouts, to giving the right of way at four-way intersections, to changing lanes in fast-moving traffic. Every country works a little differently and new drivers can be a little nervous at first, but they quickly adapt to the behavior of other drivers.
Many places where I have worked, such as Cairo, Delhi, and Kampala, seem particularly chaotic and disorderly due to the volume of traffic and the seeming disregard for the rules of the road. When I was stuck in traffic in Nairobi, I asked a local colleague why cars sometimes run red lights and other times stop at green lights. “Don’t worry,” she reassured me. “We know how it works.” When I mentioned this to a friend, a diplomat based in Nigeria, she told me that upon her arrival in Lagos, she was informed that such signals were “merely advisory.”
You don’t even have to drive to understand this: a pedestrian attempting to cross a road for the first time in a new place isn’t sure whether traffic will stop until they step onto the road.
These conventions are not part of formal rules, but are the product of circumstances and evolution. Built over millions of repeated interactions between drivers over many years, they reflect a shared appreciation of the common difficulties of driving here, and each driver’s behavior reflexively adapts to the behavior of others. When traffic is perpetually backed up, drivers find shortcuts and ingenious workarounds, even if this requires bending the formal rules. As these options become apparent, others imitate them. Over time, mutual understandings and social norms adapt to these new patterns and ultimately determine how traffic flows.
There seems to be a belief that if you get the rules right and provide enough resources, politics will work just like anywhere else.
Ask drivers in Cairo, Nairobi, Delhi, or any congested city how they would feel if the traffic system were overhauled to make it more rational, and there will likely be only one answer. But when they’re stuck in traffic, their only primary concern is to get to their destination as quickly as possible. They find shortcuts, ignore formal rules, and even run the occasional red light — all of which makes sense in the short term. But congestion establishes patterns of behavior that make life harder for everyone (including their own) in the long term, often reinforcing rather than alleviating the system’s underlying problems.
This is how we understand politics elsewhere.
Just as driving patterns are often the result of a less-than-optimal transportation system, politicians are also constantly dealing with flaws in their own governance structures. When governments fail to protect the welfare of their citizens, legislators and political parties step in to fill the gaps: by providing funds, helping people find jobs, and paying for basic necessities like food, water, health care, and education.
Many politicians recognize that lasting solutions to the everyday problems that people need help with can only come from stronger, more effective government institutions. But when faced with voters who just need enough money for an ambulance, or school fees, or food today, political energy will be directed toward solving the immediate problem rather than the long-term effort of fixing the systems that are causing these problems in the first place.
That is, where the state is weak, politicians will be better at circumventing it. They will find their own shortcuts and workarounds in personal, direct, entrepreneurial solutions to people’s problems. Their logic of action will also be shaped by dominant social norms, cultural traditions, and, crucially, the expectations of voters in such situations. State insufficiency means that voters want politicians who can circumvent rather than go through the system, who can pay for themselves, or who can access and influence funds on their behalf.
As one Tanzanian member of parliament explained to me, “This is how things work here. This is what we have to do. This is how we get elected.”
The blind spot that has plagued international development
This is the kind of collective action problem that lies at the heart of most political developments: newly designed institutions of governance and democracy, such as parliaments and ministries, are always built on rational principles, but these principles only bear a tenuous relationship to the human logic behind political action.
Ironically, international efforts funded by European and North American governments fail to understand how their own political institutions have developed. As Joseph Henrick points out in his book on WEIRD psychology, these institutions did not emerge from an intellectual epiphany in which “rational parties got together, put their heads together, and worked out an effective institutional design.” Rather, they developed from what Henrick calls “a painstaking process of myopic groping.” They began as informal solutions to immediate problems, gradually evolved over decades, sometimes centuries, and were gradually formalized into norms, rules, and institutions.
Political developments are rarely the neat product of rational planning, but rather the result of a much messier and more complex process in which humans find ways to solve important problems.
Political developments are rarely the neat product of rational planning, but rather the result of a much messier and more complex process in which humans find ways to solve important problems.
This is a blind spot that has plagued international development for the past 30 years: the process of starting with templates for institutional design that seem rational to foreign observers and then trying to bend local codes of behavior and societal norms to fit those expectations is unlikely to bear much fruit. Politicians always act logically, not rationally.
International aid to support the much-needed process of strengthening governance in fragile countries needs to start with the human side of politics: it needs to focus on the problems that politicians need to solve today and help them solve them, but in ways that will make them easier to solve tomorrow.
That is, change must begin with the existing logic of action, and it must begin within political thinking and work its way outwards from there.
As Rory Sutherland points out, we shouldn’t denigrate an action until we know what purpose it actually serves. Rather than trying to figure out why lawmakers are doing something that doesn’t make sense, we need to first ask, “Why does it make sense to them?” Here, a more behavioral approach could offer new ways to strengthen our political system in the places where it really matters.