Overload

The overload thesis became popular in the 1970s. It offered a diagnosis of the crisis afflicting the advanced liberal democracies at the time. Drawing on [Page 653]public choice theory, it identified a set of ongoing processes that it suggested had increasingly served to render the advanced liberal democracies “ungovernable.” In this context, the concern of the overload theorists was to demonstrate the need for a withdrawal of a monolithic and overbearing state from its stifling regulation of the economy, civil society, and the public sphere. This account proved extremely influential, decisively shaping the manner in which the crisis of the 1970s came to be understood and the nature of the (largely neoliberal) response.

Drawing on rational choice assumptions, the overload thesis identified a self-reinforcing tendency for the politicization of the economy and civil society. Enticed perhaps by the promise of the scientific management of the economy and society offered in particular by Keynesianism, the state of the postwar period came to claim for itself an ever-greater range of responsibilities. In so doing, it sanctioned ever-spiraling social expectations. The state now claimed to bend an ear to all concerns. The result was to reward those organized political interests that were most active and strategic in lobbying the state. This was to provide a powerful incentive for heightened pressure group activity. The unintended consequence, in turn, was to establish a political marketplace in which the parties would vie for votes, yet one lacking the discipline provided by formal market mechanisms.

In such an undisciplined political market, fiscal irresponsibility is rewarded electorally. Political parties seeking only to maximize votes are encouraged to “buy off” a sufficient share of the electorate by promising to accede to the demands of an ever-greater range of interests, thereby raising the “price” of a vote and the stakes of fiscal irresponsibility. Once established, such logic is cumulative—a crisis of overload and ungovernability is inevitable. For the overload theorists, the result was a profound crisis of democracy—government's capacity to respond fell far short of demands placed upon it.

The image was a simple one: A vicious political whirlpool out of whose clutches political parties can only escape at considerable cost to their electoral prospects, but which could not fail to produce economic irresponsibility and political insolvency. The solution, however politically unpalatable one might think to an electorate that had come to conceive of government as a simple relay for its preferences, was simple: A severe bout of fiscal austerity, tight monetary control, and a programmatic withdrawal of an overloaded, overburdened, yet beleaguered state.

Despite its appeal and influence, the overload thesis contains a series of profound internal contradictions and tensions. On the one hand, its proponents conjure the impression of a cynical and self-serving electorate responsive only to political bribery and looking to the state to satisfy its every whim and desire. Yet this depiction of the electorate as greedy, unprincipled, opportunistic, and, above all, simply too stupid to consider the costs (both economic and political) of their unrealistic expectations, stands in marked contrast to the empirical evidence. This suggests that the principal factor determining success at the polls throughout the postwar period (particularly since the mid 1960s) has been the perceived state of the economy and not the ability of parties to outvie one another through ever-spiraling public expenditure commitments. Once it is considered that reelection is likely to prove conditional upon perceived fiscal probity, the incentive to court interests with promises that cannot be realized seems to evaporate and with it much of the credibility of the overload thesis. Moreover, in its call for a decisive break with the practices that have led, supposedly, to overload and ungovernability and, in particular, in its advocacy of welfare and state retrenchment, the overload theorists appealed to precisely the good sense of the electorate that they had previously dismissed.

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