Government Efficiency and Network Theory

Science News reports on a study relating (in a loose way) the efficiency of a national government with the size of its cabinet. Researchers in Vienna found that the development level of countries, as a proxy for the efficiency of their governments, is in general lower for countries with more members in the national cabinets. They then went on to model cabinet members as nodes in a network and found support for the observed correlation. There was even specific evidence for the decades-old observation of English historian Cyril Northcote Parkinson that decision-making is severely impaired in committees of more than 20 people. The US is getting close to Parkinson's cutoff, at 17.

Comments

National governments

[Iamthecheese]

This can, at best, describe the cabinet-level and section of the governments. With many different structures, a poor measure at best. A proper study would require many more measurements, and be weighted by the decision powers given to various levels of government. The Japanese diet, for instance, is much more powerful than the president and his cabinet.

Re:National governments

[paanta]

"Stefan Thurner, a physicist at the Medical University of Vienna, and his collaborators looked at the overall efficiency of virtually every government on the globe, as measured by United Nations and World Bank indicators taking into account factors such as literacy, life expectancy and wealth"

The big problem with this is that it's assuming the government has significant control over literacy, wealth and life expectancy. Literacy and life expectancy are strongly related to wealth, and wealth is related to a bunch of geographical factors. I didn't read the study, but did it compare a country only to its neighbors/other countries on its continent? Because it should have. Also, is there any way to separate causation and correlation here?

Perhaps Weak Country -> Weak Government -> Political Mayhem -> Large Committees of People With Divergent Opinions.

P.S. Be suspicious of any political/social science research done by physicists.

sounds like something I should model

[cliffski]

sounds like something I should model in the next version of this:

http://www.democracygame.com/

It already represents ministers as nodes in a neural network.
Can't say it surprises me in the least tbh.

Power shift

[ChrisMaple]

Parkinson also noted that when the cabinet exceeded 20 persons it merely indicated that power had shifted away from the cabinet as a unit. Power might be in another group, or in a subset of the group and meets separately to get the real work done.

Around 20 members, people start making prepared statements rather than using meetings as think tanks. Real work is no longer done in cabinet meetings.

Since this new study indicates that the government and the nation is less efficient if the cabinet is large, it's an interesting extension of Parkinson's work.

Many of Parkinson's articles were humorous and he strongly hinted that he had no actual numbers to back up his claims. It's a little surprising to see that the real world aligns with his claims.

Re:Government inefficiency is good.

[Chuck Chunder]

Efficient in the sense that they don't bother working much on a whole heap of areas and just concentrate on oppression.

Dictatorships don't tend to get more done, they just try to do less. Perhaps that is efficient in some sense but not, I think, in a particularly useful one.

You are right though, for governmental systems that are somewhat more answerable to the public inefficiency is one thing that stops governments doing too many things the people aren't interested in as there tend to be enough things the people are interested in to keep them fairly occupied.

Re:Government inefficiency is good.

[n dot l]

Efficient in the sense that they don't bother working much on a whole heap of areas and just concentrate on oppression. Well, yes and no. Stalin, for example, built Russia back up from the brink of disaster (Soviet losses were staggeringly large during WWII) and into a nation the rest of the world feared for nearly half a century. This was no small task - it involved the reconstruction of the cities the Germans had razed, modernizing many others, rebuilding his military, development of the USSR's nuclear weapons program, etc. That was no small task. He did that and he oppressed the people he ruled over.

I don't think the number of priorities has much to do with efficiency (by any measure) in the long run. Authoritarian regimes can get a lot done in a very short period, and history has proven that time and again (I think we all remember reading about all the kings that inherited a disaster and had built an empire by the time they died in school). The trouble is that they're extremely sensitive to corruption, internal power struggles, and simple human vanity. When the strong leader dies, those who inherit his power often do tremendous damage simply bickering with each other over who gets to rule exactly what. And then when the next great ruler steps up and takes control we find that they first go throughout the country destroying a great many things in order to rebuild them in their own likeness. And in both cases we find that the bottom rung officials are corrupt as all hell since they're not accountable to anyone but their own superiors, who are often at great distance and too indifferent to bother listening to the people's complaints.