A few years ago, I was in conversation with a Member of Parliament (MP) from Nepal about the challenges he faced in trying to improve the lives of his constituents.
“What sort of things do they need?” I asked.
“I once bought someone a cow,” he replied flatly.
“Why did you buy him a cow?” was my obvious next question.
He eyed me levelly. “Because he needed a cow,” he said.
The exchange highlighted a basic truth about politics in many places: where the state is failing to meet the needs of its citizens, responsibility invariably falls on MPs. For almost everything.
Over the last 20 years, I have worked with hundreds of politicians in more than 60 countries, as diverse as Iraq, Albania, Nepal, and Uganda, to strengthen their systems of governance. In each, elected politicians will relay a long list of the pressures they face: finding people jobs, sorting out access to basic services like electricity and water, paying for everything from school tuition fees and healthcare bills, getting them out of trouble with the law, covering funeral costs and even paying to transport a deceased relative from the hospital to the cemetery.
Often, it simply means giving people money. Or buying them a cow.
To Western eyes, many of these practices look odd, idiosyncratic, and quite possibly corrupt. Very little of this is found in the formal descriptions of the MP’s role in political science books, institutional procedure, or a country’s constitution. Where politicians are giving people money, the outside assumption is usually that this must equate with vote-buying, when the truth is more nuanced than this.
Attempts to improve governance in some of the world’s most troubled states have been based more on the rational design of formal institutions than on the behavioral logic of the individuals that work inside them.
Over the last 30 years, huge amounts of international aid have been spent on strengthening democracy and governance in such places to very little effect. In Afghanistan, for example, the international community spent $65 billion over 20 years trying to make the country look more like Western democracies, only to leave it in pretty much the same state as it was when they started in 2001.
The problem is that attempts to improve governance in some of the world’s most troubled states have been based more on the rational design of formal institutions than on the behavioral logic of the individuals that work inside them.
One can appreciate the underlying objective. Stronger formal institutions are essential to the development of such states and would undoubtedly help politicians to manage better the intractable problems they face. But it has resulted in outcomes like those in Iraq and Afghanistan. In failing to get to grips with the realities of politics and the social norms that held them in place, many of the existing problems simply persisted. And many got worse.
This approach to state-building has a parallel in many of the assumptions that underpin traditional economic theory. The belief appears to be that provided you get the rules right and provide enough resources, politics is bound to work like it does elsewhere. That though relies on the politicians behaving like the “rational actors” that populate classical economics textbooks. But MPs are not Econs, they are humans.
Here, the experience of driving in an unfamiliar city helps to illuminate the problem and reveals why traditional efforts often have had such limited effect.
How driving in a different country explains politics in other places
To appreciate the challenge, consider how traffic works in different countries. Road furniture looks pretty similar the world over, and the “rules of the road” conform to the same basic principles everywhere. There are usually white lines down the middle of the road, traffic lights will be stationed at busy junctions, and stop signs will warn the driver to slow down. But learning to drive in a different country depends far less on the formal structures and rules than it does on understanding the informal norms and assumptions that every local driver regards as standard.
This shapes almost every aspect of driving, from entering a roundabout, to right of way at a four-way stop, to changing lanes in fast-moving traffic. Every country works slightly differently, and the new driver will initially be filled with uncertainty, quickly adapting to what other drivers are doing.
In many places I have worked, like Cairo, Delhi, and Kampala, the volume of traffic combined with an apparent disregard for any road formalities makes them seem particularly chaotic and haphazard. Whilst stuck in a traffic jam in Nairobi, I asked a local colleague about why cars were sometimes going through red lights, and sometimes stopping at green ones. “Don’t worry,” she reassured me, “we know how it works.” When I mentioned this to a diplomat friend based in Nigeria, she told me that, upon arriving in Lagos, she was informed that such traffic signals were “purely advisory.”
You do not even need to be behind the wheel to appreciate this. Any pedestrian trying to cross the road for the first time in a new place will not be sure whether the traffic is going to stop for them until they step into the road.
Such practices are not part of the formal rules, they are a product of circumstance and evolution. They have built up through millions of repeated interactions between drivers over the years, reflecting a shared sense of the common difficulties of driving in this place, each driver’s behavior reflexively adapting to what others are doing. Where the traffic is permanently clogged, drivers will find shortcuts and inventive ways of evading them, even if it means bending the formal rules to do so. Once these options become apparent, they are copied by others. Over time, mutual understandings and social norms adjust to these new patterns and ultimately govern the way that the traffic flows.
The belief appears to be that provided you get the rules right and provide enough resources, politics is bound to work like it does elsewhere.
Ask any driver in Cairo, Nairobi, Delhi, or any congested city whether they would like to see the traffic system overhauled so that it is more rational, you would only get one answer. But when stuck in traffic, their principal concern is simply to get to their destination as quickly as possible—finding shortcuts, ignoring certain formal rules, driving through the occasional red light, all of which make sense in the short-term. What it also does though is establish patterns of behavior that make everybody’s lives (including their own) more difficult in the long run, often reinforcing the underlying problems in the system, rather than alleviating them.
This is the way to understand politics in other places.
Just as patterns of driving are often the result of a suboptimal traffic system, politicians are also continually navigating flaws in their own structures of governance. Where the government is failing to protect the welfare of its citizens, MPs and political parties step in to compensate for its failings—providing money, helping people to find work, or paying for basic necessities like food, water, health care, and education.
Most politicians recognize that lasting solutions to the everyday problems that citizens need help with are only likely to come from stronger and more effective government institutions. But when faced with voters who need an ambulance, school fees, or enough money to eat today, political energy will be directed to fixing immediate problems, rather than the long-term slog of fixing the system that is causing these problems in the first place.
In short, where the state is weak, politicians get good at going around the state. They will find their own shortcuts and workarounds in personal, direct, and entrepreneurialsolutions to people’s problems. The logic of that behavior will also be shaped by dominant social norms, cultural traditions, and, crucially, the expectations of voters in such contexts. The inadequacies of the state mean that voters want politicians who can circumvent the system, rather than go through it, who can pay for things themselves, or who are able to access money and influence on their voters’ behalf.
As one Tanzanian MP explained it to me, “This is how things work around here. This is what we need to do. This is what we have to do. This is how you get elected.”
The blind spot that has plagued international development
This is the sort of collective action problem that sits at the heart of most political development. Whereas newly designed institutions of governance and democracy, like parliaments and ministries, will always be built around rational principles, these principles will only ever have a glancing relationship with the human logic behind political behavior.
The irony is that international efforts funded by governments in Europe and North America fail to appreciate how their own political institutions evolved. As Joseph Henrich points out in his book about WEIRD psychology, their institutions did not emerge from an intellectual epiphany where “rational parties sit down, put their heads together, and hash out an effective institutional design.” Rather, they developed from what he calls a “grinding process of myopic groping.” Starting out as informal solutions to immediate problems, and evolving gradually over decades and often centuries, they were slowly formalized into norms, rules, and institutions.
Political development is rarely, if ever, the neat product of rational planning, but rather the result of a far more messy and complex process of human beings finding ways to fix the things that matter.
Political development is rarely, if ever, the neat product of rational planning, but rather the result of a far more messy and complex process of human beings finding ways to fix the things that matter.
This is the blind spot that has plagued international development over the last thirty years: A process that starts with a template for institutional design that looks rational to foreign observers, and which then seeks to bend local behavioral and social norms to those expectations, is unlikely to achieve much. Politicians will always behave logically rather than rationally.
For international assistance to support the process of strengthening much-needed institutions of governance in fragile countries, it needs to start with the human side of politics. It needs to pay attention to the problems that politicians need to fix today and help them to fix them—but in ways that make them easier to solve tomorrow.
In short, change needs to begin with the existing logic of behavior. And that must start inside the political mind and work outwards from there.
As Rory Sutherland notes, you should never denigrate a behavior until you have worked out what purpose it really serves. Rather than trying to work out why MPs are doing things that don’t seem to make sense, we need to start by asking: Why do they make sense to the MPs that are doing them? It is here that a more behavioral approach may offer new ways of strengthening political systems in places where it really matters.
