Year after year, Congress fails to reach consensus on important issues, the electorate screams for change, and voters become more polarized along party lines and ideology. These struggles aren’t causes of America’s political malaise, says Michael E. Porter, co-chair of the U.S. Competitiveness Project at Harvard Business School; they’re symptoms of a much larger problem. U.S. “democracy” is a weak, uncompetitive industry controlled by a duopoly that pursues private interests at the expense of public good.
“To fix our political system, we must see politics as the major industry it has become, the major economic benefits it provides for its participants, and how today’s political competition is not serving the public interest,” as Porter explains in “Why Competition in the Politics Industry Is Failing America,” a just-released groundbreaking study co-authored with business leader and former CEO Katherine M. Gehl.
Experts in the benefits and drawbacks of competition in the private sector, Porter and Gehl describe the four fundamentals of a healthy political system:
- Practical and effective solutions to solve our nation’s important problems and expand opportunity
- Legislative action to advance those solutions
- A reasonably broad-based public consensus on policy
- Respect for the Constitution and the rights of all citizens
Measured by these success factors alone, America’s system has already failed. But Porter and Gehl are adamant in their belief that we can recover our former sense of bipartisanship and dynamism.
Read Porter’s and Gehl’s paper to learn more about their poignant perspective on our nation’s most urgent problems and how business, strategy and competition can help solve them.
Danny Stern is Managing Director of the Stern Strategy Group