overload

overload, in political science, proposed concept claiming that liberal democracy has become ungovernable.

The overload concept became popular in the 1970s, following the publication in the United Kingdom and the United States of reports on the governability of democracies. The concept offered a diagnosis of the crisis afflicting the advanced liberal democracies at the time. It identified a set of ongoing processes that were believed to have increasingly served to render 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 and civil society.

Drawing on rational choice assumptions, the overload concept identified a self-reinforcing tendency for the politicization of the economy and civil society. Enticed perhaps by the promise of the scientific management of economy and society offered in particular by Keynesianism, the state of the post-World War II period came to claim for itself an ever-greater range of responsibilities. In so doing, it sanctioned ever-spiraling social expectations. 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 that enabled parties to vie for votes and yet lacked 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 solution was considered to be relatively simple: fiscal austerity, tight monetary control, and a programmatic withdrawal of an overloaded, overburdened, yet beleaguered state.

Despite its appeal and influence, the overload thesis contained a series of profound internal contradictions and tensions. On the one hand, its proponents conjured the impression of a cynical and self-serving electorate responsive only to political bribery and looking to the state to satisfy its needs and desires. Yet this depiction of the electorate as greedy, unprincipled, opportunistic, and, above all, incapable of grasping 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.