Part VIII: Summary and Conclusions

This is the final essay of a series exploring the topic: What impact does political entrepreneurship have on freedom and flourishing? The series commenced with a Preface which provides a synopsis and explains why I think it is important to obtain a better understanding of political entrepreneurship.

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The purpose of this series of essays has been to explore the contribution that political entrepreneurship makes to human flourishing. A central issue is whether political entrepreneurship has a role to play in promoting a political and legal order more conducive to human flourishing.  

Each essay in this series has sought to address a question relevant to assessing the impact of political entrepreneurship on freedom and flourishing. The main points that emerge from each essay are as follows:

1. This series of essays has focused on institutions related to liberty because those institutions are strongly linked to human flourishing. The links between freedom and flourishing are conceptual as well as empirical. Human flourishing is inherently individualized and self-directed. Liberty is necessary to enable individuals to flourish in different ways without the flourishing of some individuals or groups being given structural preference over that of others.
2. At a national level, prevailing culture offers only a partial explanation of differences in economic and personal freedom levels. In several countries, political entrepreneurs and their ideologies have played an obvious historical role in bringing about economic and personal freedom levels that are substantially lower than predicted by underlying cultural values.
3. Political entrepreneurship is similar in some ways to other forms of entrepreneurship. Don Lavoie’s suggestion that entrepreneurs play an interpretive role in complex systems is applicable to all kinds of entrepreneurship. Political entrepreneurs respond to public discourse by using it as a basis for policy innovation.
4. Political entrepreneurship is largely about obtaining and using political power. Political entrepreneurs face incentives to exploit the misconceptions and irrational preferences of voters by making deals with narrow interest groups at the expense of consumers and taxpayers. Innovators among them have incentives to focus on niches in the marketplace of ideas that established parties don’t satisfy. However, political entrepreneurs who engage overtly in interest group politics are not always able to overcome opposition from other politicians who see benefits in seeking to serve broader community interests.
5. Many political entrepreneurs are motivated by a desire to pursue economic, environmental and social objectives that are widely supported in the broader community. However, even modest attempts to steer the market system toward desired economic objectives often obstruct the price signals that convey information from consumers to producers about the most advantageous use of resources. Pursuit of social and environmental objectives is usually a matter of “muddling through” in the face of unintended consequences.
6. Historically, the path-dependence of social norms has played an important role in slowing the emergence of interest group politics in the long-standing democracies. People were once more reluctant to become dependent upon government or to use the political system to obtain benefits at the expense of others than they are today. The erosion of those norms has led to increasing constraints on economic freedom, a decline in dynamism, and rapid growth in public debt. Path-dependence of social norms now poses a difficult challenge for political entrepreneurs seeking to promote policies that are more conducive to freedom and flourishing.
7. The idea that autocrats have sometimes helped to promote greater economic freedom may not be entirely fanciful but empirical evidence certainly doesn’t support the idea that democracy, and the personal freedom associated with it, is incompatible with high levels of economic freedom. It is clear, nevertheless, that the long-standing democracies are experiencing difficulties in maintaining economic freedom in the face of interest group politics. Reform-minded political entrepreneurs in those countries have a great deal to learn from previous reform experiences. The problem of ensuring adoption of government policies that more consistently advance economic and personal freedom cannot be reduced to the question of how to elect better political entrepreneurs to national leadership positions. Institutional change is a complex process involving social movements, media organizations, and interactions between individual citizens, as well as local and national politics.

 In the preface I suggested that it is important to obtain a better understanding of political entrepreneurship at this time because there seems to be increasing support in liberal democracies for leaders who propose rule changes which are likely to have detrimental impacts on prospects for freedom and flourishing. In this series of essays, I have attempted to shed some light on the ways authoritarian leaders seek to appeal to the public but have not attempted to assess the gravity of current threats to liberty.

My concluding message for those who perceive that liberty is under threat is that they should emphasize the potential for positive relationships between democracy and human flourishing. Perhaps the most important thing I have learned in writing these essays is that my previous tendency toward cynicism about democracy was not entirely appropriate. If we want institutions that are more supportive of freedom and flourishing to become entrenched, we will need more supportive citizens engaged in discursive processes at all levels of society – that means more democracy, not less.