The Unfashionable Case for Incremental Governance Reform

Incremental governance reform has, in most political cultures, a reputation problem. It does not lend itself to memorable slogans. It does not produce the kind of single-event accomplishment that makes for a confident campaign narrative. It does, however, produce most of the actual improvement in how governments function, and the gap between its operational importance and its political visibility is one of the more durable misalignments in modern democratic politics.

Why the incremental reforms compound

The reforms that compound are the ones that change procedure rather than headline outcomes. A tighter intake standard at a regulator. A revised disclosure timeline at an agency. A better-designed appeals process inside an administrative system. None of those changes produces a campaign narrative. Each of them, over time, changes the texture of how the government actually engages with the citizens and businesses it regulates.

The more ambitious reforms, by contrast, tend to be the ones that produce headlines and that, on a longer time horizon, get partially or fully unwound by subsequent administrations or by courts working through their implications. The incremental reforms are harder to unwind precisely because they are too small to motivate sustained opposition.

What political culture would have to change

Recognizing the value of incremental reform would require a political culture more comfortable rewarding the kind of work that does not photograph well. The current culture rewards the ambitious announcement. It generally fails to track whether the announcement produced operational change two cycles later. A political culture that did track those outcomes would, in my view, give more political room to the practitioners who specialize in the incremental work and that would in turn change the kinds of reforms that get attempted.

The case for incremental reform is, in the end, a case for taking the operational layer of government seriously. The operational layer is where citizens actually experience the state. Reforms that improve that experience deserve more political room than the current culture allots them. The work is unglamorous. It is also where the durable improvement comes from.