John Bernard: Growing accountability in government and healing partisan divide begins with Spokane

By John Bernard

Spokane, unlike most larger American cities, is a place where politics is still a competition between parties. While the mayor’s office is officially a nonpartisan one, Spokane’s residents have shown a willingness to elect Republicans or Democrats to fill the role. Neither side can assume re-election, they must convince the people that they’ve earned it. In theory, the competition should make political leaders more open to ideas not necessarily from their respective partisan tribal enclaves.

Too often in politics, it’s hard for voters to get unbiased information they can trust to judge for themselves whether certain policies are succeeding or failing. Inevitably, the side not in power says every decision has been a disaster, while the side in power proclaims every problem is being solved and tremendous progress is being made across the board. It can be difficult for any voter to measure whether any given set of priorities are improving. This leaves everyone less capable of making informed decisions based on his or her own public policy priorities.

I’ve spent my career helping governments and businesses find ways to increase accountability and achieve their goals. But leadership in the political world doesn’t always want accountability as much as they might say they do.

For example, when I designed and spearheaded the “Results Washington” program for the Inslee administration, we established objective metrics that could be measured to establish whether administration policies were achieving the results expected. The idea is that if the metrics did not show improvement, it would inform the governor and agency leadership that there was work to be done. That would trigger a dive into the processes and the data to find out if a process was falling short or the policy needed rethinking.

In the business world, results are quickly measured in growth in the top or bottom line. In politics, however, “results” can be perceived when media coverage is favorable to a new policy to improve, say, the environment, whether the actual result of that policy improves the environment or not. If a policy proves to be a failure when objective metrics are considered but media coverage and public perception remain unchanged, there is very little incentive for a politician to point to their own policy and say it failed and a new approach is needed.

Frustratingly, in the Inslee administration, while “Results, Washington” was nationally hailed as a milestone in government accountability, when it came time to putting results feedback into practice, accountability for results was put out to pasture. When the results didn’t prove to be good news for the governor’s environmental policies, instead of making the results public as planned and doing the work to improve it, the data was scrubbed from the web without a word.

In politics, ignoring or denying data can be enough for “problems” to go away – at least in the political sense. But for us citizens the simple truth is our resources were spent without achieving the desired improvement.

The solution to this problem is America’s Pulse, a website and app launched publicly for the first time in Spokane at Washington Policy Center’s annual dinner on Oct. 10.

Instead of relying on politicians to hold themselves accountable, America’s Pulse puts power in the hands of the people. America’s Pulse automatically gathers objective, nonpartisan, standardized data collected by federal agencies from all 50 states and enables users to see how their state ranks across more than 50 wide-ranging issues including public safety, health care, vulnerable populations, taxes, and education. All data featured on America’s Pulse must conform to consistent federal definitions and standards and must be required by law to be collected, undergo audits, independent verification and be publicly available and tested to ensure historical accuracy and comparability.

Whenever a politician claims problems are being solved, a user can bring America’s Pulse up on their phone and see how their state compares to the other 49 states and discover objectively whether that problem is trending toward being corrected or becoming worse. The app strips partisan language of much of its power by making every citizen a fact-checker.

Far more than Seattle, Spokane represents an ideologically diverse population that more closely resembles the nation. Where better to launch a tool that has the potential to begin the healing of our social fabric by cooling political incivility and refocusing political culture away from insults and toward results?

John Bernard is the Senior Fellow for Government Accountability at Washington Policy Center. He is a bestselling author and has worked with Democrats and Republicans on improving accountability measures including work with seven governors, 14 states and more than 100 state agencies. He is based in Camas, Washington.