Right-wing politicians can sometimes implement policies that left-wing politicians cannot, and vice versa under Cowen and Sutter’s only Nixon can go to China theorem:
The point is that politicians with a previous record of opposing a policy shift are often the only ones who can bring it about, because their policy support provides a credible signal of policy quality to the relevant interest groups who would otherwise oppose the policy.
Contemporary wisdom has it that only Nixon could go to China and make a deal because his decades of fierce anti-Communist stance gave him credibility with fellow conservatives and shielded him from any domestic attack.
Cowen and Sutter say that a policy could depend on information – on which policies or values everyone could potentially agree, or on which agreement is impossible.
Politicians, who value both re-election and policy outcomes, realise the nature of the issue better through inside and secret information and superior analytical skills (or access to those skills), whereas voters do not have access to such information base or skills.
Only a right-wing president can credibly signal the desirability of a left-wing course of action. A left-wing president’s rapprochement with China would be dismissed as a dovish sell-out. Nixon must be going to China because that is the best possible policy choice and he would never do so otherwise giving his previous record of firm anti-Communism.
Left-wing parties adopt right-wing policies because they are good ideas that will get them re-elected. Bob Hawke, Tony Blair, and Bill Clinton were centre-left economic reformers who can credibly signal the desirability of their economic reforms because of the brand name capital they invested in distributional concerns and protecting the poor.
The same goes for reforming the Resource Management Act (RMA) in New Zealand. Only a left-wing government can implement major reforms such as abolishing the Auckland urban limit and other restrictions on land supply. Deregulation is normally a right-wing policy.
The irony of National voting against freeing up restrictive zoning and land use rules. @dbseymour @bernardchickey… twitter.com/i/web/status/8…—
Phil Twyford (@PhilTwyford) April 12, 2017
When a left-wing policy undertake reform of land use regulation, things must be so bad on the housing affordability front that they accept that the reforms must be done despite their natural reluctance to deregulate anything on ideological grounds.
Up until past the 2014 New Zealand election, the Labour Party undertook scare tactics on land use regulation reform as a way winning votes from environmentally leaning voters.
Housing affordability situation is now so bad, with a whole generation locked out of housing, that even the ideological opponents of deregulation accept that restrictions on the housing supply are a bad idea.
Naturally the Greens continue to have their head in the sand. That is the big difference between them and the Labour Party. The Greens are policy dilettantes. The Labour Party is made up of people who believe in making difficult choices and the need for trade-offs.
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