The Spirit of 1993?

(a) California's budget process has become crippled by a complex entanglement of constraints that interfere with an orderly and comprehensive consideration of all fiscal matters. ...

(b) The legislative process has at times become mired in gridlock. ...

(c) California's existing "system" of government is dysfunctional and does not work together sufficiently to achieve the public's goals. ...

To many political reformers, the extensive quote above may be an appropriate summary of what ails the California of today. They might be surprised to learn, however, that it was written more than 15 years ago as part of a bill creating the California Constitution Revision Commission. The fate of the commission, and of the reformist fervor of the early 1990s, provides some important lessons about the most salient political reform questions confronting voters today.

Between 1993, when the Revision Commission was first created, and 2000, the three problems described above appeared to grow only worse. Constraints on the state budget increased. To name a few examples: in 1994, voters approved the three-strikes law, fueling huge growth in the state's correctional costs; in 1998, voters approved $9 billion in bonds, to be repaid from the General Fund, to help relieve overcrowding in schools; in 2000, voters approved $350 million in bonds, to be repaid from the General Fund, to improve public libraries, and another $4 billion in bonds, also to be repaid from the General Fund, to protect the watershed, increase flood protection, and protect lakes.

By all measures, polarization in the Legislature continued to grow. And the relationship between state and local governments became ever more complex. Yet by 2000, public approval of state government had risen to one of its highest levels in three decades. Indeed, when the Revision Commission issued its final report, political reform had become such a low priority that the commission's recommendations didn't even receive a vote in the Legislature.

So what can today's reformers learn from the failures of 1993? The first lesson, I would argue, is that the most prominent reform proposals likely to appear on the June and November ballots -- limiting the influence of the initiative process, promoting the election of more moderate candidates, rationalizing the funding of local governments -- will do little to address the arresting decline in approval of state government. Although all of they may be worthwhile reforms, there is little evidence that growth in budgeting-by-initiative, ideological polarization, or state shifts in local revenues are the cause of growing in public discontent.

The second lesson is that large economic recessions -- like the one that followed the end of the Cold War in the early 1990s or the global financial crisis of 2008 -- have a disastrous affect on public finances and make governing a large, complex state like California all the more difficult. Harrowing budget deficits feed public discontent, which gives rise to opportunistic reformers who push their own preferred solutions as the kryptonite that will cure all that ails the state. While many of their ideas appear popular, fixing the underlying problem -- the sensitivity of state revenue to the economic business cycle -- is not. The latest PPIC poll shows that a small minority support expanding the scope of the state sales tax to reduce revenue volatility. (The same poll finds that an overwhelming majority support raising taxes on wealthy Californians, which, if anything, will make the feast-and-famine cycle in public finances only worse.)

So regardless of what happens this June or November, expect the cycle to continue. As the economy recovers, the sense of crisis in state government will dissipate. When the next big recession hits, deficits will again explode, unpopular cuts will have to be made, and public discontent will reach historical levels. A new crop of reformers will emerge, offering new set of fixes that will do little to make financing state government any easier. And so it will continue.

George Washington Plunkitt, the once-powerful boss of New York's Tammany Hall political machine, used to call political reformers "morning glories." Like the beautiful flower, Plunkitt observed, reformers "looked lovely in the mornin' and withered up in a short time, while the regular machines went on flourishin' forever, like the fine old oaks." In California, the analogy is definitely an apt one.