Institutional Alignment

A new political matrix for a disorienting time

Note: if you are looking for quick access to the Institutional Alignment quiz, you can find it here.

We are in the midst of a dramatic political re-alignment. I’m sure you have noticed. Years ago, most of us in open societies accepted the traditional social and fiscal axes that defined political life. Kitchen table debates mapped to these axes as well: social conservatives argued with social liberals over gay marriage, and fiscal conservatives argued with fiscal liberals over funding for government programs. They all basically agreed that the way to enact the changes they want was to get existing public and private institutions to better reflect their personal values through, for example, reform or competition or elections.

However, a series of events over the last decade have prioritized a conversation upstream of any fiscal or social issues: are our institutions valuable at all, and to the extent that they have failures is it even worthwhile to try to reform them or are they so rotten that we need to raze them and start anew?

I say this is a political re-alignment, because traditional adversaries are becoming allies (and the opposite) in a way you’ve likely found disorienting. Neo-conservatives like Bill Kristol find new allies in the Democratic party because their allegiance to American institutions pre-empts any difference about social policy or budget issues. Similarly, liberal populists like Noam Chomsky or Eric Weinstein suddenly find themselves allied with Donald Trump or Peter Theil as like-minded adversaries of US institutions.

Institutional failures over the last decade are what pushed this conversation into the forefront. There are numerous, but a subset include: the Iraq war, the 2008 financial crisis, the denial of the US election results, failures by supposed experts during the recent pandemic, and the January 6th insurrection.

My goal with this short article isn’t to assert my own opinion on these topics—though I certainly have one. Instead, I do my best to put these aside to instead map this realignment into a familiar format: the political compass. The traditional political compass that mapped your perspective onto social and economic axes no longer does a good job sorting people with their political allies, as the current debate is upstream of these concerns. Perhaps there will be a time when this isn’t the case—say, if institutional competence is restored via reform or disruption—and then we can have the luxury of debating traditional social and fiscal policy points. However, that debate has been irrelevant for years and its return is far from imminent.

So, to accompany this realignment of society, I introduce the following Institutional Alignment matrix:

Institutional alignment supersedes the prior traditional divisions of “liberal” vs “conservative” on social and economic axes.

There are three primary questions we all must answer:

1. Conceptually, do institutions offer any value to society?

2. Currently, do today’s institutional hegemons¹ have value, and to what extent?

3. What role does technology (encryption, AI, automation, cryptocurrency) play in remaking society?

Based on your perspective on these three questions, I’ve formed eight archetypes:

• Institutionalist: “institutions are important, and ours are valuable as is”

• Contrarian: “institutions are important, but ours are rotten and need replaced”

• Reformer: “institutions are important, we should use technology to make our institutions better”

• Sovereign Individual: “institutions are important, but ours are rotten and need replaced with new technology”

• Kleptocrat: “institutions are only valuable insofar that they allow my looting of the public”

• Tech panopticon: “institutions are only valuable insofar that they allow my mass surveillance and control of the population with technology.”

• Coup strongman: “I want to usurp institutions to seize power for myself”

• Cyber-anarchist: “I want to use technology to wreak havoc and burn it all down”

In this conception of institutional alignment, then, there are three axes: Support for Institutions as a Concept (x-axis), support for Today’s Institutional Hegemons, and Tech’s Potential (red = techno-optimist, blue = not).

If you’re like me, you will see that such a framework instantly clarifies today’s disorienting political landscape. I’m interested to see how you score on the quiz!

How some popular figures may score on the quiz. This demonstrates how political allies are better explained by their disposition to institutions than the traditional measures of fiscal and social liberalism.

Take the quiz and see how you score.

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A note on Materials & Methods:

I coded this quiz with JavaScript using the Plotly library. I chose five questions for each domain. I am open to feedback on these questions. My goal was to create clear, concise questions that broadly covered the three different concepts. I also tried my best to remove the question prompts from any particular geographic or cultural context. For example, I asked whether there “are countries” that offer good educational opportunities to see whether the user thinks such an institution exists in the world, rather than asking whether their own country offered these opportunities. The exception to this was asking about the UN, because it is a global institution without competitors (yet!), so therefore should be relevant wherever the user sits in the world. It’s worth restating that I am happily open to feedback and revision of this document and the quiz, archetypes etc so please send feedback.

1. An “institutional hegemon” in the most dominant institution in each domain. Eg, in law this could be the International Criminal Court or the Supreme Court. In health, it could be the WHO or CDC. In journalism, perhaps it is the New York Times. In education, it is Harvard. In defense, it is NATO. When asking “do you support today’s current insitutional hegemons,” it is these dominant institutional powers I am curious about.