Is Language a Determinant of Reform Success?

Last week Graham Scott gave a lecture on public sector management and governance at the Mercatus Center. Dr Scott was the Secretary of the New Zealand Treasury between 1986 and 1993, which was a very important position at the time of the NZ reform process. Dr Scott had an enormous influence on the evolution of NZ economic policy and he was  one of the key people behind the public sector reforms.

The State Sector Act in 1988 created the State Services Commission. In 1989, parliament adopted the Public Finance Act, and, before the 1993 election, Finance Minister Ruth Richardson, introduced the Fiscal Responsibility Act. The first act removed the power to manage public administration from the hands of government and created an accountability mechanism that imposed a higher level of discipline on government departments and their CEOs. The second act focused on how government departments spend money. The third act provided rules for the conduct of fiscal policy, establishing principles of fiscal management and reporting requirements.

During his lecture Graham Scott remarked that the word “accountability” has no translation in many languages. For instance, it has no direct translation in French and Spanish. I presume it is the same with other Latin-based languages, such as Italian or Portuguese. While the word “responsibility” is Latin in its origin (and thus has equivalents in French and Spanish and other languages), it encompasses more than just accountability and, for that reason, is much less precise. In Scott’s view, the concept of accountability is at the core of the public management reforms in New Zealand. But its absence in many other languages may limit (and perhaps has already limited) the adoption of similar reforms elsewhere. Or it may lower the quality of their results. This would show the power of language in shaping institutions. An interesting conjecture...

Comments

[Sudha Shenoy]

Concepts lie behind language. Common law countries have strong traditions of suspicion of political power. Not so in Roman law countries.

[Law Student]

Sudha's point raises a classic chicken-egg problem. Do words presuppose underlying concepts? Or do concepts need words to be realized and understood?

While there is merit to Sudha's point, I also think it more likely that political language can pull moral concepts by their bootstraps.

Most people don't think about political concepts on their own. Political language is a simplifier. It connects people with the moral concept without making them having to do the heavy legwork of a political philosopher. Orwell's newspeak is the realization of this phenomenon.

Therefore, if a language is deficient, it makes public awareness of moral principles less likely.

[frederic]

Sudha - you are right, concepts lie behind language. If one takes the stance that concepts cannot exist without language, then language (and the existence or absence of concepts) plays a role in the way people think. The suspicion for political power that you mention may have some relation to the absence of key concepts (and thus some relation to language) in Roman law countries. Whether this is a primary cause, I don't know.

[jpleis]

Of course, you don't know frederic. You really, really drag down this blog. The concept is so obvious and research tired. But you don't know.

[Gustavo]

I like the idea, but I don't think it's quite original.
It is a concept quite well developed in Orwell's 1984. He says that the adoption of newspeak (a very limited language) will limit the scope of thought so much that any actions against the state will be impossible to even think about.

[Steve]

Jpleis,

That's a bit strong. What's your problem with it?