One of the fundamental laws of bureaucracy, Parkinson's Law states that work expands to fill the time available. It is responsible for a tremendous amount of waste and inefficiency and for the uncontrolled and unnecessary growth of organizations of all kinds. In the original essay describing his law, Cyril Northcote Parkinson demonstrated how its effect appears everywhere from old women who take a long time to write a letter to the disproportionate growth in the number of British Royal Navy officers.

I recommend reading the whole thing which may be found in a book collecting Parkinson's essays. It's great reading for anyone who works in an office or who just wants to feel superior to people who do work in offices. The old edition I found at a library was subtitled "The Pursuit Of Progress" - after all, no one loves progress as much as bureaucrats do.

Reflecting on Parkinson's Law recently, I realized that democratic governments should be more vulnerable to it than totalitarian governments. After all, a democractic government can always expand itself to exercise more control over its subjects, whereas a totalitarian govnernment already has total control and therefore nowhere to expand its influence except through territorial, population or economic growth. By creating more government agencies and officials in a democracy, a government expands its power and attracts more people to government employment. A totalitarian government, on the other hand, can only divide the existing complete power into smaller pieces, thus making previously existing officials less powerful.

I wanted to test this hypothesis by looking at some publically available data in the "quant-blogger" tradition which may have been started by Steve Sailer. I first thought about comparing the rates of growth in the number of government officials in a Communist and a post-Communist country, but accurate numbers are very difficult to find and the line between government officials and other government workers can get fuzzy. To get some more reliable data which would reflect the growth of government power, I decided to look at the number of laws passed instead. I managed to find complete lists of laws passed in one of my neighboring countries for every year since 1918 except for the period of World War II. That gives us two periods of democracy with a period of Communism between them - a perfect hypothesis test.

While Communism is clearly worse to live under and more progressive than modern democracy (after all, it implemented much more of the progressive agenda much earlier and Stalin was referred to as "the leader of all the progressive nations" with some hyperbole but not a hint of irony), it is totalitarian and therefore valid for testing the hypothesis. So just what does the data look like?

The average of the democratic periods is clearly much higher, but two other things are striking. One is that during the long Communist period, the number of laws passed each year shows a downward trend. There was also a similar trend during the prewar period, but with fewer years and government changes it's difficult to say whether that would have continued as a long-term trend. The most striking thing about the graph, however, is the rapid rise in the number of laws passed after the fall of Communism in 1989. These people are now passing several laws in an average working day which makes me wonder how many of the MPs and Senators actually read the things they are voting on.

Not only were my suspicions about democracy leading to bureaucratic bloat and a stifling mass of legislation well-founded, it turns out the situation is so bad that modern democratic governments bloat and stifle blindly without really knowing in what directions they bloat or what they stifle. This is what the pursuit of progress looks like.