The Democratic Risks and Potential of Administrative authority

Abstract

Political theory is rediscovering public administration and reassessing its legitimacy and relationship to democracy. Theorists, if they have not simply ignored it or treated it as theoretically setteld, have often treated public administration as a necessary evil. While functionally necessary in modern states, it is a potential source of bureaucratic domination and a threat to democracy. Much theory from Weber onward has therefore been concerned with the question of how to check, limit and control administrative authority. Many theorists have appealed to the administration’s purported expertise or political neutrality as grounds for its legitimacy. The so-called “compliance model” holds that public administrations simply use their techncial expertise to implement, in the most efficient manner, political directives given by the legislative, subject to some clarification and constraints by the courts. Administrative legitimacy under this model derives from the parliament’s democratic legitimacy, since they are no more than an instrument of them. Administrations are transmission belts that converts political directives into action without any policy influence of their own, effectively removing any worries of domination and unaccountable authority. This logic extends to institutions of scientific policy evidence and advice, which have also traditionally been justified by reference to their value-freedom and technical expertise. Much of the renewed theoretical interest in public administration comes from authors who challenge the long-dominant compliance model. It has become increasingly clear that the compliance model no longer adequately describes the actual workings of modern bureaucracies, which unavoidably make political or value-based decisions in their day-to-day workings. What should come in the model’s place is less clear. Some take the model’s fall to imply that public administration should be limited as much as possible, some aim to salvage the compliance model, while others look for other grounds of legitimacy for public administrations and policy advisors that do not rely on naive notions of their technical expertise or apolitical status. This panel brings together contributions that in different ways move beyond the default position. They do so in a range of ways, for instance by defending the compliance model against its critics, by arguing that public administrations have democratic qualities that do not reduce to their link to the legislative, by analyzing the distinct role of regulatory agencies, or by analyzing the democratic dilemmas posed by scientific policy advice and expertise.

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