Capacity, Agency, Power: The Democratic Credentials of Public Administration

The administrative state is under fire. In the United States, the Trump administration has taken steps to dismantle large swaths of the independent civil service with an unprecedented fervor. The now-defunct “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE) claimed that most government decisions are made by “millions of unelected, unappointed civil servants,” making it “antidemocratic.” The European Union is also routinely accused of running a democratic deficit, governed by faceless, unelected, and unaccountable bureaucrats. It is perhaps surprising that many normative political theorists would agree with the core of this anti-bureaucratic critique. There is a fundamental worry about bureaucratic domination in democratic theory, going back at least a century. While practically all theorists admit that centralized public administration is inescapable—modern societies are too complex, diverse, and large to avoid it—they do so begrudgingly. The functional need for administration is perceived to come at a democratic cost; bureaucracy is a necessary evil. There is, in conventional wisdom, a trade-off between the functional benefits that the administrative state brings and the demands of democratic legitimacy. This paper challenges the conventional wisdom. The state has vast power to shape our lives, and liberal theorists are right to fear government power exercised badly. But this fear may also lead us to ignore all the ways public administration may, in fact, be a precondition for meaningful democracy. The paper sets out to develop a new model of democracy that does not discount the democratic potential of public administration while remaining attuned to its risks. I suggest it may do so in at least three ways. It may (1) give the state capacity to act, hence making genuine political agency possible; (2) work as a source of countervailing power; and (3) act as an institutional brake on democratic backsliding. These possibilities are underexplored in theoretical and empirical research on the administrative state.