Conclusion

This conclusion explains how the Progressive theory offers a critical perspective on our present political moment and the political ideologies that underlie it. Using examples from the Obama and Trump administrations on topics such as fair housing, climate change and immigration, I show how cost-benefit analysis and presidentialist theories of administration undermine deliberative democratic values. Cost-benefit analysis tends to restrict the administrative state to the task of simulating a perfectly competitive marketplace. Progressivism insists that the state should more broadly further public freedom, providing the goods, services, and institutions that allow democratic self-government to function. Presidential administration equates democracy with plebsicitary legitimacy, and aligns with Carl Schmitt’s illiberal, authoritarian political theory. While Progressivism acknowledges that the president has an important role to play in supervising administration, it aims to anchor administrative legitimacy in broader, plural, and discursive interactions between the government and its citizens.

The Normative Architecture of Progressive Democracy

This chapter develops a normative model of Progressive democracy on the basis of the intellectual and institutional history presented in the previous chapters. The Progressive theory remedies deficiencies in existing arguments for administrative legitimacy—those based on efficiency, constitutional values, or republican political theory. Unlike these theories, Progressivism draws an intrinsic connection between the purpose and the structure of regulatory law. Its purpose is to promote individual freedom through law. The structure of regulatory law ensures that such norms arise from the people’s own self-understandings. Progressivism aligns with deliberative democratic theory, but focuses on ex post deliberation about the consequences of policies, rather than solely on ex ante justification. This democratic theory requires an iterative process where abstract norms are expressed in law and then specified in a participatory and rational administrative process. The United States has a thin version of such a process in the Administrative Procedure Act’s “notice-and-comment” rule-making provisions. But today this process is too technocratic and distorted in favor of well organized and powerful interests. Opportunities for inclusive and egalitarian participation must therefore be deepened. At the same time, administrators must understand that they have an official duty to further the equal freedom of the persons their decisions affect. Judicial review of administrative action impedes such a self-understanding because it focuses on technocratic and instrumental reasoning. At the same time, the increasing investment of power in the president threatens to undermine deliberation with arbitrary assertions of personal will.

Syrian Kurds will seek administrative legitimacy

Headline SYRIA: Kurds will seek administrative legitimacy

Reflections on the ‘Administrative, Not Constitutional’ Character of EU Law in Times of Crisis

As is broadly recognized, the realm of administrative power greatly expanded over the course the twentieth century (particularly after 1945). This essay argues that this expansion, along with differential conceptions of legitimacy deeply bound up with it, are crucial to understanding not just the modern administrative state but also the nature of EU governance and the law governing its operation. Despite a dominant paradigm that seeks to understand EU governance in autonomously democratic and constitutional terms, the legitimacy of integration as a whole has remained primarily ‘administrative, not constitutional’. The EU’s normative power, like all power of an ultimately administrative character, finds its legitimacy primarily in legal, technocratic and functional claims. This is not to deny that European integration involves ‘politics’ or has profound ‘constitutional’ implications for its member states or citizens. The ‘administrative, not constitutional’ paradigm is meant only to stress that the ultimate grounding of EU rulemaking, enforcement, and adjudication comes closer to the sort of administrative legitimacy that is mediated through national executives, national courts, and national parliaments to a much greater extent than the dominant paradigm supposes. This is the reality that the ‘administrative, not constitutional’ paradigm on EU law has always sought to emphasize, and it is one that is particularly pertinent to the integration process in times of crisis. It is unsurprising, in these circumstances, that the public law of European integration has continually resorted to mechanisms of nationally mediated legitimacy in order to ‘borrow’ legitimacy from the national level. Unless and until Europeans begin to experience democracy and constitutionalism in supranational terms, the ‘administrative, not constitutional’ paradigm suggests that the EU’s judicial doctrines must be adjusted. The purpose should be to address the persistent disconnect between supranational regulatory power and its robust sources of democratic and constitutional legitimacy on the national level.