Administrative Democracy and Federalism

Abstract

This chapter connects two themes in Susan Rose-Ackerman’s seminal contributions to comparative public law and political economy: public participation in administrative policy-making (“administrative democracy”) and federalism. It puts forward an ideal type of federal-state interaction that can lead to the development of effective administrative democracy. This scheme consists of feedback loops, whereby the center may adopt a particular accountability mechanism, potentially in the form of a minimum standard, that it can impose on the periphery or indirectly influence the periphery to adopt. The component entities of the federal system “download” this minimum standard and are free to move beyond it and to experiment with procedural modes that operationalize it and may enhance democratic accountability in the periphery. The emphasis in this scheme is on procedural innovation instead of substantive policy innovation. Some of these good practices might be subsequently “uploaded” onto the center and be generalized or spread across state borders. The chapter explores how this hypothesis plays out in three examples of federal or decentralized systems – the United States, the European Union, and Canada – which illustrate different aspects of these feedback loops and the interactions between federalism and administrative democracy.

Keywords: Administrative democracy, federalism, administrative federalism, administrative history, notice and comment, Administrative Procedure Act (APA), public consultation, laboratories of democracy, policy experimentation, policy diffusion, Model State Administrative Procedure Act, guidance documents