Democratic Autonomy: Public Reasoning about the Ends of Policy

Are citizens culpable for state action?

“…(a) The bureaucratic agency must be set up by the democratically-elected legislature, and must be subject to the continuing supervision of the citizenry's elected officials and courts. (b) Roles within the agency must be structured as a system of "offices" that incentivize bureaucrats to act on the citizenry's constitutional commitments, rather than on their private aims and interests (Cordelli 2020, Ch.3;Richardson 2002).…”

Who Are the Policy Workers, and What Are They Doing? Citizen’s Heuristics and Democratic Accountability in Complex Governance

“…Salamon (2002) notes that the skills of good collaboration are participation relevant networks of policy workers, having the ability to persuade other policy workers in those networks to engage in collaborations, and effectively mixing incentives for these partners such that the collaboration produces the goal the collaborative manager intends. This, of course, sounds much like the bargaining that is necessary to create an enacting coalition of politicians to enable policy workers to act in the first place, and to the extent that ends, rather than means, are subject to such bargaining, democracy suffers (but see Richardson 2002). While this may seem like an inevitable condition of complex, networked governance, I argue that we should not ignore the opportunity for democratic accountability.…”

Electoral democracy and structural injustice

“…Deliberation and aggregation form part of a broader electoral culture, in which elections, campaigns, and party competition shape much of political life, even when augmented by mini‐publics and social movements. In the absence of a critique of this culture, otherwise perceptive critics have increasingly turned to electoral democracy as a crucial mechanism for undermining domination (Bellamy, 1999, p. 216; Richardson, 2002, pp. 244, pp.…”