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The Case for Gridlock
Democracy, Organized Power, and the Legal Foundations of American Government
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Publisher:
2010
Summary
The Case for Gridlock explains how Progressive ideas about government have led to severe representational problems in the American political system. Having rejected the Framers' institutional arrangement as sluggish and frustrating, Progressives have, for over a century, worked to circumvent the Madisonian system by establishing policy-making power in executive agencies and commissions. Ironically, the most consequential legacy of Progressivism is an institutional system that became more perfectly and efficiently responsive to the inherently unbalanced organized political power that they lament. Drawing on an analysis of administrative law and decades of research on interest groups, The Case for Gridlock explores the faulty logic and na_ve thinking of the Progressive perspective, revealing the uncertainties and anomalies in legal doctrine that have emerged as a result of their effort to graft 'efficient' designs onto the gridlock-prone system that James Madison and the other Framers left us. The problems of 'interest group liberalism' and the accumulation of powerful interests that undermine economic growth and political stability have long been recognized by political scientists and economists. The Case for Gridlock argues that these problems are not inevitable and that a solution exists in reasserting the Constitutional Principle as the foundation for the design and operation of U.S. governmental institutions. The public's interests can prevail over those of organized special interests by returning power to the gridlock-prone institutional arrangement established in the Constitution.
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Bibliographic data
Copyright year
2010
ISBN-Print
978-0-7391-4237-0
ISBN-Online
978-0-7391-4239-4
Publisher
Lexington, Lanham
Language
English
Pages
223
Product type
Book Titles
Table of contents
ChapterPages
Table of Contents No access
Preface No access
1. Introduction No access Pages 1 - 20
2. Progressivism, Organized Interests, and the Politics of Gridlock No access Pages 21 - 46
3. The Constitutional Principle and Institutional Design No access Pages 47 - 74
4. Incomplete Conquest: Progressivism and the Legal Foundations of the Administrative State through the 1960s No access Pages 75 - 118
5. The Collapse of Progressive Institutional Design No access Pages 119 - 164
6. Constitutionalism Resurgent: The End of Liberalism? No access Pages 165 - 192
