Paul Tucker — The 5 best books on The Administrative State

Experts versus populists, bureaucracy versus democracy: Paul Tucker, former deputy governor of the Bank of England and a fellow at Harvard's John F Kennedy School of Government, chooses books that wrestle with the central dilemmas of today's liberal political order….

Important with respect to the paradoxes of liberalism that are are now coming to a head in the conflict between politics as usual and populism. Steven Bannon's chief target was the administrative state, which is bound up in the meaning of "draining the swamp." This post is a good summary of the issues involved and the major positions concerning them.

Everything comes back to the elected legislature, because our system of government ultimately depends upon the legislature drawing lines between the pursuit of efficiency and of equity, reconciling our disagreements on various fronts for the time being. Legislation itself is a commitment device. You can’t flick a switch and it’s no longer law; you have to go through a process to change it, and it’s done in more or less bright sunlight. We debate legislative change, which is terrific. My book is trying to draw on both our liberal traditions and our republican traditions. The problem with the liberal tradition, as Lowi saw, is that it too easily ends up saying that vague delegations are inevitable, and therefore we must have these technocrats overseen by the courts and we must make it easy to challenge their rules and decisions via the courts.

I don’t want to argue against those processes, but they can’t suffice because they amount to no more than one group of unelected officials (judges) overseeing another group of unelected technocrats (central bankers and regulators). So, if we have legislatures that just pass vague statutes—in effect handing over their power and responsibility to set high policy—and then say that judges will see it’s all okay, then something has gone deeply wrong.…

These issues are directly related to economic policy, most obviously monetary policy set by a politically independent central bank. They also concern governance and policy in general in a democratic republic as the contemporary state becomes less democratic and more technocratic.

Should we be governed more by laws passed by democratically elected representatives or by technocrats that are appointed rather than elected? The answer involves tradeoffs.

Almost all aspects of policy and its implementation are now bureaucratic, managed by "experts," usually drawn from the field expertise, that is, the industry. The top level is appointed politically and the lower level consists of career civil service personnel. This puts governance largely in the hands of unelected technocrats that may harbor conflicts of interest, but it also provides expertise and a measure of continuity in a complex world in which the public and politicians are woefully ignorant of the background and nuance.

Five Books
The best books on The Administrative State, recommended by Paul Tucker