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FIGHTING POWER WITH POWER: THE ADMINISTRATIVE STATE AS A WEAPON AGAINST CONCENTRATED PRIVATE POWER

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 October 2021

Samuel Bagg
Samuel Bagg*
Affiliation:
Politics, University of Oxford, UK
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Abstract

Contemporary critics of the administrative state are right to highlight the dangers of vesting too much power in a centralized bureaucracy removed from popular oversight and accountability. Too often neglected in this literature, however, are the dangers of vesting too little power in a centralized state, which enables dominant groups to further expand their social and economic advantages through decentralized means. This article seeks to synthesize these concerns, understanding them as reflecting the same underlying danger of state capture. It then articulates a set of heuristics for the design of public and administrative institutions, which aim at minimizing the risks of capture from both public and private sources. By following these heuristics, it claims, we can successfully employ the administrative state as a weapon against concentrated private power, rather than allowing it to serve as a tool of dominant groups.

Keywords

bureaucracystate capturedemocracyconcentrated poweradversarialism
Type
Research Article
Information
Social Philosophy and Policy , Volume 38 , Issue 1 , Summer 2021 , pp. 220 - 243
Copyright
© 2021 Social Philosophy & Policy Foundation. Printed in the USA

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Footnotes

*

Nuffield College and the Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Oxford, samuel.bagg@gmail.com. For generous feedback on earlier drafts of this essay, and the larger project it comes from, I would like to thank Arash Abizadeh, Rob Goodman, Jacob Levy, Victor Muñiz-Fraticelli, and the other contributors to this volume—especially Dave Schmidtz, whose penetrating comments helped me identify the core message I wanted to get across.

References

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6 The “all else equal” here is intended to clarify that minimizing state capture is not the only valuable political goal.

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9 For more on this perspective, see Samuel Bagg, “Between Critical and Normative Theory: Predictive Political Theory as a Deweyan Realism,” Political Research Quarterly 69, no. 2 (2016): 233–44. See also Samuel Bagg, “Realism Against Legitimacy: For a Radical, Action-Oriented Political Realism,” Social Theory and Practice (forthcoming).

10 Again, my claim is not that minimizing capture is the only goal we ought to strive for: as will become clear in subsequent sections, this demand can be outweighed by other concerns. But given the seriousness of capture on nearly any plausible account of political normativity, it should be considered quite weighty indeed.

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13 To be clear, many radical traditions have proposed accounts of socialism that do not rely so heavily on the ideal of collective control, including “guild socialism” and certain forms of “labor republicanism.” It is therefore a mistake to equate socialism with state ownership of the means of production, as is often done by critics and advocates alike. Nevertheless, this remains a widespread and influential picture.

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16 See Samuel Bagg, The Dispersion of Power: A Critical Realist Theory of Democracy (forthcoming, Oxford University Press), especially Chapter Two: “Beyond Policy Responsiveness.”

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21 See Bagg, The Dispersion of Power, especially Chapter Three: “Beyond Participatory Inclusion”

22 As Vlad Tarko helpfully pointed out to me, this is not the only explanation for the asymmetry between coercion and other forms of power—as he suggests, we might also look to the existence of positive spillovers from pluralism—but it does seem to me to be a powerful one.

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31 As Samuel DeCanio argues, this was a key factor in the rise of the American regulatory state, some of whose founders wished to keep it insulated from popular oversight. Democracy and the Origins of the American Regulatory State (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015).

32 See Chapter Two of DeCanio’s Democracy and the Origins of the American Regulatory State (“State Autonomy in Democratic Societies”) and Chapter Two of my Dispersion of Power (“Beyond Policy Responsiveness”).

33 Michaels, Constitutional Coup.

34 I make this argument with respect to universal suffrage, for instance, in “The Power of the Multitude.”

35 Rahman, K. Sabeel, Democracy against Domination (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016)Google Scholar. See also Emerson, Blake, The Public’s Law: Origins and Architecture of Progressive Democracy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Stears, Marc, Demanding Democracy: American Radicals in Search of a New Politics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010)Google Scholar.

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37 Ibid., 8–9.

38 Ibid., 39–44.

39 Ibid., 11–16, 54–77. In this way, Rahman draws extensively from Stears, Demanding Democracy.

40 Rahman, Democracy against Domination, 116–38, 139–65, respectively.

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46 Louis Brandeis, “The Curse of Bigness,” Harper’s Weekly, December 20, 1913. For context, see the history of the antimonopoly tradition in Matt Stoller, Goliath: The 100-Year War Between Monopoly Power and Democracy (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2019).

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57 Michael Schulson and Samuel Bagg, “Give Political Power to Ordinary People,” Dissent Magazine, July 19, 2019, https://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/give-political-power-to-ordinary-people-sortition. My discussion here draws on this piece, as well as broader conversations with Michael Schulson, for which I am very grateful. For more detail, see also my “Sortition as Anti-Corruption” (manuscript on file with author).

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64 For a more comprehensive account of how the state can help facilitate countervailing power, see Kate Andrias and Benjamin I. Sachs, “Constructing Countervailing Power: Law and Organizing in an Era of Political Inequality,” Yale Law Journal 130 (2020): 546-635.