Pluralism and the Administrative Process

Abstract

Criticism of the administrative process continues to be more cogent than proposed reforms. Some charge that the malaise afflicting agencies is fundamental because it is the inevitable consequence of the dominant pluralistic philosophy. According to Theodore J. Lowi, this philosophy erodes public authority by asking government merely to ratify bargains struck by competing interest groups. Lowi's principal "radical reform" is a quixotic call for the revival of the doctrine that it is unconstitutional to delegate law-making powers to agencies without meaningful legislative standards to circumscribe them. Proponents of participatory democracy charge that agencies satisfy claims of strongly organized groups but not of the weakly organized or unorganized. But participatory democracy is not a panacea and would produce injustices of its own. Probably never before in our history has legal policy been so supportive of the rights of individuals and groups affected by administrative action to be heard and to influence the action taken. Agencies must be receptive to this participatory policy. But they are not umpires or mediators and must be prepared to make conscious value choices in the light of the fullest available knowledge and to defend their choices in the name of justice.

Societal engagement, democratic transition, and constitutional implementation in Malawi

“…Instead of merely mimicking the Western legal tradition (Banda 2009), African constitutionalism proved to be innovative and far-sighted. Indeed, although American and European scholars have been examining civic and public participation since the second half of the 20th century (Kaufmann 1969;Auerbach 1972;Hart 1972), the most developed countries have been drawing on participatory mechanisms in constitution-making processes only since the first decade of the 21st century, as the cases of Iceland, Ireland, and, at the subnational level, Canada and Italy, show (Tushnet 2014, 19ff;Suteu 2015;Trettel 2015).…”