I saw Prof. Pildes's forthcoming article, and asked him if he might guest-blog about it; he kindly agreed, and passed along the following:
I thank Eugene for inviting me to write about a new essay of mine entitled "The Neglected Value of Effective Government."
A central challenge, and threat, to democracies throughout the West in recent years is the perceived failure of democratic governments to deliver effectively on the issues their members care most about. When democratic governments cannot do so, that failure can lead to distrust, alienation, withdrawal, anger, and resentment. Even worse, it can fuel desires for a strongman figure who will supposedly cut through the dysfunction and deliver when democratic governments have failed to do so. Many of these manifestations of dissatisfaction are already visible in the United States.
Despite the critical importance of delivering effective government, democratic and legal theory have given too little attention and weight to this value. Much of democratic theory and legal scholarship on democracy focuses on values such as political equality, fair representation, democratic deliberation, political participation, and individual rights, among other values. This focus is largely on the input side to democracy. But less weight is given to the output side: the capacity of government to deliver effectively on the issues citizens care about most urgently.
I have been writing about the decline of effective government, focused initially on the United States, since 2014. In this essay, I aim to bring greater affirmative attention to the imperative of effective government in our thinking about the design of democratic institutions and processes. My approach is to identify and highlight tensions that arise between effective government and other important democratic values. These tensions or tradeoffs arise at both the macro-level of democratic institutional design and the more routine level of matters such as the administration of public policy.
