The Case for Gridlock Democracy, Organized Power, and the Legal Foundations of American Government

by Ethridge, Marcus E.

• ISBN13: 9780739142370
• ISBN10: 0739142372
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2010-03-30
• Publisher: Lexington Books

Summary

The Case for Gridlock: Democracy, Organized Power, and the Legal Foundations of American Government 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, Progressive 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 nave 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.

Author Biography

Marcus E. Ethridge is chair of the Department of Political Science at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

Table of Contents

Preface	p. ix
Introduction	p. 1
Progressivism, Organized Interests, and the Politics of Gridlock	p. 21
The Constitutional Principal and Institutional Design	p. 47
Incomplete Conquest: Progressivism and the Legal Foundations of the Administrative State through the 1960s	p. 75
The Collapse of Progressive Institutional Design	p. 119
Constitutionalism Resurgent: The End of Liberalism?	p. 165
Tables of Cases	p. 193
Bibliography	p. 197
Index	p. 213
About the Author	p. 223
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