Adrian Vermeule (Harvard): Bureaucracy and Distrust: Landis, Jaffe and Kagan on the Administrative State. Peter L. Strauss (Columbia): Politics and Agencies in the Administrative State: The U.S. Case. Daniel E. Ho on government under review: Could peer review for public servants make the law more consistent? The soul of a new machine: Political machines were corrupt to the core, but they were also incredibly effective — if Democrats want to survive in the modern age, they need to take a page from their past. The Obama administration wanted to open up government to citizen input — why hasn’t it worked? Henry Farrell interviews Beth Simone Noveck, author of Smart Citizens, Smarter State: The Technologies of Expertise and the Future of Governing.
Alasdair S. Roberts (Missouri): Blind Men and an Elephant: Three Partial Views of Public Administration. Johan Wennstrom (Linkoping): A Left / Right Convergence on the New Public Management? The Unintended Power of Diverse Ideas. Washington’s “governing elite” think Americans are morons: Jeff Guo reviews What Washington Gets Wrong: The Unelected Officials Who Actually Run the Government and Their Misconceptions about the American People by Jennifer Bachner and Benjamin Ginsberg. Is government truly broken? Only if democracy’s disrepair leads to fear and fatalism will democratic government in the United States truly and irrevocably become broken (and more).
Robert Flannigan (Saskatchewan): The Fiduciary Status of Political Actors. Edward L. Rubin (Vanderbilt): Executive Action: Its History, Its Dilemmas and Its Potential Remedies. Could the erosion of trust in government be at an end? American trust in the branches of government is on the upswing, but the implications of this are less than meet the eye. Mehdi Hasan on how the American political system is broken. Do government incentives make us bad citizens? John McMahon reviews The Moral Economy: Why Good Incentives Are No Substitute for Good Citizens by Samuel Bowles (and more). Ryan Copper on how to make big government agile again.
David Orentlicher (Indiana): Political Dysfunction and the Election of Donald Trump: Problems of the U.S. Constitution's Presidency. Let’s relocate a bunch of government agencies to the Midwest: Time to shift economic activity from the overcrowded coasts to places that need more of it.
