The American administrative state often looks like Hobbes’ Leviathan itself. It makes and changes law on a scale and with an inscrutability that are scarcely to be believed. Its agencies at times seem rigidly bureaucratic while at others cravenly partisan and political. They are unlike anything contemplated at the Founding, yet they exist in an environment that would crush anything less powerful or pervasive. Most importantly, though, the bases of federal agencies legitimacy and authority have been matched in their ambiguity only by that of how our constitutional traditions tolerate them.
A new school of thought integrating different critiques of the administrative state is now seeking to revolutionize the Leviathan. It is called ”democratic experimentalism” and it describes, while also trying to facilitate, new deliberative regulatory structures. It proposes to recreate a participatory democracy out of the technocratic and impenetrable pieces of the administrative state. Across diverse spheres once run by experts far remote (both physically and socially) from the citizens and localities concerned, pragmatic innovations have led to newly participatory and collaborative models. The academics who call themselves democratic experimentalists have sought to explain how certain of these instances share foundational similarities. . . .