The Case for Gridlock

Democracy, Organized Power, and the Legal Foundations of American Government

Marcus E. Ethridge

• Publisher: Lexington Books
• Year: 2010
• eBook ISBN: 9780739142394
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: American Government
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The Case for Gridlock 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, Progressives 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 naïve 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.

The problems of "interest group liberalism" and the accumulation of powerful interests that undermine economic growth and political stability have long been recognized by political scientists and economists. The Case for Gridlock argues that these problems are not inevitable and that a solution exists in reasserting the Constitutional Principle as the foundation for the design and operation of U.S. governmental institutions. The public's interests can prevail over those of organized special interests by returning power to the gridlock-prone institutional arrangement established in the Constitution.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Progressivism, Organized Interests, and the Politics of Gridlock
• 3 The Constitutional Principle and Institutional Design
• 4 Incomplete Conquest: Progressivism and the Legal Foundations of the Administrative State through the 1960s
• 5 The Collapse of Progressive Institutional Design
• 6 Constitutionalism Resurgent: The End of Liberalism?
• Table of Cases
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author