Abstract:
The concept of good government aims to triangulate between questions of legitimacy and justice. Asking how government should be conducted is distinct from asking who should govern or what they should do. Even if distinct, these questions are clearly related. As Blake Emerson argues elsewhere in this volume, it can be hard to evaluate how good government is without first understanding what government should be doing. Nik Kirby has emphasized the “messiness” of the division between good government and legitimacy. While I also take up the relationship between who should rule and how government should be conducted, my focus is not on legitimacy—the matter of who has a right to rule—but instead on the relationship between how government is conducted and who has the capacity to rule. More specifically, I consider the relationship between good government and the balance of power required to sustain a system of self-government over time.
The essay proceeds as follows. In the first section I argue that any commitment to a system of self-government—such as those we see in both democratic and republican scholarship—produces the condition that citizens must have the power to, directly or indirectly, control policy. In large, complex, modern states with administrative regulatory bodies such a condition requires that the legislature retain power over policy.
The second section turns to the question that dominates much of the good governance literature: how should administrative agents exercise their discretion? Existing literature on the topic tends to focus on identifying conditions for the moral and legitimate exercise of such discretion. My concern, instead, is to determine when administrative discretion is compatible with the power condition outlined in section one and when it isn’t. It isn’t, I argue, when administrative discretion becomes administrative autonomy.
In the final section of the paper, I suggest a governance structure that would prevent the development of administrative discretion into administrative autonomy and meet the power condition required to sustain a system of self-government over time: active management. If the legislature actively manages policymakers, they are able to maintain a balance of power over policy alongside a significant degree of administrative discretion. An active management approach to governing policymaking, however, is incompatible with independent agencies as currently structured.