Administrative Burden
Administrative Burden

Author: Pamela Herd

Publisher: Russell Sage Foundation

Published: 2019-01-09

Total Pages: 361

ISBN-13: 1610448782

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Winner of the 2020 Outstanding Book Award Presented by the Public and Nonprofit Section of the National Academy of Management Winner of the 2019 Louis Brownlow Book Award from the National Academy of Public Administration Bureaucracy, confusing paperwork, and complex regulations—or what public policy scholars Pamela Herd and Donald Moynihan call administrative burdens—often introduce delay and frustration into our experiences with government agencies. Administrative burdens diminish the effectiveness of public programs and can even block individuals from fundamental rights like voting. In AdministrativeBurden, Herd and Moynihan document that the administrative burdens citizens regularly encounter in their interactions with the state are not simply unintended byproducts of governance, but the result of deliberate policy choices. Because burdens affect people’s perceptions of government and often perpetuate long-standing inequalities, understanding why administrative burdens exist and how they can be reduced is essential for maintaining a healthy public sector. Through in-depth case studies of federal programs and controversial legislation, the authors show that administrative burdens are the nuts-and-bolts of policy design. Regarding controversial issues such as voter enfranchisement or abortion rights, lawmakers often use administrative burdens to limit access to rights or services they oppose. For instance, legislators have implemented administrative burdens such as complicated registration requirements and strict voter-identification laws to suppress turnout of African American voters. Similarly, the right to an abortion is legally protected, but many states require women seeking abortions to comply with burdens such as mandatory waiting periods, ultrasounds, and scripted counseling. As Herd and Moynihan demonstrate, administrative burdens often disproportionately affect the disadvantaged who lack the resources to deal with the financial and psychological costs of navigating these obstacles. However, policymakers have sometimes reduced administrative burdens or shifted them away from citizens and onto the government. One example is Social Security, which early administrators of the program implemented in the 1930s with the goal of minimizing burdens for beneficiaries. As a result, the take-up rate is about 100 percent because the Social Security Administration keeps track of peoples’ earnings for them, automatically calculates benefits and eligibility, and simply requires an easy online enrollment or visiting one of 1,200 field offices. Making more programs and public services operate this efficiently, the authors argue, requires adoption of a nonpartisan, evidence-based metric for determining when and how to institute administrative burdens, with a bias toward reducing them. By ensuring that the public’s interaction with government is no more onerous than it need be, policymakers and administrators can reduce inequality, boost civic engagement, and build an efficient state that works for all citizens.

Law and Leviathan
Law and Leviathan

Author: Cass R. Sunstein

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2020-09-15

Total Pages: 209

ISBN-13: 0674247531

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From two legal luminaries, a highly original framework for restoring confidence in a government bureaucracy increasingly derided as “the deep state.” Is the modern administrative state illegitimate? Unconstitutional? Unaccountable? Dangerous? Intolerable? American public law has long been riven by a persistent, serious conflict, a kind of low-grade cold war, over these questions. Cass Sunstein and Adrian Vermeule argue that the administrative state can be redeemed, as long as public officials are constrained by what they call the morality of administrative law. Law and Leviathan elaborates a number of principles that underlie this moral regime. Officials who respect that morality never fail to make rules in the first place. They ensure transparency, so that people are made aware of the rules with which they must comply. They never abuse retroactivity, so that people can rely on current rules, which are not under constant threat of change. They make rules that are understandable and avoid issuing rules that contradict each other. These principles may seem simple, but they have a great deal of power. Already, without explicit enunciation, they limit the activities of administrative agencies every day. But we can aspire for better. In more robust form, these principles could address many of the concerns that have critics of the administrative state mourning what they see as the demise of the rule of law. The bureaucratic Leviathan may be an inescapable reality of complex modern democracies, but Sunstein and Vermeule show how we can at last make peace between those who accept its necessity and those who yearn for its downfall.

Tocqueville's Nightmare
Tocqueville's Nightmare

Author: Daniel R. Ernst

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 2014

Total Pages: 241

ISBN-13: 0199920869

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De Tocqueville once wrote that 'insufferable despotism' would prevail if America ever acquired a national administrative state. Between 1900 and 1940, radicals created vast bureaucracies that continue to trample on individual freedom. Ernst shows, to the contrary, that the nation's best corporate lawyers were among the creators of 'commission government'; that supporters were more interested in purging government of corruption than creating a socialist utopia; and that the principles of individual rights, limited government, and due process were designed into the administrative state.

Unmasking Administrative Evil
Unmasking Administrative Evil

Author: Guy B. Adams

Publisher: SAGE

Published: 1998-05-05

Total Pages: 242

ISBN-13: 9780761906698

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Although social scientists generally do not discuss "evil" in an academic setting, there is no denying that it has existed in public administration throughout human history. Hundreds of millions of human beings have died as a direct or indirect consequence of state-sponsored violence. The authors argue that administrative evil, or destructiveness, is part of the identity of all modern public administration (as it is part of psychoanalytic study at the individual level). It goes beyond a superficial critique of public administration and lays the groundwork for a more effective and humane profession.

Is Administrative Law Unlawful?
Is Administrative Law Unlawful?

Author: Philip Hamburger

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2014-05-27

Total Pages: 646

ISBN-13: 022611645X

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“Hamburger argues persuasively that America has overlaid its constitutional system with a form of governance that is both alien and dangerous.” —Law and Politics Book Review While the federal government traditionally could constrain liberty only through acts of Congress and the courts, the executive branch has increasingly come to control Americans through its own administrative rules and adjudication, thus raising disturbing questions about the effect of this sort of state power on American government and society. With Is Administrative Law Unlawful?, Philip Hamburger answers this question in the affirmative, offering a revisionist account of administrative law. Rather than accepting it as a novel power necessitated by modern society, he locates its origins in the medieval and early modern English tradition of royal prerogative. Then he traces resistance to administrative law from the Middle Ages to the present. Medieval parliaments periodically tried to confine the Crown to governing through regular law, but the most effective response was the seventeenth-century development of English constitutional law, which concluded that the government could rule only through the law of the land and the courts, not through administrative edicts. Although the US Constitution pursued this conclusion even more vigorously, administrative power reemerged in the Progressive and New Deal Eras. Since then, Hamburger argues, administrative law has returned American government and society to precisely the sort of consolidated or absolute power that the US Constitution—and constitutions in general—were designed to prevent. With a clear yet many-layered argument that draws on history, law, and legal thought, Is Administrative Law Unlawful? reveals administrative law to be not a benign, natural outgrowth of contemporary government but a pernicious—and profoundly unlawful—return to dangerous pre-constitutional absolutism.

Judicial Review of Administrative Discretion in the Administrative State
Judicial Review of Administrative Discretion in the Administrative State

Author: Jurgen de Poorter

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2019-06-07

Total Pages: 198

ISBN-13: 9462653070

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This book deals with one of the greatest challenges for the judiciary in the 21st century. It reflects on the judiciary’s role in reviewing administrative discretion in the administrative state; a role that can no longer solely be understood from the traditional doctrine of the Trias Politica. Traditionally, courts review acts of administrative bodies implying a degree of discretion with quite some restraint. Typically it is reviewed whether the decision is non-arbitrary or whether there is no manifest error of assessment. The question arises though as to whether the concern regarding ensuring the non-arbitrary character of the exercise of administrative power, which is frequently performed at a distance from political bodies, goes far enough to guarantee that the administration exercises its powers in a legitimate way. This publication searches for new modes of judicial review of administrative discretion exercised in the administrative state. It links state-of-the-art academic research on the role of courts in the administrative state with the daily practice of the higher and lower administrative courts struggling with their position in the evolving administrative state. The book concludes that with the changing role and forms of the administrative state, administrative courts across the world and across sectors are in the process of reconsidering their roles and the appropriate models of judicial review. Learning from the experiences in different sectors and jurisdictions, it provides theoretical and empirical foundations for reflecting on the advantages and disadvantages of different models of review, the constitutional consequences and the main questions that deserve further research and debate. Jurgen de Poorter is professor of administrative law at Tilburg University and deputy judge in the District Court of The Hague. Ernst Hirsch Ballin is distinguished university professor at Tilburg University, professor in human rights law at the University of Amsterdam, and president of the T.M.C. Asser Institute for International and European Law. He is also a member of the Scientific Council for Government policy (WRR). Saskia Lavrijssen is professor of Economic Regulation and Market Governance of Network Industries at Tilburg University.