A Constitution of Democratic Experimentalism
Abstract
In this Article, Professors Dorf and Sabel identify a new form of government, democratic experimentalism, in which power is decentralized to enable citizens and other actors to utilize their local knowledge to fit solutions to their individual circumstances, but in which regional and national coordinating bodies require actors to share their knowledge with others facing similar problems. This information pooling, informed by the example of novel kinds of coordination within and among private firms, both increases the efficiency of public administration by encouraging mutual learning among its parts and heightens its accountability through participation of citizens in the decisions that affect them.
In democratic experimentalism, subnational units of government are broadly free to set goals and to choose the means to attain them. Regulatory agencies set and ensure compliance with national objectives by means of bestpractice performance standards based on information that regulated entities provide in return for the freedom to experiment with solutions they prefer. The authors argue that this type of self-government is currently emerging in settings as diverse as the regulation of nuclear power plants, community policing, procurement of sophisticated military hardware, environmental regulation, and child-protective services.
The Article claims further that a shift towards democratic experimentalism holds out the promise of reducing the distance between, on the one hand, the Madisonian ideal of a limited government assured by a complex division of powers and, on the other hand, the governmental reality characteristic of the New Deal synthesis, in which an all-powerful Congress delegates much of its authority to expert agencies that are checked by the courts when they infringe individual rights, but are otherwise assumed to act in the public interest. Professors Dorf and Sabel argue that the combination of decentralization and mutual monitoring intrinsic to democratic experimentalism better protects the constitutional ideal than do doctrines of federalism and the separation of powers, so at odds with current circumstances, that courts recognize the futility of applying them consistently in practice by limiting themselves to fitful declarations of their validity in principle.