Representative Government through Democratic Governance

How does representative government function when administrative policymaking has the authority to reshape democracy?

The discretion that modern governments give to unelected officials, who have policy preferences themselves, not only captures the means for implementing policies, but also the authority to make tradeoffs among important democratic values to promote the outcomes they desire. REPGOV aims at exploring how governance structures shape the way officials make democratic value tradeoffs.

REPGOV’s mixed-method design, scale, and scope have the potential to recast the study of public administration into more richly democratic terms, and to make unique and significant contributions to the study of political philosophy, institutions and behavior. The project has four main objectives.

First, it will develop a unified theoretical approach grounded firmly political science and allied disciplines that explains why and how governance structures reinforce the values of the representative government by shaping officials’ belief systems.

Second, the project grounds theory into practice through rigorous qualitative research into the way that formal and informal institutions shape belief systems.

Third, through state-of-the-art machine learning methods, REPGOV will construct an important database that captures democratic values in laws and regulations and conduct large-scale observational tests of the relationship between institutional politics and the democratic values in delegated authority.

Fourth, through survey and laboratory experiments, REPGOV will examine the effect of formal and informal institutions on officials’ democratic beliefs