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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Case for Gridlock: Democracy, Organized Power, and the Legal Foundations of American Government

Case for Gridlock: Democracy, Organized Power, and the Legal Foundations of American Government

Ethridge, Marcus E.

Hardcover

General Political ScienceUnited States Politics

ISBN10: 0739142372
ISBN13: 9780739142370
Publisher: Lexington Books
Published: Mar 30 2010
Pages: 240
Weight: 1.10
Height: 0.80 Width: 6.10 Depth: 9.20
Language: English

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.

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