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Making The Administrative State "Safe For Democracy": A Theoretical And Practical Analysis Of Citizen Participation In Agency Decisionmaking, Reeve T. Bull

Reeve T Bull

In recent years, academics, politicians, and journalists have hailed the rise of a new model of governance in which citizens take a more active role in government decisionmaking. To the extent citizen participation advocates offer a normative justification for their proposals, they tend to appeal to democratic ideals, contending that increased citizen involvement lends enhanced legitimacy to the government’s actions. This article seeks to explore these normative justifications in greater depth and offer a new model for integrating public input into government decisionmaking. Confining its focus to citizen participation in the decisionmaking of administrative agencies, it first examines whether or …