Law Commons^™

Agency In State Agencies, Anya Bernstein

Contributions to Books

Published as Chapter 5 in Distributed Agency, N. J. Enfield & Paul Kockelman, eds.

The democratic state is an administrative state: the actual work of representative governance is done primarily in administrative agencies, which interpret and implement the often vague ambitions inscribed in statutes. When we talk about agency in the state, then, we must primarily be talking about agency in agencies. That may seem odd. Bureaucracy seems like the absence of agency: just mechanistic gear-grinding continuing things begun by other, distant, powerful actors. Where can agency find a foothold amid the faceless people, the featureless buildings, the infinite red …