Governing Well in Uncertain Times: Democratic Legitimacy and the Administrative State

Governing Well in Uncertain Times: Democratic Legitimacy and the Administrative State

Anthony Bertelli

Democracy faces unprecedented pressures across Europe and beyond. Populist movements, rapid AI deployment, and institutional crises threaten the legitimacy of governance itself. At this critical moment, this Initiative aims to foster rigorous, interdisciplinary research on how democratic societies can preserve effective, legitimate governance, and creative public outreach about the importance of democratic values in the state and in our lives.

With support from an Advanced Grant from the European Research Council, Professor Anthony Bertelli has developed a framework for understanding democratic legitimacy that is both theoretically grounded and urgently practical. His governance compact argues that democratic legitimacy rests on six interconnected values that remain stable even in crisis: the rule of law as bedrock, four guiding values (accountability, impartiality, efficiency, and transparency), and the integrity of the administrative state that binds them together. Recent research demonstrates that the governance compact has a resilient place in the political and social belief systems of ordinary citizens, who also intuitively recognize governance consistent with the compact when they encounter it.

This Initiative intends to generate actionable knowledge aimed at making democracies more resilient. It creates research, mentorship, and internship opportunities that engage students, including those from disadvantaged backgrounds, in innovative thinking about the problems of governance. And it integrates law, philosophy, political science, behavioral science, data science, and management, ambitiously extending into the arts to stimulate questions that can be answered by rigorous social science research.

Research highlights

Public Administration and Democracy: The Complementarity Principle (Anthony Bertelli and Lindsey Schwartz, book)

Bureaucracy Under Pressure: Structural Integrity and the Ethics of Democratic Administration (Anthony Bertelli and Vincenza Falletti, survey article)

Authorized Discretion: The Democratic Essentials of Governance in the European Union (Anthony Bertelli, Vincenza Falletti, and Silvia Cannas, survey article)

Anchoring Institutional Values in Democracy: A Systematic Review, a Constructive Critique, and a Research Agenda (Anthony Bertelli, Silvia Cannas, Katerina Sharova and Iker Uriarte, survey article).- 

Democracy Administered (Anthony Bertelli, public essays).