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

The Case for Gridlock: Democracy, Organized Power, and the Legal Foundations of American Government 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, Progressive 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 nave 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.

Marcus E. Ethridge is chair of the Department of Political Science at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.