How democratic is arms-length government? Catherine Durose, Jonathan B. Justice and Chris Skelcher argue that those who consider it to be an undemocratic phenomenon over-simplify, and make the case for assessing the question in a more citizen and community focussed manner

Durose, Catherine

Justice, Jonathan

Skelcher, Chris

LSE Research Online

democraticaudit.com http://www.democraticaudit.com/?p=10728By Democratic Audit UKThe expansion of arms-length government is not necessarily atodds with democratic accountabilityHow democratic is arms-length government? Catherine Durose, Jonathan  B. Justice and Chris Skelcherargue that those who consider it to be an undemocratic phenomenon over-simplify, and make the case forassessing the question in a more citizen and community focussed manner.Credit: Martainn MacDhomhnaill, CC BY NC 2.0It is relatively uncontroversial to assert that modern democracies should aspire not only to democracy but also toefficiency and reliance when and as appropriate on expert, evidence-based judgments in designing andimplementing governing arrangements and public policies. It is also frequently accepted that these values areoften at odds with one another. Can we have both democracy and efficiency in governance? The still-expandingpractice of decentralization and delegation of a variety of activities from national and subnational governments toa variety of non-state organizations has been portrayed as evidence supporting both negative and affirmativeanswers to that question.Is this practice of “arms-length government” – the use of organisations other than government departments orministries to undertake public functions such as developing policies, allocating resources, delivering services, andperforming a variety of regulatory and adjudicatory functions – counter-democratic? Our research suggests thatthe answer is something like “not necessarily,” and “it depends.” Close centralized state control is not in everycase necessarily democracy-enhancing, but neither can it be dispensed with thoughtlessly.The challenge for institutional designers and operators is to distinguish the specific combinations of objectives,contexts, and governing designs that can achieve a favorable balance of democracy, expertise, and efficiency.More controversially, we suggest that many well intentioned advocates who share those three broad goals mayneed to abandon their familiar state-centric perspectives on the problem if they hope to solve it.One dominant, state-centric perspective on arms-length government sees it as delegated governance, andsuggests that agency problems and conflicts of interest will tend to lead to a democratic deficit when governingtasks are delegated (by the elected representatives who lead the state, which is the seat of legitimate collectiveauthority) to independent agencies or quasi- or non-governmental organizations.From this perspective the use of “arms-length” or “third-party” entities may be portrayed as a way to ensuremarket efficiency, reliance on technical expertise, and consistent decision-making and implementation, albeit atthe expense of diminishing democracy  by reducing the directness of elected representatives’ control overdecisions and operations. Or, in some variants of the argument, this delegation trades “democracy” in the form ofmaximizing individuals’ welfare against “democracy” in the form of engaging individuals actively and expandingtheir capacity for collective self-determination.An alternative, “polycentric” perspective articulated in the work of scholars including Elinor and Vincent Ostrom,Bruno Frey, and Archon Fung, views the state not as the sole seat of legitimate governing authority but rather asone locus of  democratically legitimate decision making and authority: often necessary, but not always an optimalor sufficient instrument of self-governance and collective action.This perspective views individuals and communities rather than the state as the basic locus of legitimacy, andsuggests that questions about the normative desirability of governing and service-provision arrangements shouldbe approached empirically and on a case-specific basis. This approach complicates the task of design andevaluation by offering only “it depends” as the generic answer to the arms-length question, but compensates forthe additional effort by offering a way for us to see and realise possibilities that might be missed by dismissingnon-state institutions of collective action out of hand.We recently completed a multi-year project, funded by the ESRC, that brought together scholars, practitionersand activists from several countries, sectors, and types of organisation to explore the question of “arms-lengthgovernment” or “governing beyond the state” in research seminars we organised at the University of Birminghamand De Montfort University. We took away from those discussions an appreciation of the manifold ways in whichthe polycentric perspective offers not just a valuable theoretical framework for designing and evaluatinggoverning arrangements but also a way to make sense of the astonishing variation in the types and quality ofarrangements in use today.One set of lessons drawn from the seminars is compiled in the pamphlet Beyond the State: Mobilizing and Co-Producing with Communities. In the first part of the pamphlet, organizers Alejandra Ibañez and Lina Jamoul andresearcher Liz Richardson demonstrate how community organizing and self-organization can potentially mobilizelocal resources for the co-design and co-production of services and empower diverse communities throughconstructive advocacy and negotiation. They trace the progression from oppositional mobilization to thenegotiation of arrangements that generated shared power to and with in case studies from Chicago and London.In the second part, Catherine Needham, Janet Newman, Chris Sherwood, and Jess Steele note that the languageof co-production encompasses both the liberation and empowerment of power to and power with, and a darkerside of more coercive personalization of centrally designed and dispensed services.In a subsequent review of academic literature on arms-length government, we built on a key insight we gainedfrom the contributors to the pamphlet. A shift in perspective from the state-centric model of legitimate andaccountable governance to a polycentric perspective facilitates the analysis of approaches to collective choiceand public policies in ways that engage with the potential for undemocratic or inequitable results as one relevantdesign consideration, rather than as an inevitable product of “delegation” by elected officials. (The article,published in Policy & Politcs, is available here.)In short, blanket generalisations about the negative implications of arm’s-length government for the quality ofdemocracy, based on narrowly state-centric models of democratic legitimacy and accountability, are oftenfactually incorrect and unnecessarily limit the scope of analysis in ways that may foreclose opportunities toincrease both democracy and efficiency. At the same time, in the world of political practice, the increasingfrequency and diversity of applications in a variety of contexts provides an abundance of material for thoughtfulempirical assessment, particularly if we approach it in a way that views strong state institutions as one part of alarger configuration of institutions, rather than as the only legitimate seat of democracy.And in fact, it is clear that citizens, practitioners, and scholars around the world are taking up the challenges ofdesigning, implementing, evaluating, and then redesigning configurations of institutions and practices thatsometimes manage to increase community power (to and with) and democracy.—Note: this post represents the views of the author, and not those of Democratic Audit or the LSE. Please read ourcomments policy before posting. —Dr Catherine Durose is Senior Lecturer and Director of Research in the Institute of LocalGovernment Studies at the University of Birmingham and works with the Public Services Academy.Jonathan B. Justice is Associate Professor, School of Public Policy & Administration, University ofDelawareChris Skelcher is Professor of Public Governance, Institute of Local Government Studies at theUniversity of Birmingham

The expansion of arms-length government is not necessarily at odds with democratic accountability

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