Beyond Principal-agent Governance: Experimentalist Organizations, Learning and Accountability

The success of LPF, like the success of similar populist movements that preceded it in Austria, France, Switzerland and elsewhere, raises grave questions about the legitimacy of democratic inputs to public decision making and the efficacy of public action however decided. At the very least these successes signal an impaired responsiveness of the democratic state to its electorate: a democratic deficit. Coming at a time of economic well being, shifts in party allegiance of a magnitude not seen since the 1920s are thus widely and rightly seen as extending beyond democratic criticism of this or that incumbent government into a protest against the way contemporary representative democracy works. The causes of this democratic distress are many. But there is substantial agreement that an important source of the protest is disappointment with the way government provides public goods such as education, health care, public security, and with the regulatory rules regarding, for example, the environment, to which civil society actors must respond (Van den Brink 2002). Among politicians of many political colors and in the high reaches of the civil service there is further agreement that government fails at these tasks because it tries to solve too many public problems directly, and too often with rigid, bureaucratic methods: The state fails to deliver in key areas where sustained public engagement is necessary, even while meddling wastefully in matters where it is not. These failures, it is further claimed, are especially burdensome for increasingly diverse and vulnerable social groups. As government is manifestly less able today than in recent decades to protect the vulnerable against the insecurity associated with market economies by social insurance, it must assure solidarity by providing those particular forms of education and other services that enable citizens, as