Creating comity amidst gridlock: a corporatist repair for a broken congress

Abstract

With partisanship and gridlock at record levels in the US Congress, there is a need for institutional reforms that can encourage greater cooperation and productivity. We explore forms of deliberative democracy to help overcome the problem. Deliberative democracy holds that for a democratic decision to be legitimate, it must be preceded by authentic deliberation; that is, voting alone is not sufficient to establish legitimacy and public buy-in. We examine institutions of deliberative democracy that might be applied to the Congress. We first examine the federal advisory committees used to inform and counsel government agencies in the implementation of federal programs. These standing advisory committees, with members taken from the relevant stakeholder groups, provide an opportunity for antagonistic interests to build relationships over an extended period. We then look at democratic neo-corporatism, in which certain community or interest groups are privileged participants in the national policy formulation and implementation. We then apply these approaches to Congress, assessing whether advisory committees made up of interest group representatives could help establish genuine deliberation, potentially enhancing communication and compromise. We analyze what such a Congressional advisory system would look like and how it could be designed.