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Bureaucratizing Democracy, Democratizing Bureaucracy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 December 2018

Wendy Nelson Espeland
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Abstract

This article analyzes the relationship between how rationality is conceived and how democracy is practiced in the Bureau of Reclamation, a water development agency in the Department of Interior. The efforts of some inside the agency to institutionalize rational decision-making models, partly in response to new environmental law, expanded the number and range of interest groups that participated in its decisions fry incorporating their preferences into their models for evaluating plans. But the terms under which people could express their values and interests were strictly controlled in ways that some felt misrepresented their concerns. How we conceive of rationality has important implications for how and which people are included in bureaucratic decision making.

Type
Symposium: Law, Democracy, and Society
Information
Law & Social Inquiry , Volume 25 , Issue 4 , Fall 2000 , pp. 1077 - 1109
Copyright
Copyright © American Bar Foundation, 2000 

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