As long as their actions are lawful, administrators ought to reinforce the democratic values in their systems of representative government. The reason why is that doing so helps to legitimate policy work as a form of representation: policy work is done on behalf of citizens, and recognizing this integrates policy workers and the state, which itself is born from representation. Institutional designers must not advocate structural choices that compromise the legitimating that representation has for policy work, and they can only craft structures capable of producing democracy administered from values that complement those of the representative governments toward which they direct their proposals. One structure thus cannot fit all political jurisdictions because their representative governments make different trade-offs in accountability and process values. But attending to value complementarity helps to facilitate representation, to legitimate the state, to address the fundamental problem of public administration and to nurture democracy administered.

The process values of majoritarianism, pluralism, and collective rationality are described. The social choice understanding that it is impossible to respect all three of these values with a single collective decision mechanism is considered, as are epistemic and deliberative theories of democracy.

The democratic values discussed in the two preceding chapters are represented in four basic governance structures in contemporary public administration. The democratic influence governance structures, such as the rules and hierarchies of bureaucracy, or the mechanisms for consensus in participatory structures are considered. A framework for understanding the trade-offs between accountability and process values is provided.

How does representative government function when public administration has the authority to reshape democracy? This chapter sets up the problem of value reinforcement as an additional element to the traditional narrative of control and capability for legitimating public administration.

The practice-based approach to theory development in the book is described. Three core values of electoral accountability - identifiability, evaluability, and the probability of sanction - are discussed. Theories of retrospective voting and conditional representation are also presented.

A value reinforcement hypothesis expects that governance structures reinforce the values of the representative governments they serve. If a political system embraces pluralism and collective rationality as process values, its governance structures will enhance those process beliefs. If a government faces strong electoral accountability, its governance structures will emphasize accountability values, making identifiable managers likely to face sanctions for their performance. Correlations such as these would be observed if the hypothesis has potential for guiding a positive research agenda. The value reinforcement hypothesis has both institutional and behavioral mechanisms behind it.

The book concludes with a brief look at hybrid organizations, international organizations, administrative rulemaking, and the rise of populism with an eye toward how they might be considered in the light of value reinforcement.