Almost everyone agrees there is a legitimacy crisis in American government. Almost everyone agrees something must be done about this legitimacy crisis. Yet hardly anyone agrees on exactly what the legitimacy crisis is. And hardly anyone agrees on exactly what is to be done. The Supreme Court is illegitimate, the last election was illegitimate, the administrative state is illegitimate, and executive orders are illegitimate. In nearly every case, “illegitimate” means “produced an outcome I reject.” Both sides make the same move: they judge American self-government by its outputs and declare those outputs illegitimate when they oppose them. By that definition, no system of self-government, no democracy, has ever been legitimate and none ever will be.

Legitimacy is what makes America’s democracy a self-government. Without it, the federal government does not disappear. It continues as a government by administration, imposition, and, ultimately, coercion. Every government, including a democratic one, keeps coercion in reserve; people file their taxes on time in part because penalties await those who do not. In a self-government, consent granted broadly does that work, and force remains the backstop. When legitimacy erodes, force stops being the backstop and becomes the operating principle.

The governed no longer recognize the system as one in which they govern themselves. A government whose people make decisions collectively through genuine participation and contestation differs categorically from one that makes decisions through expertise, executive authority, and, ultimately, force. When legitimacy erodes, the government loses more than the public’s trust. It stops being a self-government and becomes something the people endure rather than something they do.

This document states the theory behind Self-Governance in Motion, a multi-year initiative of New America and the Foundation for American Innovation. The project’s premise is that restoring American self-government requires understanding what generates its legitimacy, and its wager is that the answer lies in the structure of political conflict. The pages that follow set out a three-element account of self-government, apply it to the current reform debate and the current crisis, and translate it into charges for four working groups whose proposals must survive cross-ideological scrutiny. The theory serves as shared language, not settled doctrine. It earns its place by surviving the working groups’ scrutiny.

Self-government has three elements.

The first is participation: people must be able to take part, directly or through representatives, in the decisions that bind them.

The second is conflict: participation generates disagreement, because people want different things, and that disagreement is the condition that makes self-government necessary in the first place. If everyone agreed on the right answer, there would be no need for politics. All politics contains conflict; authoritarian systems suppress it or settle it in private. Only self-government makes conflict the source of its own authority.

The third is resolution: conflict must terminate in a collective decision that is binding on participants and that participants can trace to the contest that led to it. Participation, conflict, and resolution do not follow a sequence of stages in an agreed-upon process unfolding by design toward predetermined outcomes. They constitute the very activity of democratic self-government. These three elements underpin the entire federal government and legitimize its actions. Congress is at the center of that process, and of the American constitutional order, precisely because it houses all three elements. That is why America’s current crisis of legitimacy is a crisis of its legislature, the House and Senate.

Legitimacy is essential to American self-government because it enables people to distinguish between an outcome with which they disagree and the process that produced it. Legitimacy allows people to accede to undesirable policies without rejecting the government that produced them. People can oppose a decision and still accept it as legitimate and binding, provided the process that led to it offered them a genuine opportunity to participate and shape it, and provided it will give them another opportunity in the future. That is normal democratic life. American self-government breaks when people stop making that distinction, when policy disagreements become grounds for rejecting the system altogether.

Why would anyone who did not get what they wanted continue to grant the system legitimacy? Democracy involves a fundamental puzzle: groups of people who hold power voluntarily surrender it after losing elections, even though they control the machinery of government. One answer is that people respect the outcome when they calculate that a system of regular votes and elections is better than any alternative without them, and that the next vote or election might go their way. Democratic self-government thus combines institutional certainty with outcome uncertainty.

That is only half the answer. It explains why people who lose an election do not launch a coup to seize power. It does not explain why they actively consent, why they grant the government legitimacy rather than merely endure it. Grudging compliance is brittle: it lasts only as long as the strategic calculation holds. Genuine consent renews itself with each round of legitimate process.

Political scientists call this loser’s consent. The phrase is awkward. Nobody thinks of themselves as a loser, and in a functioning self-government, those who do not prevail in one round are citizens awaiting the next, not a permanent class of the defeated. It is better called what it is: consent. It describes the willingness of those who did not get what they wanted to accept the outcome as legitimate and continue participating. Margaret Levi’s work on contingent consent describes the same phenomenon from the citizen’s side: people comply willingly when they judge the government trustworthy and its processes fair, and their consent remains conditional on both.

Most reformers treat this acceptance as a background cultural condition. They measure it in surveys, lament when the indicators decline, and search for silver-bullet solutions.

Yet loser’s consent emerges out of the process of democratic self-government itself. Genuine contestation, in which participants can see they had a real opportunity to prevail, in which shared rules of engagement empowered them to fight, and in which they retain a credible path to fight again, legitimizes policy outcomes and produces consent for the next round. Theatrical provocation decoupled from any real attempt to prevail, rigged processes, and decisions displaced to venues nobody agreed to consume consent without replenishing it. Politics is continuous, punctuated by decisions that mark particular rounds of contestation: bills, regulations, judicial decisions, elections, reauthorizations. The store of consent is renewable but not inexhaustible, and a system that stops replenishing it becomes illegitimate.

Acknowledging the legitimacy crisis is not easy in the current environment, because contestation has not disappeared. It has instead migrated away from the House and Senate, where binding resolution is possible, into two kinds of venues. Some hold real governing authority but lack a legitimating process of their own: executive orders, agency rulemaking, and the federal courts can decide, but they cannot make the governed feel that they decided. Others are merely expressive: social media and the streets can voice conflict but can bind no one.

Neither kind can generate legitimate policy outcomes on its own. When contestation shifts from Congress to these venues and the House and Senate become afterthoughts, policy outcomes depend on force and endurance rather than consent. The institutions designed to convert political conflict into legitimate decisions weaken from disuse while political energy flows to arenas that cannot produce legitimacy.

A generation of political theorists assumed that established democracies were self-enforcing, that only an external shock could dislodge them. American self-government is not dysfunctional because of an external shock. It is degrading from the inside out. Democratic commitment is eroding because the system has stopped doing what generates it. The cause is institutional, not cultural. The capacity for self-government has been atrophying for decades as the American people and their representatives look to venues other than Congress to prevail in politics. The decline of Congress as the central venue of self-government damages every other part of the federal government in turn, in ways the section on Congress below describes.

The Three Elements of Self-Government

Each element is necessary for self-government to work. Each, when absent, produces a distinct failure.

Participation

People, construed broadly, must have a meaningful opportunity to participate in any process that leads to a public decision. Participation takes electoral, administrative, and associational forms: representation through elections, stakeholder participation in rulemaking, community voice in implementation, and organized interests capable of articulating demands.

The opportunity to participate is a precondition of self-government: a system that excludes people from the decisions that bind them is not a self-government at all. Participation is also a continuous activity, renewed each electoral cycle and each round of policymaking, and the other two elements inherit their democratic character from it.

Conflict legitimizes only when the people fighting are, or answer to, the people bound by the outcome. Resolution binds only those who were present for the contest, in person or through representatives. Remove representation and conflict becomes a contest among unaccountable proxies, while resolution becomes an imposition on the absent. Elections do double duty here: they are the mechanism of accountability and the recurring moments when citizens learn what the contests were about and who fought for them. Without representation that citizens experience as real, no quality of conflict or resolution can legitimate what follows.

No one with a stake in the outcome can be systematically excluded. When affected parties believe their participation could not have changed the outcome, the outcome lacks legitimacy, regardless of its quality.

Participation that cannot surface disagreement is not real participation, and it produces the representation paradox: so many voices arrive at the table that no coalition can form, every interest has standing, and none has enough weight to force a tradeoff.

Practically, much of this participation can and should operate through intermediary organizations that coordinate and channel public input.

Conflict

Participation generates disagreement, and the represented parties must contest that disagreement openly. They have to fight over the substance in ways that are visible, consequential, and bounded by shared rules of engagement that empower them to participate in the first place. Conflict that occurs behind closed doors may resolve questions, but the governed cannot see that they had a champion in the fight, and consent does not follow.

Conflict is the mechanism that produces legitimacy. This is the project’s central claim. A legislature that suppresses disagreement cannot legitimize its decisions. An agency that forecloses public contestation cannot legitimize what it implements. The procedural justice literature consistently finds that people accept unfavorable outcomes when they believe the process gave them a genuine chance to be heard and to prevail.

What distinguishes political conflict from violent conflict is the form it takes: bargaining, negotiation, persuasion, and compromise rather than coercion and force. The process requires shared rules of engagement, and political contestation itself produces and revises those rules over time. But they must exist, and all participants must believe that the others operate within them. When that mutual belief breaks down, when each side believes the other operates under different rules, the process cannot produce consent regardless of how formally correct the procedures are. No one accepts an outcome produced under rules they believe only they were following.

Conflict also requires institutional coupling: it must connect to a venue that produces binding decisions. Expanding the scope of conflict, taking the fight to the media, and leveraging the outside game to change the terms of the inside game are legitimate and often necessary; Schattschneider observed that the weaker party broadens the audience to change the outcome. The problem arises when the inside game itself has atrophied, when no institutional venue remains for the expanded conflict to couple to. That failure belongs to the institutions, not the participants.

Conflict without resolution produces the procedural trap: abundant deliberation that never terminates in a binding decision.

Resolution

Conflict must terminate in collective decisions that participants can trace back to the contest that produced them. Those who did not prevail must be able to see how their concerns were heard, why they did not win everything they wanted, and what they might do differently next time. When that connection breaks, when leadership drafts legislation and brings it to the floor without committee markup or open amendment, when agencies implement mandates bearing no relationship to legislative intent, when executive orders bypass the process, the result lacks legitimacy. The lesson people draw is that good policy requires bypassing self-governance, and that lesson corrodes the system whether or not the policy is substantively good.

Resolution also makes the output visible as government work. Research on public perceptions shows that citizens systematically misattribute high-quality public services to the private sector, because their priors tell them government cannot deliver quality. A legitimate process solves this attribution problem: people who watch a legislative fight over a program and then receive its benefits know where the benefits came from. A legitimate process also generates tolerance for imperfect implementation: people who believe the process was fair extend a line of credit when implementation falls short.

Legitimate resolution does more than produce consent for the next round. It settles questions. Outcomes in American self-government are provisional in theory but seldom provisional in practice: those who fought and lost in a genuine contest rarely devote themselves to permanent reversal. Congressional opponents of Social Security fought the program bitterly in 1935, and the Republican nominee ran against it in 1936. Within two decades a Republican president treated abolition as political suicide, and the contest shifted from whether the program should exist to how it should grow. The pattern recurs from Hamilton’s financial program to Medicare.

Even the Affordable Care Act shows it in partial form: the process consumed consent and the statute’s details remain contested, but the principles it established, that everyone should have access to insurance coverage and that preexisting conditions should not bar anyone from getting it, are no longer in serious dispute. Durability is a byproduct of legitimate conflict, not a property of good policy. A system that resolves questions through contestation gradually closes them. A system that resolves them through unilateral action reopens them with every change of administration.

Resolution without conflict produces the technocratic fallacy: government delivers, but nobody fought over what it delivers or for whom.

Congress as the Nexus

Congress is where all three elements of self-governance converge. When Congress works, it transforms citizen demands into contested legislation into implemented policy. Every successful round sustains the system’s capacity for self-governance by generating consent for the next.

Each institution in the American government operates on a different basis of authority. Congress legitimizes decisions through contestation among equals: bargaining, negotiation, persuasion, and compromise. It is the only institution that can legitimize its own decisions through its own process. The executive branch implements policy by applying expertise as Congress defines it. The judiciary resolves disputes by invoking a higher authority: the Constitution and the laws made pursuant to it. These are different functions requiring different institutional capacities.

When Congress fails, other institutions absorb work that their authority does not support. Courts make policy; they were designed to adjudicate. Agencies resolve political conflicts; they were designed to implement. The executive substitutes unilateral action for legislative compromise. Each institution handles the displaced function badly, because it operates outside the basis of authority for which it was designed, and the displacement undermines each institution’s ability to do the work it was designed for.

When Congress fails, the experience of political participation also shifts. People look to media and interest groups to feel represented, but those institutions lack legislative authority and can only make demands, not negotiate compromises. Political participation shifts from negotiation to demand-making.

Most proposals for reforming Congress focus on restoring capacity: more staff, stronger committees, rebuilt support agencies. The diagnosis here reverses the causal arrow. Congress stopped being the site of productive conflict and therefore lost capacity. The 1995 staff cuts illustrate the mechanism. The new House majority slashed committee staff in the same Congress in which it sought to make the House the center of national politics, because centralizing power in the leadership required weakening the committees where internal contestation lived. The defunding was an instrument of conflict suppression, not a response to institutional decline; the decline followed. Capacity investments that leave the structure of conflict untouched will refill offices that still have no fights to host.

The legislature is the arena where conflict is most public, where participation is most pluralistic, and where binding resolution emerges from genuine contestation. Its failure cascades into every other institution.

Three Diagnoses

Three broad diagnoses explain why government has lost legitimacy. Each has a simple version and a nuanced version. The simple version says getting one thing right solves the rest. The nuanced version says each is one essential piece that cannot work alone. The working groups should develop their own diagnoses and compare them to the analysis here.

More Participation

The first diagnosis: government has become too distant from too many people. The solution is to get more people involved, to make government more familiar and more responsive, through town halls, citizen assemblies, public comment opportunities, deliberative polls, and voter registration drives. The implicit theory is that legitimacy follows from inclusion.

The simple version says participation suffices, that getting the right people in the room takes care of the rest. It does not. The most inclusive, representative, and beautifully facilitated process changes nothing if it does not connect to a decision that somebody wins and somebody loses. Participatory budgeting illustrates the point: a well-designed process applied to trivial sums with zero power transferred. Pursued alone, participation produces the representation paradox.

The nuanced version says participation is necessary, that without genuine representation the system talks to itself. That is correct. Participation is one element. It is not three.

Deliverism

The second diagnosis: government has failed to deliver. Build faster, permit faster, deliver benefits without six-month wait times. Legitimacy follows performance. This diagnosis drives the abundance agenda and the state capacity revival.

The simple version says delivery suffices, that if government just did things better, trust would return. The evidence does not support this. Citizens systematically misattribute good government performance to the private sector. Benefits that arrive without visible connection to a democratic contest register as background conditions rather than as collective decisions. Pursued alone, deliverism produces the technocratic fallacy. The pattern recurs throughout American governance, from the scientific management movement to the New Deal administrative state to the current state capacity revival.

The strongest version of this diagnosis concedes that performance alone cannot legitimate and argues instead for sequence: build capacity first, because sustained competence creates the conditions for trust, and trust then enables the deeper reforms that participation and contestation require. On this account, legitimacy built on incompetence is merely well-intentioned impotence. The sequence never completes, however, because the first step’s dividend never gets deposited. Citizens credit competent performance to the private sector unless a visible contest marks it as government work. Performance builds trust only when conflict and resolution give it provenance. Capacity built first, without that provenance, builds someone else’s reputation.

The nuanced version says delivery matters, that a system which cannot resolve problems and produce results will lose public support regardless of how fair its procedures are. That is also correct. But government performance builds legitimacy only when visible conflict resolution connects it to self-governance.

The Structure of Conflict

The third diagnosis: conflict has gone wrong. This is often told as a story about hyper-partisan polarization, tribal warfare, and zero-sum politics. One response tries to suppress that conflict by seeking consensus, bipartisanship, civility, and a return to some imagined comity. Another accepts that all politics involves conflict and asks how to structure conflict: how to build a productive process for multi-sided, public-facing disagreement into policymaking and resolution, primarily through Congress.

The task is to structure conflict so that it produces collective decisions. Conflict oriented toward resolution is the essential activity of self-governance: people with competing interests fight over binding outcomes, and the process of fighting, not prevailing, and retaining the ability to fight again generates the legitimacy that sustains the system. Conflict without an intention of resolution becomes endless conflict for its own sake. Two versions of this problem recur.

The first is the means-ends inversion. Conflict becomes self-sustaining when the fundraising email needs an enemy, the cable hit needs outrage, and the primary needs a villain. When campaigning becomes permanent and governing becomes the intermission, the fight is no longer a means to a decision but the end in itself.

The second is the procedural trap. The notice-and-comment apparatus is the clearest example, and two decades of empirical work converge on the diagnosis: comment volume does not predict influence on rule content; well-resourced repeat players dominate the channels that matter; and agencies now write their responses to comments primarily as litigation defense rather than as deliberative engagement. Participation without an exit condition is the trap’s design flaw, and resolution is the exit condition. Every participation process must be able to answer the question of when participation ends and a binding decision issues.

Both problems share a root: conflict unmoored from resolution. Expanding the scope of conflict and socializing the fight remain part of how democratic politics has always worked; the failure arises, as the framework describes, when the inside game has atrophied and the outside game has nothing to couple to.

Why the Third Diagnosis Integrates the Other Two

The third diagnosis integrates the other two. Participation without conflict produces no outcomes: people show up, speak, and nothing happens. Delivery without conflict produces no legitimacy: government performs, but nobody fought over what it performs or for whom. Conflict makes participation meaningful and gives resolution democratic provenance. Pursued alone, each diagnosis produces its own failure mode. Together, they describe a system that needs all three elements operating simultaneously.

The Current Crisis

The decades since the post-war settlement have seen productive political conflict steadily suppressed within the institutions designed to manage it. The demands did not go away. The disagreements did not resolve. They accumulated, the way suppressed fire accumulates fuel, and the longer the suppression, the less generative the eventual burn. The current crisis follows from that accumulation.

The crisis will intensify, because no one can manage the questions ahead quietly. An aging population places the central pillars of the twentieth-century welfare state under mounting fiscal stress, and managing that stress requires explicit choices about taxes, benefits, and intergenerational equity that distribute costs and gains on an enormous scale. At the same time, open political struggle has reclaimed domains once handled technocratically; the dismantling of USAID showed how quickly settled arrangements can come undone. Non-incremental conflicts are coming whether or not the institutions designed to host conflict can still do so.

All three elements fail simultaneously, and each failure accelerates the others.

Participation has become performative. Formal representation exists, but the connection between representatives and the represented has weakened. A calcified two-party system with near-zero electoral volatility fights every election over the same narrow terrain, with parties trading narrow majorities and suffering the predictable cost of ruling once they gain power. Ninety-seven percent of House incumbents won reelection in 2024, and most state legislative races went uncontested. Voters vote, but they do not believe their vote translates into governance. The structures of representation persist. The felt experience of being heard does not.

Conflict has been displaced. Productive conflict has migrated out of the institutions designed to convert it into decisions and into arenas where it is merely expressive. Committee markups, conference committees, floor amendment processes, and negotiated rulemaking are the institutional sites where conflict couples to binding decisions. Successive speakers deliberately centralized the legislative process: they restricted open rules, replaced conference committees with leadership-negotiated packages, and cut committee staff. Cable news, social media, government shutdowns, and floor speeches designed for clips are full of conflict but produce no binding decisions.

Displaced conflict migrates to agencies, courts, executive orders, media, and the streets. These institutions were not designed to handle legislative-scale conflict, so they handle it badly, generating further legitimacy failures and further degrading Congress. Each displacement makes the next displacement more likely. The system is in a spiral, not a stalemate.

Resolution has been severed from process. When Congress cannot legislate, the executive branch acts unilaterally. When Congress legislates without resolving its own disagreements, it delegates broad mandates with no settled goal, and agencies inherit the unresolved conflict in statutory form, guessing at the intended outcome and absorbing the public’s frustration when the guess disappoints. When agencies implement ambiguous mandates, courts intervene. When courts intervene, the next administration reverses. Policy oscillates rather than reflecting durable compromise. Citizens either do not experience government outcomes at all, cannot connect them to any democratic process they participated in, or, when the outcomes are good, misattribute them to the private sector.

Efficiency that bypasses conflict undermines the system’s capacity for self-governance. Every streamlined executive action, every agency rule that settles a question Congress would not touch, and every reconciliation bill designed to avoid bipartisan negotiation may be defensible on substance, but each arrives without democratic provenance. Those who did not prevail have no reason to accept it because they never had an opportunity to participate. The next administration reverses it. The cycle teaches everyone that policy is temporary and power is all that matters.

Even extensive, formally legitimate process can fail when conflict collapses to one dimension. As the Affordable Care Act showed, when all conflict sorts into party versus party with no cross-cutting coalitions, the same side wins everything and the same side loses everything. The collapse from multidimensional to one-dimensional conflict may be the structural condition that makes the current legitimacy crisis intractable under existing institutional arrangements.

The feedback loop has reversed. In a healthy system, demands flow in, the system processes them through institutional conflict, and resolutions feed back as new demands. In the current system, failed resolution erodes trust in the process, which degrades the quality of participation, which further degrades the process.

The damage compounds. People comply in part because they believe others are also complying. When that belief fractures, compliance cascades downward. Both sides now believe the other is dangerous and does not follow the rules, and structural dynamics reinforce this perception regardless of which side bears more responsibility. Neither has reason to keep playing by rules they believe only they follow.

Underneath all of this, the institutional settlements that once held the system together were designed for a different political ecology: two ideologically heterogeneous parties, a media environment that rewarded legislative achievement, and a public that experienced government primarily through local implementation. Hugh Heclo identified the turn as early as 1978: the closed policy subsystems that had managed most conflict privately were giving way to sprawling issue networks, and the broadening never stopped. Many separate, quiet, multidimensional contests flattened into one loud partisan dimension. The institutions remain, but the conditions that sustained them are gone.

Implications for the Working Groups

The framework provides a shared language and a common diagnostic. Each working group examines how participation, conflict, and resolution operate, and fail, in its specific domain.

Legislatures & Legitimacy: This group inherits two live debates that its work must adjudicate rather than assume away. The first concerns causation. The conventional diagnosis holds that Congress lost capacity, in staff, committees, and support agencies, and therefore stopped legislating; the framework holds that Congress stopped hosting productive conflict and therefore lost capacity. The 1995 staff cuts support either reading, and the group’s reform proposals will differ depending on which one survives scrutiny.

The second concerns dimensionality. The comparison between the 1986 Tax Reform and the ACA generates the hypothesis that major legislation cannot produce consent from those who lose when all conflict collapses to a single party-versus-party dimension. If that hypothesis holds, procedural reform alone cannot restore legislative legitimacy, because the defect lies in the structure of competition itself.

Questions: Where does the current legislative process fail to produce conflict coupled to binding decisions? What specific mechanisms, in committee practice, floor procedure, and leadership control, sever the connection between participation, conflict, and resolution? Does the collapse to one-dimensional conflict originate in behavior, procedure, or party structure, and what follows for reform? What would restore the institutional sites, markups, conference committees, open amendment, where conflict couples to binding decisions?

Regulatory Participation Reform: The empirical record in this domain is stronger than in any other, and it complicates the most intuitive reform instinct. Two decades of research converge on three findings: comment volume does not predict influence on rule content; the formal comment record functions primarily as litigation infrastructure; and the most consequential participation occurs in informal pre-proposal channels that favor organized interests over the public by ratios approaching two orders of magnitude. The administrative process thus offers two kinds of participation, one effective but invisible, one visible but decorative, and neither couples participation to conflict and binding resolution.

This evidence sets the group’s central test. The first diagnosis in the appendix, that legitimacy follows from inclusion, predicts that widening the channels of participation will rebuild trust. The record to date predicts that adding voices to a channel that does not connect to decisions produces more theater, not more legitimacy. Broadening participation is a coherent reform only when paired with a redesign of what participation terminates in.

Questions: Does the current administrative process provide genuine participation, real contestation, and resolution, or does it simulate these while the real decisions happen elsewhere? When should participation end and a binding decision issue? Which participation mechanisms couple to binding outcomes, and which exist to be seen? What redesign of administrative procedure would produce legitimacy rather than perform it, and what role, if any, can AI-assisted aggregation play once the group treats coupling, rather than throughput, as the primary problem?

Service Delivery: When programs cross levels of government in implementation, where does the connection between the democratic contest and the policy outcome break down? How can implementation maintain visibility so that citizens know that what they receive is government work produced by self-governance?

State Innovation (Pennsylvania): In a decentralized, politically divided state, what does the balance between participation, conflict, and resolution look like? Where do intergovernmental handoffs destroy accountability, and where do they create space for productive adaptation?

Conclusion: The Work Ahead

This document makes three claims. Legitimacy is constitutive of self-government: a government the people no longer legitimate is still a government, but it is no longer theirs. Conflict, bounded by shared rules and pointed at a binding decision, is what produces that legitimacy. And Congress is where all three elements live under one roof, which is why the crisis shows there first.

If the claims hold, the familiar fixes are partial by design. More listening sessions, faster permits, and better service each tend a single element while the others wither. The work is to surface disagreement, fight it in the open, and end it in a decision people can trace. Reform that stops short of this tends the garden one plant at a time.

That work belongs to the project; people who do not share each other’s politics carry it forward, domain by domain. The wager beneath it is the old one: that people who want different things, given rules, a venue, and an ending, will produce something suppression never can, the renewable consent of those who lost the last round and intend to win the next, which is legitimacy itself, and which no expert, no executive, and no algorithm can manufacture on the people’s behalf. A government that recovers this practice will have turned its conflicts back into the thing its people do rather than the thing they endure. In short, legitimate democratic politics.

Read the full piece at Reason →

Bridget Dooling’s work examines how AI is changing the landscape of public commenting on federal rules — including both the risk that AI-generated comments could flood and distort the process, and the potential for AI to help agencies process and respond to comment volume more meaningfully.

Dan Chenok’s research on AI in state government looks at how state agencies are beginning to adopt AI tools for service delivery and administration, offering an early read on what’s working and what isn’t as adoption accelerates.

We’ll keep updating this section as the field develops — flag anything you think we should be tracking.