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Publication Date

6-3-2024

Abstract

Decision-making in the administrative state increasingly relies on automated information processing. Yet administrative law has not kept pace. This creates a need for an institutional redesign of decision-making processes under the conditions of digitization and presents a window of opportunity to discuss the normative pillars of a renewed architecture for administrative decision-making. Automation creates an impetus for administrative actors to broaden their perspective from making singular, deterministic, and individual decisions to adopting a pluralist, probabilistic, and generalized approach to address any underlying more complex and dynamic problems. Therefore, this Article argues that the conventional normative goals of efficacy, efficiency, and legitimacy can only provide insufficient guidance for designing administrative technology. Instead, it proposes that administrative law should embrace the concept of “resilience” to open up a productive debate about the necessary framework of digitizing the executive branch in light of its current challenges.

With this backdrop, this Article investigates the structures and resources of resilience in administrative law. In particular, it asks which infrastructure and mechanisms the administrative state can invoke in the face of antidemocratic forces that challenge its integrity. It argues that a resilient construction of the digital administrative state rests on three pillars: employing administrative foresight, “strategy-proofing” the administrative process, and designing a choice architecture for the interaction between public officials and technological instruments.

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