Reforms driven principally by the democracy ideal also have fallen short. Indeed, unlike the rule of law and public purposes ideals, there is evidence that the democracy ideal is underserved by present administration, which suggests that progress in realizing the ideal could enhance legitimacy. In addition, unlike the other ideals, the most prominent challenges for realizing the democracy ideal are matters of practical design, not flaws in the ideal’s very conception. This analysis suggests that it may be possible to make administration more democratic and that doing so should be the most fruitful path to improving administrative legitimacy.

Traditional models of democratic legitimacy in administrative law focus on holding agencies accountable to elected officials or increasing interest-group participation in the regulatory process. The models are valuable but fall short, largely because their representative nature replicates rather than remedies the core principal-agent problem. More recently, some scholars and reformers have attempted engage citizens directly in the regulatory process. These efforts have not circumvented the representation-based problems, and they have introduced new ones as well—the high costs and other complications of direct democracy that counsel in favor of representative forms of government.

This Article introduces a new model for democratic legitimacy, "direct republicanism," which attempts to combine elements of both representative and direct approaches. In a direct republican system, large panels of randomly selected citizens decide policy questions presented to them by government officials. In this way, citizens can act as their own representatives, the principals their own agents. The Article sketches an initial application of direct republicanism to the regulatory process in the form of "administrative juries."