In 2020, America’s government fell under scrutiny. Its citizens demanded better regulation of the government’s police practices, better public health procedures, protection of the environment, and democratic elections. Protesters took to the streets across the country to advocate that Black Lives Matter and that states should consider defunding the police. All of this happened as the United States and the world wrestled with the deadly coronavirus. Additionally, the year marked record temperatures, wildfires, droughts, and storms as concerns about climate change intensified. The presidential election in November revealed the intense political polarization in the United States and Americans’ growing distrust of their institutions, including their democratic elections.
Why is the legitimacy of public administrators, the representatives of the people’s shared will, unraveling at a rapid pace? In The Privatized State, Chiara Cordelli provides a compelling explanation: the outsourcing of government duties to private organizations, both nonprofit and for-profit. This growing practice ultimately ruptures the balance of power between people and their democratic governments.
An assistant professor of political science at the University of Chicago, Cordelli examines the logic behind legitimate authority and the powers exerted through bureaucratic discretion. Her argument exposes how the transfer of democratic mandates to private organizations is far more dangerous than subjecting public policy to market forces and commodification. By detailing this logic, she reveals how these actions ultimately invalidate the state as an arbiter of justice.
The book begins with an explanation of how the US government has become a privatized state. The US budget has exponentially grown over the last 60 years while the labor force has remained fairly steady. Cordelli highlights the one area of the state where there has been a significant increase: contract labor. For example, she shows that the US Department of Defense has 700,000 to 800,000 federal civilian workers and hires between 620,000 and 770,000 contract employees from for-profit companies—a near one-to-one ratio. Though one may immediately think of the military contractor Academi (formerly Blackwater) and the long-standing dilemma that states face on hiring mercenary soldiers, this subcontracting for the government is pervasive across all forms of state services and goods. Governments are basically contracting work to for-profit and nonprofit organizations, fostering a dependent system that Cordelli examines in the later chapters of her book. While the government has grown in its responsibility and action, the actors—the people and organizations—who embody and fulfill these responsibilities are not civil servants but contracted labor. Cordelli rightly defines this privatization, this growth of contract labor, as transforming of the practice of governing.
Cordelli analyzes the “privatized state,” her central concept, in the book’s three sections. In the first section, she draws upon political theory to explain her argument that extends the dangers of the privatized state on democratic legitimacy. In the second section, she unpacks how the authorization of power, representation of interests, and domain of public governance are violated by the outsourcing of governance. The final section outlines how the practices of private donors and foundations could be better utilized to repair social and political inequalities in the United States. Cordelli’s concluding chapter suggests new approaches to relegitimize public administration in order to regain Americans’ trust in government. The Privatized State will benefit those attempting to reform public administration, to theorize how privatization affects representation, and to improve democratic governance.
In part one, Cordelli begins with some fundamental assumptions drawn from liberal political theory that address the relationship between democracy, justice, and sovereignty. For example, the rule of law—the collective, shared will of the public—represents democratic legitimacy because individuals choose it over living outside of society in a lawless state of nature. Cordelli emphasizes the democratic principle that people will follow rules when they have a say in how the rules are created. People entrust public administrators to execute these shared laws as representatives of the state.
Cordelli’s argument ultimately demands that democratic government return to governing and be more transparent in the process.
She further argues that the state is necessary for legitimate justice, and if people cannot trust the state to provide this, then they might as well live in a state of nature, outside of civil society. Public responsibilities, actions, and decisions cannot be entrusted to private actors on moral and pragmatic grounds because, she contends, there is a “fundamental and morally necessary connection between justice and public action.” In some way, Cordelli differentiates moral obligation to the public by role.
This reasoning is fundamental for Cordelli’s argument that privatizing the agents who exercise the rule of law—from soldiers to social workers—delegitimizes democracy. This is a consequence of removing citizens from the decision-making process; private contractors have no accountability to citizens, only to their clients. Cordelli posits that when public administrative duties are privatized, democratic society sacrifices its own legitimacy and regresses to a pre-civil state. She debunks the view that the privatization of public functions leads to greater efficiency and effectiveness.
In the second section, eponymously titled “The Privatized State,” Cordelli assesses the bases of representative government—the domains of authorization, representative agency, and delegated activity—that have been affected by privatization, resulting in numerous violations of democratic principle. When governments contract with private organizations, the relationship can harm both the state and those organizations. She examines whether private actors who have been contracted by the government have not only the legal authority to act on behalf of the state but also the moral sanction.
For example, Cordelli begins to dissect the problem of representative agency by asking, “Do private actors have the standing or capacity to exercise certain forms of power, or make certain decisions,” on behalf of the republic? Are they truly capable of acting “in the name of the people, whom government is meant to represent?”
While acknowledging that elected officials do not always serve “in the best interests” of their constituents, Cordelli argues that a difference in intentionality and interest between those elected representatives and private contractors results in a breach of democracy. When intention and interest are divorced from the public good, the legitimacy of democratic governance is undermined. “Different institutional roles … provide agents with different, and possibly conflicting, obligating reasons for action,” she explains. Such conflicts of interest undermine the democratic relationship between citizens and their government.
The final section, “Beyond the Privatized State,” offers a map back to a legitimate and just democratic state. Cordelli begins by redefining the relationship between the state and private actors. In a privatized state such as the United States, she says, philanthropy is a viable avenue to creating a more just and equitable society, since, she claims, “within privatized societies … the wealthy benefit from cuts to public services that harm the poor.” To inspire philanthropic giving, Cordelli outlines policies the state could implement to better direct donations toward addressing inequality. As it stands, any donation is a potential tax write-off. This policy creates a false equivalency, according to Cordelli, among all charitable causes. She suggests we could create more incentives (such as tax deductions) and costs to target how these donations are dispersed to better serve the public that has been harmed by the privatization of the state. Throughout this chapter and the section in general, Cordelli’s voice consistently sings the value and importance of preserving the democratic state that rests upon an active, responsible citizenry.
Carefully and almost conservatively, Cordelli offers three exit strategies out of the privatized state and back to legitimate democratic governance. First, and perhaps the most aspirational of the three, she suggests passing constitutional amendments that bar the government from contracting out the work of governing. She illustrates why only government officials, authorized and held accountable to the government, should conduct the work of governing.
Second, echoing the 1883 Pendleton Act, which established a merit-based selection of government officials, Cordelli demands stronger education for civil servants. These positions, she believes, should hold greater value in the community, and, drawing from France’s École Nationale d’Administration (ENA) model, she asks the state to foster and generate a culture of pride and solidarity for civil servants.
Lastly, Cordelli lays out a set of four requirements to ultimately legitimize public administration. First, she calls for the creation of a formal top-down system of controls over decision-making that is regulated by legal authority. Second, there should be clearer and more rigid definitions of roles that demarcate differences between public office holders and private contractors. Third, Cordelli requests a streamlining of the democratic decision-making process and the bureaucracy that executes these decisions. Finally, to complement the formal top-down structure, Cordelli argues that there needs to be a stronger bottom-up procedure that can provide a check on the power of administrative authority. When people feel further away from their power in the governing process, they feel a greater disconnection from democracy.
Cordelli concludes by offering ways to extend the expectations of democratic accountability that citizens apply to members of Congress to the public administrators that are responsible for executing the people’s will. Though the responsibility of “oversight” does fall to Congress, this norm perpetuates what Cordelli points to as a top-down approach that only partially addresses the lived relationships between public administrators and the public they serve. She argues for the democratic necessity of establishing bottom-up and lateral systems of oversight for public administration, such as her suggestion to create randomly selected citizen juries with the power to inform, direct, and even veto the interpretation of policies by public agencies through an “appropriately deliberative process.” Thinking about the positive reception that some states have experienced when they formed public committees to deliberate issues such as how to best distribute ICU beds and ventilators, the legality of police tactics, and the transparency of ballot counting, these recommendations could even help reverse the tide of civic discontent sweeping across the United States.
The Privatized State articulates the political reasoning behind how and why we need to reform public administration. Cordelli shows how privatization—the growth of contract labor by the government—has transformed governing and undermined the legitimacy of law and transparency of justice. This theoretically dense text gives us a new, thoroughly detailed rubric to evaluate the practice of a democratic state, redrawing the boundary lines between the public and private to protect their preservation. Her argument ultimately demands that democratic government return to governing and be more transparent in the process. Since Cordelli holds citizens responsible for the government they create, it is perhaps of little surprise that, ultimately, she expects us to join her.