6 - The Complementarity Principle

Summary

As long as their actions are lawful, administratorsought 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 inaccountability 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.