Response to John Ferejohn's review of Reputation and Power: Organizational Image and Pharmaceutical Regulation at the FDA

Extract

How do republicanism and regulation coexist? How does the politics of administrative constitutionalism constrain and enable the action of regulators in their governance of economic, political, and scientific realms? How can an adaptive republic strike a set of appropriate, lawful, representative, and efficient balances among the contending interests in regulatory policy? These are what I take to be the central questions raised by John Ferejohn in his perceptive review of Reputation and Power. His answer, as applied to US pharmaceutical regulation, is not intended to be definitive but aims, rather, to pose a set of hypotheses and questions.