ABSTRACT
The officials who staff regulatory agencies are not elected and yet they make more decisions than even elected legislators, decisions that can have direct and significant effects on matters such as workplace safety, environmental quality, and the cost and reliability of essential goods and services. The ideal of consensus also looms large in intellectual discourse about the validity of knowledge as well as the legitimacy of politics. Regulators are increasingly called upon to engage the public in making policy decisions through processes variously described as "stakeholder involvement", "partnerships", "consultation", "collaboration", "regulatory negotiation", and "consensus-building". Despite the claims made for consensus over the years, few efforts have been made to determine whether processes organized around a search for consensus achieve their goals in practice. Perhaps the most intuitive impact attributed to consensus has been the reduction of conflict. If all the interested parties can come to an agreement, then presumably all subsequent conflict should be avoided.
