The Intelligence of Democracy: Decision Making Through Mutual Adjustment

Lindblom argues that effective central coordination of policy decisions is impossible in a complex society because no central decision-maker can obtain or process the information required . Coordination instead emerges through partisan mutual adjustment—decision-makers adjusting to each other without a central coordinator, without a dominant common purpose, and without fully prescriptive rules . This decentralized process, Lindblom contends, produces better policies than rational-synoptic planning and constitutes the intelligence of democracy.

Lindblom introduced 'partisan mutual adjustment' as the mechanism by which democratic decision-making achieves coordination. The term describes how multiple actors, each pursuing their own values and interests, adjust their decisions in response to one another without central direction . This concept built on his earlier incrementalism (The Science of Muddling Through, 1959) and A Strategy of Decision (1963), extending it from a decision strategy into a full theory of how democratic systems coordinate policy .

The 1959 article introduced incrementalism as a critique of rational-comprehensive policy analysis. The Intelligence of Democracy, published six years later, expands that argument into a broader theory of democratic coordination. Where Muddling Through focused on how individual decision-makers actually operate, The Intelligence of Democracy examines how multiple partisans adjusting to one another produces systemic coordination without central planning .

The framework remains influential but faces significant challenges. Critics note that Lindblom assumed a fundamental consensus on values that was exaggerated, particularly around issues of race and equality . His model treated partisans as disconnected monads, whereas network theory shows them as connected . Further, the theory assumes conditions—shared culture, resource slack, value agreement—that may not hold in globalized, networked, and increasingly conflictual policy systems .