 Okay, welcome every day, everyone, to day three of our Tanner Lecture events. I'm Jay Wallace, Vice Chair of the Berkeley Tanner Lectures Committee. This is more of a seminar type of session. The procedure is going to be, I'll ask each of the three commentators to deliver a second set of remarks about Chuck's lectures. We'll then take a break. Chuck will offer some comments and response to the comments. And then we'll open into a general discussion. So that's the procedure. And we'll begin with Marty Gillins from UCLA. Okay, welcome everyone. In my comments today, I want to pick up on a couple of the lessons that Chuck drew from his assessments of democratic failures. And then share some thoughts on the current state of our democratic dysfunction and some speculations on what the future might hold. So one lesson is that democratic representation must be understood as a system, and not, or at least not primarily, as a dyadic relationship between individual citizens and individual representatives. And I agree with this first for the normative reasons that Chuck elucidated. For example, that representatives have responsibilities to citizens outside of their jurisdictions. But in addition, because the empirical study of democratic representation must address the system level for these two practical reasons. First is because dyadic responsiveness is of little value if it doesn't lead to policymaking that is itself responsive to citizen preferences. That can happen for a variety of reasons. So for example, if the legislative body itself is unrepresentative, like the U.S. Senate, as Pam so powerfully described yesterday, then even a perfectly responsive relationship between representatives and constituents on a sort of state-by-state basis will lead to biased policymaking. For another reason is that what looks like effective dyadic representation may in fact reflect representatives' efforts to seem responsive to their constituents' preferences, at least in their observable behaviors, like final roll call votes in Congress, when in fact their behavior on less visible and less sort of easily interpretable actions like procedural votes or amendments that are offered during committee markup is inconsistent with their constituents' preferences and driven by other motivations, like their own personal political orientations, their campaign donors, interest groups, party leaders and so on. And in fact, the number of studies of American politics show that exactly that pattern that representatives' behavior in Congress is most consistent with their constituents' preferences on those sort of highly visible kinds of actions and much less so on often equally or sometimes even more important matters that are sort of less visible to the public. A second sort of practical reason why representation needs to be assessed at the systemic level is that a central component and determinant of democratic policymaking is agenda control. And which of the many potential issues and policies make it onto the agenda can be as important as the choices that are made about those issues once they're addressed. And the agenda is inherently a characteristic of the political system. It's sort of an emergent attribute that reflects a wide range of decisions and choices that are made often largely invisibly within a very complex structure. A large body of empirical studies of representation that focus on congressional voting and the constituent representative connection miss altogether that important aspect of policymaking. So while there's important things that we can learn about representation from dyadic studies and they're certainly more tractable from an empirical point of view, after all you've got 535 data points in the House and Senate for every single policy that's voted on. But that approach provides a very partial window into the responsiveness of the government to the preferences of its citizens. A second lesson that Chuck drew is about political parties and the centrality of party competition to representation. This is something that I've largely neglected in my own work, but it's certainly a maybe arguably the key mechanism in the sort of black box between what citizens' preferences are and what government policy looks like. Now it's certainly true that parties compete, but it's less clear exactly what they compete for. And political scientists' understanding of that has evolved as parties themselves have changed over time. So in the 1950s and 60s the dominant view was that parties were vote maximizers. His primary objective was to gain and retain office. And in a two-party system what that meant was hewing to the preferences of the median voter. In many ways that did seem like a pretty reasonable description of the national parties in the post-war period. In fact so much so that as Chuck noted, political scientists at the time bemoaned the lack of a clear policy difference between the parties and the resulting lack of clear choices for voters. But starting roughly in the 1970s, as Chuck also noted, the two major parties have become far more distinct from each other and more internally homogeneous. Contemporary parties are now often understood not as vote maximizers but as policy maximizers. And this is the so-called UCLA School of Political Parties. So in this view parties are coalitions of intense policy demanding groups. Labor unions, environmentalists, business interests, religious fundamentalists and so on. With most of those groups clearly aligned with one or the other party. Though there are some sort of interests that are sort of more bipartisan in their approach to politics like the defense industry and Wall Street. But nevertheless there's a clear sort of connection now between interest organizations and one or the other political party. Now the consequence of this shift in the nature of parties is that the policy stakes of elections are greater and efforts to shape the outcome of elections have grown as reflected for example in the massive increase in the cost of political campaigns. Now lobbying of incumbent office holders is an important feature of our politics that Chuck noted that lobbying expenditures have grown dramatically over time and there's now about 12,000 active lobbyists in Washington who are working to influence the 535 members of Congress. But interest competition based on this sort of newer understanding of political parties is reflected both in lobbying of incumbent policy makers and in the makeup of the political parties and the interest group coalitions that they form or that they represent. And I think importantly those two sort of realms of interest competition, the lobbying and the composition of political parties are not really separable. Right, so organized interests are central among the complex set of actors that make up the parties and that work to shape for example the party nominations to their liking. And at the same time they also of course nurture relationships with the representatives once they're elected through lobbying, coalition, building, campaign contributions and so on. Now Chuck rightly identifies the epistemic or informational distortions that can arise when policymakers understanding of a given issue relies disproportionately on information from one side, like say the chemical companies with regard to pesticide regulation or business lobbyists with regard to the minimum wage. And in my view that informational bias is real but not the main problem. If policymakers want balanced information then they can seek out more information from less represented voices and pay less heed to interests that tend to dominate the pressure system. The larger problem in my view is the incentives that representatives face to accede to the wishes of lobbyists in their policymaking. After all lobbyists and interest organizations host campaign fundraisers, they make campaign donations themselves, they fund super PACs and perhaps equally importantly they provide jobs as lobbyists and industry executives when members of Congress and their staff leave government. Lobbying is indeed the single most common job for former members of Congress and their top staff people. And lobbyists and the sort of interests that they represent are not interested in access to policymakers for its own sake, right? They devote enormous amounts of time and energy to lobbying because it pays off or at least they are hoping that it will pay off in terms of the policies that they want. So by this account the relationship between policymakers and interest groups on the one hand with the relationship between policymakers and interest groups is a transactional one. But it's not for the most part a quid pro quo. Rather interest groups and campaign donors invest in long term relationships with policymakers and party leaders. They support like minded representatives and they work to help defeat their opponents. So in some the nature of party competition has changed over time. It's raised the stakes of election outcomes for both citizens and organized interests and it's made the interest competition and partisan competition sort of more tightly enmeshed with each other. All right, finally as I promised I'd like to turn to the kind of social context and the long term trends that impact American politics. So political dysfunction is a result of many factors. I just want to sort of point briefly to a few that I think are among the most important and suggest very briefly what they may portend for the future. Now over the past 50 years more or less we've seen increases in economic inequality in part due to technological changes and rise of global trade. We've seen increases in ethnic and racial diversity, largely due to immigration. We've seen increases in political polarization and we've also seen a rights revolution that brought greater social and political equality to African Americans and other ethno-racial minorities to women, to LGBT Americans. We've also seen a distrust of government that's grown at least in part in response to events like Watergate and Vietnam, but maybe even more so to decades of efforts by Republican and later Democratic leaders to disparage government and to laud the free market. And then starting in the 1980s we've seen a powerful and really profound shift in our media environment toward a much more fractured and sort of siloed structure. And that started with cable television in the 1980s, the internet in the 1990s, social media in the 2000s. These trends have shaken our society and they've undermined some of the social and economic security that white middle class Americans had previously enjoyed. So while our economy has prospered over the last few decades, the gains have gone exclusively to those at the top. The division of profits between owners and workers, between capital and labor, has shifted dramatically toward the former. Housing has become exorbitantly expensive in many parts of the country. I don't need to tell you about that. Public higher education has become far less affordable. Probably something also familiar to you here. Social and economic risk has been pushed down onto those who are least able to manage it with things like the sort of decline of pensions, increase in personal bankruptcies, often due to medical expenses, declines of job security in many industries and occupations and so on. So in short, the sort of middle class lifestyle is increasingly out of reach for many middle income Americans. While cultural changes and social diversity challenge the formerly preeminent position of white Christian native-born population. On the face of these changes, many Americans have concluded that their government is failing them. Some have become disillusioned and disengaged. Others are angry and many are drawn to outsider candidates who promise to disrupt a dysfunctional system or they're drawn to the array of angry voices in our fractured media environment. Many of the problems that Americans face are similar to those faced by citizens of other established democracies. Things like increasing racial diversity resulting from immigration, changes in the nature of job opportunities, increased economic inequality and a hollowing out of the middle class. And we see that citizens in many countries have lost faith in the parties and the leaders that have dominated their societies for most of the post-war period and are open to nativist and nostalgic appeals. Now one can easily imagine a dystopian kind of anti-democratic future, especially after that many of our problems, but there are some counter forces I think that also might help to turn the tide. So one is to recognize that the Republican Party is currently pursuing an unpopular agenda and it's made possible by their structural advantages in the Senate, the Electoral College and even the House of Representatives and by their willingness to abandon democratic practices in norms in order to advance their policy agenda and satisfy their coalition's intense policy demanders. But the demographic tides are not in their favor. Our society is becoming more diverse and more tolerant of that diversity. Racists, nativists and religious bigots have become more open in the Trump era, but they're not more numerous. In fact, white's racial attitudes have become gradually more sympathetic to blacks and Latinos or to put it more bluntly, become less racist over the past few decades and that positive change has only accelerated since 2016. Young people are the least racist and the most progressive and most political issues. In 2020, 35% of 18 to 29 year old voters voted for Trump compared to 52% of those over 50. Intermarriage is growing. About one in five new marriages are now to people of different races or ethnicities. Religiosity has been declining for a long time in the United States and appears to be continuing to do so and of course the proportion of the population that identifies as like white only has been in decline. So the Republicans minority or minoritarian strategy I see as a delaying tactic, right? They'll hold on to a shrinking pool of conservative white religious voters as long as they can. But even with their structural advantages and efforts to entrench their rule, they're swimming against powerful currents. So finally, let me just briefly ask what does it take to bring about progressive social change or what has it taken in the past and especially when that change comes against more at the expense of the powerful? Well, again, very briefly, it's taken a mass movement of popular support. It's taken allies among the powerful oftentimes in recognition that reforming the system that they benefit from is the only way to retain that system. So for example, in the case of business interests that allied with Roosevelt's New Deal and perhaps most dishearteningly, it's taken a common enemy. So public enthusiasm for democracy in America was bolstered first by a war against fascism and then by the Cold War against anti-democratic Soviet enemy. So our task, as I see it, is to build a multiracial democracy with a responsive government and fair representation for citizens of every kind and with a more equitable and more equal distribution of wealth and power. Now, that's not going to be easy. It won't happen quickly and it might not happen at all. But if it's possible, and it seems to me it is, then it's worth fighting for in whatever ways we can contribute to that effort. And one of the ways is by better understanding the nature of our democratic shortcomings, the ways in which they might be addressed and the criteria by which we might assess our success. And that is the larger project that I see Chuck's important work contributing to. Thank you. Thank you very much, Marty. Our next commentator today will be Pamela Carlin from Stanford University. Hi, everybody. I guess you're going to feel sort of like the folks in Henry V, because you were here on St. Crispin's Day and that, you know, those who aren't back here, they will rue that day and you'll be glad. So yesterday, the point that I began with is that Chuck is talking about fair and effective representation and he derived those words from Reynolds against Sims, a kind of foundational, indeed probably the most revolutionary single decision by the U.S. Supreme Court, because it required revamping the political system in all 50 states to change how people were elected to state legislatures and to Congress and ultimately also to school boards and city councils and county commissions and the like. And what the Supreme Court said there in the paragraph in which it announced that the goal was fair and effective representation was that fair and effective representation has to have at least one majoritarian element to it, which is that a majority of the people can in the election system elect a majority of the electoral body, and that's not the only thing you need, but it's certainly one of the things you need. And one of the underlying motivations for the court there, and I think this ties in with Marty's point and with Chuck's point about, and Jenny's point about looking at the system of representation, is that the right to vote, which lay at the heart of Reynolds against Sims, has three big elements to it. The first is the right to participate in the election, to cast a ballot and to have that ballot counted. And that's critical because that's how we show equal respect and dignity for other citizens. That's what turns people into authors of law rather than simply subjects. That's what makes them the makers, not just the matter. The second thing, which Reynolds against Sims didn't really talk about directly, but has been the focus of much of voting rights litigation and much of voting rights law since then, is that people aren't just voting to show that they're members of the society, they're voting in order to elect representatives. And so the rules for whose votes count towards actually electing a representative matter. That's where we get discussions about single member districting, an issue to which I'll return somewhat later in my talk. But even the reason people vote for representatives, and this is a point that Marty just talked about at the beginning of his comments, and it's been, I think, underlying what the Supreme Court cared about was, it's not just about whether you could elect the candidates you want. Indeed, at the time of Reynolds against Sims, there was no real suggestion that people in districts that were very small weren't able to elect or that people in districts that very large weren't able to. They were all kind of able to elect representatives of their choice if they could vote at all. But the concern was with the jurisdiction-wide election. That is, you cared about what your representatives were going to be able to do once they got elected, and that depended on other people electing their representatives as well. And so that's what I call in my work the governance piece of the right to vote. So the right to vote is about participation. That's a very individual right. It's about election, aggregation of the votes to determine who wins and who loses. That's group-based, by its very nature. Individuals don't elect members of Congress. Groups elect. And then there's governance, which is what people do after they're elected. So yesterday, what I spoke about was how the U.S. Senate, when looked at jurisdiction-wide, is deeply problematic from a majoritarian point of view. Because a majority of the members of the Senate are elected by a minority of the population. If you care deeply, deeply, deeply about the states as federal entities, and you're a super federalist in that way, then maybe you're not troubled by this. But if you believe in kind of fair and effective representation for people and not just trees and places, then you got to care about the fact that we are in a country where an increasing number of the seats in the Senate are controlled by a decreasing number of the people. Now, what I want to talk about today is turning from elections to multi-member bodies to the presidential election, which is subject to what Professor Bytes calls a regulative rule that has its own set of pathologies to it. These stem from the fact that our presidential election is decided not by popular vote, but by vote of the electoral college. And this system of having the president selected by the electoral college creates a second potential for disconnection between the formal majority of voters, majority of people in the country, and the majority of electors. And that potential has been reached to striking effect in this century. In two of the six most recent presidential elections in 2000 and in 2016, a candidate who lost the national popular vote won the presidency. And both times I think you can see the consequences of that for various policies were profound. Now this is something quite new in our history. There are, you know, people talk sometimes about the election of 1824, the election of 1876, the election of I think it's 1888. And they say, well, those were elections in which the candidate who won didn't receive a majority of popular vote. It's really hard to say that that's accurate, because in 1824, for example, not every state even conducted a popular vote for its electors. New York, for example, just selected its electors by the state legislature doing it. And that was a state that was heavily federalist. And so they might well have voted for for Adams, which would have given him an electoral majority. 1876 and 1888, there was so much vote suppression going on in the south, you really can't say who won the popular vote at all, because it was tremendously inaccurate. But in modern times, we just, you know, the first part of the 20th century, we never saw this. We never saw a candidate who received fewer electoral vote, popular votes than the other candidate getting elected. So we've seen something quite new in our history. And recent work by a trio of economists at the University of Texas suggest that this experience is not a fluke at all. That it is dependent on where people live and how the party's relative strength is distributed across the various states. They've estimated that in elections where the candidates popular votes are closely matched, the probability of what they call electoral inversions, where the candidate who receives fewer votes in the population as a whole gets elected, is quite real. So in elections decided by a percentage point or less, and remember the two parties are very competitive with each other at the national level in various ways, in elections decided by percentage point or less, the probability of an inversion is around 40 percent. It was a big number. And even at a three percentage point margin in favor of the Democratic candidate, which would be about four million more votes for the Democratic candidate than the Republican candidate, the likelihood of a Republican inversion would be 16 percent. And I'll give you just a really kind of clear example of how this plays out in a way. Consider that 2020 election. In 2020, Joe Biden received 7,059,547 more votes nationwide than Donald Trump. But he won in Arizona, in Georgia, and in Wisconsin by razor thin margins by 0.3 percent in Arizona, 0.2 percent in Georgia, and 0.6 percent in Wisconsin. If just a relative handful of votes in those states had gone the other way, and you'll remember Donald Trump in that notorious phone call saying, I just want to find 11,780 votes, Trump would have carried those three states instead of Biden carrying them. The electoral vote would have been tied 269 to 269. The choice for the presidency under the 12th Amendment would have been thrown into the House of Representatives. And Donald Trump would have been reelected there, even though we still would have received 6 million something votes fewer than Joe Biden, because in the House of Representatives, we have perhaps the most anti-democratic regulative rule in the American constitutional system, which is that they vote state by state. So California, with its 53 electoral votes or 55 electoral votes, gets the same one vote in the House of Representatives that Wyoming, with its three representative skits. So you can see that that's a profoundly anti-majoritarian system, and the risk of that anti-majoritarian rule coming into play is non-negligible in close elections, which is likely to be most of our elections in some way. Now, turning to Professor Beitz's point about fair and effective representation and racial equality, I want to make a couple of comments about that as well. It's worth noting how presidential elections, even more than congressional elections, minimize black political power in this country. In the original Constitution, enslaved people were infamously counted as three-fifths of a person for purposes of allocating seats in Congress. And today, when people talk about the three-fifths, what they suggest is the problem with this is saying that somebody isn't five-fifths of a person, they're only three-fifths of a person, right? They're only like 60% of a person. That's what we focus on today, but the original effect of the three-fifths clause was far worse than just rhetoric about who people were because the original effect of the three-fifths clause was doubly perverse. People who were enslaved counted not at all in the elections themselves for those seats in Congress. They counted for zero-fifths of a person because they weren't allowed to vote at all. And yet, their presence in the apportionment base meant that those states, the slave-holding states, had more political power than they otherwise would have had because these people were counted there for giving away the seats but not able to be counted in the elections themselves. So that was bad enough that after the Civil War, things actually got worse in a sense because after the Civil War, the political power of white Southerners ironically increased because what the 14th Amendment required was counting every person, every person who was an inhabitant of the state. So the Southern states got full credit for their substantial black populations. South Carolina and Mississippi, for example, were majority black states right after the Civil War. So they got full credit for their black population. But after the end of Reconstruction, they completely disenfranchised their black citizens. So black people counted not at all in the elections, but counted as five-fifths for giving Southern white supremacists power. And this power gave them both more seats in the House of Representatives and because of the way the electoral college works, which is you get electoral votes based on the number of seats in Congress plus the number of seats in the Senate. But, you know, it also had an effect in the presidency itself. And I'll just give you one example that I think is really interesting, which is in 1904 voters in Ohio cast the same number of votes for president as were cast in nine Southern states put together. As if you look at how many people went to the polls in Ohio, this number in the nine Southern states, this number. But Ohio only had 23 electoral votes and those states had 99 electoral votes. This disparity persisted through the presidential elections of the 1960s as there were many fewer ballots cast in the South than in the rest of the country, but the populations were taken into account in giving the electoral votes out. Now, if this is a flip side, I'll just say because Jenny made a really great point yesterday about sometimes it's hard to tell what's a benefit and what's a disadvantage. It's a flip side of one of the advantages of single-member districts over proportional representation for several kinds of groups of people in the United States, most notably immigrant communities and African American communities. And the reason for this is that these communities tend to have disproportionate numbers of people under the age of 18 and for Latino communities in many parts of the country, disproportionate numbers of non-citizens in them. So if you have a proportional representation system, turnout determines who gets elected. And in single-member district systems, turnout is a little bit less important because if you create a district that's say 60% black in total population, the black voters in that district will be able to elect the candidate of their choice almost everywhere in the country now. Whereas if you simply required proportional representation, you might run the risk either that the number of black residents of the district who are under the age of 18 and can't vote at all in places that have offender disenfranchisement, large percentages of the population are disenfranchised. And if you recognize that wealth tends to be positively correlated with people's likelihood of voting, poorer communities are less likely to vote than rich ones. So what happens is, you know, this is the flip side of what was going on in the south in the period I've been talking about here, which is there. The electorate was very small but they were able to elect. Same thing is true of single-member districts. And so it's always worth thinking about that when you think about whether we should move to proportional representation systems. Even today, I've been talking about the history, but even today, the presidential election system undermines the voting strength and thus the political power of black citizens in the United States. Nearly half of the nation's black population lives in the 11 states of the former confederacy. And they vote overwhelmingly for the Democratic presidential candidate. But in this century, indeed this millennium, which is kind of like this century, so maybe that's cheating a bit, of all those states, only three of them, Georgia, North Carolina and Virginia, have ever cast their electoral votes for the candidate nominated by the Democratic Party. And not all of them have done that in every one of those elections. So if you think about it, there are 55 elections available here and the vast majority of them, the Democrats did not win. By contrast, think about Texas. Texas is a state with 38 electoral votes and a population that's 40% either black or Latino. But not a single electoral vote from Texas has been cast for the presidential candidate that black and Hispanic voters in Texas prefer since Jimmy Carter was elected in 1976. And this disadvantage lies atop the disadvantage that Professor Bytes in his paper identifies that because black voters tend to live in larger states, the small state bias of the Senate and also of the electoral college may contribute to the failure to respond equally to their concerns. So political competition in the United States is skewed in deeply structural ways and that skew is self-reinforcing for a reason I want to turn to now. In the last 10 presidential elections, Democratic candidates have been elected five times and Republican candidates have been elected five times, although twice the Republican candidates were elected receiving fewer votes than the Democratic candidate. So in the last 10 presidential elections to put this in other terms, the Democratic candidate received a majority of the votes seven times. And yet Republican presidents have been able to successfully nominate 10 justices to the U.S. Supreme Court, six of whom are presently serving, while Democratic presidents have successfully nominated only five, only three of whom are now on the court. And that has produced a court whose decisions have permitted what I think Professor Bytes would characterize as unhealthy competition in which the Republican Party tries to move Democratic voters off the playing fields entirely through laws that make it harder to vote, that deny them even the chance to be, in Professor Bytes' words, authors of Democratic law, in which political spending is deregulated in ways that exacerbate the advantages that the wealthy already enjoy and that undercuts the strength of political parties by driving money away from parties into PACs, into super PACs, and into independent expenditures. And that on top of that, the Supreme Court comes up with a number of doctrines that move policymaking out of particular channels and into other ones. I mean, the most obvious example of this in the last term at the Supreme Court was the decision in the West Virginia against EPA case, which is about the ability of the government to deal effectively with climate change. And the Supreme Court has made that much more difficult by coming up with a set of new doctrines in administrative law that take power away from the EPA and its expertise and require the dysfunctional Senate and House that the earlier decisions have produced to be the source of making any response. So they've kind of both, you know, they've kind of disabled effectiveness at both, in both arenas. Now, for Professor Bytes, political parties are the key in our contemporary system to achieving any kind of fair and effective representation. So as we've discussed, I think, a bunch yesterday, there's a special irony that the framers of our Constitution assumed that they had created a system that would prevent the emergence of parties, what they called faction. In fact, as James Madison explained in Federalist 10, which is, I think, the most famous of the Federalist papers, the framers assumed, in his words, that the Republican principle, right, the Republican principle, would supply relief against any faction that consists of less than a majority. That is a faction that's smaller than a majority of the body. The Republican principle would solve this because, in his words, it would enable the majority to defeat its sinister views by regular vote. It may clog the administration. It may convulse the society. But it will be unable to execute and mask its violence under the forms of the Constitution. Today, however, we face exactly that risk. And as both Chuck and Marty have pointed out, it's a risk tied directly to our current partisan politics. Put simply, the current Republican party undermines the constitutional Republican principle. There's thus a wonderful double entendre in the last line of the written version of Professor Beitz's lecture where he states that, quote, restoring healthy party competition is among the most serious challenges facing Democratic representation today. Restoring healthy party competition. In the context of the paper, he's using the word healthy to modify the phrase party competition. We need to have competition that's healthy competition among the parties. Political parties are critical to effective, responsive, and responsible government. But we can't ignore the need to restore healthy parties as well. As long as one of our major parties is enthralled to election deniers and coup plotters and vote suppressors and Orban fanboys, representative democracy is under a serious threat. Thank you. Thank you very much, Pam. I guess that was, yeah, that went a little bit against the brief moment of optimism that we all sustained at the end of Marty's talk. But I'd like to introduce now Jane Mansbridge from Harvard University for additional set of comments before the break. Thanks. Not easy to follow, Pam, guys. So prepare yourself for sort of political theory. So yesterday I told you how important I thought Chuck's stress on systems was. And I'm convinced that the systems approach is an important part of normative theory in the future. We need to think not only about norms for dyads, one-to-one relationship between constituents and representatives, but also about the norms for the system. That's crucial. Today, however, I'm going to talk about a new norm for the dyadic one-to-one relation between the constituent and the representative. And then I'll return briefly to systems. I agree with almost all of what Chuck's saying. I have only two disagreements, I think. First, I think I disagree with Chuck's claims that democracy is competitive and representative democracy consists of competitive processes because I said last time, I thought there are a lot of democratic, non-competitive processes. But maybe I could address that disagreement by broadening my conception of competitive to include any initial disagreement. And then as I said, I disagree with Chuck's seeming dismissal of the normative value of constituent satisfaction. But that too we might resolve after discussion. But because so much of what he says seems to be absolutely right and a major step forward, I'll do what I did yesterday and simply fill in some blanks in the process of political representation that he didn't cover. So today I want to introduce the communicative dimension of the dyadic one-to-one relation of constituent to representative. Henry Brady, who was in the audience for the last two sessions, but had to teach today and so couldn't be here, wrote to Chuck and to the three of us commentators about what he thinks and I think all of us agree is the important distinction between what constituents want and what they need. Or you might put, say, their preferences and their interests. In the division of labor between representatives and constituents, representatives sometimes should, normatively, give constituents what they need instead of what they want. When this is the case, some explaining is in order. Some giving of an account as the traditional meaning of accountability that I referenced yesterday. But our current representative system is not set up to make explaining easy or even usually possible. When William Bianco in the early 1990s asked members of Congress whether they thought they could explain to their constituents a vote that they considered a vote for good public policy, but they believed their public did not understand, many members found that their attempts at explaining only made the constituents angry. He was discussing a vote for catastrophic coverage for health insurance in which a major advertising campaign by insurers had essentially deceived the public. In this case, the richer constituents whose private policies already covered much of what the bill would provide and who would foot some of the bill for that coverage in higher taxes had far greater access to influence than others as did insurers with their massive advertising budgets. So to counteract that unequal influence, representatives needed to explain to their constituents why they wanted to vote for catastrophic and they couldn't do it. They had no way of doing it. So that's another issue when John Kingdon was talking with members of Congress about another issue, one of them said to him, very frankly, if I had a chance to sit down with all my constituents for 15 minutes and talk to them, I would have voted against that bill, but I didn't have that chance. They wanted X and if I voted against it, it would appear to them that I was against X and I wouldn't have a chance to explain myself. So what is the appropriate normative ideal for political representation here? I've suggested the ideal of recursive representation, not just one way explaining, but two way mutually responsive back and forth communication between representatives and constituents, the kind that currently characterizes communications between a representative and a major donor. Representatives talk with major donors and they listen and they explain why they voted the way they do. So that's an aspirational ideal, this idea that there would be mutually responsive communication and just a little digression here. An aspirational ideal is one that you can't achieve, but you should attempt to strive toward and my favorite example is Christ's command, be perfect as thy heavenly father is perfect. Well, he didn't expect you to actually be God, he expected you to strive toward it and constictum ought implies can, therefore doesn't apply to the ideal itself, it applies to the striving. So recursive representation, this mutual communication is an aspirational ideal, no relationship, no representative constituent relationship will ever achieve that ideal, but we can design our institutions to facilitate a somewhat closer approach to it. Now, our institutions were designed at a time when recursive communication between the representative and the constituents was literally unthinkable. The two models of political representation that undergraduates are still taught today are those of the delegate and the trustee, both from days when the elected representative got into a carriage, drove off to the Capitol and was pretty much out of communication. So then you had to either give your representative details and instructions to take on the carriage or you had to trust them when they got to where they were going with the carriage to do what they thought was right, that's delegate and trustee. Recursive, mutually responsive communication was impossible, but today it's far more possible. So the norms of good political representation are beginning to change. In France, Roseau Valon writes, quote, citizens increasingly want to be listened to and reckoned with, they want their views to be taken into account. He says this actually with a teeny bit of distance and sarcasm, I'm reporting it straight. They want their views to be taken into account. They want their representatives, they want representatives who are accessible, receptive and open, who react to what they hear and are willing to explain their decisions. That's what's going on in France and it's going on today a little bit in the United States. To my knowledge, only one researcher's gone into the field and just ask constituents in an open-ended way what they want from their elected representatives. And bizarrely, they don't talk about policy. They, at least this teeny, teeny sample of 28 people in upper New York state. Nevertheless, it's the only sample we've got and what they said was the main thing they wanted from their representative was communication. They stressed again and again their desires that the representatives listen to and be available to them. In this small, in-depth study, reinforces Richard Feno's conclusion in the late 70s, also based on the United States. He wrote responsiveness and hence, representation require two-way communication. Although the congressman can engage in this kind of communication with only some of his supportive constituents, he can give many more the assurance that two-way communication is possible. And he concludes, access and the assurance of access, communication and the assurance of communication, these are, in his italics, the irreducible underpinnings of representation. Now, I'm not the only theorist to stress the normative value of two-way relationships. Iris, Mary, and Young said in 2000, we should evaluate the process of representation according to the character of the relationship between the representative constituents. The representative will inevitably be separate from constituents, but it should also be connected with them in determinate ways. Representation systems sometimes fail to be sufficiently democratic, not because the representatives fail to stand for the will of the constituents' policy, but because they have lost connection with them. And she concludes by enunciating a norm of political representation, quotes, a representative process is better to the extent that it establishes and renews connection between constituents and representatives. And other theorists know right about the norm and political representation of an interactive relationship where citizens have an ongoing deliberative, participatory engagement with the representatives. That's the norm, that's the aspirational ideal. So what practices let us approach that ideal today? I mentioned yesterday that long incumbencies, which everybody in political science is against except me, help their representatives learn, help the constituents learn their representatives' names and actually possibly facilitate contacting. Descriptive representation, particularly by race, but also by ethnicity and other, someone who shares your experiences, shares your background, you feel you can contact them and they can talk your language and you can talk their language. So that increases the likelihood of contact. And then as we're listing the good things and the bad things about single-member districts, single-member district systems with one member per district rather than proportional representation, which has many members per district, facility has more incentives for the representatives to actually talk with their constituents. So all the innovations that we've had in the last decade to promote individual representative constituent interaction have come about in countries with single-member districts. So there's Michael Neblos connecting to Congress project at Ohio State. And what he does is 175 randomly chosen constituents get on their laptops and the poor people are provided with laptops and so forth, get on their laptops and have a conversation with their member of Congress for an hour about some important topic like terrorism or immigration. And obviously with the 175 people in one hour, not everybody gets to talk, but in the surveys that they do afterwards, the people who haven't talked more or less very large proportions of them feel that they've been listened to and they've been taken into account because people like them have said what they had on their minds. So that's what members of Congress have taken to doing now when they participate in these 175 person virtual one hour talks is afterwards they publish a list of their thoughts and what they're thinking of doing about it based on the conversation. So it's recursive and participants talk later on average with 1.5 people. It's hard to talk to half a person, but you know. So to Australian MPs have done this and in the US, Neblo calculates if every member of Congress engaged in this kind of discussion with constituents twice a week for an hour each, not too hard. In six weeks they could cover six years, sorry, they could cover one quarter of their district. So if that procedure were institutionalized we could all expect to be contacted for such a conversation at least once, maybe several times during their lifetimes and we'll talk about the discussions with our friends and students in schools might be, you know, be might they enact simulated discussions and the process would become an established part of our representative system making that system more recursive. In Germany, the parliament's just passed legislation establishing constituency councils. You know, in Germany they have a mixed system, both proportional representation and single member districts so they try to capture the good of both. And each of the single member districts now is funded to convene a randomly selected group of 50 citizens to discuss some issues of upcoming legislation. So that's how you can do it in the single member district. Now, in proportional representation you can't but you can in proportional representation you can do group citizens as a group talking to parliament as a group and that's where citizens assemblies come in. There's, that's where randomly chosen participants after the usual self-sorting process in which many don't respond to the invitation to participate their balance. So there you've got a representative sample this that has the same gender, age, locale, et cetera even in good ones attitudes on the issue. You get a balanced group and then their citizens are paid usually half again the minimum wage to come for a weekend or several weekends to discuss these issues sometimes with the representatives in the room sometimes not. And East Belgium, that's the German speaking part of Belgium, that's the only part of polity to have institutionalized this procedure but it's in the law now. And the parliament is required by law either to enact what the citizens have recommended or to give a public justification, why not? So that's recursive and Mongolia has a similar procedure for constitutional amendments. So systemically, these processes are likely to increase responsiveness and concurrence by ensuring that members of groups who are unusually who are usually disadvantaged in the representative process receive a hearing. For same reason, it's a little bit likely to encourage systemic fairness and it also might encourage systemic effectiveness by informing representatives of the conditions on the ground. And systemically, active citizen participation in law giving can also give increased normative and perceived legitimacy to the law. These processes I want to say also have normative value to individuals independent of their systemic effects. And although I'm a huge believer as you saw yesterday in looking at systemic effects normatively, we also need to look at individual effects. These processes, I think you can think of them, this is the way I think of them anyway, as bringing small sort of threads, shards, kind of intimations of autonomy of actual lawmaking into the representative process. The representative process is one in which you delegate your lawmaking authority. But some of these processes allow some little pieces of lawmaking authority into the law, citizens own lawmaking authority into the process. And as we do that, we say something about the citizens, we give them a status that is beyond even the status they have as voters voting for the representatives. So I think we, I would argue for adding both the ideals of recursive representation and the threads of active citizen lawmaking to our plural normative ideals of political representation. Thank you. Thank you very much, Jenny for all three commentators for those really rich remarks. Let's take a nine minute break and reconvene here at 5.20 for Chuck's response, which we'll open up into a general discussion. Thanks. Great, so I'd like to now invite our main lecturer, Chuck Bites, to the podium for some brief responses to the rich comments, and then we'll open up into a general discussion, which will continue until around 6.15, at which point these doors will magically open and we'll segue into a reception. Thank you, Jay. Thank you, all three of you. Once again, I mean, you've helped me to see where these lectures do, and maybe they don't lead our thinking about democratic representation. And again, let me just thank you all three of you for the time and attention you've devoted to these lectures. I mean, I know how much time this occasion is taken for people, and I'm just very grateful. You've made this intellectually profitable for me in ways beyond what I would have expected. So, like yesterday, I again find myself in the position of responding to comments that I read as mostly sympathetic, and they certainly aren't the harsh disagreement that I had kind of half wished for yesterday afternoon. But the comments mostly don't overlap, and so I'm gonna try to respond to them one by one, and because all three of the comments are rich and contain a lot, I'm gonna just sort of pick and choose some points to comment about. So apologies in advance for not addressing all the points the three of you have made. So, beginning with Marty's comments, they're really quite comprehensive, and they extend his own views well beyond the territory that he described yesterday and that are covered in his famous book. So I wanna try to single out two points to emphasize, I think not in either case to disagree. So, the first one is about parties, and as Marty notes in his own earlier work, parties were mostly in the background, and as I said on Monday, there is some subsequent work, work subsequent to his book, about the influence of wealth on party, on policy outcomes that suggests that the influence of wealth is mediated by partisanship in ways that Marty's own findings don't reflect, although it's compatible. And the sort of bottom line of this research is that Republicans are more likely to reflect affluent preferences than Democrats, and that so partisanship may play a greater role in explaining the pattern of outcomes that Marty documents than we've recognized. And that gets us into somewhat complicated territory by raising the question of how wealth and partisanship interact in influencing policy. And I would love if we have time in the discussion, I would really love to hear how Marty reads that interaction because I do think it, although I'm not sure it complicates the kind of normative diagnosis, I do think it kind of would fill in a kind of level of detail that might help us to see how it is that parties helped, that party competition helps to produce the policy bias that Marty has shown us. Now, as he observes, there's a larger story to be told about parties that's very important, actually, and involves changes in the nature of parties in the last several decades. Several writers have pointed out, in some respects, the age we're living in is not historically unusual. The historically unusual age was the period from the end of the Second World War until the middle of the, maybe middle of the 1970s, as far as the competition of parties is concerned. The only comment I wanted to make a reflection about Marty's comments was that I'm not sure that we can generalize across the two parties in ways that the UCLA school's approach might suggest. I mean, it's at least in the early iterations of that work 10 years ago. The suggestion was that a similar kind of evolution had happened in both parties. Both parties had become much more something like coalitions of intense policy demanders, and that explained the political conduct and political programs of both parties. So something like that might be true, but it seems to me that the Republican Party, and here I speak as a complete amateur observer, that the Republican Party has become more ideologically homogeneous than the Democratic Party, and I think we know that empirically. And also it seems to me more ideologically driven by the Democratic Party. In fact, you know, it's a common criticism of the Democrats that they can't get themselves together around any very clear set of ideological commitments, and it may work to their disadvantage. But this latter point I think bears on the asymmetries in party conduct that maybe all of us have mentioned yesterday and today. So I want to say, although this doesn't particularly illustrate any disagreement here, that as a political theorist reading political science, one of the most interesting problems seems to me to be to find an adequate way to conceptualize contemporary American political parties. I mean, they're not easy to comprehend. They're certainly not collective agents. You know, I think an old truth that we inherit from V.O. Key is that there are parties in the electorate, there's parties in the government, there's party organizations, there are national parties and there are state parties. They're not arranged together in a neat hierarchical structure. They're only loosely connected, they're more like a network than a hierarchy. They have some capacity, but it's realized to a greater or lesser extent for coordination and for central guidance. And all of that makes it hard to kind of get into your head a picture of what an American political party is, and it certainly makes it difficult to make sense of claims that people make about the ways that parties are behaving. It makes sense, I think even, it makes it hard to make sense even of the notion that parties have ideological commitments because I think it's clear on the face of it that that's just not true of everybody who we identify with either of the parties, though maybe more so for Republicans today. So, you know, as Marty observes, we also now need to take account of the relationships between organized interests and various elements of our parties. I mean, they interpenetrate in ways that traditional party scholars haven't on the whole, I think, recognized or at least not in the last 20 or 30 years, and maybe not even in the age of Schachtner. Now, it's true, I think, and the political scientists here would bear me out that there's dispute about the nature and the role of parties in contemporary US politics. You know, I think there's a whole body of people who don't accept the UCLA school view. And I think that here, one thing political theorists could usefully do would be to bring some analytical clarity about the terms of reference and the grounds of disagreement about what it means to say that we have political parties. As I said yesterday with some exceptions, and you know, the notable ones are books by Nancy Rosenblum and Russell Muirhead. Political parties continue to be mostly absent from the work of democratic theorists. I've argued that they shouldn't be, and I think one step in that direction probably is just for us to get clearer about what people are arguing about when they argue about how we should conceptualize political parties. So I have a much briefer second comment, which is about interest competition. So Marty's the expert here, and I certainly wouldn't want to disagree with the empirical claim that the main problem about fairness involves the incentives that representatives face to exceed to the lobbyists who compete for their support. And I think absolutely it seems clear as an empirical matter that interest groups tend to invest in long-term relations with politicians, which is the important point that Marty made, and I think as follows, that they're not offering quid pro quos in any simple way. They're trying to cultivate more complicated kinds of dependence of politicians on their lobbyist and interest group supporters, the dependence for campaign fundraising and contributions for policy advice, jobs for staff through revolving doors and so on. Larry Lessig has written about this at some length, and he describes it as dependency corruption, which seems to me a kind of an apt term for the phenomena that Marty describes. But still, as I read the literature, we shouldn't lose sight of the aspect of interest representation that involves competition for attention within a deliberative system. We have pretty good observational evidence, I think, that competition for the attention of policymakers, I mean, members of Congress, perhaps more importantly, congressional staff members and even more importantly officers of administrative agencies. But there, that competition drives a process in which the skewed distribution of various kinds of resources produces skewed deliberative outcomes. And again, it's not a question of quid pro quos in any simple sense. Maybe we could describe it as a kind of dependency corruption, but I think what looks like dependency in these kinds of cases can't be explained without this competitive dynamic within what is essentially a kind of a deliberative structure that produces it. And I kind of, I don't think Marty and I disagree about this point, and I certainly take the earlier point about dependency relationships on board. Maybe a somewhat brief comment about Pam's remarks today. She makes several important points about the Electoral College as a site of the disconnection that she's described between formal majorities of electors and the popular majority of voters and the resulting potential for what's been described as inversion, which produces presidential election outcomes that favor the party of the national popular minority. I think an important comment about the resulting potential for the underrepresentation of blacks in national policy, the self-reinforcing nature of the skew that results from the president's influence over the composition of the court and the perversion of party competition that several of us have mentioned that's been produced by the transformation of at least a large part of the Republican Party into what we might call an anti-system party or in Pam's words, one whose strategy undermines the constitutional Republican principle. These observations seem to be important and hard to resist. And if I were to expand these lectures, I would try to find some way to take all of them on board. I'll have to think more, but it doesn't seem to me offhand that they raised doubts about the view of the normative view of fairly regulated competition that I tried to sketch in the lectures, although they might raise doubts about the relevance of those comments to our current situation. One sort of footnote comment I might wanna offer just about the relationship between our observations of the relationship between the popular vote for the presidency and the output of the electoral college and the relationship, that is the relationship between that comparison and the claim that our system is objectionably minoritarian. I think there's a lot to the objection that the system is minoritarian, but I think it needs to be borne in mind that it's the structure of the current system that establishes the incentives that candidates face in electoral competition for the presidency. And so there isn't any incentive now to compete for a national popular majority because that's not how the system works. The incentive is to compete for majorities in the states that can be flipped. And a candidate who is pursuing those incentives may very well produce a minority in the national popular vote. So while I don't disagree at all with the critique of the electoral college system, I think one wants to be a little bit careful in two easy inferences from what we observe about the distribution of popular votes for the presidency and the objectionably minoritarian, the potential for minority rule that's built into the constitutional structure. It's certainly there, but I think it's at this point a hypothesis, maybe a plausible hypothesis, but only a hypothesis that a presidential election that was conducted in response to incentives that encourage candidates to seek real national majorities might still produce minority outcomes from the electoral college, so from some hypothetically restructured electoral college. So that's not an objection at all, just a kind of observation, I think worth bearing in mind when we look at the relationship between what we observe and the presidential vote and the outcomes. So sort of along the lines that I was mentioning a minute ago, the main questions that Pam's comments raised for me concern the inferences that we should draw. I mean, they're kind of along the lines of therefore what? I mean, are there possibilities for reform that might be both effective and politically feasible? So some years ago, people will recall there was some talk about an interstate compact that would commit participating states to apply their electoral college votes to the national party popular vote winner. I think it would be worth asking, I'd love to hear reflection about this, what are the prospects of that idea today? It seems to me that Pam's analysis suggests that it's probably less likely now than when first broached when it seemed that both parties might believe that they had an interest in supporting the proposal. And if the trends that she describes continue, then a compact wouldn't be, I think a compact wouldn't be in the interest of Republicans because it would probably result in more democratic victories than the institutional status quo. So it's worth considering whether that's right. I mean, if so, then we're more dug in, I think to the difficulties Pam describes than we might have thought. And a brief point about parties. If we agree that at least part of the problem with unfair representation is that the Republican party has engaged in efforts that change the rules of the game in a way that effectively disenfranchise some groups of democratic voters, and otherwise undermines fair competition, what follows from that? And should we agree, for example, with Jenny's concerns yesterday about the bad influence of excessive partisanship and try to think about alternative ways to organize political competition? I mean, if we want to go down that route, what would that look like? Aught we to be thinking, as some people have argued about mechanisms that are about changes that would make it easier for third parties and independent candidates to compete for presidential office? I mean, that would be a sort of an anti-partisan reform. Would that make any sense? Should we hope for a recapture of the Republicans by leaders who are committed to constitutional Republican principles? What would that require of other political actors? Or what would require of manipulative, elements of campaign and election regulation? Would it be constructive that some people have recommended to give the party machinery more control over campaign finance? Or would that just, is that train left the station? These are all questions that Pam's commentary raised for me. I don't feel particularly competent to say very much about them, but it seems to me worth a conversation. Now, Jenny's comments, once again, are rich and diversified and in some ways challenging. And again, I can only respond very selectively. So to begin just very briefly, just as a matter of clarification, in my view, to say that democracy is competitive is not to say that it's only competitive. As I said yesterday, my concern with so much of democratic theory in the last couple of decades and particularly some forms of deliberative theory is its resistance to the thought that democratic politics involves competition in any essential way. We've had more than a generation of theoretical work on deliberative democracy and it's been constructive, I think, in important ways. Among other things, it's been a reminder that in the early days of representative democracy, the notion that representation is, as it was often put, government by discussion in a forum visible to all was really quite central to the aspiration that political representation could be and could be seen to be simultaneously democratic. That seemed to me very important. And it's an idea that it would be right to say dropped out of many views of political representation that emerged in the 20th century. And those include the views of some theorists of competitive models, I mean, conspicuously including Schumpeter, though I think it's worth reminding ourselves that even Schumpeter devoted some attention in a chapter in his book that people rarely read to the role of parliamentary process in his conception of democratic politics. My worry, and this is a really, I think, an inside baseball worry in democratic theory, sorry for the sports metaphor, but baseball's been on my mind lately, is that the wave of interest in deliberation has obscured the essential institutional structure of democratic representation, which as I've argued is fundamentally and unavoidably competitive. As I was preparing these lectures, I looked through a fairly wide swath of theoretical works of democratic theory in the last few decades, just looking for references to parties, districting alternatives, election laws, and other features of institutional structure that we might regard as intended to regulate political competition. And I was surprised how little discussion was devoted to any of these institutional features. I mean, the kind of the central tendency of the literature has been to kind of fly above these variations in institutional structure and to operate at more abstract levels of principle. Now, of course there are exceptions. I mean, there are always exceptions, but I think it's hard to avoid concluding that there is a kind of distaste among some democratic theorists, or maybe it's just discomfort, with the thought that whatever else it is, democratic politics is basically a system for processing conflict by establishing regulative rules to challenge it in a way that's fair to its participants. So the bulk of Jenny's comments today concern the potential value of increasing the recursive communication of representatives and constituents. She says, if we could find a way to do that, well, she says that's an aspirational ideal, and she points out that there's some experimental evidence that structured processes of communication involving representatives and selected groups of constituents can have an impact on the way that representatives confront choices in the legislature, and maybe more importantly, can have an impact on the level of constituent trust in representation, which seems important. She points out, I think correctly, that it's easier to foster this kind of recursive communication in single-member district systems than in at least some proportional systems, which seems to me is kind of an important point in not often or adequately taken account of when people kind of draw up these balance sheets of the difference between the two kinds of system. And she also notes, I think correctly, that it's more likely to occur with representatives who've held office for more than one term than those newly elected. So I kind of joined Jenny in wondering why there is such hostility to incumbency among some political scientists. So I think maybe it's not, I wouldn't want to say that it's widely shared, but I've wondered sometimes why we think it's a bad thing for constituents to kind of want to reelect the same person time after time, maybe they just appreciate what they're doing. So, you know, looked at from one perspective, it's kind of an appealing and irresistible ideal to try to cultivate more recursive communication. But I'd have to say that in the current political environment, the adjective aspirational has to bear a lot of weight, because it's hard to imagine how systems of recursive communication could be implemented at anything like the scale that would be required to produce substantial changes of the kind that we might hope for. But I think the main thing to say about that proposal is different. It's that implementing that proposal at scale wouldn't only require overcoming some predictable partisan and institutional resistance. I mean, it would also require kind of substantial changes in other parts of the other aspects of the representation system. You know, I think particularly of the system of campaign finance, which demands an extraordinary commitment of time and energy by representatives to fundraising. You know, when they're in Washington, we're told that they spend a big chunk of their time on the phone calling potential donors. And when they're in their districts, they spend a lot of time attending fundraisers and so on and so forth. That would have to change to make enough time for representatives to devote kind of meaningful attention to programs of recursive communication with any significant proportion of their constituents. And beyond that, I suspect that lobbying and stakeholder consultation would also have to change because that also commands a lot of time and attention and we can't legislate an increase in the length of the day. So we'd have to figure out some ways to reform the other parts of the system in ways that would make it possible for systems of recursive communication with ordinary constituents could have a place. Now, I don't mean to, I don't say this to frame an objection to Jenny's proposal. If it could be made to work, it seems to me entirely constructive, but just to illustrate the ambition of the proposal kind of interpreted at scale. We're working with a system whose dysfunctions are a product of a variety of factors and it'll be hard to change one piece of that system without changing others. So that's not a challenge to the wisdom of the idea but to its feasibility at the scale at which it would have to be implemented to make the kind of difference that we would like to see that we might hope that it would make. So I'm not gonna say more, I think, about these individual comments other than just to reiterate my thanks to the three commentators. I think I've probably in any case taken more time than I should. So thanks again to all three of you for helping me to think beyond what I've said in these lectures. It's really been hugely valuable to me. Okay, at this time, I'll like to open things up for discussion so please raise your hand if you've got a question. But if I could ask you to just wait a moment before you ask your question until the microphone reaches you. Henry, we'll start with you. But Jamie, okay. Put your hand up if you- Should I start? Yes, you can start. Okay, so this is a little unfair because you've talked about how you don't really wanna deal with the complexities of the environment and yet you've done the really wonderful move bringing parties into your system. How about the media? It's clearly true that in the last 20, 30, 40 years there's been tremendous changes in the media. It's clearly true that in a representative system you need the media to mediate between the voters and the parties and therefore it seems to me they maybe should have a somewhat larger role and not just be ostracized to the environment out there and that you should include them in how competition might or might not work better. I couldn't agree more. And as I said, either yesterday or Monday I'm losing track now of the days. I think the sort of one of the major missing pieces in these lectures would be some attempt to understand the way that the structure of political communication has affected the process of representation. And I think you've put your finger on exactly the sort of entry point there which is the dramatic changes in the structure of the media in the last, you tell me, three decades, four decades, two decades. That's a lot of different things that have happened. No, a lot. And as I- So it's the demise of local media, for example. No, absolutely. And as I said, on Monday mentioned Nadia Urbanadi's observation that these changes have, the fundamental effect of these changes has been to undermine the operation of effective intermediary institutions by creating these, you know, a much more decentralized pattern of political communication. And it's devalued, it's removed the kind of value that intermediary media institutions can provide by sort of editing and disciplining political communication. So I couldn't agree more with the importance of the point. The reason I didn't try to say more about it in the lectures other than the obvious, which is that I felt like they already were trying to say too much, is that I just, I think our kind of systematic understanding of these changes in political science has not developed as much as some of the, our understanding of some of these other moving parts that I've been talking about. You know, I don't think, I mean, I have a couple of colleagues who work on this fairly closely. And their view is that we're not very much beyond that in the political science of, you know, the impact of changes in the media on political communication, we haven't really gotten beyond what is essentially the kind of descriptive stage of telling ourselves in each other what's happened. But, you know, we don't know very much about the impact of that has been on the conduct of politics. So, you know, both because I thought it was more than I could handle, but also because I wasn't sure that we had enough reliable political science to say very much, I decided to leave it for, as I put it in the lecture to leave it for another time. Would anyone else like to speak to this issue? I mean, I would just briefly say that it's easier to conceive of ways we might regulate competition between parties and within the electoral structure than it is to think about how we might regulate the media. Doesn't mean that we can't do it, but it does also raise the idea that there's both a sort of regulatory side to the kind of changes we might hope to bring about. And maybe something like more of, like what kind of subsidies, sort of like the kind of communication that Jenny was talking about isn't really regulation, but it's changing the nature of the political system and maybe that's sort of the lens through which we could look at changes in media or what could be done about them. Well, that's right. And this, I mean, that approach also is a way to deal with the First Amendment issues that would arise and any efforts to regulate. And now then there's a kind of an issue of how you divide the regulatory burden between the state and the media themselves and how you encourage the development of kind of self-regulation. There's a lot of tricky questions here at the level of regulatory structure. Okay, next question. Okay, I think from the bottom up. And so many times I hear after doing a lot of work with various leaders in the community, I agree with what we just learned. It makes sense to me, but I'm not gonna do it. And they're not gonna do it because they've got too much pressure on their backs to get reelected. So the question is, where in the system do we create an opening for candidates to wanna do it? Wanna have a responsive, productive conversation with their constituents. On an issue that maybe their constituents don't agree with them on, but it's necessary to have that discussion and create that opening in the community so maybe some change, thoughtful change can happen. So where does the door open? Jenny, that sounds like it's for you. Yeah, I'm not 100% sure I grasped the full import of the question, but Larry Susskind at MIT has developed some very good suggestions for how to run quote unquote town halls. I was talking about the fruitfulness of randomly selected bodies, which turned out to be potentially very deliberative where citizens learned very much to talk with one another. But if you're not gonna go that route, if you're gonna have an open, come one, come all, which town hall, which generally attracts activists, you usually, you often get into a shouting match. I mean, you often don't have anything at all deliberative and Larry Susskind at MIT has come up with a bunch of suggestions such as you select five people to come up to the stage, not just one at a time but five and you ask them to say what they have to say, but you ask each one to say something that the other person hasn't said and if they start to say something the other person hasn't said, you say thank you very much, your turn is over and so forth, that's just a, I'm just giving you one example, but he has a whole list, well thought through list, of how to take what we have relatively dysfunctional quote unquote town halls where representatives and constituents don't have much of a recursive conversation and change them into something much more productive. His suggestions have never been implemented. I probably am one of the few people who sort of read them and taken them to heart, but they're good suggestions and if we were to take that ideal very seriously, I think that we could just begin to design institutions that responded to that ideal. The problem is we haven't taken the ideal very seriously, so nobody's reading Larry Susskind and nobody's thinking, how do we change these institutions that we now have to make them more deliberative, more recursive? Could I just ask was the question about how to change the incentives facing citizens to get them to participate more in these kinds of exchanges or was it incentives facing office holders? It's kind of both, it's, the leadership is challenged to be honest with its constituents to have an open discussion on an issue that really does need to be discussed and the other side of it is the constituents don't see any need for it or don't want to. And the problem then is how do you get them together so that you don't get a conflagration, you open doors so that they can begin to see the other person's point of view. I see. Yeah. Next question. Good question. Yeah. Is Mike Martin? I have a question for Chuck going back to yesterday where you were highlighting the centrality of competition in political activity. And I was just wondering whether just the bare idea of competition is too abstract, distinguishes different kinds of ways in which we interact. So this came up briefly in your presentation where you contrasted economic competition as one model of competition and that that might be misleading. And maybe what you had in mind at that point was the idea in some competitions there are goods that are distributed through the competition, which are independently construable and we can imagine different ways in which they could be obtained. But on a certain picture of central problem of a democratic society, so for instance, Bob Adams paper conflict is the idea we face a problem that different groups of us prefer policies where only one of them can be implemented. And so the competition there will be, well, only one of these policies will be implemented. And our interest in the competition partly is just that we can reconcile ourselves to the frustration of our policy not being implemented. In that case, it's less clear that we have independently identifiable goods that are distributed through this. And it seems to me when we talk about the values that competition furthers, it looks rather different in those two kinds of cases. I'm sure there are other forms of competition which likewise will give us different pictures of values that are furthered. So I wonder whether the granularity of the notion of competition is where we want the normative story to go? Well, I think that is where we want the story to go. And that's the reason I tried to talk about, I talked about these three, I call them sites of competition, competition in electoral competition, party competition, interest competition. Each of those things happens in different kinds of institutionally defined structures. And I was interested in, the general question I was interested in was how competition ought to be regulated in order to be fair and effective to the people affected by it. And my thought was that competition takes different forms at these different sites and our understanding of the right regulative rules for those sites needs to be sensitive to how it is to, as you say, the granularity of competition, and how it is that it works at those sites. So, I mean, I think I'm on the same wavelength as your question. There's a larger question that Henry raised about the regulation of the public sphere or a public of political communication at large. And there I think the same kind of question arises, although the way that one deals with the regulation of competition is gonna have to be different. It's gonna have to respond to the way that public communication might be organized in order to serve the purposes that we need it to serve for electoral and legislative choice to work. So I think, I just think that's another instance of the point that, you know, it isn't as if we have this one abstraction called political competition. We have, I mean, to say that democracy is a competitive system, or at least often partly a competitive system, is to say that it has these kind of competitive modules in it, each of which serves a certain kind of purpose and that needs to have its own norms worked out. So just to kind of take, I mean, a quick, and I think probably, you know, slightly toy example, I mean, if you were to think about norms for, if you were to think about lobbying in the way that I was describing, as kind of competition for the attention of policy makers who need some resources that lobbyists can provide in order to do their job well, what we'd want presumably is to organize and structure the lobbying process so that the policy makers who are kind of the target of it sort of have reasonable access to enough different sources of information viewpoints so that they aren't vulnerable to the kind of manipulation of the, you know, their limited attention time for those with greater resources to get the kinds of outcomes that they want. So, you know, one of the proposals in the case of lobbying of congressional committees, one thing that's happened in Congress in the last few decades is that the share of the congressional budget that is devoted to committee staffs has declined while the share that has been devoted to essentially political activity by the leadership has increased. And that's had the effect of putting committee staffs in a greater dependency relationship to the private lobbyists who have the most resources. Well, that's just, I mean, to me, that just doesn't make any sense if the aim is to put the staff members in a position that they can make reasonably well-informed independent judgments about what to recommend to their bosses. So, you know, a way to deal with that is simply to increase the independent resources that are available to these committee staffs, increase their budgets, find ways to subsidize public interest lobbies so that they're in a better position to offset the impact of the private interest that already have significant resources. So, you know, but I think the only way to kind of understand norms or that sort of thing is to think about the way the process actually operates and how it is you could regulate it so that it would do a better job of producing the outcomes that we need it to produce. So, I'm just, I think just, you know, extemporizing on your own observation, but I think that's important. Any, all of the examples, all the sites, the examples you use. All our cases where the goods in question can be defined independent of the game. Whereas one response to Jenny yesterday saying, it's better to think of the political realm other than in competitive terms. If we treat it in the Bob Adams conflict way, it makes no sense to say there can be politics without competition if there can only be politics where there's conflict. Because the only way we can live together with conflict is to have some way of settling the conflict. And so that's just formally a competition in one sense. It seems to me that's different from the kinds of competitions that you've mainly focused on. Well, I might disagree a little bit that the only way to resolve conflict is through a competitive process. You know, we could have a lottery. That's not competitive. We could establish an authoritarian dictator. You know, it's, I mean, democracy is one way among many of resolving political conflict. And what I'm arguing is that one feature of it is that it has a kind of distributive set of competitive processes that help it to do the job we need it to do. Can I just ask a follow-up question to that in a sense, which is there are competitions in which it's a zero-sum game. And then there are competitions where it's not a zero-sum game. If you think about a competition among ideas may produce a different idea than you started out with in the sense that in a very different way than an election where one person is gonna hold that office. And so that's a zero-sum competition. And I think maybe separating out the different kinds of competition would be helpful in thinking about which ones get which kind of regulation. No, I think that's right. I mean, that comes into, where I think about that is thinking about this question of, you know, how to regulate political communication. You know, how do you think about what the norms are for regulating it? You know, it's, you know, you kind of think in a John Stuart Mill sort of way. You know, what you want is to kind of establish terms that make it possible for some variety of positions to be sufficiently well represented in the public conversation that all of us as kind of part of the audience can have access to them. And you know, presumably if that works, we're all gonna come out ahead. So it's gonna be a non-zero-sum process. But there's still gonna be the question of how to regulate what is basically a contestatory process so that it produces the outcomes that we need to produce. Yeah, it's just gonna be a very different kind of regulation than for a zero-sum competition. Good. Daniela. Next question. Thank you. So I may break the frame slightly here. I want to just think about a very different context, but because it's got some really striking similarities to what you've been talking about. So I was really struck by the rules quote about democracy being a best regulated rivalry. I agree with that. I agree absolutely in everything you've been saying about the importance of competition. Sorry, you agree with what he said or you agree that we should pay attention? Oh, no, no, I agree with that. I agree that that's actually a very good definition of all the forms of democracy that have existed. So I'm thinking about ancient Greek democracy. It may seem surprising, but that actually is a very good account of ancient Greek democracy, as I understand it. That it's regulated rivalry among politicians who make proposals and try and get them passed. It's highly regulated through the legislative process, through judicial activity. The difference would be that there are no parties. So that's one kind of big thing that your emphasis on parties has really struck out to me because that seems like an extra that we have just in the modern world. But also the big differences in the ancient Greek context, people were competing to lead. They were not competing to rule. They were not competing to be part of a ruling body. Instead, they're competing to be on a public platform, have loads of influence, be really significant, part of the political elite, but only from a leadership position, only occupying these positions, not actually making decisions themselves. Those decisions are left for actually also representative bodies of ordinary people, a different form of representation, but both those bodies seem to conceive of themselves acting on behalf of others in the way we would recognize, the way that Pitkin would recognize, for example. And also the speakers, the politicians, seem to understand their position as representative too. So I guess the two things I want to say is kind of, are there independent goods that you can think of for supporting the existence of parties with respect to competition that only parties can bring? Or to flip that question around, you could say, oh, sorry, this seems to have just died. I'm going to run out of battery. Thank you. And the other thought was how... Sorry, could you say the party question again? Oh, yeah, sorry. So how important is it that you have parties instead of maybe other forms of competition that we could think about? How important are parties as the vehicles of competition in your theoretical understanding? And then also, how important is it that the people who are competing are competing actually to rule, to be members of ruling bodies? Because I think that you can have the competition and the rivalry without having to have that. I'd love your thoughts. Thank you. Well, I mean, both interesting questions. Just to go back just briefly to that Rawls passage, to me, part of what's interesting is the passage says that democracy is at best regulated rivalry and then there's an important second part of that sentence too. But the question that it raises just about Rawls is that it's a good deal of what he says about democracy makes it out to be more than regulated rivalry. And to say that it's at best regulated rivalry raises this question of what was the force of the at best and all of that. That's what drew my attention to it. And then to the source that he cites, which is this incredibly interesting essay by Frank Knight, who I think anybody who's heard of him tends to think that he's part of this kind of Chicago school of kind of right wing libertarians. And he's anything but that in this essay. His central worry is that political competition and market competition, if it's not well regulated, is going to exacerbate inequalities of wealth and power and undermine our capacity to do whatever the competition is supposed to help us to do. So anyway, that seemed to me kind of an interesting angle on Rawls' perception of democracy that we haven't thought very much about. Now I don't know, I mean, what goods do parties serve that couldn't be served by other forms of organization? I mean, I guess I'd need to know what the other forms are in order to make the comparison. My kind of general aspiration for parties in modern mass democracies is more or less Chatchniders, that they could organize conflicts among interests in society in ways that make those conflicts available for public intervention. The Chatchnider view is that you have two kinds of competition going on. You have competition among interests for control of policy, and then you have competition among parties for control of the government. And what the competition among parties for control of the government should do is kind of discipline and make visible the competition among interests. Because his view was that tends to be invisible, and I think that's still mostly true. We can't see what the lobbyists are doing and what the interest groups are doing in trying to influence the output of this or that kind of decision about policy. But we could hope that parties could try to assemble coalitions of interests capable of commanding majority, a majority and an electoral majority. And in order to do that, they would have to make the interests at stake public so that people could see what they are. So I kind of think, and again, that's an aspiration. It's not a necessity in party competition. And I just don't know what other... It's maybe just a failure of imagination, but I don't know what other way we could organize electoral competition on the mass scale in order to get that degree of popular control over the struggle for policy. Maybe there's other alternatives, but as I said yesterday, if not parties, what's the alternative proposal? I don't know quite what to make of the other question about whether it makes a difference that competition is for rule. I mean, you know, I think what political competition is basically about is for control of the policy-making capacity of the state. And another way to say that is for control over the disposition of the state's coercive power. And which strikes me as like a pretty important subject. And if that's what rule is, then maybe competition for rule just is what we should be talking about. And there may then not be a difference between your description of competition for rulership positions in the ancient world and competition in the modern world. But I think that may just be a matter of the appropriate level of abstraction. Can I make a quick... I don't think anyone has done an appropriate balance of parties, not parties, and that would be good. But let me argue against what I was arguing yesterday and try to give you a very specific instance of where the absence of parties hurts the deliberation, which is take my Cambridge, Massachusetts, no parties. It's all ranked for choice voting and it's all a matter of voting for individuals. That means that questions like low income housing or other issues don't come up in an articulated way. People are voting for this person, that person. Some individuals take stances on these things, but there's not the kind of articulation that you would have if you had parties in Cambridge, Massachusetts. So that's a real life example of something that's more Athenian. What would it have looked like if in Athens there had been two parties? Around what concepts would they have gelled would it have been simply rich and poor? Or would there have been other issues? Should we go more to war or less to war? Would there have been a different kind of conversation in Athens if there had been parties that was a pro-war party, anti-war party, and people had actually talked about it in those terms. Citizens had talked with one another over, so to speak, the dining room table and had those things articulated for them by parties. I think Athens, you've got to answer, but one just little thing about leadership versus rule. Yes, you compete as parties to rule, but then let's take the Congress. There's an awful lot of competition for leadership, not for rule, within the party. So you have both. Yeah, no, that's a fair point. Hannah Ginsburg is next. Yeah, thank you very much. I'm a bit embarrassed about this question. I think it may come from way out of left field because I understand that you're concerned with actual practical issues about how political representation in this country actually functions, and you're concerned with very concrete problems about how to get it to work better. And my question has more to do with a sort of more ideal or aspirational conception of what democratic representation is. But having issued that caveat, the question has to do with the idea of being an author of democratic law, which is something that came up in Chuck's lecture and that Pam brought it up today. And my sense was that the assumption there is that what it is for us to be authors of democratic law is something that happens exclusively through our role in the electoral process. So I think Pam said something like, we're authors of democratic law, because we have a vote. But I wanted to ask about this because I was thinking about the view that Shana Schifrin develops in her panel lectures actually a few years ago, where she argues that you're the author of democratic law, not just by having a vote, but in ways that have nothing to do with the electoral process. So in particular, she's interested in the way in which citizens can influence common law through being involved in the judicial process, maybe as litigants or plaintiffs or friends of the court, or other ways in which they can just influence law because of the ways in which judges tend to be responsive to public opinion. And it seemed to me that, and she thinks that this is sort of all part of what it is to be represented in a democratic system. And it seemed to me that Jenny's kind of recursive idea of conversations with legislatures, even though it does have to do with the electoral process rather than the judicial side of things, is consistent with this somewhat broader more capacious idea of what it is to be represented and have a role, I mean, have a role in authoring the laws by which one's governed. So I guess the question here is, to what extent you think that the criteria for successful representation should focus exclusively on the electoral process, or the extent to which you think that there's maybe room for a broader conception of democratic representation, which goes beyond the kind of representation we have through being participants in elections and interacting with our legislators? Well, that's a big question. As I tried to say at the beginning of the first lecture, my kind of goal here was to try to follow the political science and try to understand, to try to, by thinking about the norms for successful representation that are implicit in the political science, to try to articulate some broader sense of what fair and effective democratic representation might be like, and that I know meant taking on board a narrower conception of political representation than some people would like, and I don't dispute that the broader conception is important, and as I was saying yesterday in response to Jenny, I think it's important to be able to see the electoral component as part of a larger system. And an important part of that larger system, which we've talked about a little bit today, is the kind of public process of political contestation, which has certain kinds of values that go beyond the electoral system, but it also belongs to the electoral system because the public contestation can influence the way that members of representative bodies conduct themselves, and so it isn't just a, part of a, I shouldn't say just, it isn't that we have this larger democratic process with a kind of significance of its own, it's that part of its significance is that it can guide and nudge and motivate the conduct of people who have offices within the structure that is defined by constitutional rules. So I think it's important to see the electoral process as part of that larger structure, and I don't think it's, I think political science can be narrow when it thinks that the only question we've got is kind of how the rules influence the responsiveness of office holders to their constituents. Now having said that, I think that Shauna's lectures, which I think are wonderful lectures, are dealing with an even broader conception of representation, which isn't necessarily focused on how laws are made, and I think there's something to the thought that we could imagine a democratic society, in fact we ought to imagine a democratic society as a kind of more robust social phenomenon than only what we see in the formal process for making the rules that govern the way that social authority is disposed. But I don't think it's an either or, I mean I think that the formal part of it is really important for the reason I said earlier, because it's the way that the power of the state gets guided and we better worry about that. Now maybe more than five years ago, but I also agree that a kind of robust, effectively functioning democratic society is one in which people exercise control over what you might call the course of our common life in other ways than by participating in the way that the formal rules are made. So I'm sympathetic to that view, I just think it's a different question from the one I wanted to think about. I don't think there's anybody who thinks that voting is the only way that people are the authors of law. But I'll just make two observations on this. The first is that if you wanna talk about the making of law through the judicial process, the way people get on juries in this country, certainly on federal juries it's the only way to get on is to be registered to vote. And in most states the jury pool is made up of people who vote. So if you can't vote, you can't be the author of law in that way, either. The other point I'll make about this, which ties in in a kind of direct way with Dr. King's famous sermon on give us the vote, give us the ballot, is that being somebody who is permitted to vote sends a very powerful message to everybody else in the society about what your interests, whether your interests should be respected in various ways. And so even if somebody doesn't vote, or even if they vote for the losing party in a particular election, there's a very powerful message sent by saying that they're entitled to vote and that they're part of the we the people as opposed to being someone who is outside of the people who are entitled to that formal role. So I'm kind of mystified as to why anybody would think voting is the only way because it's obviously not. Rupert Murdoch influences our politics even before he became a citizen, which I think at some point he became. But it is a really important and central piece of the way you're an author of the laws and to diminish that importance, I think is a big mistake. I think we have time for one more question. Warren, did you have a question? So thank you very much for the stimulating ideas. I think I noticed at least two places in the various talks where the idea of lasting, dyadic relationships came up. So the first was the lasting, dyadic. Lasting? Lasting and dyadic relationships. So the first one I noticed was the diet of individual and politician. So they came up, for example, the discussion of incumbents. The individual might know their incumbents' name, might feel presented by them, feel that they have certain interests, that the person stands for, et cetera. And another diet I noticed was that of lobbyist and politician, which came up notably because of the idea of accountability that came up, the idea that the politician gives account for his or her actions to the lobbyist. And so I was wondering how, it seems like there's an idea here. And I was wondering how this idea, we might call it like the role of politics as structuring certain dyadic relationships. I was wondering how that idea bears on two things. The first is on our ability to think about the centrality of communication to representation. And the second is how the existence of certain relationships might play a normative role in what was referred to yesterday as the legitimacy system, especially given the comments from yesterday about the reality of increasing state coercion over time. You know, I'm terribly sorry. I think that question was addressed, essentially, to me. And I'm deaf, so that I didn't fully hear what, maybe someone can tell me what, I'm terribly sorry. Maybe sit up closer as well. So essentially I was remarking on the existence of particular dyad relationships. Particularly dyadic relationships between constituents and representatives. For example, right? And also between lobbyists and politicians, right? And so I was wondering about two particular things. First about how this role of politics as structuring the kind of dyadic lasting relationships we can participate in, how that could affect first, our ability to think about the centrality of communication to representation. There might be something to say there about how the ability of having this relationship is what constitutes the value of it, for example. And on the other hand, how the existence of certain relationships might play a normative role in what was referred to as the legitimacy system, especially given the increasing reality of state coercion in our lifetimes and in the role of the state. Right, okay, thank you. So just to make clear, I was saying when you say, when you use the word constitutes the value of the, I was trying to say that this kind of recursive communication should be considered as one of plural criteria. I was only adding it to a list. I wasn't saying that recursive communication constitutes the entire system of political representation. I was just saying that because we haven't formulated it as an ideal explicitly, it hasn't been studied empirically, but also practitioners trying to improve democracy haven't been focusing on it and trying to make it better. So it's both, it's addressed to political theorists. Let's think about this more carefully. It suggests to empirical political scientists, let's study it. For example, the question of whether proportional representation or single-member districts produces better recursive relationships. I was suggesting that single-member districts might because the single-member district people have an incentive to reach out and incumbency that the constituents know the names. But in proportional representation, you often get more descriptive representation. A party will put forth a group of people to represent it and these days they try to put half women, if blacks are 10%, blacks will be 10% of the slate, similarly Muslims, whatever. So there'll be a descriptive representation built in to proportional representation which will itself encourage constituents who are blacks to reach out to the blacks, Muslims to reach out to the Muslims and so forth. We don't empirically know which systems are more likely to produce which kinds of recursive communications because people haven't studied it because it hasn't been out there as a conscious norm. So I'm not saying that recursive communication constitutes or ought to constitute everything we should conceive of in the representative process. I'm only just saying add it in. It's an important thing to add in. And thank you for the point about legitimating systems because I do think that your one's own sense as a citizen of authorship, of having that right to be a citizen, that I am a citizen who counts is critical to the legitimacy of the entire system. And I think we haven't necessarily looked closely enough at all the different parts of the system that might contribute to and also detract from that sense of self-respect that a citizen might have in any given democracy. Which does proportional representation or single member districts contribute to that sense of self-respect and the sense of genuinely based authorship. We don't wanna kid people into thinking they're authors of the law when they're totally not. We only want to find places in which they could be to some degree, to some small degree, authors of the law that coerces them. And we want that to be genuine. So I think that, thank you very much for bringing it back to the question of legitimacy. Because I think, as I said, the legitimacy system is sort of the biggest one. We ought to be asking all the time about any of these features of democracy. How much does it contribute to the overall legitimacy since we're gonna have more and more coercion? We really need that legitimacy desperately. So thank you very much for bringing that up again. Can I follow up on that just a little bit about the single member districts? And there's been some work done on this. But one of the differences between single member district systems and proportional systems is in constituent services. That one of the things you can say in a single member district system is the representative knows who his or her particular constituents are in a way that's much harder to figure out when you're talking about a proportional representation system. And to the extent that you're talking about a state that not only has a lot of coercive power, but where there are a lot of social welfare programs and like one of the biggest things that members of Congress do is have staffs to deal with the Social Security Administration and Medicare and various other government, you know, various other government bureaucracies. And that is a kind of interesting dyadic relationship with a lot of communication in it. And one of the things that was really interesting that we looked at when I was doing some litigation in Arkansas is some of the black constituents went to the black representative from the next door district because they thought they would get better constituent service from him. But at the same time, Strom Thurman, for example, was famous for tremendous constituent service without regard really to whether the constituent was likely to have voted for him or not. And so there's a really complicated relationship there that's also about something that's quite recursive that's not about policy, but is about the coercive power of the state or the ability of the state to provide or not to provide, you know, absolutely essential services to people. It's a measure of how rich and stimulating these discussions have been. I've now gone 12 minutes over the time that we allotted for this discussion and there's still several questions. But I think this is the point where we should invite people to continue conversation with our guests informally over refreshments next door before doing that, I'd like to extend a word of thanks to Jane Fink and the graduate division staff for the excellent work on the logistics of these events. And of course, I really want to warmly thank all of our participants, Marty and Pam, Jenny and especially Chuck Bites for these remarkably rich and stimulating set of discussions over the past three days. Thank you very much for being with us. Thank you.