 Welcome all of you to day two. This is a nice crowd for day two of the Tanner lecture. Tanner lecture by Professor Charles Bites, Chuck Bites. The best way for me to do justice to Niko's marvelous introduction of Chuck Bites yesterday is to just shut up and say, here again, is Chuck Bites. And we're now going to, we've found out why we were wrong about what we thought was wrong with our system of government. And now we'll, I hope, find out what might point us in the better direction. We'll look forward to that now. And sorry, actually, I'll just tell you the timeframe after that. After that, we're actually, why is it so good that you came today? We get not just one, but two marvelous commentators today. And Professor Pamela Carlin and Professor Jenny Mansbridge, I'll introduce them. They'll give their comments. We'll take a break. We'll give Chuck a chance to think about his response to their comments. He'll give some short remarks, then we'll have some Q&A after that. With that, Chuck? And, okay, no good. You've got a place for your water now. So thank you, Chris, again. Thank you all for coming. I'll try to do a better job with my water today. So yesterday, we considered some reasons from political science to believe the democratic representation in the United States is failing. I grouped the putative failures under three headings of effectiveness, of congruence and responsiveness, and of fairness. And as I observed, there are some people who disagree about the underlying facts, and I didn't try to adjudicate the disagreements. My question yesterday was diagnostic. It was taking the facts as presented by what standards might we think that democratic representation in the United States is failing. I considered some standards that were implicit or occasionally explicit in the political science literature. I resisted some, I suggested alternatives to others, but I didn't try to draw lessons for democratic theory. And that's where we begin today. And I'll just preview the main theme is that the normative theory of democratic representation should take the competitive nature of democratic representative politics seriously, or at least more seriously than much of it, much of that theory does today. It should try to say what it would mean for democratic competition to be fair and effective. So that's the overarching point. So to begin, I'm gonna propose four lessons for the theory of democratic representation that we might draw from reflection about the putative failures that we talked about yesterday. I think that for many political scientists, these are gonna seem like truisms, but they're not commonplace in political theory. So here's the first lesson. Much of the political science of democratic representation and much of the political theory of democratic representation concentrates on examining the dyadic relationship between individual elected representatives and their constituencies. And we find that concentration in many of the studies of congruence and responsiveness. It's inherent in the traditional contrast of delegate and trustee conceptions of representation. But I think what we saw yesterday is that some of the most consequential failures of democratic representation only become visible at the level of the system. So for example, disparities in policy-responsive despite class and race, partisan bias, legislative dysfunction, these are all features of the system as a whole. And the lesson here, I think, is the democratic representation is a jurisdiction-wide practice. Those who are elected to legislative office, each one selected from their own constituency, constitute a group that acts for the whole people. Now, I don't wanna suggest that the dyadic relationship doesn't matter, of course it does, but it's a mistake to think that a representative elected in a geographical constituency has responsibilities only to its residents. Representatives also have responsibilities to others. I mean, that thought is part of the idea of virtual representation, although its significance is more general. So I mean, it explains, for example, why we think that representatives can have reasons to advance the programs of their parties, even if their own constituents disagree about parts of the program. And it's necessary to see why we think that members of legislative committees represent all of those whose interests fall under their committee's jurisdiction regardless of their constituency. So this is Berkeley, and so let me add that I think this first truism agrees, or at least I hope it does, with one of Professor Pitkin's most important conclusions. In a passage, there's a passage in her famous book that's sometimes overlooked, but I think really quite important for her. She says this, political representation is primarily a public institutionalized arrangement involving many people in groups and operating in the complex ways of large-scale social arrangements. What makes it representation is not any single action by any one participant, but the overall structure and functioning of the system. And that seems to me just a very important insight and interestingly kind of not quite the insight for which she's usually credited, which I won't go into now. Anyway, the implication of taking the view that she suggests is that in seeking normative standards for representation, that's not her purpose, but it's ours, we should think first about the properties that would be desirable in the system. So that's the first lesson, a second truism follows. There's a long-standing tendency to think of democratic representation as a second best arrangement, something that we adopt for polities that are too large for assembly democracy. And that perspective tempts us to think that the regulative norms of representative democracy derive from those of director assembly democracy in some way. So for example, representative democracy should aspire to be direct democracy scaled up. Representation, on this view, representation fails when it doesn't deliver outcomes that the people themselves would choose if they were in a position to do that. Now, many people over many years have criticized this perspective, but it persists in more or less sophisticated forms, both in political theory and in political science. But I think a moment's reflection shows us that democracy scaled up is just too thin and evaluative standard to diagnose some apparent failures of democratic representation. So think, for example, about failures of legislative effectiveness, which can't be explained as failures without some conception of the purposes that political representation should serve. We talked about this yesterday. So I think the second lesson is that democratic representation is a compound idea. As Payne put it, talking about the Constitution, it's representation engrafted upon democracy. It's a complex institutional arrangement with a division of labor at its core. A subset of the people decides on the whole people's behalf and in some way under their control what law and policy should be. I mean, the point of representation is to shift the question that faces the people from what should be law to who should decide. Now, I think it's, of course, in a well-functioning democracy, deliberation in the public sphere, ought to enable people, or at least ought to enable people, to think together about the choices before them. And those deliberations ought to influence the choices that people make. Mechanisms of public contestation also afford opportunities to shape the political agenda and to influence the range of electoral choice. But that doesn't deny that the political responsibilities of citizens are different from those of representatives. Representation simplifies the burdens of citizenship. And in doing so, it renders the idea of democracy scaled up just normatively inapt. The democratic and the representative elements of the compound idea, I'd like to say cast orthogonal shadows. So the third truism concerns what we see when we take the perspective of the system. And here, of course, there's room for disagreement. But to me, the most prominent fact is that democratic representation is fundamentally a competitive process. People and groups contend for influence over authoritative decisions about policy. That seems to me just fundamental. The most visible form of competition, of course, is for elective office, but democratic political competition ranges far more broadly and its broader scope matters in ways that we'll consider. Now, of course, the idea that democratic politics is competitive is hardly a new one. In the last century, Joseph Schumpeter, E.E. Schachtner, Anthony Downs, each one of them presented theories of democratic politics in which competition is the chief dynamic. Yet in each case, competition takes different forms and it promises different democratic values. It's a mistake when I teach these people to my students. One of the chief tasks is to get them to see the differences in the views of these three important theorists. Now, the thing I wanna say now is we might add John Rawls to this list, though his view is ambivalent in ways I'll try to come to. There's a puzzling passage in the theory of justice in which Rawls writes that the democratic political process is at best regulated rivalry. The democratic political process is at best regulated rivalry. Now, unfortunately, aside from some important remarks that he offers about ensuring what he calls the fair value of political liberty and a brief comment about gerrymandering, he doesn't address the subject of fair rivalry in much detail or in any detail. That's not unusual in democratic theory, but I'm gonna wanna suggest that it's a mistake. So here's the final lesson. Maybe it's inherent in the last one and I'm gonna sort of state it in the slogan that political parties matter for democratic representation. It's a mistake to see them as incidental. Chachniter is famous for the thesis to quote him that political parties created democracy and modern democracy is unthinkable save in terms of parties. Well, if democracy is unthinkable without parties, it's because parties play a critical role in organizing political competition. In Chachniter's view, parties are impelled by competitive pressure to build coalitions of interested groups by identifying policy programs on which a majority can agree. They have a distinctively democratic function which is to use his word to socialize conflict, to define salient political cleavages in a way that structures public deliberation and makes meaningful electoral choice possible. Now I should just clarify here that for Chachniter, these are kind of political parties conceived in a certain kind of way. He doesn't mean to be describing the way parties always are even often functioned in the American constitutional system. Now I don't think any of this should need to be said, but for another Chachniterian home truth, he famously wrote that parties are the orphans of political philosophy. What he meant by that was that parties were not at least not explicitly part of the constitutional design of the framers, but he certainly also meant to include political theories of his own time. And with some important exceptions, the critique applies as much democratic theory in our time as well. So the lesson here is that parties should feature in the theory of democratic representation because distinctive questions arise about the fairness of the rules that structure party competition. We saw a little bit of this yesterday. So we see it, for example, in objections to partisan bias in districting plans. As I tried to suggest yesterday to make sense of those objections, we need a notion of fairness to parties or maybe to partisans. So that's the fourth lesson. And taking all four of these lessons on board, I wanna return to Rawls' observation that I quoted earlier that the democratic process is at best regulated rivalry. Now, as I suggested, that observation is puzzling. It's partly puzzling because it's unclear from what Rawls says why political rivalry needs to be regulated. That is what the normative basis is for thinking it needs to be regulated. And it's also puzzling partly because it's not clear what to make of the phrase at best. Democratic politics is at best regulated rivalry. So I think this latter is largely a matter of kind of exegetical interest. I think it's actually very interesting, but I don't wanna spend time talking about it now. But we should ask why political rivalry needs to be regulated. So Rawls' source, the source he cites is Frank Knight's book, The Ethics of Competition, published in 1935. In his own time, Knight was the most, probably the most influential contributor to economic thought about market competition. And in the passage that Rawls cites, Knight describes democratic politics as a competitive game and he compares it with economic competition, which he also calls a game. And he worries that rivalrous conduct in both realms produces and I'll quote him here, a cumulative tendency to inequality and consequent disruption of the system as differences in natural talents and abilities express themselves in increasingly unequal outcomes. And he says that if the process goes on too long unregulated, the game will stop serving its purposes as the losers come to see it as unfair and stop participating. And Knight thinks that regulation should primarily aim to limit or redress the growth of inequalities that undermine the game. Now for readers of Rawls, this passage is enormously important because it explains the source of his idea of the fair value of political liberty, but I think it's also important as a kind of freestanding normative observation. So in trying to take a systemic perspective on democratic representation, I propose to follow Knight and Rawls and consider how political rivalry should be regulated and why, if it's to function fairly and effectively or to put it differently, the question is whether we can understand at least some of the prominent failures of democratic representation as shortfalls from fair democratic competition. And to pursue that question, I'll ask some questions. I'll ask what competition is. I'll suggest two reasons why democratic competition needs to be regulated, if it's to be fair and effective. I'll identify some purposes that we I think justifiably rely on political competition to serve. And then finally, I'll consider, mainly as illustrations, three I'll call them sites of competition in the politics of democratic representation. So our time is pretty short and what I'll propose I think is really just an exploratory sketch. Now, as I've mentioned, social scientists have long associated democratic politics with partisan competition for control of government. That idea is also prominent in the law of democracy jurisprudence, jurisprudence that Pam Carlin has contributed to importantly. Many I think would agree with Sartori, a writer in an earlier generation, who thought that the association of democracy and competition was analytic. He said, if institutions make political competition impossible, they are authoritarian, not even minimally democratic. So, you know, against that background, it might be surprising, at least if you're not a political theorist, that political theorists have resisted conceptions of democratic competition as competitive. I think one reason is that competitive models, I mean, as a historical matter, competitive models arose from an analogy with competition in economic markets. That's how they're presented in night. And as most people today agree, that analogy can mislead. But competition is a more general social phenomenon than market rivalry. And I think the defects of that analogy with economic competition needn't move us to abandon the idea that democratic politics is competitive. Competitive conceptions might also seem to fit uncomfortably with an ideal of public deliberation. I think this is another consideration that moves some democratic theorists to resist the thought of democracy as modeled competitively. And that's because public deliberation is sometimes presented as a cooperative enterprise. But I think that's naive. I mean, there is probably at some level of abstraction a way of thinking of public deliberation as a cooperative enterprise. But as we experience it, it is essentially contestatory. And think, for example, of John Stuart Mill's account of what he called the real morality of public discussion in On Liberty, he argues there that only the vigorous public presentation of opposing views within a kind of normative, regulative structure of social norms can satisfy the educative aims of public deliberation. So I think the real problem is that social scientists typically deploy competitive models of democracy for positive purposes instead of to advance normative principles. And that's not a criticism, but it means that if we, it means there's less to go on than we might have hoped in the literature of competition, in framing norms for democratic political competition. So for that reason, I think we should begin at the beginning with the idea of rivalry. So if you think about rivalry, you'll realize that idea is ambiguous because rivalry in its ordinary sense needn't be regulated at all. So let's say that rivalry is a kind of generic notion, is a kind of interaction in which two or more agents seek a good under conditions in which only one can succeed in securing it, or more accurately conditions in which not all agents can succeed in securing it. And let's say, and I think this is semi-stipulatively, that competition is rivalry that occurs in an environment that is structured by rules or social norms. Under the rules, one agent can succeed only by preventing other agents from doing so. That means that competition sets agents against each other, it's adversarial. And just to make the point, consider that competition sets stands in contrast to various non-adversarial mechanisms for resolving conflict, like command or lottery. Now, I think it's important to see that competitions in general share at least three features. They can produce social value. They can do so even if the competitors are not motivated by that fact, and they're regulated by rules and norms. So let me just say something quickly about each of those three points. The first one is that considered as a social phenomenon, competition or most competition can affect people who are not themselves competitors. Another way to put that is it can produce positive externalities. Or what I'm gonna call social value for the non-competitors. And I think that's a major reason why we approve of various kinds of competitive processes. Games of sport, for example, or criminal trials are obvious examples, even though their adversarial character might otherwise seem troubling. We didn't think they served any positive purpose, we might not think there was a justification for the kind of conduct that they elicit. The second point is that competitors don't need to be motivated by an interest in the social value that's produced by the competition. I mean, in some cases they are, but and they may recognize the social value even if it doesn't motivate them, but in most cases they're motivated in addition by a desire for the payoff that the game offers to the victor. They wanna win. And I think that's important because successful competition can be costly and the social value may not be enough to motivate people to prepare for it and to carry it out in an effort to be successful. Then the third point is that competitive interaction as I've stipulated occurs in a regulated environment. It's guided by more or less enforceable rules and then informal norms. Some of those rules are constitutive of competition like the rules defining what it means to win. You might think the rules that define checkmate and chess. Other rules are more precisely regulative. They constrain the manner of competition. So in chess you should be quiet while your opponent is considering their next move. The critical point here is that competition needs regulative rules for a very clear reason because the adversarial motivations that it depends on to produce social value can induce competitors to do things that undermine the production of that value. A good illustration I think is Knight's worry that political competition would produce a cumulative tendency to inequality and consequent disruption of the system. That's an instance of this general tendency that the competitive motives can generate outcomes that undermine the production of the social value that justifies the competition in the first place. I'd wanna say competition can run off the rails. Adherence to the regulative rules and background norms that structure competition, that adherence distinguishes between competitive behavior that advances the practices justifying purposes and behavior that undermines achieving them, which is to say between what we might call healthy and unhealthy competition. Often we describe unhealthy behaviors and competitive conditions as unfair and what we're saying might be interpreted as that the behaviors undermine the competition's capacity to produce the social values for which we justifiably rely on it. So running off the rails is what I might call an internal pathology. It's produced by the dynamic that causes competitive processes to generate the social values that we rely on to produce. But competition can also be pathological in other ways, not by undermining itself, but by violating other moral constraints. So just to give an example, the design of democratic institutions is subject to a norm that I once described as equal recognition. Institutions should define the public status of citizenship in a way that conveys what I've called a communal acknowledgement of the equal worth of citizens. That norm is not internal to political competition. We don't depend on the competitive dynamic to satisfy it. Equal recognition is an external constraint on institutional design. It's one that's required by democratic commitment. Yet, the competitive dynamic can defeat it if it's not appropriately regulated. One reason, I think hardly the only reason, to object to a campaign finance regime that allows the wealthy to exert far more influence than others over outcomes is that when that becomes understood in public, it undermines the equal public status of citizens. So let me try to give just a little bit of structure to the notion of fair and effective democratic competition that's kind of suggested by what I've said so far. The main idea is that representative democracy consists of a set of competitive processes. And just to give some examples, processes for selecting representatives, for making policy in the legislature, for influencing administrative agencies, for contesting in the public sphere. And those processes or sites of competition serve functions that enable the system as a whole to satisfy its justifying purposes by producing various kinds of social value. Regulative norms for those sites of competition derived from the more general purposes interpreted for the characteristics of and dynamics of competition of each particular kind. So I'd wanna say, at least as a hypothesis that we think of fair and effective representation as representation conducted according to the regulative norms that apply to the various sites of competition in the system of representation. Now, I know this is abstract, probably too abstract, and I'll offer some illustrations in a minute. But first I wanna say one more thing and theoretically probably the most important thing about the idea of fair and effective representation. At the most general level, as I've suggested already, this idea incorporates several purposes that we ordinarily believe the democratic representation should satisfy, more than one. Now, in a longer presentation, a much longer presentation, I would try to motivate these purposes by showing how they derive or express an ideal of democratic self-government. But for now, I'm just gonna settle and ask you to settle for a simple list of four purposes. More or less culled from our discussion yesterday of putative failures of representation. So the first two purposes relate to the fairness of representation, and the second two relate to its effectiveness. And I state these purposes in the form of slogans understanding that they need a good deal of elucidation. So first, the system should be responsive to the people in the sense that policy would change when durable electoral majorities favor change throughout a jurisdiction. And that embeds, I think, one dimension of democratic equality. It's a condition of fairness to citizens considered equally as the agents of government. Now, in a longer discussion, I should say something about the relationship between thinking of citizens as equals and thinking that durable majorities should be able to influence the conduct of government. That's not an easy argument to make, and I just am gonna pass on that for now. Second point is that the system should resolve conflict in a way that takes fair account of the political interests of each citizen. That's a very demanding consideration. And in practice, I think it's probably better put negatively. The system should protect citizens from systematic neglect of their interests. That condition, I think, embodies another kind of democratic equality. It requires fairness to citizens considered as the beneficiaries of government. Now, these first two purposes rely on a distinction that I drew very briefly yesterday between two dimensions of democratic citizenship. On the one hand, citizens are authors of democratic law. And they have an interest in having a share of control over the process of lawmaking and administration. On the other hand, they're also the law's subjects or its beneficiaries. And in that capacity, they have an interest in how the laws affect them. I might have mentioned yesterday that Hobbes and Leviathan recognized that those two perspectives are those that he calls the perspective of makers and matter of government. Now, of course, he thought the perspective of the makers of government was only relevant once when the government is first established. But it seems to me that there's really quite a general point being made there. There are two perspectives. They're distinctive, evaluative perspectives, and they give rise to distinctive, evaluative interests. So the third purpose is that the system should be decisive. But I want to say decisive in a certain way. It should be capable of resolving conflict about the content and direction of public policy, at least insofar as conflict pertains to achieving broadly valued public functions. And this is fundamentally a condition of effective government. It should be able to govern in the face of disagreement, at least in a limited range of cases. And this gestures back to some things I said yesterday about different reasons to care about effectiveness in different political contexts. But I would say here that I have considerable sympathy for people who have argued that political thought, at least in the U.S., has tended to undervalue the importance of the effectiveness of government. Seems to me it's an important expectation we have that governments should be able to govern. And that ought to be reflected in our normative theories of representation. And then finally, the last point is this, deliberative environments should enable their participants to advance a reasonable range of alternatives and to deliberate responsibly about them. This is a deliberative interest. And it applies in the environments of electoral and interest competition and in the broader public sphere, although maybe it applies differently in those different contexts. And I think we have interests in this, both as democratic agents and as beneficiaries. As agents, we have interests in having opportunities to influence policymakers and other citizens about the course of public policy. And as beneficiaries, we have interests in access to the arguments and the responses given by others so that we can make our own responsible choices. It seems to me plausible that a system of democratic representation should seek to satisfy these four purposes, though I know it's hardly beyond debate and my list may not be complete. But I'll have to leave those issues sort of aside for purposes of this lecture. The main points I wanna suggest are that the requirements of fair and effective democratic representation respond to multiple purposes, which means that the requirements themselves will be plural. And they need to be interpreted for the institutional contexts in which competition tries to satisfy them. And in this latter sense, I'd wanna say that norms of fair and effective representation are context sensitive or maybe more loosely that they're local. Now in saying this, I'm not suggesting that these aims can be satisfied just by getting institutions right. It's I think yet another truism that competition can fail when institutional rules are not adequately supported by suitable social norms. And for example, in games of sport, norms of sportsmanship. And I think the more general point is that the practical possibility of healthy competition depends on a supporting normative environment that institutions themselves may not be able to guarantee. That's I think just an important point to bear in mind as we think about the extent to which norms, the changing norms themselves can rescue competition from its tendency to undermine itself. So in the time we have left, I wanna illustrate this conception of fair and effective competition by considering, I'm afraid very briefly, three sites of competition that I think ought to be subject to norms of fairness. And these are electoral competition, a separate subject, although it blends into the first competition between parties and competition among interests. So electoral competition, competition between parties and competition among interests. And in each case, I'll focus on just one element in a larger phenomenon, largely for reasons of time. And the question, the general question I wanna ask is how we might understand norms of competitive fairness, local to each site, and how they might help us to identify failures of fair representation. So let me begin with electoral competition, which is the first site I wanna consider and possibly the most obvious. It's the process of election to representative office. Questions about regulating competition arise, I think most prominently in connection with legislative districting and the conditions of valid access, which I'll focus on here without meaning to suggest that these are the only important elements of electoral competition. So the basic question is, how competitive should elections be? Well, that question is ambiguous because the idea of competitiveness is ambiguous. So I wanna just mention three dimensions of competitiveness. In one sense, a competitive system is just a system in which the rules define an adversarial process for attaining some good. So I wanna say that that kind of system has a competitive structure. However, nothing follows about whether agents within a competitive structure are all things considered likely to conduct themselves as adversaries. That is to say to be competitive. I mean, resources might be so unequally distributed that it makes more sense for the people who are less advantaged by the distribution to take what they can get by cooperating. So this points to a second sense of competitive. I mean, it might refer to a situation in which there's some reasonable doubt about which of the competitors will prevail, maybe because resources are not too unequally distributed. So here I wanna adopt a term from the theorist, Kara Strom, who thought that we might say that a system of the kind I've described is situationally competitive. And I think it's clear that some competitive situations are more competitive in this sense than others. And that's true, for example, of election districts. So situational competitiveness is a variable. However, it would be myopic, I think, to say that even a highly competitive situation is necessarily competitive in another sense that might concern us normatively. And in this third sense, a competitive system is one that's open to participation to anybody who's willing and able to compete. So again, following Strom, we might say that that sort of system is fully contestable in the sense that all competitors face comparable barriers to entry. Now, these distinctions matter for political competition. And just to give an example, politics in the old South had a competitive structure, but general elections were not situationally competitive. Democrats almost always won. And when there were primary elections for democratic nominations, those elections might have been situationally competitive, but they certainly weren't very contestable because barriers to entry prevented some people who might have wanted to compete from participating. So those distinctions are important in trying to understand democratic competition. Now, I want to talk first about situational competitiveness. Because I think many people think that the competitiveness is a desirable feature of election systems. In fact, some people, as I've suggested, think it's a requirement of democracy. Edward Tufty, for example, in a seminal paper written decades ago, wrote that a system of representation should satisfy a condition of electoral responsiveness, which was his term for situational competitiveness in order to be, as he put it, even minimally democratic. Now, electoral competitiveness is clearly not the same as policy responsiveness in the sense that we talked about yesterday. But these ideas are plausibly related. Electoral competitiveness, or as Tufty put it, responsiveness, can be a condition of policy responsiveness. And if one of the social purposes that we should want a competitive system of representation to serve is to be responsive to durable changes in the majority's political preferences as they express them in elections, then we ought to agree that competitiveness is one desirable feature of districting systems. Now, I say this recognizing that the value of electoral competitiveness is not the only reason that we might value it. That we might, sorry, the value of responsiveness is not the only reason that we might value electoral competitiveness. I mean, we expect competing candidates to define the choices that are open to voters. But if a district is not competitive, the candidate of the majority party has less incentive to articulate a program that takes account of voter interests. And the challenger may have fewer resources to communicate her own views to the electorate. So the quality of the information environment would suffer. And as we know from social science, the level of voter engagement would probably be suppressed. So the point here is that if another purpose of electoral competition is to enable voters to deliberate responsibly about the alternatives on offer, then features of the system that subvert the exercise of that responsibility are independently objectionable. So we have so far at least two reasons to regard electoral competitiveness as a virtue of districting systems. But here I think the difficulty is that just as there's no clear basis for judging some level of policy responsiveness to be optimal, point I made yesterday, there's also no clear basis for judging some degree of electoral responsiveness or district competitiveness to be optimal. Although I think it's clear that the optimum is not the maximum. But still, as Tufti suggests, we might think that a democratic system of election should display some reasonable degree of responsiveness where we interpret reasonable in terms of the capacity of the system to produce a change in representation when a majority in the jurisdiction as a whole prefers it. So I'm gonna kind of leave this point in that unhappily, with that unhappily vague formulation. So what I've described so far as I think a very familiar pro competitiveness view held by a lot of people. And there are some reasons to resist it. I wanna mention just one and explain why I'm not persuaded by it. The objection involves the satisfaction of members of a constituency within incumbent's job performance. Now, to make the point, let me say this, in a Downsian world, under ideal conditions, incumbents would act in ways that are aimed at satisfying the median voter in what in that world we'd regard as an issue space. And that, among other things, would minimize the aggregate dissatisfaction with the official's performance in office. That's because they're trying to satisfy the person in the middle. And by doing that, the aggregate dissatisfaction would be less than it would be if they tried to satisfy somebody anywhere else in the issue space. But aggregate dissatisfaction depends not only on where in the issue space is, the voter is located, who to whom the official addresses their decisions. It also depends on the concentration of voters within that issue space. And the more concentrated they are, which is just another way of saying, the more homogeneous the voters are, the less the aggregate dissatisfaction. So somebody understanding that might argue that it's better to make districts as politically homogeneous as possible in order to minimize aggregate dissatisfaction. And you might think there's just some value in keeping voters as happy as we can. But if we try to do that, we might reduce competitiveness. Now, the response to this view invokes the doubts we discussed yesterday about the importance of congruence. And it seems to me just not clear why the prospect of dissatisfaction of voters with the conduct of their representatives in the legislature should matter in assessing institutional structures. I mean, dissatisfied voters can always decide to vote to replace their representatives. And a more competitive system, assuming it would be more responsive, increases the chances that they can succeed. A less competitive system, although it might produce a higher aggregate level of voter satisfaction when it's looked at synchronically, reduces the chances of voters to hold representatives accountable when it's looked at over time. And that's incompatible with the aim that political competition should foster responsiveness to changes in the popular will. And I just observe here parenthetically that this just illustrates the importance of the distinction between congruence and responsiveness. Now, as we've seen, a generic notion of competitiveness includes dimensions of both situational competitiveness and contestability. And I think it's clear that we can have one without the other. In the United States, for example, districts vary in their situational competitiveness. Some are quite competitive, but there is much less variance in contestability. And that's just to say that barriers to entry for third parties and independent candidacies are high almost everywhere. And those barriers might seem unfair for at least two reasons. First, they're very likely the result of the two major parties taking advantage of their duopoly to avoid competition. It's a case of what Samuel Isaacaroff and Richard Pildes called partisan lockup. Second, the reasoning that led us earlier to a pro-competitiveness view of districting systems also seems to lead us to value greater contestability. I mean, a system that excludes participation by representatives of some minority positions can't promise to be responsive to them even if it's situationally competitive. On reflection, though, I think these two reasons actually become reduced to one. The partisan lockup concern arises from skepticism that partisan efforts to avoid competition have the appropriate kind of justification. And that skepticism might very well be warranted, but it doesn't rule out that there might be a good justification after all. And that's why the second reason is important. It argues that the lockup treats those who were excluded unfairly. And if that's right, then ballot access restrictions might be internal pathologies of competition. They could be cases in which competition undermines the social value that justifies it or so the argument would go. However, before we reach that conclusion, we should remember that with a first past the post plurality decision rule, which we have almost everywhere, a three or more way election can produce a winner who ranks lower in the preference orderings of a majority of the people than some other candidate. So that's just to say the decision rule allows spoilers. One solution to that problem is to allow fusion candidacies, which is candidates whose names can appear on the ballot for more than one party. Another possible solution is to use a rule for aggregating votes that's sensitive to voters' preference orderings, perhaps rank choice voting. I think offhand, both of these are attractive solutions, but if neither of them is available, then it seems to me that the force of the primatacea preference for greater openness is substantially reduced just because it can produce minority winners. So that's what I'd say about the, I think, complicated arguments about contestability and barriers to entry. So let me turn to the second kind of competition, party competition. I said earlier that parties matter and at the most abstract level, they matter because they're the most influential agents in democratic political life that organize political conflict and public deliberation. I say the most influential, obviously not the only. In one helpful, although I think maybe not much less abstract formulation, the political scientist Daniel Schlossman and Sam Rosenfeld write that the parties functions include aggregating and integrating preferences and actors into ordered conflict, mobilizing participation and linking the governed with the government. Parties, these are intermediary functions and parties serve them both in the electoral arena and in legislatures where in both cases, they have institutional advantages over other agents. So for example, party candidates have privileged access to positions on the election ballot and parties enjoy a license to choose their candidates subject to state regulation. In the Congress, their caucuses control significant aspects of the legislative process, including the distribution of committee positions and the floor agenda. And I think we need to regard parties competing entities, even though it's empirical phenomena, they're difficult to conceive as collective agents. And there's actually I think an interesting discussion to be had of how to conceptualize American political parties. They're far more complex entities than we typically recognize in ordinary conversation. Now, party competition can be regulated in various ways. One is through the laws that define conditions of ballot access and candidate selection. Another is through the campaign finance regime's rules that structure the flow of resources to campaigns and affect the parties capacities to influence the selection of candidates. This latter sort of latter process, I think has been very much on our minds in this election season. But I want to consider a third way that institutions influence party competition. And this involves the impact of legislative districting on the transformation of votes into seats in elections to Congress and the state legislatures. And this is to continue a discussion I started yesterday. So as I said then, the combination of the geographical distribution of partisan voters and partisan gerrymandering can produce a condition normally usually called partisan bias. And that's roughly a condition in which one party can elect more members of the legislature with a given share of the vote than the other party could if it had the same share of the vote. And as I observed yesterday, many argue that partisan bias and districting is unfair. Now, there's one obvious way that partisan gerrymandering might look like a failure or a fair competition. It's a use of power by the majority party to subvert party competition by entrenching itself. The aim is to block competitive threats in the future. And so for that reason, we might think of it as a case of competition going off the rails. But I think on reflection, that's a hard position to sustain without some notion of the social value that districting is supposed to produce. I mean, it can't simply be that it's to offer voters equal opportunities for electoral influence because as we've seen, gerrymandering is compatible with that. So the question is whether we can make sense of the distinct idea that partisan bias is unfair to political parties or to partisan voters. So here's one attempt. What partisan voters aim for when they vote is not or not only election of the candidates they favor, but also advancement in the legislature of the candidate's political commitments with which the voters identify. Voters wanna contribute to the election of a candidate who will contribute to the movement of public policy in the direction of the voter's policy preferences. Now, unlike parties in the electorate, parties in the legislature are relatively coherent organizations. Their leaders manage the agenda, they coordinate the framing of legislation, they organize coalition building, and they provide the discipline or they at least try to provide the discipline to secure a majority. Ordinarily, a member of the legislature who wants to advance her political aims there will have to rely on the leadership and other members of her party for help in doing so. And one factor that determines a member's capacity to get the legislative outcomes she wants is the voting strength and organizational discipline of her party in the legislature. Partisan bias diminishes the capacity of voters for candidates of the disadvantaged party to get the legislative outcomes they want by diminishing their party's representation in the legislature in relation to what it would have been in the absence of bias. Now, the question is why should that trouble us? I mean, partisan bias is made possible by the use of single-member territorial district systems of representation. It's a pathology of these systems. Presumably, single-member district systems are chosen because they're supposed to have certain kinds of advantages. So something, for example, that they produce more stable governments and they make policy choices more transparent. But they come with a disadvantage, at least in comparison with some kinds of proportional systems, which are the major alternative, that the minority party ordinarily wins a smaller share of seats than its share of the votes. And so its influence in the legislature is correspondingly smaller. And it's important to recognize that that would occur even in the absence of partisan bias. It's just built in to the way that single-member district systems work. However, partisan bias makes it worse. It exacerbates the gap in responsiveness to the voters for the two parties considered as groups that's already present in single-member district systems. So the unfairness of partisan bias on this view is that its differential effect on the capacity of partisan voters to attain their political ends through participation in a party. That differential effect looks unfair just because it can't be justified in terms of the legitimate objectives of systems of single-member districting. Now, that can produce consequential damage for groups that participate in a party's coalition. And to take a prominent example, in some states, black voters who were overwhelmingly democratic tend to be concentrated geographically in districts with large democratic majorities. That's a phenomenon that was exaggerated by implementation of the Voting Rights Act's requirement to construct reliably majority minority districts. And under those circumstances, the black vote is relatively inefficient in influencing the election of representatives. That can contribute to partisan bias at the level of the jurisdiction that advantages Republicans. And other things equal, the effect is to relatively disempower black voters as contributors to their party's coalition. So that's an example of a consequential damage of a system that contains partisan bias. Now, this argument I've sketched, maybe stretched, maybe needlessly indirect. And I'm not sure in any case that I can defend all of its details, but it does seem to me to offer a plausible interpretation of the intuitive idea that in view of the functions of parties in democratic representation, partisans can object when electoral institutions differentially affect their party's capacities to secure their legislative ends without an appropriate justification. Now, earlier, I observed that partisan gerrymandering might seem to be a case of competitive, of competition running off the rails because it involves a party's use of a competitive advantage to entrench itself. And that seems to me true. But the objection to partisan bias that we've arrived at now is different, although it's not incompatible. It holds that partisan bias defends an external constraint on districting. And that constraint is something like that the system shouldn't impose on partisan voters a larger disadvantage than what's necessary to attain the social values that single-member district systems produce. The opportunity cost of institutional design should be fairly shared. Now, the subject of the role of parties in electoral competition is part of a larger story about how parties organize political conflict. And that includes their roles in congressional procedure and in the public sphere. And in both realms, I think, one focus of normative interest is the impact of institutional rules on the capacity of parties to shape interest conflicts. And that, of course, is a central concern in the Schachniderian tradition that sees parties as agents of democracy that socialize conflicts of interest so that the people can resolve them. And at the moment, it seems to me, though, others here could speak to this with more authority, the capacity of American parties to play these roles seems significantly diminished. I mean, it's not clear to what extent this is an institutional failure. But even if the parties were to become more capable of integrating interests, I think, there would still be a problem about the representation of interest in the modern policy state. So as my last illustration of the need for regulated rivalry, I wanna turn to the question of interest competition. Now, interest representation, particularly as it takes place through the lobbying system, is our third site of political competition. And the question here is whether considering lobbying as a competitive activity in democratic representation would influence our thinking about regulative norms. Now, for the political theorists in the room, this will seem like an esoteric question. So let me try to put it in context. One way that inequality of wealth can threaten democratic politics is by shifting the boundary between public and private power. When government is unable to assert control over concentrations of private economic power, that threaten the people's capacity for self-rule, then democratic representation might seem to have failed. And I think to the extent that there is a failure, it's not only one of process. It isn't just a failure, just. I mean, it's an important, would be important, but it isn't only a failure to ensure that individual citizens have equal opportunities to influence outcomes. It's a structural failure. Even if the means of political influence among individuals were somehow equally distributed, in the presence of inequality of wealth, it's still a good bet that there would be a tendency to produce outcomes that democratic government exists to avoid. I mean, namely those in which private concentrations of economic power become politically hegemonic. That, remember, was Knight's concern. He worried that the natural tendency of political competition was to exacerbate inequalities of wealth and power. Now, the reason I think the lobbying system is interesting is that it presents that phenomenon in microcosm. And so I think it's worth our attention. But at the same time, it's hard to describe the normative problem accurately. So I wanna begin with the basics. Lee Drutman, who wrote a very good book about lobbying, defines it as activity-oriented towards shaping public policy outcomes. And I think there are four features of lobbying worth noting that help to explain why we should pay attention to it. One, the organized representation of interests in the system of legislation and administrative regulation is inevitable in a modern polity. I think that's just a fact. And in some form, probably as desirable as a means of providing information and expertise to people who are charged with making policy. That's one point. Second is that interest representation is competitive. Interest conflict in policymaking and their conflicts are resolved by public officials in a system that has a good deal of structure. Third, although lobbying has long been a conspicuous failure of democratic representation, it has grown strikingly in the last 40 years. It commands very substantial resources, especially in the business and professional sectors. So an anecdotal indication one I find particularly striking is that interest groups today spend more on lobbying than the entire congressional budget. As I suggested last time, I think any attempt to explain findings like Marty Gillins about the class bias of public policy needs to take account of lobbying as a mechanism. And I hope Marty will, whereas Marty there he is, I hope he'll say something more about this tomorrow. And then finally, lobbying is capable of regulation. And in fact, it is regulated both by law and by executive order. So those are reasons to pay attention to it. 40 years ago, Robert Dahl observed that the role of organizational activity in democratic politics raises a question of political fairness. He treated the question as an extension of the problem of political equality. He said that in an ideally democratic state by which he meant a state in which the conditions of political equality among individuals had been fully satisfied, he said it would still be necessary to regulate political organizations in order to make sure that their activity didn't distort the equality that had been realized among citizens. The way he put it was this, he said, political equality can only be realized if the political resources of all organizations are effectively regulated so that resources are proportional to the number of members. So the political resources of all organizations need to be effectively regulated so that resources are proportional to the number of members. Now on reflection I think this is pretty clearly inadequate even in the perspective of its own theoretical motivation but I don't wanna dwell on the reasons why because I think that this view also betrays a kind of unrealistic conception of organizational activity. In that picture, what I'm saying is an unrealistic conception. All organizations have memberships consisting of individuals who have common interests and all politically salient shared interests are represented by organizations. But in fact, most organized interest groups are not membership organizations in the ordinary sense. I mean if they have members at all, the members are more likely other organizations like business firms or even universities than individuals. And of course it's a characteristic fantasy of pluralism that all salient interests are organized. I think for our purposes a more serious misperception is that lobbying operates primarily by exerting pressure on policymakers by offering quid pro quos. Now that's clearly part of the picture but I think a more realistic view sees interest representation as part of what Jenny Mansbridge and others have described as a deliberative system. Lobbyists belong to professional communities of experts. Their expertise has value. And policymakers benefit from it. The process as I've said is competitive. Lobbyists compete for policymakers attention by offering information and points of view, by facilitating relations with other interests and by coordinating the building of coalitions. And policymakers depend on this competitive process for resources that they need to make good policy. So I wanna say that competition among lobbyists for the attention of policymakers generates a valuable externality for policy making. Schachneider, to refer to him once again, described, I should say famously described the main normative problem in the pressure system by saying that its chorus sings with an upper class accent, maybe his most quoted remark. I mean, he certainly is the most quoted of 20th century American political scientists. But I think his observation is plausible only if class is taken very broadly. I mean, there is an extreme imbalance in the system, but it's primarily reflected in the fact that business and professional interests are represented by groups that have far greater resources than the organizations that we might classify as representing other interest sharing groups in the public. By another kind of very startling calculation, the ratio might be in spending might be something like 34 to one. But as I've suggested, the concern about unfairness isn't quite about bias in the capacity to control what policymakers do by apportioning rewards and punishments. Although, I mean, we shouldn't overlook the role that's played by campaign contributions by lobbyists in gaining access to legislators and staff. I think the objection arises from the ability of well-resourced lobbyists to overwhelm the epistemic capacities of policymakers to process and evaluate the information that the lobbying system makes available to them. Those capacities are limited by time, attention, and staff support, and what large inequalities and resources do is to exploit those limitations. Now, if we understand the social value of lobbying as providing policymakers with the resources they need to make good policy, then the basis of the objection to the imbalance is something like this. Under contemporary conditions of policymaking, the imbalance of resources skews the epistemic environment in which deliberation about policy takes place. And that can create an advantage for the better resource interests, although we know empirically that it doesn't always do so. And that imbalance is a kind of unfairness, but it's not just a matter of inequality of opportunity for influence among individuals. The unfairness lies in the undermining of the deliberative system's capacity to sustain an epistemic environment that's conducive to responsible policymaking. And citizens are entitled to that. Sufficiently imbalanced resources undermine the competitive process in securing the social value that justifies it. And the unfairness is in that sense structural rather than only transactional. And although I don't want to say much about potential reforms, I think fixing it doesn't necessarily require and may not require at all, equalizing resources among citizens. It requires creating conditions for effective contestation of policy within the policymaking process. Here I'm influenced by a very good book seven years ago by Bruce Kane. So let me move toward a conclusion. I've explored three sites of competition and the considerations that seem to bear on judgments about its fairness and its effectiveness. If there were more time, I try to elaborate the idea of fairly regulated competition for other sites, including the organization of the public sphere, which I think is probably my most important omission and a challenging subject in its own right. But I hope I've at least illustrated a general idea about standards of fair competition at various sites where it takes place. They derive from a view about the supporting, about the justifying purposes of democratic representation interpreted for the functions we should expect competition to serve at each site, each of which has its own particular structure and dynamics. Just to be clear, I don't suggest that those standards could be read off features of the context. The view I've explored is normative while trying to be sensitive to the varying functional roles that competition at different points in the system should serve. Now, just to pick up a theme from last time, I've only gestured at a response to a question that I raised about whether the intimations of failure are signs of institutional dysfunction or instead expressions of changes in the political environment. Without, I don't wanna pause to explain, but to me, the most troubling failures seem to result from a combination. Changes in the political environment are refracted through institutions that functioned well enough under other circumstances, but that don't do so today. Our institutions seem to me ill-suited to meet the challenges of a changing polity. I wish I could develop this with more authority, but I think any of my three commentators could do that better than I could. So instead, I wanna conclude just by noticing what I think is the element, the elephant in the room that's probably occurred to most of you. In the framework that I've described, there's no more troubling case of political competition in the United States running off the rails, than the erosion of healthy party competition that's been in progress for at least 30 years and arguably considerably longer. It's been propelled by a Republican party whose leadership has made strategic choices that have destabilized democratic norms that are essential for healthy political competition in a process that now appears to have escaped the party leadership's control. That to me is a deeply disturbing prospect, a source of the anxiety I mentioned at the beginning of my comments yesterday. I don't believe that democratic theory can say very much to illuminate this prospect beyond acknowledging it and giving reasons for lamenting it. I do think that restoring healthy party competition is among the most critical challenges that face the system of democratic representation in the United States today. It's a prerequisite even though, if on my account it won't be sufficient for fair and effective representation. I'll stop there. Thanks. I think it might make sense for us to take our break now actually before the two commentators, but would you be up for that? Fine, whatever you say. So I think, yeah, let's take a five minute break. I'll be stingier than Nico yesterday, but a five minute break now and let's reassemble. We'll hear first from Professor Carlin. I have on my watch five, 20, so five, 25. We'll start again. Great, thank you. Okay, so I take great pleasure in introducing you to our first commentator of the day, Professor Pamela Carlin of Stanford Law School. Pam is the Kenneth and Harle Montgomery Professor of Public Interest Law and a founder and co-director of the Supreme Court Litigation Clinic at Stanford Law School. Pam is a Yale product having received her BA, MA in history and JD there and clerked for US District Court Judge Abraham Sofair and Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackman. She then practiced law with the NAACP before joining the Academy with the first position at the University of Virginia. Within the Academy, Pam's teaching and scholarship focuses on voting rights and anti-discrimination law. She's the co-author of three leading case books cited today, several times in yesterday, one of constitutional law, one on the regulation of the political process and one on civil rights cases, the Civil Rights Actions and a monograph on constitutional interpretation, keeping faith with the Constitution, written, I might add, with our erstwhile colleague, Goodwin Lu. Her early article on race, rights, remedies and criminal adjudication remains a hallmark and a reference point in the field. She's written dozens more articles exploring different facets of the ways democracies devise ways to avoid rather than embrace racial, gender and sexual equality. In recognition of her scholarship, Pam is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Law Institute and probably many other academies beyond that. Somewhat unusually for such a distinguished academic, Pam is at least equally well known for her work as a lawyer inside and outside government. She has a well-deserved reputation as one of, if not the, foremost constitutional lawyers of her generation. She has served in senior government positions twice, first as the Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice for a year and a half during the Obama Administration and then again as Principal Deputy Assistant AG for Civil Rights in the Biden Administration in 2020, 2021. I think I got those titles right. 21, 22. Oh, 21, 22, okay. Dates wrong, but the title's right. We could have been saying 20 as well. At DOJ, she received the Attorney General's Award for Exceptional Service, which is the department's highest employee award for her work in implementing the Supreme Court's decision in the United States versus Windsor, which required federal recognition of same-sex marriages. At the Stanford Supreme Court Litigation Clinic, she's argued some of the most consequential cases in the last few decades, including the Bostock case of 2019, which is the one where Justice Gorsuch of all people came to the surprising conclusion that a strict reading of the 1964 Civil Rights Act prohibition of discrimination on the basis of sex also applies to sexual orientation. And as a side note, I'll just say I'm sure there's a time bomb hidden in that opinion much as I applaud the result and bravo to Pam for helping get that. Because of her combination of appellate court skills and brilliant scholarship, Pam is on many peoples including my own short wish list of future Supreme Court justices where she would in a better world to get to bring her unsparing vision of the need for real equality and voting rights to bear, not just as an advocate arguing against a majority seeming determined to entrench minoritarian rule, but as a collegial interlocutor. We actually have a glimpse of what Justice Carlin would be like. I think it's an open secret that she wrote Justice Blackman's dissenting opinion and the infamous and now happily overruled case of Bowers versus Hardwick, which accepted the criminalization of same-sex intimacy. From right about the history of that case, Blackman's dissent would have been the majority but for Justice Powell switching at the last minute. In any event, Justice Blackman slash Professor Carlin's ringing dissent essentially became law in Lawrence versus Texas 17 long years later. Today I expect we're to hear Pam scholarly persona rather than her advocacy one and we will get the benefit of her view both synoptic and fine grained about the ways in which America's peculiar electoral institutions are gained to preserve and extend unjust hierarchies of power and whether Chuck's ideally regulated rivalry proposals stand a chance against the interests that will rally to oppose them. Please join me in welcoming Pam to the podium. Thanks so much, Chris, for that introduction. Thank you to the Tanner Committee for inviting me. Thanks to Jane for all of her help in getting me here and in the words of one of America's greatest philosophers, Yogi Berra. Thank you, Chuck, for making today necessary. Professor Bytes has offered a thoughtful and thought provoking analysis of whether the United States' representative institutions are failing and if they are, why and how. I take the ultimate goal of his project to be in his words, what do the diagnoses suggest about the requirements of fair and effective representation? And Chuck has said a number of very original things during lecture yesterday and today but those words are actually not original to Chuck. He draws the phrase fair and effective representation from the United States Supreme Court's decision in the path marking one person, one vote case of Reynolds against Sims, decided in 1964. At the time of Reynolds, the United States scarcely had fair and effective representation. Indeed, it lacked even the most minimal requirements for saying that representation was fair and effective. For example, black citizens were disenfranchised across a wide swath of the country in Mississippi. Only 6.4% of black adults were registered to vote. And I still remember once being asked when I was testifying in front of Congress whether John F. Kennedy was the choice of Mississippi voters. The representative who was asking me the questions was trying to show that white elected officials could represent black people, which I've never contested. And he said, well, don't you admit that John F. Kennedy was the representative of black voters in Mississippi? I said, I can't say that. And he said, well, why can't you say that? I said, because only 6.4% of them were able to vote, we have no idea what black people in Mississippi wanted in the 1960 presidential election. He said, well, would you admit that Jimmy Carter was their choice? And I said, yeah, by then, yeah, we can do that. So I take as my starting proposition here something that this wing court said at the beginning of the paragraph that ends with the phrase about fair and effective representation. And here's how the court began that paragraph. It said, logically, in a society ostensibly grounded on representative government, it would seem reasonable that a majority of the people of a state could elect a majority of that state's legislators. The problem that the court saw in 1964 was that in virtually every American state that proposition was untrue. For example, in Alabama, which is the state that Reynolds against Sims came from, only a quarter of the state's total population could control the election of a majority of the state's House of Representatives and of a majority of the state's Senate. And Alabama wasn't even the worst state in the country. In Maryland, one seventh of the population elected a majority of the seats in the state legislature. And in Connecticut, the state where I grew up, every city, every township of the 69 townships got one seat in the state House, which meant that the 500 people in Colchester and the 125,000 people in Hartford each elected one representative. So that was a problem just as a matter of math. But even worse than that, the apportionments before the court systematically biased the overall legislative process in favor of certain groups, most notably in almost every part of the country, white, rural voters. And the court was well aware of the consequences of that, which were that much of the court's workload in the 1960s, particularly when it came to areas of civil rights, was a product of the inability of the political system to solve for those issues because extremist politicians from underpopulated Southern jurisdictions were at the forefront of running Congress. Earl Warren was famously supposed to have said, or at least his biographer quotes him as saying, and one never knows with these things, that if the Supreme Court had decided Reynolds against Sims 20 years earlier, Brown versus Board of Education would have been unnecessary because the political process would have begun the process of dismantling Jim Crow and Dejeure segregation. And we know to some extent that this is true because it was only once the political process started to require desegregation that we got effective desegregation. It wasn't in 1954. It wasn't even in 1964 at which point something less than 4% of black students in the South attended a school with a single white student in it. It was only once Congress passed laws that said we'll take the funding away from Southern school systems if they don't begin to desegregate then any real desegregation happened. But let's generalize the Supreme Court's point. We might posit that in a nation where federal power is ostensibly grounded on representative government, it would seem reasonable that a majority of the people of the nation could elect a majority of Congress. And it seems even more reasonable perhaps to believe that fair and effective representation requires that a majority of the people in the nation be able to elect the one office that's elected nationwide, which is the presidency. Fair and effective representation in this view requires at least some measure of majoritarianism. Now that's not to say it requires nothing else. As Professor Beitz explains, a fair and effective system requires political opportunity for numerical minorities as well. And a democratic polity necessarily places some issues beyond majority control altogether. For example, certain rights of conscience or basic human rights are not supposed to be subject to the majority's will. In practice, though, we have a structure that falls systematically short of that majoritarian ideal. In my commentary, I wanna build out a point that Professor Beitz made in his first lecture and referred again to today when he offers the stylized facts for why we think that representation is failing. The fifth of those facts is, he says, the partisan bias in districting for the House of Representatives and many state legislatures. He then drops a footnote, signing the work of my Stanford colleague, Jonathan Rodden, and observes that there's also partisan bias in the definition of Senate constituencies and that the median Senate constituency or state is more Republican-leaning than the country as a whole. Obviously, this bias isn't a product of gerrymandering. Now, I'm not a political scientist or a political theorist. I'm a law professor. And so I focus a lot of my work on the Constitution, which I think of as the ultimate regulative rule when it comes to our politics. What I'm gonna suggest this afternoon is that perhaps the greatest example of representational failure in contemporary U.S. politics is not the partisan gerrymandering of the United States House of Representatives, serious though that is. Rather, it's the composition of the United States Senate. That failure is precisely because, as Professor Byte so well puts it, democratic representation is a jurisdiction-wide practice. Voters and citizens care not just about whether they can vote. That's the equal respect that he talks about. Not even just about whether they can elect the candidate of their choice, but they care about equally and perhaps even more the overall composition of legislative bodies because that is what's gonna determine whether their preferred policy outcomes have a chance of being enacted. And that, along the way, I'm gonna suggest, is the real problem. And the other thing I'm gonna suggest in is something that you may not have thought about as much. And since I'm not a political theorist, I'm not a political scientist, I'm also not, although I have a master's degree in history, a historian, right? You know, like Bill Nye, the science guy. I've got a master's in science. Well, I have a master's in history, but actually it was in Renaissance history. But I'm gonna suggest something about our Senate as a historical matter, which is that our Senate is actually a product of what we might think of as meta gerrymandering. Partisan manipulation of jurisdictional boundaries that's so baked into the structure of our polity that it lies beyond repair by any of the normal anti-entrenchment devices we have available to us. Like initiatives or judicial challenges are like, we don't even really think about it as something that can be challenged at all. Now the past two decades have seen something new in US politics, a partisan divide between large population and small population states. And to be sure, we've always had a division between the large population and the small population states in the United States. At the time of the founding, for example, Virginia had more than 12 times the population of Delaware. And the constitutional convention that created the US Constitution almost dissolved over the conflict between small and large states about how political power was going to be allocated in Congress. Ultimately, that conflict was resolved by the so-called Connecticut compromise under which each state received equal representation in the Senate, but representation in the House of Representatives was allocated on the basis of population. Now negotiating that relative political power issue was critical to there being a United States. Even at the time of the 14th Amendment, the foundation of much of what our constitution talks about when it comes to equality and political fairness, even when that was ratified, things were skewed. Indeed, they were even more skewed then. New York had 100 times, New York was the most populous state, and it had 100 times the population of Nevada, which was the least populative state. What Jonathan Rodden points out, though, in the work that Professor Byte cites, a book called Why Cities Lose, is that we now have a highly polarized partisan geography. In contemporary America, mostly rural, less populated states are voting increasingly Republican. More alarmingly, the gap between large and small states is growing. Within the next generation, 70% of Americans are gonna live in the 15 most populous states, leaving only 30% of Americans in the remaining 35. Now the effect of this, the commitment the court made in Reynolds to the idea that fair and effective representation requires at least the possibility of a majority controlling a majority is just doing a little bit of math. 30% of the population comprised of individuals whose interests and partisan preferences differ in systematic ways from their compatriots now have the capacity control in a durable way how one of the central organs of representative government operates. Because the 30% who live in the 35 states have 70 senators among them. The majority who live in the 70% who live in the 15 states get 30 senators. And there's not much we can do about this unless large numbers of citizens relocate themselves to places like North Dakota and Wyoming, which climate change could create some incentive for that. Or unless we start making some new states and I'll have a little bit more to say about DC and Puerto Rico in a little while, and obviously you could divide up California when Texas came into the union, part of its agreement coming into the union is it could divide itself at any point into five states. So we can think about those things. There's a possibility of that, but not in the short term. Now, why is it that this is the most durable piece of problematic structure for fair and effective representation? It's because perhaps the most fixed regulative rule in the entire Constitution involves the Senate. Article five of the Constitution provides for the possibility of amending the Constitution. And a majority of the amendments that have been enacted since the original Bill of Rights are about voting and representation. And all of them, at least as a formal matter, seem to make the country more fair and more effective in its representation. So a ban on race discrimination in voting, a ban on denying women the right to vote, extending the right to vote to 18-year-olds, getting rid of the poll tax, allowing people in DC to vote and all. So you might think all the Constitution can be amended in really useful and helpful ways here. One of the phrases we teach our students in the clinic to use, and we use it in every brief, is the following, not so, not so because Article five ends this way with a proviso that quote, no state without its consent shall be deprived of its equal suffrage in the Senate. So what we have is a system where an organ of government that's capable of creating all sorts of gridlock, not just in legislation, but also in refusing to confirm judicial nominees, think Merrick Garland, or refusing to ratify the president's choice of high level executive officials, is becoming increasingly subject to capture by a numerical minority that supports a minoritarian political party. So the gridlock is not just the gridlock in legislation, it's a gridlock in the courts, it's a gridlock in the executive branch as well. Now before I turn to the contemporary consequences, and I mean before by saying some of these I won't get to until tomorrow, I wanna say a bit about the history, how we got to where we are. We tend to think of the map of the United States as fixed beyond politics. But in fact, partisanship is baked into the map. The states we have, and thus the representational structure that they instantiate, is the product of a series of highly partisan and sometimes directly race-conscious decisions about the admission or non-admission of new states. Prior to the Civil War, you probably all remember this from your American history class because they always start with the pilgrims and you usually get maybe to World War I, but that's about as far as you get, but at least you got that far, right? So maybe you don't know much contemporary, but you know the old stuff. So prior to the Civil War, you'll probably remember this, disputes over state admissions were primarily proxy fights in the battle over slavery. So for every slave state that got admitted, they'd admit a free state as well. So that was a time when racial considerations were directly inflecting which places got to be states and which didn't. But the thing most people don't talk about is how this continued after the Civil War as well. During the Civil War itself and during reconstruction, Republicans in Congress pushed through the admission of four new states in order to shore up their control of the national government, despite the fact that the southern states were being readmitted. They wanted to make sure that they continued to control the national government. So how do you do that? You mint some new senators. Most strikingly, and this goes back to something I was saying a moment ago, in 1864, Congress granted statehood to Nevada, which was a heavily Republican territory, despite it's having less than half the population of Oregon, which was then the least populous state in the country. Up until then, the rules seemed to be that you couldn't admit a territory as a state until it had the population of the least populous current state. But that went out the window for partisan reasons. At the same time that Congress let in Nevada, it denied statehood to Utah, which was far more populous, but was dominated by Democrats. After the Civil War ended, Republicans continued to use statehood politics as a way to secure their hold on the Senate and on the presidency. In 1889, Congress split the Dakota territory and admitted North Dakota, South Dakota and Washington. Each of them heavily Republican and dramatically underpopulated, which two of them have managed to maintain their underpopulated status even to today. At some point fairly soon, given the population trends, they may have like the three people who live there as the representative and the two senators. Now, although Congress in this kind of 1889 deal admitted one state that leaned Democratic, Montana, it declined to confer statehood on two other Democratic leading territories, once again Utah and also New Mexico. Despite the fact that these areas had similar populations. And race and religion obviously played a big role here. In New Mexico, scholars have said that the Spanish heritage of most New Mexico residents and the prevalence of the Spanish language in the region frequently prompted Republican statements wondering whether such people were even capable of independent self-government. And Utah was then as now a heavily Mormon state. Overall, of the 11 states admitted between 1861 and 1890, and I'm excluding West Virginia here because that was just like a kind of carve off of the parts of the state of Virginia, Commonwealth of Virginia, that didn't leave as part of the Civil War. Five of the 11 states had populations smaller than the average existing congressional district. Wyoming has never once reached that size. I feel like now that after the list chain thing, we should just take away the representative all together and that would teach them something. That same issue, of course, plays out today. And why has DC statehood failed? Well, it's obviously because of partisan concerns among other things, because DC is larger than more populous than three of the current states. Puerto Rico, where they had on the 2020 ballot yet another statehood referendum is larger and more populous than I think six or seven of the states. And yet it's obvious that under current conditions, they are simply not gonna be, there's not gonna be statehood for either of them. How does this play out today with respect to fair and effective representation? Well, the current Senate is split 50-50, but the Democratic senators represent more than 41 million more people than the Republican senators do. Moreover, because the Republican party can gain a Senate majority without having to appeal to the nationwide median voter, the party has less incentive to move its politics towards the center. And thus, our current system fails to fulfill a basic purpose that Professor Beitz identified, that the system be responsive to the people in the sense that policy would change when durable electoral majorities favor change. We risk a pervasive and persistent disconnection between durable popular majorities in this country and durable elected majorities. As Reynolds insists, that disconnect cannot produce fair and effective representation. Thank you very much. Thank you very much for the wonderful comments. So now I'll introduce Professor Mansbridge. I'm then gonna do a magic trick and transform myself into Professor Kevis Goodman, who's gonna replace me at about six o'clock because I have to run fast away from here and then come back. But anyway, ideally you won't even notice the transformation. So it is my great honor to introduce you now to Professor Jane Mansbridge. Professor Mansbridge, or Jenny as she is universally called, is the Charles F. Adams Professor of Political Leadership and Democratic Values Emerita at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. Before that, she taught for many years at Northwestern and before that at the University of Chicago with a brief stop at our sister school, UC Santa Barbara. With a career so long and distinguished, it seems silly to cite her undergraduate degrees, but it is our custom. She received her BA from Wellesley and then began a PhD in history at Harvard before switching to the government department. Saying that Jenny is a giant of democratic theory risks understating the case. Among her many books is her landmark study Beyond Adversary Democracy, which appeared in 1980 and which set the agenda for thinking about democracy as a practice, not a theory. And moreover, a practice whose dependence on social norms of exclusion and disempowerment was frequently ignored. She's published two other solo books edited five more important collections and written far too many articles for me to count. No wonder she is among the most awarded political scientists of our time with just about every award you can name and many you can't, including three honorary doctorates and most recently in 2018, the Ohan Skuta Prize, widely considered the Nobel Prize of Political Science. She has all the other honors one can name, including membership as well in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. What intrigues me, and I'm sure many others about Jenny Mansbridge's life's work, is that her prodigious scholarship does not represent an alternative to a life in politics, but rather goes hand in hand with a life lived in politics, specifically in working with various forms of co-ops, organizations, and social movements. This combination of theory and praxis is a theme for our commentators today. I gather that her professional education involved learning at least as much about discrimination and misogyny in the academy as about the formal institutions that were the object of her dissertation. I think the Supreme Court, if I'm right. Jenny has thus learned to weave her life into her work and vice versa. In a revealing interview in the Harvard Gazette, she says it was particularly her experience in fractious collectives and withering co-ops that led to her work on what we would now call Perspiratory Democracy, as a way to help these organizations survive. Beyond adversary democracy contrasts two models of democracy, the sharp elbowed competitive form favored by Joseph Schumpeter and everywhere around us, especially in the political pathologies Chuck has been diagnosing and now helping us to repair, and the gentler but still troublesome model of town meetings and face-to-face collective work, which she called Unitary Democracy. By sketching out a range of positions between these two ideal types, while showing their limitations, Professor Mansford greatly expanded both our theory of democracy, what values we see it as embodying, but also our practice. Jenny's later work, Exploring the Possibilities of Deliberative Democracy, takes up some of the lessons from her activism on behalf of gender equality. That work first appeared in her 1985 book Why We Lost the RA, which detailed the ways in which, despite a clear and well-supported objective, the effort to constitutionalize gender equality through a constitutional amendment, why activists failed in their effort to do so. Jenny's diagnosis lay in part in a failure of activists to listen to voices other than their own, and so ultimately to fail the test of democracy and progressive leadership. That test requires listening rather than shouting and persuasion rather than excommunication. Needless to say, these lessons have not been fully absorbed by the world. In her most recent work, Jenny, sometimes solo, sometimes with a village of co-authors, has done much to explore the interstices of political life where deliberation rather than discord might bloom through small, medium, and large public gatherings, and where different models and concepts of political representation might flourish. I read her work as essentially optimistic about the possibilities of collective self-governance, even in these dark and polarized times. Like you, I'm eager to hear Jenny's comments on these wonderful lectures, so I'll stop shirking my fundamental political responsibility and sit down and listen to somebody who knows a lot more than me. Thank you, that was a terrific introduction, and I actually recognized myself in it, which is wonderful. And Pam, who can follow that? But I'll try. So thank you very much for all of you for coming, and thank you for inviting me today to comment on these really wonderfully thought-provoking lectures. They excite me for three reasons. First, these lectures stress plural criteria for evaluation. This is going to be a political theorist's talk, but so these plural criteria for evaluation, you might not guess it, but previous analyses have really focused only on one criterion, and that's responsiveness, congruence, the people alighting them, as Chuck said. And this is just what Chuck did in his superb book on political equality. He complexified, he pulled it apart, he made us understand how something that people just thought was equal power, that is democracy, right? No, not quite, let's pull it apart, let's understand it better. He did it better than anyone else. So second thing is plural. First is plural, and the second is that these lectures engage deeply with the empirical work in the field. And that's something that political theory is now beginning to do. It's a very good step forward in my view. It doesn't mean leaving the other ways of doing political theory aside, but it's an important future direction. And third and most importantly, from my perspective, these lectures focus on the normative theory of the system of political representation. It's unusual but vital to develop normative criteria, not just for the dyadic, individual, constituent, representative relationship, but for the entire system. So just to be clear about what we mean by system, it's not a mechanistic system in which each component part has only a defined and invariant function, nor does Chuck mean that the system as a whole has only one function. He means that the whole should be judged as a whole, and not just as a sum of the parts, that the parts don't have mechanically predictable effects on one another, but that they affect one another in some ways and they have interactive consequences. In my own writing, both individually and with others, as the introduction suggested, I've stressed a deliberative system and I've stressed the division of labor within the system and the fact that a part may itself be normatively defective, but nevertheless play a positive role in the system. I'm gonna go back to that. So to say that a given part of the whole has a function in that whole system, that means you have to develop criteria for the system as a whole, and that is actually not easy. It's hard enough to develop criteria for individual constituent relations, representative constituent relations, but to develop criteria for the system is getting you in possibly deep trouble. As Chuck points out, the criteria are bound to be both plural and contested, and in that plurality and contest, we should be clear about the different elements of what's contested. Contingency, I'm gonna suggest, may play a major role. As Chuck points out, and I quote, institutions that are unproblematic in some circumstances can become problematic in others. So today I want to add to the complexity that Chuck has shown us. First, I'm gonna place the system of political competition that Chuck is studying within the context of other systems surrounding it, and then I'll dive more deeply into the competitive system itself and suggest that non-competition may have virtues. You didn't see. So first let me place the system of political competition within a set of larger and sister systems. For me, the largest system is what I'll call the legitimacy system, because I've argued that as human interdependence inevitably increases in this world, barring nuclear catastrophe, we're going to get more and more interdependent. We're gonna need more and more regulation to handle that interdependence. We're not just independent farmers anymore. And that interdependence creating more need for regulation is gonna require more state coercion. So we're gonna have increasingly more state coercion in your lifetimes, in your children's lifetimes, in their children's lifetimes, more and more state coercion in order to regulate the much more complex interdependence that we're gonna have. And that means that our 18th and 19th century democratic systems just can't provide the legitimacy for all that coercion. They were invented for times when you could say that government is best which governs least. That's a stupid thing to say right now. We're gonna need all that coercion but we can't legitimate it with what we've got. So I worry tremendously about how to legitimate that coercion and I see the larger system necessary to legitimate that coercion. I'll just call it because just for the first time today because of Chuck, I'll call it the legitimacy system. And within that larger legitimacy system in the United States, there's some direct democratic elements, referenda, but most takes the form of what we can conceive of as a gargantuan representative system. And within that huge representative system lies the electoral representative system which is the subject of Chuck's lectures. And we could also if we wanted to add the judiciary as representing the people in some ways and the administrative policy making system where top policy makers regularly consult stakeholders as in addition to lobbyists, they go out and consult stakeholders who represent major constituencies. So you've got representation working in the administrative system. And then we have what I'll call the societal representative system. Kathy Rudder and her co-authors estimate that quote, taken together agency rulemaking, that's administration and the policy decisions of private groups, that's civil society organizations, what I call societal groups, account for most policy making in advanced societies. So we should be looking at representation in those arenas since that's what accounts for most policy making. And as Marty Gillins pointed out yesterday, the representation in those systems is highly unequal. So we also need to think about to use Chuck's words. The fairness of the rules that structure representation in the administrative system and in the societal system. So that's the big picture. Legitimacy system at the most encompassing, inside it direct democracy, electoral representation, administrative societal representation. Big picture. I'm gonna do a deep dive unconnected with that picture in a way. I'll come back to both pictures next time. But I'm now gonna ask in the system of political competition that Chuck analyzes within the representative system, he focuses a great deal on political parties. Political parties to me exemplify a part of the larger system that has normatively questionable features in itself, but becomes not only normatively acceptable but valuable as part of the larger system. So in the work on deliberative systems that I've done, I've written that within a deliberative system, political protest and what I call enclave deliberation, which is likes talking to likes, just people who get themselves into an enclave and why we lost the ERI one of the things I wrote was it was a problem because the activists talked only to one another and didn't listen to the other folks, that's enclave deliberation. Those have some problems. Protesters may shout slogans and demonize their opponents, the liberty of problems I mean. And enclaves like-minded shut out opposing views. But both protest and enclaves sometimes play important roles in the deliberative system. Protest by drawing attention to ideas and facts that have previously been ignored. And enclaves by allowing the like-minded to clarify the issues among themselves and I'm thinking of the feminist movement here, create new ideas and support one another in presenting those ideas to the larger system. So when you think about these parts that have problems in themselves, normative problems in themselves, but play a role, I think maybe a bowel movement, you know? They play a function in the digestive system. They're not attractive in themselves, but they make the system work. So maybe political parties are a little bit like that. So the founders may not have been crazy when they abhorred a faction. They didn't have access to the research deriving from Taj fell's minimal group experiments in 1970, which showed how easily people collect onto their group and discriminate in their group's favor and against other groups. Even when the group is based on nothing more than what modern painter you like, Kedinsky or Clay. I mean, irrelevant to the English school boys he was studying. But once you're put in one group, you're gonna distribute money that favors that group. And we now know that people very typically think that the members of their group are much more homogeneous than they are, and that they're further away from members of the outgroup than they actually are. So human beings are, among other things, group beings. And that being pro-ingrope bias can easily, in Chuck's words, run off the rails. So the fear of faction is reasonable. Now Chuck's work is sensitive to context as he writes, quotes, the norms of fair and effective representation are context sensitive. So I want to ask, and I'm not gonna answer this question but I think it's a question for normative theory going further, so in what context would the vices of competition outweigh its virtues? In what context might the vices of parties outweigh their virtues? The context question seems to me to be the next step along the path that Chuck is appropriately leading us. And I don't think the contextual value of competition or parties has been deeply thought through. We might need a contingency theory of competition and parties. Now competition is so central to Chuck's concept of a representative system that he goes so far as to say, quotes, democratic politics is competitive, close quotes, or quotes. Representation, representative democracy consists of competitive processes, strong statements. So I'm gonna suggest that there are at least two major instances of fairly functional spaces and fairly fair spaces in the representative system in which in Chuck's telling terms there's a competitive structure but the arena's not situationally competitive. So obviously these are one-party districts and one-party states, one-party citizens and non-partisan cities. And then I'll look very quickly at incumbency the long and relatively unchallenged tenure of one representative in one district. For example, Edward Kennedy and now perhaps Elizabeth Warren in Massachusetts. Non-competitive, essentially. Chuck and others point out that in the abstract one would expect higher voter satisfaction in homogeneous districts. He made that point today because homogeneous non-competitive districts have fewer minority voters. Fewer voters who don't think that the party in power represents their interests. If you had everybody at one party everybody would think that the party in power represented their interests. Now voter satisfaction may be good for perceived legitimacy. Chuck addresses this issue and ends by saying it is not clear why the dissatisfaction of voters with their representatives should matter in assessing institutional structures. I think that's wrong. I think that the satisfaction of voters does matter in assessing the structures because that satisfaction bears heavily on perceived legitimacy. We want our voters to be satisfied. So they may be satisfied for the wrong reasons but getting your person in power is not such a bad reason. Now there's other reasons for reducing competition and I'm not gonna argue that we should eliminate competition for everyone's sake because I'm making to some degree a devil's advocate point but also to some degree a real point. Reducing competition might actually increase the number of people who are willing to run for office. Many women don't run for office because they just don't want the kind of stuff that gets thrown at you in political office. So this has been shown by some studies by Shauna Shamas. So at least some people who run for office aim at social value and they enter the competitive game only as the price of being able to increase that social value. They're not gung-ho the game at all. They hate the game. They don't want all that stuff but they do want to help and they think that by becoming a representative they can help. Now that's maybe we get more such candidates in nonpartisan cities. I don't know, that's an empirical question but the empirical political science in this case hasn't been driven by a normative theory that says go look at that, go find out. Progressives historically made several arguments for nonpartisanship, many of which have been discredited as elitists but some might bear revisiting in a little interviewing of state legislators that I did 10 years ago. I noticed that the legislator I interviewed from Hawaii which is a one-party state, Democrat, had no hot button issues on his little one paragraph bio. Well the six others I interviewed from relatively competitive states all listed in endorsements from the National Rifle Association, Planned Parenthood and other sort of signaling organizations. So given a whole set of hot button issues they were there, there, there you could tell instantly. The guy from Hawaii just listed his legislative accomplishments. I think the progressives might have approved. That's what they wanted to see. The greatest vice of party competitions is the one that founders feared which is in Chuck's words, competition running off the rails. There's gotta be an enough already point where competition starts getting too strong for what Chuck calls a healthy system where the in-group, out-group dynamic or affective polarization gets overwhelming or where there too much emphasis on women winning. Chuck doesn't explore this but I think that normative theory ought to be looking at this and so should empirical work. What is, you mentioned it, running off the rails several times but what should we look at to say that something is okay, it's really running off the rails and of course we think all of us of the current polarization stop the steal, lie and January 6th. That's Chuck's elephant in the room. I think that elephant in the room really can be explored normatively and also empirically. What makes, what's running, where does the running off the rails line begin? Now on the plus side for competition we have several points that Chuck makes including accountability but in an uncompetitive situation accountability can take the traditional form of giving an account. That's what it used to mean giving an account both in French and in German and in English, the concept of accountability. Explaining, explaining why I deviated from your expectations rather than the more modern meaning which is sanctions. That's what accountability is it's the application of sanctions. Now, I think that possibly so I think there's a way of giving an account even in non-competitive states. On the plus side there's also possibly efficacy but it's not clear that one party hegemony in a city or state reduces its quality of government. Massachusetts and Wyoming are the two states in which Democratic and Republican parties respectively have the closest to one party rule and neither of them has a reputation for terrible government. Massachusetts ranks ninth in the US news and world reports state quality index and Wyoming ranks 35th but it still comes in just above the five states of Ohio, Nevada, Michigan, Arizona and Pennsylvania four of which are pretty competitive and traditionally been competitive. So it's not clear that efficacy is maps onto competition. The non-partisan city of Cambridge, Massachusetts is relatively effective. An empirical research on this subject is surprisingly sparse and not yet guided by normative theory. Do citizens perceive less fairness in one party's cities and states and are those cities and states less effective than those structured by partisan conflict? As far as I know, we don't know. Now, of course, if Chuck points out there is competition within relatively one party's cities and states and in non-partisan cities. It's just that that competition is not structured the way parties tend to structure it and it may be more cutthroat. So it may be that we should just simply balance the pros and cons but I'm suggesting that balancing the pros and cons is not the most effective way to think about competing things from a systemic point of view. Rather, you might ask whether competition is more important normatively in some contexts than others. I can't answer that question tonight. I just want to say that that seems to me the next question to ask and the same considerations apply to incumbency. It has the disadvantage of lesser competition but it actually has advantages and improved communication with constituents because the constituents know the names of long-term incumbents. An awful lot of constituents don't know the names of their representatives. So it's rather hard for them to conceive of contacting them. They don't have a sense of contact. Long-term representatives do. And also it has advantages and expertise and competence within legislatures like legislative negotiation which takes a long time getting to know the other people and been rarely studied in political science. So I'm going to stop. I've taken my cue from Chuck who stressed complexity, the plurality of normative criteria and the importance of system-syncing. So I've just done a kind of double-bites bringing out more complexity, more criteria, more doubling down on systems-syncing. And this line of inquiry, thanks to Chuck, has a strong promise of prompting, I believe, further normative inquiry and new empirical research. So thank you, Chuck, for starting us off. Thank you. Thank you. Chuck, you're now invited to make your response. So let me just thank Pam and Jenny for, I mean, thoughtful and characteristically stimulating comments. Both of them, both of these sets of comments reflect the kind of enormously impressive intellectual depth that each of them brings to the subject and just makes me very grateful that they're here to comment. Both sets of comments kind of generously present themselves as complimenting my lectures by extending them to subjects that I didn't consider or only mentioned briefly. And as I say, that's generous, but it really does make it difficult to respond. I mean, it would be easier if there were really sharp, clear disagreements. I mean, my emeritus colleague and good friend George K. Tebb once remarked that there's kind of nothing like harsh disagreement to confirm one's confidence in one's own views. And lacking that kind of stimulus here, I can only respond by appreciating the extensions that Pam and Jenny suggest and commenting on a few points that might reflect differences of emphasis and judgment. I know our time is limited and we'll have more time tomorrow, so I'm just gonna pick some points and comment about them fairly briefly. First, beginning with Pam's comments, I particularly appreciate her calling our attention to the political consequences of the combination of the country's increasing geographical polarization and the partisan divide that's developing between large and small states and the interaction of that development with the constitutional and statutory provisions that enable a partisan minority to win majorities in the Senate and I think she'll say more tomorrow in the Electoral College. I didn't comment very much about the partisan bias that's baked into these institutions under our contemporary circumstances other than to, as Pam mentions, to kind of note them in a footnote, but I agree that it's a critical part of the explanation of some of the failures of our representative institutions that I mentioned. I think as Pam argues persuasively, the consequences are even more ominous going forward as the Republican Party consolidates its grip on political power as majorities in state electorates are becoming increasingly. In some state electorates are becoming increasingly insecure. As Pam observes, those consequences go beyond enabling Republicans to exercise legislative power out of proportion to their share of the national electorate. They also contribute powerfully to the disempowerment of black voters. I touched on this briefly yesterday but I failed to observe, as Pam does, how the Electoral College, and she'll say more again tomorrow, minimizes the voting strength of black voters in presidential elections. And that's important politically and it deserves greater emphasis. And it also underscores the role that the plebiscitary presidency has assumed in national politics. That fact figured prominently in Sunquist's concerns about the anti-democratic potential of divided government that I mentioned yesterday. I think the racial bias in the Senate and in the presidential election system adds a dimension to this, a concern about the discriminatory potential of those provisions. Now today, Pam added some, I thought, illuminating remarks about the history of the statutory and constitutional provisions that helped to produce the growing skew between national and electoral majorities and their representation in the Senate. And she notes the difficulty that borders on impossibility of changing them. So I'd have to say just parenthetically, that proviso at the end of Article V that makes it practically impossible to amend the provisions for election of the Senate has always seemed to me a kind of perverse constitutional witchcraft. I mean, it's the kind of reductio ad absurdum of the law's capacity to extend its dead hand into the future. And maybe you can explain this tomorrow, but as a conceptual matter, I've just never understood how this can be. I mean, how can it be that the last sentence of an article in a constitution written 200 years ago can effectively prevent any political action, any legitimate political action to change the provisions of the constitution in the future? There's got to be more to be said about this. And also, parenthetically, and maybe of more specialized interest, Pam reminds us that single-member districts were not required for the election of members of the House until 1842, at which time alternatives like rank choice voting were unknown or uninvented or at least unknown. And I guess it's true that they were unknown in the US, but they were a matter of active debate in the United Kingdom. And a predecessor of the hair system of proportional representation, which John Stuart Mill advocated in his considerations on representative government in what was it, 1859 or so. A predecessor of that was proposed in the UK in 1822. And there was lively debate about mechanisms of proportional representation from then on in the UK. In the US, something like it was proposed in 1844 by someone named Thomas Gilpin. And that was just two years after the statute that Pam cites. So just as a historical matter, it would be interesting to know if there was anything like the debate in the UK that was produced in the US before the statute of 1842, or was it just taken as obvious that the alternative institutional structure to the hodgepodge of district practices that he emerged early in the Republic had to be some form of single-member district. So I don't know, that's just, I think a matter of historical interest, but it might sort of shed some light on the question that Pam raises, I think interestingly, what the range of options that were actually available in 1842 might have been. So that's the end of my sort of two parenthetical remarks. Pam is also right to call our attention to the history of admissions of new states, which was more politicized and indeed racialized than the textbooks that I read in school act made clear. Maybe yours were more accurate than mine. Stepping out of my identity as a theorist and into my identity as a concerned citizen, however, I wonder about the significance of this historical fact for politics today. I mean, I think it's clear as Pam was suggesting that it may show the proposals to extend statehood to Puerto Rico and the District of Columbia in order to redress the imbalance in the Senate are nothing new, but the political consequences of that strike me as at best ambiguous. Pam is, I think, too generous to say so, but I also think it's true that a more penetrating analysis of failures of representation and particularly of the partisan bias induced by geography might be more insistent about the consequences that she described so clearly. As I said yesterday, I think one of the real difficulties of this subject is the complexity of the relationship between institutional structure and the political environment. And it's a further challenge to try to imagine the kinds of political reforms that might offer some promise of offsetting those consequences while remaining within the range of political feasibility. I'm pretty sure that that challenge isn't within my competence as a political theorist, but Pam has addressed these questions in other work and I think it might be interesting tomorrow if we could devote a little bit of time to thinking about the range of possible conceivable reforms. So let me just say a few things about Jenny's comments. They're unsurprisingly rich and stimulating and they stretch us to think beyond the boundaries of the conventional discussion of political representation. You said a lot Jenny and I think there's only today time to respond on two points. First of all, I find it really helpful to situate my subject in a larger context in the way that Jenny has done. She describes what we might think of as a structure of nested systems with a legitimacy system as the most comprehensive level representation subsystem and within that systems of elective representation, administrative policy making and societal representation. And I do think it's important to see the system that we conventionally think about, especially in empirical political science as part of that larger structure. I think it's actually impossible to understand how the limited conventional system of electoral representation works without taking account of that larger structure. Now, of course, there's other ways of kind of arranging the pieces on the chessboard. Habermas, for example, conceives of a formal system of rulemaking that encompasses not just legislation but also administrative rulemaking as existing, so to speak, side by side with a public sphere that whose structure enables individuals and civil society groups to contest the operations of the formal system. For example, by putting issues on the agenda, eliciting dispute about priorities, holding public officials to informal account in some of the ways that Jenny mentioned. I'm not sure it matters which of these taxonomies that we adopt, but I certainly agree that we should appreciate that the elective representation system is part of a larger functional whole whose disorderly interactions combine to produce and obstruct and sometimes change policy. So I'm all on board for that. I just think it's a practical challenge, really, to get the connections right and to kind of get beyond what I think are often the kind of excessive abstractions that arise in these kinds of discussions about how one piece affects the other and actually see where the connective tissue is. I think this is the last thing I'll say, I think, but one implication of this larger perspective, as Jenny suggests, is that an account of political representation in the conventional sense that doesn't pay attention to the social organization of public deliberation or what Habermas calls the public sphere is just deeply incomplete. And as I said, I couldn't agree more. I hope to be able to say more about that in the future, but it is a very difficult subject. And I think a good deal of the literature about deliberative democracy, not including Jenny's work, has tended to denigrate the competitive elements of large-scale deliberative processes. I mean, it's true, as I said earlier, that a certain level of abstraction, we can understand public deliberation as a kind of social cooperation. I mean, it's structured by rules and norms that are justified by the goods it provides for citizens, but the kind of deliberation that we are actually familiar with in democratic politics is, it seems inevitably contestatory. It consists of what we might call structured disagreement. And for me, it's only a conjecture at this point, but I think it might redress a kind of imbalance in the literature on deliberation to make ourselves more aware of its competitive elements because this would draw attention to the rules and norms that either do or might regulate contestation. And that's important for a reason I mentioned yesterday because the technology and the practice of public contestation has changed so dramatically in the last 20 or 30 years. I mean, it's a matter of active controversy today how the new media environment should be regulated or should regulate itself. Political theorists, most of them anyway, even those interested in deliberative democracy are just beginning to engage that controversy. And I think it's fair to say that it's not even clear what the alternative normative approaches are to it. But I think that subject is urgently in need of further attention. Last comment, I said last before, but that was a lie. Here's the last comment. It involves competition and its vices. I think we agree that political competition kind of run off the rails when it undermines the production of the social values that justify it. I mean, if I had to say, give an abstract answer to Jenny's last question, I think that's where we draw the line between healthy and unhealthy competition. But I might wanna push back a bit on the suggestion that there are in general advantages to reducing competition. Jenny suggests that one party hegemony might not be so bad, even though it means that party competition would be less important in structuring political disagreement. And I'm sure there are places where this is true. I mean, maybe Massachusetts, maybe some nonpartisan local government and so on. Another parenthesis, I'm just not, you know Cambridge better than I do, but we spent a sabbatical year there several years ago and our neighbors who were Harvard faculty in fact, used to refer to Cambridge as the PRC, the People's Republic of Cambridge. And they did it to underline their sense that the ostensibly nonpartisan system mainly worked because the population was just so politically homogeneous. And you know, that's not so much an aspect of the institutional system as it is of the particular facts about the local population. But as a general matter, I'd resist the suggestion that party competition, when it's healthy and it's well-regulated might be a bad thing. We have a history in this country of one party government in the old South that ought to give us all pause. And we have an emerging social science that examines one party hegemony in the States and raises large and troubling questions about whether states dominated by a single party and more often the Republican party produce policy that can plausibly be seen in the interests of majorities of their citizens. And here I just kind of mentioned a recent book by Jacob Grumbach called Laboratories Against Democracy. That looks systematically at government in one party dominated states. So I guess the thing to say about party competition may be the kind of thing that a Shachnidarian would say is something like this. If not parties, what? Parties have the potential to democratize the contest for control over policy that otherwise would be in the hands of interests and be more or less invisible to the public. If we don't rely on parties to do that, to socialize conflict and make it visible and accessible to voters, what other structures that are feasibly available to us could perform that function? I just don't know the answer to that question. And that's the reason that I'm kind of reluctant to give up on the promise, although it's clearly not the reality at present of party competition. So I'll stop there. Okay, we have time for two questions. You will save your responses to Professor Bytes. So lots to think about. Questions? Thanks, and I love the focus on thinking about representation and effectiveness as a system. And also liked the push to think about the Senate. I've always thought of the Senate as something that looms really large when you take that kind of approach. But I would say in the last couple of years I found myself kind of imagining the Supreme Court saying, hold my beer. It's, I'll show you the kind of distortion that can take place in an important element of the system. And so I guess I'm, it's not really a critique in any way because you're covering so much ground, but I guess I feel like if we're thinking about the contemporary American political scene and we're trying to think about representation and effectiveness, and of course, the Supreme Court is not gridlocked. The Supreme Court in a single term can do more than any recent president has been able to do in terms of changing public policy. So I'd be interested in your reactions to that. That's what I'm gonna talk about tomorrow. Sorry, but yes, but the Supreme Court itself is a product of the Electoral College and the Senate. And the Supreme Court we have now. And so I'm gonna talk tomorrow about just- The President wants to have a lot of photos. Yes, and six of the nine sitting justices are Republicans. I'll give you a date. I don't mean, I'll take you out somewhere. I mean, I'll just give you a date, which is May 15th, 1969. What does that date mean to you? Last time Democrats had a majority. That's right. That's the last time that a majority of the justices on the Supreme Court were nominated by Democratic presidents. Before I ask for a last question, let me just say to those of you who don't get to ask your questions today, be here same place, same time tomorrow and hold on to your questions and there will be answers. But for now, any last thoughts? Yes. I'm just wondering maybe your reactions to educational polarization. I heard a little bit of talk a bit about like, this isn't a fully formed thought, but small population states and large population states, how do you reckon that with also like educational partisanship based on Democrats tend to be more educated or have like more college degrees than Republicans do today? Does anybody know the data? Yeah, that's true. Absolutely, it's an extraordinary change. Republicans now have higher incomes than Democrats, but they have lower educational levels. No, I know that, but does that map onto the difference between small states and big states? I don't know how the two things cross cut on each other. I mean, it's, the change is pretty dramatic though that if you looked 10 years ago, the curve on income and likelihood of voting Republican now it's a much more complicated curve. It's sort of the ends against the middle in a way. Yeah, I think it emerges kind of really quite amazingly in 2016. Right. I think it maps onto the Democrats losing the working class and the kind of discourse that you get among the kind of professional people who are now the activists in the Democratic party. So when you think of the recent vaccine stuff and masks the tendency of the Democrats has been the progressives has been to shake fingers at the people who are doing the wrong thing and tell them they're stupid and they're not paying attention to science. And not for many people's minds are changed by being told they're stupid. I mean, that's kind of the natural reaction of the educated classes to the uneducated classes. It's also really important to keep the racial angle of this in mind, which is when people say the Democrats have lost the working class, what they really mean is they've lost the white working class, not the black working class. Well, they're losing the Latino working class and they might lose some of the black working class even. Well, it's hard to maintain that level of monolithic support but it's also true when people talk about the gender gap. The gender gap in 2016 was a majority of white women in the country voted for Donald Trump. It was the black and Latino women who were voting overwhelmingly for Hillary Clinton. And so when you map all these things on top of each other, it actually gets really complicated to figure out the polarization that way. But you're absolutely right that the kind of nanny class drives people crazy, drives us crazy when we get lectured too. So why wouldn't it drive other people crazy? I will see you tomorrow, but in the meantime, join me in thanking our speakers today.