Professor Douglas Chalmers, Professor Emeritus of Political Science, Columbia University
will deliver the fifteenth annual Leonard Hastings Schoff Memorial Lectures:
Representative Government without Representatives
Seven Reasons to Think Beyond Electing Executives and Lawmakers
War, Inequality, Environment, Growth:
Successes and Failures of Representative Government
8:00 PM, Monday, November 12, 2007
Why Representation is a Process, Not a Set of People:
Porous Citizenry, Multiplex Communication and Informed Decisions
8:00 PM, Monday, November 19, 2007
Key Institutions of Representative Government:
Creating the Processes that Solve Problems
8:00 PM, Monday, November 26, 2007
KELLOGG CENTER
INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS BUILDING, ROOM 1501
420 WEST 118TH STREET
Reception immediately following each lecture.
Lectures are free and open to the public.
The governments of all complex societies with any pretension to democracy are representative in the sense that there are a set of leaders responding, well or badly, to the interests of the people, and who are responsible to them. The institutions of representative government either make that happen in the public interest, or fail to, and need reform. Well established democracies have very unequal success rates in promoting the public interest on many issues, including war, inequality, preserving the environment and economic growth. Reforming institutions could help improve that record.
The record can only be marginally improved by tinkering with the way we select our legislators and executives, reforming such things as election finance, party organization or whether the system is parliamentary or presidential. Representative government is not about electing representatives but establishing processes that will produce decisions in the public interest. Reform should be of the institutions controlling those processes.
I suggest seven characteristics of politics – not all new, but newly important – requiring rethinking how ‘the people’ shape and hold accountable their leaders. They are 1) the prominence of non-citizens, 2) the presence of sub-national communities, 3) an extreme drop in the cost of communication, 4) the multiplication of non-party and non-governmental organizations, 5) the persistent importance of personal networks, 6) a multiplicity of decision making sites, and 7) the importance of information and theory in decision making. Taken together, they imply the importance of attention to institutions that shape how problem-specific decision procedures are created, and that organize the flow of ideas and information.
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