Democracy for Busy People

Full Transcript:

INTRODUCTION: 

My name is Stephan Kyburz. And this is the Rules of the Game podcast. I am happy to be back after a break with a new episode.

What are the motivations for people to be politically active? Off the cuff, three possible explanations come to my mind. Firstly, there are those who genuinely aspire to effect societal or environmental change. Secondly, there are individuals who relish public attention and use politics as a platform to feed their ego. Lastly, there are those who perceive politics as a profitable venture.

Then there’s the majority who seem to prefer to stay away from active politics, primarily due to their hectic schedules and lack of time, or even just disinterest. It’s likely that most individuals would rather devote their lives to non-political pursuits. As for me, I am politically active because I believe there are numerous aspects of our society that require change. However, in an ideal world, maybe I’d just prefer to be fully confident in the political process and institutions, being sure that everything is running smoothly and that our politicians are trustworthy and act in good faith. Adapting the quote by the British nobel laureate John Hicks ‘the best of all monopoly profits is a quiet life’, I would propose that “the best of all democracy profits is a quiet sleep.”

Yet, that’s far from the reality that we encounter every day. We are confronted with enormous challenges, and democracy seems to require us to be proactive citizens, participating in elections and other democratic processes. Yet, many people are super busy, not because they are top managers of corporations, but because they are striving to make ends meet and secure a decent livelihood. For these individuals, ideal would be a democracy that demands minimal involvement yet yields maximum results.

The new book of my guest Kevin Elliott has all to do with how democracy could be built for busy people. Hence the title of the book: Democracy for Busy People, that was published in 2023 by the University of Chicago Press. I had a fascinating conversation with Kevin Elliott about his inspiration for writing this book, in which he takes the viewpoint of busy individuals who scarcely have the time to delve into lengthy parliamentary debates, participate in citizens’ assemblies, or cast votes on numerous initiatives and referendums. Essentially, the question is how we can simplify democracy and reduce its demands, while simultaneously enhancing its democratic nature.

Kevin J. Elliott is a Lecturer in Ethics, Politics, & Economics at Yale University. His primary research areas lie in political theory, with a special focus on the ethics of democratic citizenship and the design of political institutions. His scholarly contributions have been featured in numerous prestigious publications such as the American Journal of Political Science, The Journal of Politics, Perspectives on Politics, Political Theory and many others. He earned his PhD from Columbia University in 2015, a Master’s degree in Political Theory from the London School of Economics, and a BA from UCLA with the highest honors.

You can find all of his research and contributions on his website and please follow him on Twitter. I link to all references in the show notes.

I am your host, Stephan Kyburz, and this is the forty-second episode of the Rules of the Game podcast. I am a political economist with a PhD in Economics from the University of Bern in Switzerland. And I previously held positions at the London School of Economics and Political Science and the Center for Global Development.

You find a full transcript of this episode on my website rulesofthegame.blog. Please send any feedback to rulesofthegame.ddi@gmail.com. If you like the podcast and want to do me a favor, please give it a 5-star rating. If you’d like to support my work, consider buying me a coffee at buymeacoffee.com and you find the link to it on my website rulesofthegame.blog.

Without further ado, this is my conversation with Kevin Elliott.

DISCUSSION:

Stephan Kyburz: Kevin Elliott, welcome to the Rules of The Game podcast. It’s great to have you on the show.

Kevin Elliott: Thank you so much for having me. I’m delighted to be here.

Stephan Kyburz: So today I’d like to discuss your new book, “Democracy For Busy People”. But before we go into the book and the discussion, I’d like to know from you; What’s your first memory of democracy?

Kevin Elliott: You know, my first memory of democracy is sort of democracy at a remove. Actually, although I was eight or nine years old, the end of the Cold War was something that kind of struck me very viscerally. I was a child who had a lot of anxieties about a lot of things and one of the things that I worried about was nuclear war essentially, right? So growing up in the eighties, I watched, you know, films like war games that really kind of depicted the risk of nuclear war, very deeply affected me. And I, I sort of understood that this, you know, somehow the world was balanced on the edge of a knife in terms of its destruction. And so the end of the Cold War struck me even as a very young child as like, enormous kind of weight off my shoulders. And I did understand the kind of language of democracy has won over, you know, the sort of – as an American, right, the kind of American framing of the Cold War as this like political struggle. And so like the victory of democracy to me was like, associated with this alleviation of anxiety in this war about nuclear destruction. And so as we’ll maybe talk about, one of the things that my book is partly about is citizens who are not as interested in politics, are not as sort of up on the details of what democracy actually means. And it was like very much the case both for me and for my mother who was the only adult in the household. We’re in the situation of like, OK, oh, so democracy has somehow won. And like that means that I’m less worried about nuclear war. That seems good. I don’t actually know what democracy means, but this is the takeaway. What it brought out was that politics is important, very significant things are dealt with in politics. And even though I didn’t really understand what that meant, and even though I had absolutely no conception of what democracy was, I understood. And it was introduced to me the idea that politics was about important things, things that did relate to your own life. Even in this very, I’m now just personally less worried about being, you know, incinerated in nuclear fire, you know, something like that. So, yeah, that was my first memory was just understanding that somehow politics was important, had this immense significance, even though I didn’t know anything about it. And it took me many years to get to that point in part because the only adult in the household didn’t know anything about politics, was very unengaged in it. So…

Stephan Kyburz: So even more remarkable that you became like a researcher in democracy though.

Kevin Elliott: Yeah.

Stephan Kyburz: So that’s quite an astonishing progression. And also, for me, I think the nineties were like the kind of quiet period in a way, you know, after the Cold War and things seem to get better. And also maybe that’s the reason why I studied economics first, because I thought like, well, now the main social question is how do we get, you know, better off, how can we improve well being? And recently I turned more towards political questions a lot of course with the podcast, but also in research that I’ve done. You know, it seems like politics matters more than ever and especially, you know, democratic institutions.

Kevin Elliott: Absolutely.

Stephan Kyburz: So when people see your book, you know, Democracy For Busy People, probably the first question that comes to mind – Who are the busy people? Maybe you can quickly elaborate because some people maybe think, oh, it’s probably maybe the top managers or something, but it’s exactly not what you mean? Right.

Kevin Elliott: Yeah, exactly. So, you know, the big motive for writing the book was I mentioned my mother and really my mother is the person that I have in mind when I think of busy people. And so my mother was, at the time, when I was growing up, she’s the quintessential busy person. For me, she was a single working mother, did not have a college degree and she’s somebody who just did not really have a lot of time for politics. She was busy taking care of me. She was busy taking care of the household. She’s busy working. And it didn’t really see politics connectedly, didn’t see politics as something that necessarily was worth her time, especially given that she was so busy. To clarify, right? The busy people that I’m interested in are precisely not the jet setter and the people with lots of high stakes meetings, like on a calendar. Those are not the busy people. And I’m thinking of, I’m thinking about people who are like running a race against bills and burn out and just like keeping their sanity, right? And trying to take care of their loved ones as best they could while balancing all of these things. And the key challenge that it creates is that they don’t have a lot of time necessarily left over for thinking about politics and for engaging in politics. In some ways this dilemma has been dealt with by previous theorists and empirical political scientists have studied it in different guises, under different headings. But there have been various attempts to kind of like duck it or in various ways, the focus has slipped off of these people in the past. And so my book is really trying to focus on the problem of how to either engage these types of people in politics, is largely one of the things we’re going to talk about, but in particular, it’s like, even though they don’t have time for democratic politics, they are entitled to democratic equality, they are entitled to have their interests considered equally in quotidian democratic politics. Even though they might not be able to like, make their voice heard in all the ways that we might imagine active democratic citizens would ideally be able to do. So how do we, what do we do about this problem? That’s like what the book is about. And my motive for writing, it is like autobiographical in a way. How would we make democracy work for people like my mother was when I was a child. That’s like the question.

Stephan Kyburz: I really enjoyed reading the book. And I thought about it, you know, political institutions, democratic institutions should really be easy, accessible, right? Invite people to participate, even if people have not much time. And to be honest in general, like almost all people are kind of busy, right? And for all people, it’s easier if they can use political power, they have in a good way, in an efficient way. And I think that’s why it’s really interesting to think about it. And that’s also the reason why I wanted to discuss the book on the podcast. So one concept that you present in the book is kind of the stand by citizenship. And with stand by citizenship, how I understood it is that people are always part of the political process, but sometimes they are less active and sometimes maybe they’re a bit more active. But they are never completely excluded. So inclusion is an important part of it. And then you use these two terms like critical attention so that people are attentive to politics, at least at the minimal way and the civic skills for participation so that people are able to participate. Can you maybe tell the audience a bit about this standby citizenship and why is it important to you?

Kevin Elliott: So one of the challenges in trying to address this, what do we do about these busy people? One of the challenges is trying to rethink our ideas of like, what makes a good democratic citizen, right? So the first half of the book is all about this, like Democratic theory, questions about citizenship and you know, what makes a good citizen essentially. And so what I want to articulate what I search for is a kind of minimum that is not too little, not too much, there’s a kind of Aristotelian flavor to it in the sense that it’s this kind of middle ground between being very demanding and being not enough to sustain democracy. And it seems to me that where I end up is this model that I call stand by citizenship. And so it’s meant to be a minimum that is reasonably demanding, that is to say that even busy people should be able to fulfill it, but it will not be so automatic that anybody can fill… So there’s, there’s a certain amount of, like you do have to do something. So what do you have to do? You mentioned critical attention. So basically the minimum, the very first thing that you need to be, in order to be effectively included in democratic politics is like, attentive to politics. Political scientists have been studying the phenomenon of political interest for a long time. But again, it’s one of these like, ER concepts that everyone who begins to study public opinion or this mass publics, mass democratic politics recognizes the significance that like, some people are like, interested in politics and some people are not, but then they’ll often, like, talk about it under a bunch of different headings. And so like in the early studies of political science, you’ll have this discussed under a variety of headings. And so what I say is like, this is the ER thing. If you see yourself as interested in politics, if you see politics as something that interests you, that concerns you, then that’s the first step to becoming a citizen as, as a standby citizen. And ideally you would be then paying attention to politics, right? So you’re seeing politics as something that’s interesting. That means that when you see information about it in your social environment, you pay attention to it and ideally you’ll reflect about it. This is why I call it critical attention. So you’re not merely like, oh, look, there’s like a piece of propaganda. I will like, adopt the view that the propaganda is telling me no problem. Ideally, you’ll be reflective about it. You’ll think about it. If you see an advertisement from a political party or a candidate, you’ll like, think about it. It’s like, oh, you know, this person has lied before and I remember this high profile public lie they said so I’m going to like, take what there’s in this, in this advertisement with a grain of salt. That’s the kind of thing that I mean by critical attention. But of course, you know, being critically attentive is like, not going to be enough if you, for instance, are looking around at politics and you’re like, boy, this election seems important. I should get involved. But if you have no idea how to do that, if you’re like, not registered to vote, if you don’t really know the difference between the parties, even though you kind of have come to understand in some way that there’s some significant question at issue in a particular election, what you’re missing is what some political science have called civic skills. So basically the skills that are needed to go out and actually participate actively either by voting or in other forms of active participation. So this is not my terminology, this term civic skills, but one of the most important civic skills is kind of knowledge, is just the kind of the embodied practical knowledge of how to go about being an active citizen. You can think of knowing the mechanics of how to vote. Where is my polling place? Am I registered to vote? What does the ballot look like? I remember when I was a young man, I lived in California when I first came of age and the first time I went to go vote, California has a lot of direct democracy initiatives typically on, in a given election, they’ll have several of them. And I arrived and I looked at the ballot and I was like, oh my God, like there’s all of these things on here that I didn’t know to expect essentially. And because I was a new voter, it was a bit daunting. And so what I lacked were the civic skills for like, knowing what to expect, knowing to like, look at the voter pamphlet or to inform myself to some extent, just about the basic things about like, what am I going to go vote about. So critical attention and civic skills, when you have these together, this enables you to surveil politics and sort of keep tabs on political developments. And if you recognize that something important, something that you care about is at stake in a given electoral competition or a political event, political movement, you’re able to step in. So, stand by citizens are standing by and they are then prepared to step into politics when they see any of these things that I mentioned at stake. So, that’s the idea, is that you’re prepared to actively participate. But it doesn’t necessarily require you to, in fact, actively participate all the time. You might surveil politics and see things are basically going fine. And so it seems to me that you can be a good democratic citizen who’s not actively participating all the time if you’re like, yeah, like in my judgment, things are basically going fine or people like me with views like mine are being heard very, very well, maybe I don’t need to join my voice, right? Because I’m, you know, a member of the political majority or whatever it might be, you know, maybe my political views are being well represented right now. And so my additional contribution is maybe not necessarily needed at this time.

Stephan Kyburz: And I think that part is really important that people can be mobilized or they maybe want to be mobilized sometimes when there is an important issue coming up. And you also talk about this upward flexibility, you know, from a standby citizenship. So people being pretty passive but not being excluded, you know, and they can get active and they can use their civic skills when needed. And I think I really like that threshold. There is like a minimum threshold to be part of the political process. And of course, I also compare it to the place that I know best, which is Switzerland. And in Switzerland, I think there is a little bit of that stand by citizenship in the sense that people, wherever they live in whatever community, municipality they live, they are registered as voters automatically and they will receive the voting material always to their mailbox, no matter whether they do mail in voting or whether they go to a polling station. And that kind of means at least like four times a year, they have to look at the envelope with the voting material and they have to make a decision, right? Whether to just ignore it or actually open it and use their civic skills to actually vote or elect someone. And I think that was a nice way of thinking about it. So the least you have to do is look at the envelope and realize that you are actually a participant of democracy and you’re invited.

Kevin Elliott: Yeah, exactly. So, democratic institutions that extend invitations effectively, as you put it, are extremely important on this account because even if you’re somebody who has participated in politics before it might be the case that you’ve kind of like, gotten out of the habit of it, right? You know, your attention might have flagged, right? To some extent. One of the important things about standby citizenship is that it is something you can fail to be, right? If your attention has gone away from politics, if you haven’t checked in a while, then you’re falling below the civic minimum, the minimum of citizenship. And so it’s extremely important that we have these mobilizing institutions that we do have institutions that, yeah, as you put it, extend an invitation and I would emphasize, extend a regular invitation to think about politics and to think about what’s at issue in a given political moment. Four times a year, that might be a lot potentially. But we could talk about the periodization.

Stephan Kyburz: We’ll talk about that. I also think people, of course, react to what the institutions provide, how they are set up. And so sometimes also, I think about if citizens are happy with how things are going, you know, they become more passive, so less activity doesn’t necessarily mean, you know, that things are bad, but it can also mean that things are going well and they don’t really need to care. They think, oh, I can not participate at the moment in a way, actively and things are fine. And if things are turning and seemingly going worse in my opinion, then I become active. Also, if you look at direct democracy in Switzerland that’s often the case that if an issue is just not so important or people care less, they vote less. But of course, you as a democratic theorist or in political science, we always think like ah more participation is better.

Kevin Elliott: Right. And it can be, right? Most of the time it is. And of course, if we’ll talk about mandatory voting, perhaps there’s certain kinds of participation that are perhaps less optional, shall we say for democracy than others in my view. But we can talk about that.

Stephan Kyburz: So the three sets of institutions that you talk about, that you discussed and how they may appease busy people may invite them more to participate are first elections, second political parties and third deliberative institutions, which is kind of a new way of including people that may be kind of demanding. But we for sure, discuss that. One aspect that I think maybe I would have also like to have a bit more in discussion is direct democracy, even though you included somehow in the deliberative institutions. But maybe we can also talk about that. But first in terms of elections, you know, you also think about this upward kind of flexibility. How can we include people in a more regular way? And two things that you propose are annual elections and mandatory voting. So maybe you can say a bit about what was your thinking behind it? And you know, you may want to start with elections more in general. Why are they important? And maybe they are not talked about enough right now in political discussions.

Kevin Elliott: Right. And I think this is definitely, so you mentioned that I talk about, you know, these institutions, but it is important that like I’m not, I don’t mean to be exclusive. It’s not like these are all the only ones that are interesting as I’ve had conversations since the book has come out. There’s a lot of people ask me, what about these institutions? What about these institutions? Like those are all good. Like those are all interesting. I couldn’t write 1000 page book. But in a way it’s like, if my book, if the kind of core arguments and the core insights of the book are like stimulating to your thinking about other institutions, like that’s great. That’s like, you know, one of the hopes of any author is that someone will read the book and be sufficiently inspired to be like, ah, but he didn’t talk about this thing and it’s, it’s interesting and perhaps it challenges these elements of the framework and all that’s to the good. So why do I choose these ones? Why do I choose, let’s say, let’s start with elections. One of the key issues that I’m thinking about here in terms of elections is that in democratic theory, when people are thinking about ways of improving democracy these days, elections tend to get a lot of criticism. They’re either criticized or they’re ignored to some extent. It seems to me there’s a lot of attention on other forms of democratic participation, other institutions of democracy. And this is one of the core kind of impetuses for me to write this book was to try to really insist on – Hey, there’s a reason that our elections are extremely important in modern democracies. And a key reason is that participation in elections is at least potentially extremely inexpensive, not very costly. It can be made extraordinarily simple for people to undertake this form of participation. And very importantly, elections are typically authoritative. So they are not merely advisory for the most part, right? So you have some kinds of referenda will be merely advisory. But for the most part, we’re talking about electing representatives that is actually determining the balance of power. And because of all of these elements, you have a considerable degree of focus on these institutions which are powerful. They focus the attention of the entire society more or less, right? So the political class and citizens are focused on politics during this election season and then the form of participation is extremely accessible. So my preoccupation with elections is that they have these features that are extremely attractive for busy people. They help to coordinate social attention in this way that it’s very hard to miss typically that there’s an election happening in a given social environment. And in your participation, which is fairly easy and straightforward, there is a lot of power. It is nonetheless, as I say, it is authoritative, it is a form in which you can see your joint participation with all the other people in society having a concrete outcome that materially changes the direction of the polity or maintains that if you’re reelecting. So yeah, so I focus on elections for that general reason.

Stephan Kyburz: It’s definitely super important to talk about elections and how we do that. And I think the reason why in many countries, people are a bit, you know, disillusioned with elections is maybe that their vote doesn’t really matter as in many, you know, districts, voting districts in the US, for example, if you have a single member district, single seat districts, et cetera, et cetera. But the element that I think that you emphasize is that we should bring in the people where they are and that means, you know, mail in voting should be possible or just that voting should be really easy. Maybe could you elaborate lik e why that is so important?

Kevin Elliott: So as I mentioned, right, there’s like elections are potentially, you know, very, very easy and not very costly. But of course, they can be made more costly, right? So there are different ways of organizing elections that can make participating in them very difficult. For instance, right, in the US, one of my areas of specialty is American politics. So a lot of my preoccupations are very American specific. And the US has this, has basically all of the things you wouldn’t want. We maximize the difficulty of voting. Let’s put it that way. So probably some of your, some of your listeners are in other countries and their countries might have some of these and lack others. So for instance, in the US, in order to vote, you have to register to vote. It’s typically on you to register. There are a few states that have automatic registration, but the way that that’s done has a lot of holes. So it’s actually fairly easy to be missed by even the states that have automatic registration in the US. And so that essentially at least doubles the cost of voting because instead of needing to think only one thing about an election – going to vote – you also have to think about registration. And unlike the vote, which is typically on the same day in the entire country. And so you have this attention focusing phenomenon, the registration dates are different in every state, right? Typically. Pretty much they’re all different numbers of days, different numbers of weeks. And so there is no coordination of social attention around, be sure you register to vote by this date, right? And so this is the cost for voters for citizens in terms of voting. Another institution that some states have is same day voter registration, which essentially means you can just show up on the day when you vote. And that makes it simple. And I think same day voter registration is a best practices type of policy. I’m not alone in this. Many other scholars have sort of come to this appreciation because it effectively eliminates the cost of registration because when you vote, you can register at the same time. And it’s great. Other types of ways of making voting hard or not is having election day, either be on the weekend as it typically is. I think in most democracies or at least most European democracies. Or to make election day a holiday. In the US, we vote on a Tuesday. It’s bizarre. Of course, the history has to do with like, you know, the agrarian, you know, market days and things and it’s… The reasons for it being on the date no longer apply at all, but the US can’t move itself out of it. This equilibrium we’re in with like this is the date we’ve coordinate on. Technically your boss is not allowed to fire you if you go to vote. But that’s fairly theoretical.

Stephan Kyburz: Yeah. So in the US it seems like, you know, all these institutions that around elections, they have become like a tool of political power, right? They are strategically used to exclude people. And I mean, that’s since the civil war reconstruction… You know, that’s kind of a long story of who is included, who is pushed out from the electorate and I think that kind of fight is still going on. Even though it seems like having seen other solutions just being automatically registered and you always get the voting material. That seems such a simple solution. But of course, it’s not if the parties involved are actually shaping those institutions and trying to win the battle.

Kevin Elliott: Yeah, I think one of the notable things here is that when we look at the US, it’s very easy to say democracy itself has become a partisan issue. But as you note, it has long been the case that that’s been true. But one thing that’s I think relevant to bear in mind here is that the advantage, partisan advantage of turnout reducing cost increasing policies like so we’ve mentioned these ones but also just to run through voter id, that’s like difficult to get as it is in many American States and also like the location of polling places, staffing of polling places. So wait times, right? These are all kind of have been used, weaponized in the ways that you mean. But here’s the thing, right, is that the polarization over voter access, which is what you’re alluding to, that’s superimposed on understandings of who’s in your coalition. So the Republican Party has typically undertaken to raise the cost of voting in the United States in recent years. But what’s interesting is the transformations in who votes for them as particularly lower education, white voters have moved towards the Republican party. These are exactly the voters for whom easing voter access is going to enable them to participate at higher rates. So in some ways the Republican understanding that really it goes back 20 years, 30 years at this point that like our voters are more well to do, our voters are habitual voters making it harder to vote is going to bias the electorate in our favor that many Republicans have seems to be becoming out of date. So we are either potentially in a time now or we are rapidly approaching a time when political self interest would recommend that they change tack on this. And this is part of the reason that these types of, this type of Gamification, this partisanship polarization about democracy doesn’t always happen is because it’s very difficult to know how raising the cost of voting is going to affect coalitional politics. Who’s going to actually benefit from messing around with these policies? And it looks like in the US again, you know, things get baked in and the, you know, parties will take a position and can really kind of wed themselves to it past its partisan advantage to them. And that might very well be the case for voting rights. But it’s worth bearing in mind, at least in the US, that there are elements of this that could move the coalitions in the other direction. But we’ll see.

Stephan Kyburz: Yeah, I guess we could have a whole episode just on this issue.

Kevin Elliott: Yes, right. Yeah, yeah.

Stephan Kyburz: But I want to move on to two suggestions you make. One is annual elections and the other is mandatory voting. Now, in the first moment I was like, this seems kind of counterintuitive to busy people because it’s quite demanding, but it’s not in a way and it is. So please share with us, you know, what is the thinking behind those two quite specific institutions?

Kevin Elliott: Yeah. So just to address the counter intuitiveness of it here and it’s just important to understand that like democracy for busy people is not like you just need to ratchet down the demandingness of poli… It’s very important that that is like not the core, the sort of or that’s not like my point, right? It’s that we need to design democracy with these types of citizens in mind. And so there’s just particular things. So let’s take annual elections first, something that’s perhaps more unfamiliar to some. And this again would probably make sense in some contexts more than others. My current research project has complicated my thinking about this a little bit since I wrote the book. But here’s the thought about annual elections that’s expressed in the book. One of the and here, I’m actually, I’m informed by some recent work in political theory, which has been looking at time, the political value of time and time is a currency of political power. When you look at the structure of power in democratic constitutions one of the big questions is like, how long will power last, right? A big difference between monarchical systems where when you’re, you know, accede to power, your power lasts as long as you’re alive. Democratic systems, that’s not the case. So we have to figure out how long should power last. Now typically terms of office are multiple years. And one of the things that that creates is like, oh, you have to be reminded that, oh, it’s an election year, it’s like, oh, ok. Right. Yeah. So now I have to be thinking about politics off calendar, right? So the last time I thought of this was a couple of years ago, maybe four years ago as the case may be and that can encourage you to kind of get out of the habit of thinking about politics. It can, in other words, kind of put a damper on critical attention, right? It can increase the cost for citizens who’ve been kind of checked out from politics a bit. They might have to like get up to speed on like the events of many, potentially many years, several years. And that can be a challenge. The thing about annual elections is that if the political calendar matched the annual calendar, there’s a way in which politics would sync up with all of the myriad other ways that we periodize time along the annual calendar, right? So there are certain kinds of festivals and there are certain kinds of holidays and there are certain kinds of particular also like the seasonal pattern, right? When the leaves turn colors, depending on where you live in the world, right? Ah, now it’s politics season, right? There’s a way in which you can sort of naturalize politics. You can make politics sync up with all of the other annual patterns, rhythms of life in a way that can make it, as I say, sort of natural, it can make it a part of the rest of what we do in society in this kind of way. The reason I started thinking about annual elections is because in the United States, in the early revolutionary period, 12 of the 13 original states elected their most powerful bodies annually. And this was seen as like a guarantor, a key element of protecting the liberty of the people. And I was just fascinated by this idea and it made a certain amount of sense in the agrarian communities that they were in because as a farmer, you come to sell your product right at the end of the harvest. And so there was this period of time where everybody arrived at the same time and it was wedded to this like communal rhythm of life. So that’s annual elections.

Stephan Kyburz: One caveat I have maybe is just today, like writing legislation takes a lot of time and it’s very complicated, probably much more complicated than 200 years ago. So that would be one concern that politicians don’t even have the time to really work deeply on legislation, et cetera. What I like about the idea is the accountability element or the element that says, you know, if you fail in that year, you might just be voted out. Which also would make it quite tricky for politicians to make a career maybe. But maybe it favors the busy people. That’s true.

Kevin Elliott: Yeah. Right. Exactly. And so I’m like mainly thinking about this issue from the perspective of participation rather than the sort of tractability for governance, right? As you say. My current project that I’m working on now is like thinking much more deeply about those, about these wider concerns that are sort of triggered by this. One thing that you could think about with annual elections if you’re concerned about, well, one year is not enough time for people to become familiar with their job and as you say, to write, legislation could have rolling elections so the term could be multiple years. But then every year you would have some fraction of the, as happens with the United States Senate, not that the Senate should be emulated in many of its particulars, but this is one that a lot of people have given thought to in the history of constitutional design, this idea of having, you know, a third of the, of the body be refreshed in time. Of course, the problem with that is that you end up with a body that’s never all at one time refreshed. And so old majorities will end up often having their shadow be cast over a longer period and changing conditions can struggle to be reflected in the need. So I would say annual elections, a tool for thought. Maybe not a concrete suggestion. And the one other consideration here is that if you’re in a parliamentary system where there’s a fairly easy way of calling early elections of dissolving the government of having a no confidence motion where you can actually replace the government without having a new election or that you can replace them in the middle of their statutory term, then a lot of the considerations that militate in favor of annual elections kind of go away or at least they’re very much weakened because it’s like, oh, actually, if there’s a problem, as you say,  the regular accountability that you get from annual elections can be had in this way that also allows continuity of government when things are going well again, right? So that’s part of the considerations that I’m currently exploring are in that. But if you’re in a fixed term type situation as in most presidential systems, the idea would be that the annual elections can create for you this regular pattern, this rhythm that will help make politics an ordinary part of the lives of ordinary people. The concerns that arises for government I totally understand that and I’m working on it basically.

Stephan Kyburz: You know, I love the idea to just, you know, have suggestions and then you have to think them through and think what would be the positives and the negatives and for sure, there is always good and bad stuff about institutions. And also would it apply to government, would it apply to parliament, et cetera. Always, you know, creates different thought processes and you know, maybe people would end up kind of reelecting most of the times. But then maybe in a certain year, they were like, no, this was not good enough, you know, and then they would vote them out.

Kevin Elliott: As a matter of fact, this is how it worked in states like Connecticut where I currently live. Literally, you would have an elect… Pardon me, they had elections every six months. But they would nonetheless reelect their governors for 30 years. You got extraordinary stability in the actual people who were elected, but there were just tons of these possible accountability moments. You can think about them as accountability moments. You can also think about them as mobilization moments, right? Moments where the people are together expressing, right, their communal sense of like where we want to go and how things are going.

Stephan Kyburz: I think the mandatory voting is also interesting, you know, some countries have it, some, also in Switzerland there is a few regions that use mandatory voting. And it has definitely also some aspects to it. But like if we would have mandatory voting, then the representation, and also for the annual elections for that matter, the representation would really matter. If you vote often and if you have mandatory voting, you want to have a well represented people. You want a parliament to represent the people and that’s kind of leading over to your second set of institutions which are the political parties and how we elect, you know, representatives to parliament. So why are political parties, first, why are they so important? And why, you know, their reputation these days is not that great, but they will keep being very important.

Kevin Elliott: So one of the things that I try to emphasize as you say, so, you know, there’s this dictum in political science that representative democracy is unthinkable, save in terms of parties, right? And I think this is essentially correct. I talk about this with my students when I would teach American politics and especially in American politics, there is a, there is an allergy, there is a hatred of political parties among certain kind of casual citizen, typically. People haven’t really thought that much about politics or are trying to kind of forge a political identity that doesn’t require them to take sides in the sort of pre-existing polarized environment. They try to kind of situate themselves somehow above it. And this kind of anti-partisan language is a way that people will do that. So one of the things that I’m trying to kind of explain here is one of the key values, one of the key utilities of parties, not simply as utilities to democratic government, something like that, right? But again, from the perspective of citizens, why are parties good if you’re a busy citizen? And the key thing that I emphasize, obviously, I talk about a few different things, but the key thing that I emphasize is that when they need to compete with each other, political parties will engage in attempts to persuade citizens, they will convey messages to them in competition with the other parties that will enrich the information environment, right? It will clarify the stakes of the election, it will clarify what issues the parties think are most important in this moment, right? And it will articulate what their positions are on those issues and regarding those events. And what all of this does is it enriches the information environment for voters and it clarifies the stakes of a given electoral choice and this is an enormous aid to citizens. So there is this literature on information shortcuts, but I think it’s very important for understanding the sort of context in which the way that many political scientists will think about the demandingness of electoral participation on citizens. Many of them will say, they’ll look at factual questions, citizens will struggle to answer factual questions about politics, about the structure of government. And they’ll say, oh my gosh, look at this, citizens don’t know anything. They are ignorant of things that are happening in politics. There’s a variety of responses to this. But one of the ways that the upshot of this is like, oh, citizens need to bring information with them into the political realm. They acquire it somewhere and then they bring it into politics. But that just is, it’s essentially a misunderstanding of the social way that people learn. You enter politics and you learn in the political realm. And what political parties do is that they provide the information, they enrich the social information environment with their persuasive messages. You’ll have commentators, you’ll have journalists who are adjudicating between these claims, they will be reporting on them, they will be hopefully contextualizing them historically, all of these types of things and that will help voters arrive in politics, potentially not knowing things and then they will learn within this ecologically simplified environment. So this is one of the key functions that parties, when they need to compete with each other, one of the key things that they will do is they will simplify politics for citizens so that citizens don’t need to bring meaning with them. They don’t need to bring information with them. It will be provided to them. Parties are desperate to provide it to citizens. But when you have these competing messages the citizens as they’re being attentive to politics, hopefully, in a critical way, they will weigh these different persuasive messages and then will update their beliefs will determine how they want to vote, where they stand with respect to the issues that are at stake in to give an election and then vote.

Stephan Kyburz: I think, you know, why people really sometimes hate parties or they think they’re not useful is really when parties work like a cartel, you know? When they capture a lot of power and the people that think they have no way of changing the system. And I think what people think in the US currently is often that no matter what party I vote for Republicans or Democrats, it won’t change that much or it’s kind of a cartel. And so I think you nicely explain in the book about the competition and that new parties should easily be able to enter the political arena. And I think this is, I mean, this is super, super important for people also to understand that how the electoral system is set up actually determines how easy it is for new parties to enter. And you know, you kind of see that in many countries and you have electoral thresholds that make it harder to enter parliament, you have, you know, more proportional or less proportional systems. And you also, you talk about proportional representation as a way of increasing competition. And of course you know, on the podcast, that’s also a big topic.

Kevin Elliott: The thing about multiparty… So one of the big reasons that people look at a given sort of a party system and we say, oh my gosh, there’s no place for me. As you say, this is cartelized politics. These parties don’t care what I say because they’ve like locked down the market of political competition. And it’s like, yeah, then you need more competition. And so as you say, I really emphasize that like, those of us who emphasize the utility of parties really should do a better job of conveying the conditionality of that healthiness. So much of people’s cynicism about parties is I think motivated often by failures of competition. If you are an American, there’s like a 95% chance that you live in a mostly uncompetitive area, at least when it comes to national politics. And that sends an extraordinarily demobilizing message. And it sends you a message that like whatever the issues are, you know, well, I shouldn’t say whatever the issues are, but that it impoverishes the political agenda. So one thing is that if there’s no competition, then parties aren’t going to try to reach out to you with persuasive messages because they don’t need to. Your vote is assumed. And so that de-incentivizes that ecological simplification and information enrichment function, they don’t have to do that as much. And if you’ve ever, in the US context, you’ll often, for a 15 year spread or so, 10 years, fracking was this issue in presidential politics that in the majority of states fracking is like not an issue, but it kept coming up because it was a big issue in swing states in president elections. And so every presidential candidate had something to say about fracking, even though most Americans are like fracking, who cares about that? People live in Pennsylvania, right? People who live in a couple of these competitive states anyway. So the key thing being about competition is so important because the more parties you imagine for every pairwise comparison of parties, right, if you put the parties along the uni dimensional right to left spectrum at every joining point at every border between two parties that is a space of political contestation and that’s a political agenda. You have issues that can populate that. When you only have two parties, you get a very spare agenda. It’s only the issues that occupy that space. Those are the only ones that citizens are offered as being, here’s what the election is about. When you add more parties to that space, you expand the space on the agenda on the political agenda. And when you can have new entrants, new parties that could form, right? Then in any given interstitial space between parties, you could potentially have a new party and that opens yet further space on the political agenda. So we need to be very clear that like when you see parties that are not being responsive to the people, this can very often be due to failures in competition. And we should be much more attentive to the way that parties, that especially cynicism about parties and cynicism about democracy can often be a function of failures of political competition.

Stephan Kyburz: And also another element that you haven’t mentioned really in the book, but I think that could be or is important is that differentiation between closed list and open list systems. You know, competition can also be within party or works within party in the sense that in an open list system, people can actually, you know, select candidates that they really prefer within the party. And that also creates another dimension of competition. Which I sometimes observe, you know, in closed lists, parties still capture a lot of power even though you have new entrance of parties. But within the parties, you have little to say.

Kevin Elliott: Yeah, there’s been a lot of really interesting work being done on intra-party democracy among political theorists over the last few years. These kind of institutionally interested political theorists. And it is another kind of dimension. It’s the kind of thing that I don’t talk about in the book in part, just because it’s a whole other kind of can of worms. I emphasize in the book competition between parties. And you’re saying of course, that like you can also have through forms of democratic decision processes internal to parties. That is another way for citizens to kind of engage. And that’s fine. One of the things that I’m preoccupied with, as an American, is primary elections are a form of intra-party democracy. And in the US, it doesn’t work… I mean, there are a lot of pathologies that arise from our primary system which is not to say that there’s no reason to do intra-party democracy, there’s other ways to do it that might be less pathological. But that’s part of the background for me of why I’m thinking about inter-party competition is because you really need to be very careful about differentiating intra party systems that are like the US that really disempower party leaders very dramatically and other kinds of systems where the party itself is seen as a space of democratic participation and a vehicle of collective self rule for like a particular segment of the population. Those are really not the way that parties are imagined in the US. You have to have, like a very sophisticated theoretical conception of like what is a political party? Some political theorists have been doing this work. There’s really interesting work being done in this area lately and I’ve done a little bit of this but not so much on the mechanisms of intra party democracy.

Stephan Kyburz: I want to move on to the third pillar in your book about deliberative institutions. And you know, for me, I think they are an interesting type of innovation. They may complement our existing system. I really, I’m not of the opinion that they may replace, you know, elections or something like, you know, some authors discuss. But what is your view and where do you see the limitations in deliberative institutions?

Kevin Elliott: So deliberative institutions are often seen as an improvement over electoral participation. You know, sort of historically, the idea was if we’re trying to understand why there are citizens who don’t concern themselves with politics, when we think about busy citizens, right? One of the historic explanations or I suppose frameworks for understanding them as a phenomenon in democratic societies is that, well, they’re unsatisfied with the sort of meaninglessness of electoral participation. If only they had richer, more meaningful ways to participate, right? That would draw these citizens in. I call this in the book, the “If you build it, they will come” hypothesis, right? And this really stretches back to the 1960’s, 1970’s, the birth of the new left and all these kind of participatory movements that really grow at least during that period of time, initially. So, and I think this stuff is great, like, you know, don’t get me wrong. I find these, the studies of these, I find the pilot that have been done in places like British Columbia and all over Europe it seems like these are happening quite a bit. There was a recent OECD study, I forget what the title is, but the subtitles is…

Stephan Kyburz: Catching the Deliberative Wave.

Kevin Elliott: Catching the Deliberative Wave. Right. Exactly. Yes. So it’s like these are cool, like they’re neat. right? But the question is, are they a responsible way to re-design democracy? And so when we think about, when we foreground busy people, as I do, certain kinds of concerns arise. Among them, one, deliberation is hard. Deliberation is tough. Meaning that it’s costly, it takes a lot of time. Typically these are in person meetings and so people have to travel from their homes, right? And you know…

Stephan Kyburz: They’re very time consuming.

Kevin Elliott: They’re very time consuming.

Stephan Kyburz: If you get elected, if you get selected.

Kevin Elliott: If you get selected. And, one of the issues, one of the key issues is self selection, right? Because typically I am unaware of any of these deliberative innovations that have mandated participation. They are typically all invitations. And so you get, what you would get regularly is you would select out busy citizens right there, right? If a busy citizen gets an invitation, typically they’re gonna say no. And that’s a problem. So one of the things that you’re gonna end up with is even if you get a demographically, economically, representative body, which you don’t always do. Some of these, you get dramatic overrepresentation of well educated people, which is one of my concerns, you know, busy people, sometimes people like my mother who was not very well educated, not formally well educated. And so you end up with fairly biased bodies, right? So busy people will be selected out precisely because they are complicated, precisely because they’re demanding. But if you make it more mandatory, if you do require people to participate, then that’s going to raise the cost among other things, you’re gonna have to provide childcare, you’re gonna have to provide payment, you’re gonna have to provide a lot of things that some of these have started to do. But actually fewer than you’d think provide childcare. You know, it’s an innovation to have child care as part of these things. So yes. So there’s a variety of the cost, the dimensions of costliness that are involved here are going to exclude people. So I think that the inclusionary power of them is going to be more humble than many people think. Now, one of the other considerations that’s in my book is the cultivation of standby citizenship. And here I think deliberative bodies can be great. If you can get busy citizens, people who are not well politically socialized there, there’s pretty good evidence. I think there’s very pretty persuasive evidence myself. I go through it in the book that like, people are going to like become more politically interested, right? Because they’re going to be given a lot of tools they’re going to be given this intense course, in a way of democratic participation. I think that can be quite good. So, so I think it’s…

Stephan Kyburz: It’s like a discussion, they get a discussion forum.

Kevin Elliott: Exactly. And typically, right, again, the, especially the ones that are in Europe have affiliations with formal political institutions in one way or another. And so there’s a way that that’s like, dignifying, right? President Macron, like, convened this thing or whatever, or the legislature, you know, the parliament created this thing. And, oh my gosh, and I’m a part of this thing, right? There’s a way that that is very empowering, vastly increases political efficacy for participants. And then they see both that the political system values them and they witness their own political agency because they come and they listen, and they say things and people respond to them and they go, oh yeah, I guess people like me can be a part of this system. So I think all that is great. But ultimately, if you were to really replace representative institutions with these, what you would see is among other things, a reversal in that cognitive tractability that I talked about with respect to political parties. You would see the complexity of politics explode because you would be utterly sidelining or potentially just straightforwardly removing these powerful political institutions of parties who are doing this enormous work, focusing attention in the political environment and simplifying politics to dimensions that citizens who are doing other things in their lives can understand. If you’ve got a dozen citizens assemblies who are covering different dimensions of politics and there’s no party system to integrate those and create ideologies or platforms relating different choices and issues to each other in real time, that’s just gonna put citizens in this position of like, well, I actually don’t know what I should be paying attention to. I’m not sure what pension reform has to do with agricultural policy or how, what those have to do with migration policy. Even though there are ways of combining these policies in ideological packages that make sense in terms of economy, in terms of political economy, in terms of ideology or political values or whatever. It’s an enormous threat to sideline elections and parties in my view because it would just make politics so… It would increase the task, the demands on citizens in a way that, I think you wanted to talk a little bit about direct democracy, this is one of my key concerns about direct democracy. Is that it has this kind of structure. Perhaps you’d like to say a little more. I don’t know.

Stephan Kyburz: Yeah. No, I first want to respond still to the issues you mentioned with deliberative institutions. And I think one key aspect also that is kind of contradicting the idea of upward flexibility, that you can mobilize people is actually that people get selected only at random, right? They go through this lottocracy and if you really want to get active, if you want to participate and you have to wait till you get randomly selected, that’s going to be a long, long wait. And only a small share of people in a society will participate. So, you know, unless they want to go through the traditional politics, it’s kind of a guessing game or it’s not gonna happen for most people. And that thing is also a big problem.

Kevin Elliott: You’ve highlighted, I hadn’t actually quite put that together. But, yeah, the randomness of selection to these bodies, at least if you don’t have a whole bunch of them, which is one possible way of attempting to address the concern that people wouldn’t be selected very often is, yeah, that it’s actually incompatible with the upward flexibility of people being able to step in and take on more than simply the kind of stand by citizenship mode. They should be able to step in and have the flexibility in standby citizenship is incompatible with random choice because, ah, well, you weren’t selected so, like, go sit down. It’s not your turn. Right?

Stephan Kyburz: Yeah, you have to stay silent…

Kevin Elliott: Exactly.

Stephan Kyburz: …if you’re not part of it. Well, I mean, that’s a bit harsh but it is true.

Kevin Elliott: Yeah, that’s right. And this is one of the key things about elections again is that because elections are aggregating millions of votes, right? Literally, everyone is asked well, especially if you have a system of mandatory voting, literally, everyone is asked to be a part of that process. And so a switch to a mini public based, a deliberative institution based political system is going to actually have less citizen participation in it than elections. And that’s another thing that I just don’t think that deliberative advocates of these exchanges don’t think they take that seriously enough for the most part.

Stephan Kyburz: I think they usually say they are inclusive. For me, they’re not inclusive, they’re more exclusive or it’s just, you know, this random mechanism that creates an issue. So I’m quite a big advocate of direct democracy. You seem to be more skeptical. Maybe very briefly, what is your skepticism of direct democracy with regard to busy people? If you can, you know, summarize that.

Kevin Elliott: One of my concerns about direct democracy is precisely that typically you don’t have the information shortcuts and the simplification function that parties will provide for representative electoral choices when you have a system of direct democracy alongside representative democracy. Typically, the issues that are put into referenda or initiatives are precisely issues that the parties have failed to process, right? If they could have come to some settlement, it wouldn’t be referred to the people anyway, unless it’s like some kind of constitutional thing where it’s required or whatever. And so that makes the questions that are referred to citizens by definition fall outside of their ordinary shortcuts for understanding politics. It cross cuts existing coalitions, cross cuts existing formulations of the ideologies of political ideologies of the time. And that makes it a cognitively demanding task on ordinary citizens. We see this sometimes when you have low turnout or sometimes it’s called roll off.  If there are other items on a ballot, you’ll sometimes have low effective participation rates,  right? For certain kinds of questions. And so, that’s kind of the source of my skepticism is that for busy people I would think they’re going to be more likely to be people who are like, I don’t really know what that’s about. I’m not going to vote for it. Now, there’s one way of looking at that as being ok, because that means that people who are going to vote for it are going to be people who are going to be typically more informed about it, right? There’s like a self selection effect that you might think is ok. Except that you do run into this problem of that, like, well, what if it’s a complicated issue that is very much to the benefit of citizens, but it’s like worded in a way that’s complicated it or whatever. And that the people who are like, oh, I’m not going to vote on this would actually be benefited by it, right? So that arises. I don’t have a strong concern. I don’t have a strong prior about that. Definitely, you know, John Matsusaka, his work has definitely been influential for me in sort of challenging my priors on this. Being a Californian I was like, very impressed by all of these questions that I really didn’t think should be put to me. And Matsusaka’s work has shown that it’s like, oh yeah, but typically it works out ok and so forth. One of the big concerns with direct democracy is that process is very costly and very difficult to, especially initiatives, so here we’re talking about citizen initiated legislation as opposed to referred questions from the legislature. When it comes to initiatives, those you could be worried about capture by wealthy interests and there certainly have been cases of this. Citizens are, it can be challenging for them to identify that. I don’t think it’s as hard as you might think. And I do agree that there’s a very important role for initiatives of some kind in democracies for circumventing captured legislatures, for circumventing party systems that cannot process an issue that is of particular concern to the citizenry. We’re seeing this play out in the American States right now on issues like Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act. And when it comes to abortion, you have a lot of these states that are like single party states, the typically the Republican Party like just dominates state policy. But majorities want action that goes against the party’s position on these issues and because there are these forms of direct democracy, you’ve been able to have policy made that’s more in line with majoritarian preferences along these lines. So I’m a big fan of that. And I do think that there’s a role for deliberative institutions here, John Gastil has done excellent work exploring different stages where you might have deliberative institutions play a role in either helping to write a question or they might review the language and write recommendations for citizens that will be sent to them in the voter pamphlet. You could potentially have them actually decide the question which I don’t know about that. Certainly, I know that there’s some talk about this. I think there’s the Vaud one had this kind of design where you had a deliberative institution…

Stephan Kyburz: Yeah, exactly.

Kevin Elliott: …was going to be…

Stephan Kyburz: Be kind of a complimentary chamber.

Kevin Elliott: Right. In that case, I think it was like that you would get a certain number of votes and that would initiate the body and then they would then write a question which could then be referred to the people.

Stephan Kyburz: Yeah, yeah.

Kevin Elliott: That seems like a very attractive kind of process that circumvents some of these concerns about, well, who’s writing it? You know, who are the ones who are like controlling what actually shows up on the ballot? Who’s writing the thing and what valence does it have? I do see deliberative democracy as potentially being able to alleviate some of these concerns that I have about citizens being able to understand the question that’s put to them. The deliberative component can be a safety valve for some of the concerns about inclusion. Because as long as you do have a representative group of citizens who are involved in that reflection about the process, some of my concerns about roll off can be alleviated in that way because I do think that direct democracy can play a really important role, especially the initiative type of direct democracy, can really play an important role in circumventing these other, these regular pathologies that we see in democratic politics.

Stephan Kyburz: Yeah, definitely. I mean, we agree on that point and I think it’s all about how you design the institutions and how you combine, you know, direct democracy complementing with deliberative institutions and how that complements again the representative institution. So I think, you know, there’s a lot happening in this field and I think it’s really important to also discuss those advantages and disadvantages of different combinations of the system.
Stephan Kyburz: As a final question, what are two or three articles or books that you’d recommend to the audience?

Kevin Elliott: Yeah. So I think one of the articles that has been, just has repaid, revisiting for me over many years is this article by Andrew Sabel in perspectives on politics back in 2015, it’s called “Two Cultures of Democratic Theory”. It’s this wonderful exploration of the relationship between normative democratic theorists and empirical political scientists who are also studying democracy. His article articulates how there’s like a divide between them that is to the detriment of both, essentially. And that when we can create spaces for exchange, the studies of both can be enriched. So we’re effectively leaving the specialization within the discipline of political science on the table. We’re leaving the benefits of specialization on the table because we have not necessarily been able to talk to each other and take into account the insights of these different approaches to studying democracy. If it was up to me, if I was like the dictator of political science, I would like require everyone to  read this article like every couple of years or something like that because it’s really a great reminder of this. Another book that I have found very useful both as teaching tool, but also it’s just a way of helping to understand especially American politics better is this book called “A Different Democracy”, which is co-authored by several sort of absolutely very big figures in comparative politics. Bernard Groffman, Arend Lijphart, Matt Shugart and Stephen Taylor. This book is just a fabulous resource for helping to understand the different options that are available to you. When you’re thinking about democratic reform and institutional design. It’s just fabulous. I taught in an American government class using this as the primary textbook and students were just like, oh my gosh, like we can do things differently. You know, when you identify pathologies in American institutions, very often Americans are just like, well then what would we do differently because they don’t have that kind of richness of comparative, of the menu, essentially, of institutional design options that are out there. I think one other stellar recent contribution to this kind of interdisciplinary work is Steffen Ganghof’s book “Beyond Presidentialism and Parliamentarism”. This is a wonderful example of, he’s a comparative by training, he’s like an empirical political scientist. But a good deal of the book directly engages political theorists who have been thinking about egalitarianism and are thinking about, you know, many of the kinds of themes that are very important for making these fundamental choices between different systems of government. He articulates this model of semi-parliamentarism which occupies a quadrige, a four sided space of institutional design that would combine some of the advantages of parliamentarian with some of the advantages of presidentialism in addressing some fundamental questions of democratic design and democratic theory, really. So, yeah, those are, I think all things that would benefit your listeners from checking out, if they’re interested in the kinds of issues that this podcast talks about.

Stephan Kyburz: Cool, thanks a lot for sharing those recommendations and I like them because I had Stephen Ganghof also already on the podcast and Arend Lijphart. So that’s good and also John Matsuzaka for that matter. So yeah, for people interested in direct democracy or semi-presidentialism (correction: semi-parliamentarism) or patterns of democracy then there is already some episodes available. Ok, great. So Kevin Elliott, thanks a lot for having taken the time. It was really interesting to discuss your book with you and yeah, thanks a lot.

Kevin Elliott: Thank you. This has been an absolute pleasure.

Outro:

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