Feature

PPI Hosts Author's Roundtable

The Program on Political Institutions hosted an Author's Roundtable on Thursday, December 6, to discuss the draft of Assistant Professor Christopher Berry's book manuscript, Imperfect Union: Representation and Taxation in Multi-level Governments. The roundtable brought together political scientists from the University of Chicago and across the country to lead chapter-by-chapter discussions of the manuscript, currently under publisher review.

"The idea of the whole conference was to allow me to get feedback from other experts in the field and to get the word out more broadly about the book and its topic," said Berry. Imperfect Union examines problems of shared authority among territorially overlapping local governments, including cities, counties, and specialized governing bodies like schools, parks districts, and water commissions.

Elections of special purpose government officials, demographics of voters, and local political parties were all major topics of discussion. Participants included Jeffrey Lewis of the University of California-Los Angeles, Terry Moe of Stanford University, Kenneth Shepsle of Harvard University, and Eric Oliver of the University of Chicago's Department of Political Science. The audience was made up of faculty and students from across the University.

One major theme discussed was that little data exists about special purpose governments, including who votes in these elections and where voters receive candidate information. Moe pointed out that voter turnout is low and most likely comprised of interest groups. Lewis added that a small core group of people seem to turn out to vote in most elections, while others vote specifically for certain local races, sometimes not even electing a candidate for other races on the same ballot.

Another topic of much discussion from both the participants and the audience was political parties. Moe talked about evidence demonstrating that political parties appear to coordinate policymaking at a local level. Audience members asked questions about methods of measuring the strength of political parties and how to update current assessments. Terry Clark, of the University's Sociology Department, offered to share his data on local political parties with the author.

Oliver closed the roundtable by pointing out that the issues in the book are relevant to a wider audience than Berry originally intended-political scientists and economists. Oliver suggested expanding the introduction to address broader issues including urban planning and community empowerment.

"I am grateful for the generosity people showed in sharing their time to talk about my work, especially those who traveled from other universities to spend the day here in Chicago with me," said Berry. "I was gratified to see that the manuscript was so well received. The discussants and the audience gave me many helpful comments to take into consideration, which can only make my book stronger as a finish it off in the next few weeks."