Have we have reached an all-time low in terms of trusting our politicians and the media? Are we caught in a downward spiral that must end in institutional decay or even civil war, or can we restore trust through our shared social institutions? Listen to a conversation with Kevin Vallier, author, political philosopher and libertarian blogger at Bowling Green State University, and Jane Mansbridge, a Harvard political scientist and one of the world’s most prominent scholars of democratic theory. They tackle these questions and more about our leaders and government.
Jane Mansbridge, Charles F. Adams Professor of Political Leadership and Democratic Values, is the author of Beyond Adversary Democracy, an empirical and normative study of face-to-face democracy, and the award-winning Why We Lost the ERA, a study of anti-deliberative dynamics in social movements based on organizing for an Equal Rights Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. She is also editor or coeditor of the volumes Beyond Self-Interest, Feminism, Oppositional Consciousness, Deliberative Systems, and Negotiating Agreement in Politics. She was President of the American Political Science Association in 2012-13. Her current work includes studies of representation, democratic deliberation, everyday activism, and the public understanding of free-rider problems.
Kevin Vallier is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Bowling Green State University. His interests lie primarily in political philosophy, ethics, philosophy, politics, and economics (PPE), and the philosophy of religion. He is the author of Liberal Politics and Public Faith: Beyond Separation (Routledge, 2014) and Must Politics Be War? In Defense of Public Reason Liberalism, forthcoming with Oxford University Press in 2018.