Douglas Chalmers’ handsome book—the product of the Leonard Hastings Schoff Memorial Lecture Series—is a well-written and well-organized call for more capacious thinking about the realities of democratic representation in the modern polity. Eschewing more theory navigating the agency/delegate and trustee models of political representation, Chalmers uses his short book to sketch a concept of representation that better coheres with the contemporary challenges of democratic states. It is too short to deliver on its ambition fully, but it succeeds as a set of lectures that string together diverse strands of theory to refocus and hopefully reorient the theory of democratic political representation.

It perhaps gives too much away to just come out with the six facts. Still, Reforming Democracies is organized around them, and there is no way to analyze the contributions of the book without putting them on the table. Spoiler alert: 1) “Knowing and acting on the preferences of and information from many noncitizens within the territory are necessary for making just and effective decisions” (p. 38). 2) “Governments often have to establish representative-like linkages with other governments and their citizens” (p. 51). 3) “The way networks of organizations form, decay, and reconfigure themselves for each issue is important for the effectiveness and justice of decisions” (p. 69). 4) “Personal ties persist and have positive as well as negative consequences for the efficiency and justice of decisions” (p. 83). 5) “The way in which facts, theories, and interpretations are considered and shaped in decision making affect the effectiveness and justice of decisions” (p. 97). 6) “Decisions are made in various venues, not just the legislature, and how those venues operate and interact affect whether the outcomes are effective and just” (p. 112).

No reader trained in political theory will be overwhelmed with the originality of these facts. Chalmers himself calls them “common knowledge” (p. 123). Still, putting Fact 4 about personal ties to one side—it just does not get fully integrated into the main point of the book well enough—there is something to Chalmers’s call for a “new agenda,” giving five of his six facts the attention they deserve.

The first two facts—that governments need to pay more than lip service to what Chalmers calls “quasi-citizens” and those outside a state’s territory but within its sphere of inlfuence—are fairly conventional claims from the internationalist-, humanitarian-, and globalization-oriented camps within political theory. Not everyone agrees with these “facts,” of course; some people still believe in Westphalian sovereignty, exclusionary citizenship, and/or a carefully circumscribed demos that is represented by nations’ representative institutions. But these are not wild claims that will blow the lid off of political theorists’ parochialism. Still, tying them into an account of representation is not common. For those who subscribe to the doctrine of affected interests—that decisions ought to be rendered in a way to give access to and input from all affected interests—these “facts” will seem familiar. But it is rare and important to appreciate that we will need to reconfigure the theory of political representation to accommodate them. Sometimes Chalmers is extreme—he argues that drug smugglers and Canadians must be represented in the systems of American political representation—but he provokes in a useful way: In some important respects, these constituents are necessarily represented, and the challenge for representation theorists is to figure out how to render an account capable of making sense of these outlier cases.

Fact 3—about the fluidity of civil society and its associations—is also not going to blow anyone’s mind. Still, there are some subtle points in Chalmers’s exposition here. To wit, although civil society theorists have long known how essential civil associations are to networks of decision makers and how they keep vital democracies functioning, the author draws our attention to potentially new currents in the ways that civil associations self-organize, mobilize, and disband. Given modern technologies, civil associations may be more global, more temporary, more issue specific; and this can affect civil society’s capacity to serve as a “sluice,” in the Habermasian jargon, into the formal political system. If it turns out that Chalmers is right with his “fact”—he could be wrong and we could end up with more centralization, polarization, and stagnation from information overload or the “disposability” of civil associations—these changing dynamics will necessarily affect political representation in democracies and the way that civil society furnishes its inputs into political systems of representation. Chalmers might have used Occupy Wall Street as an interesting case study to delve further into modern civil society associations.

Fact 5—the deliberative democrats’ core commitment to careful consideration of real information over mere bargaining—also feels familiar within modern political theory. But Chalmers takes the deliberative democracy agenda into the realm of political representation, highlighting that the mechanisms of deliberative democracy need to be grafted back onto an account of political representation. As he sees it, political representation is a decision-making device; deliberative democratic theorists have colonized discussions of institutional design, justice, and theories of democracy, but the author helps connect the deliberative democratic agenda to the central issue of how to be a representative in a complex democracy.

Fact 6—that all manner of political decisions get made outside of the legislature—will not surprise even a casual observer of politics. Yet again, appreciating that different political actors with different constituencies make important political decisions outside of the halls of parliament furnishes lessons for the theory of political representation. If representation happens outside of legislatures—in civil society, in local councils, in task forces—a more capacious set of persons are political representatives, bound by the ethics of political representation. And our theory of political representation must grow to accommodate these new representatives. At some level we know this fact, too; Chalmers’s colleague Nadia Urbinati has already gotten representation theorists to open their minds to this way of thinking about political representation. But Reforming Democracies takes various strands of open-mindedness about the theory of political representation and weaves together a story commanding a new agenda for representative institutions.

To be fair, Chalmers might be surprised by the lens into his book that I offer here. He would say, I think, that he wrote a programmatic book that is really about an agenda for democratic reform and design in light of his “six facts,” not a book of theory that is geared to reorient scholars and theorists of representative democracy. Still, he would have to confess that the programs based on the six facts end up being rather thin. They seem like an afterthought at the end of the book, not an actual agenda for democratizers and democratic activists to implement. There is some discussion of “a jumble of emergent norms” (p. 128), rather than clear direction for institutional reform. Yet what the author can offer theorists is a real challenge to reigning accounts of political representation because “the people” and “the representatives” are usefully complicated by his meditations and efforts to identify them. What we are left with is a challenge to start seeing political representation as about promoting or at least considering the interests of all stakeholders, rather than focusing on the welfare of shareholders. Chalmers knows that we are not quite there yet, but his provocations implore us to reconsider what we thought we knew about democratic political representation.