In the mid-twentieth century, income and wealth inequality was declining, leading to an era of comparative economic equality and a large middle class. But since the early 1980s, income and wealth inequality has been on the rise. The 100-year life describes how increasing life expectancy could transform the course of individual lives in detail – but how does this trend intersect with our age of inequality? And what does it mean for law and policymaking more generally? The dark side of rising life expectancy is that it is unequally shared. The first part of this chapter briefly discusses how age and inequality are connected – that is, that not everyone shares in rising life expectancy equally and that those who are living longer share many common attributes. The second part considers the possible impact of the skew in rising life expectancy on representative government. Inequality skews politics to favor the wealthy; inequality by age will likely do the same. The fundamental problem is that power is held unequally in most societies. The third part, on age and institutional design, outlines some ways in which political structures might be crafted to account for age-related differences.

The chapter starts by outlining the version of direct realism endorsed by Aristotle. I argue that he was committed to uncompromised realism about perceptible qualities and to the view that we immediately perceive the bearers of these qualities without any need of further synthetic acts. These features highlight the difficulty of capturing the explanantia of perception. Two notions key to that endeavour are those of mediation and discrimination. The chapter provides a novel analysis of mediation (for discrimination, see Chapter 6), arguing that, for Aristotle, media are – more or less perfect – qualitative conductors. Furthermore, the chapter addresses the existing debate about what, according to Aristotle, happens in the sense organs when we perceive. I argue that the dilemma governing this debate between spiritualism and materialism (either ‘literalist’ or ‘analogical’) is a false one. Tertium datur, and this alternative turns out to be precisely the view Aristotle embraced: perception consists of a thoroughly material process, but what this process results in must not be a standing material likeness (which would mark the end of perception because like cannot be affected by like), but a dynamic ‘phenomenal’ likeness – the presence of a quality of the perceived object which remains to be precisely a quality of that object.

This chapter examines the various tropes and representational strategies used by writers to depict urban and rural spaces and their dynamics, highlighting the constructed nature of place and the intimate relationship between history, place-making, memory, and representation. Drawing on key cultural theorists and urban geographers, most notably Walter Benjamin, George Simmel, Yi-Fu Tuan, Susan Buck-Morss, Kristin Bluemel, and Michael McCluskey, and literary texts such as Dung Kai Cheung’s Atlas: An Archaeology of an Imaginary City (1997), I discuss different imaginative and creative impulses that underlined the discursive construction of place and space. And with reference to texts published in different cultural contexts and historical moments, such as Charles Dickens’ Sketches by Boz (1836) and The Old Curiosity Shop (1841), George Gissing’s The Whirlpool (1897), and Shen Congwen’s The Border Town (1934), I examine not only the various manifestations of urban/rural dichotomies as invoked in literary works, but also moments when these dichotomies are unsettled or blurred. The last section of the chapter focuses on Alicia Little’s A Marriage in China (1896) and Jean Rhys’ Voyage in the Dark (1934), exploring the ways in which the rural/urban constructs engage with questions of colonial politics, resistance, and the ideas of home and (un)belonging.

Chapter 1 sets the stage by comparing leadership elections in the two major UK parties following the Brexit referendum. While Conservative members of parliament acted swiftly to replace their leader, Labour was unable to follow suit, leading to an unprecedented internal crisis. These divergent paths, Kernell argues, can best be explained by attention to party rules. After briefly extending the comparison to discuss party rules in several other countries, Chapter 1 summarizes the book’s core arguments and the formal model, introduces the evidence, and provides a roadmap for the rest of the book.

This chapter explores the nature of the legislature and its relationship to constitutional government, focusing in particular on the importance of legislative agency and the dynamics that frame its exercise. The chapter begins by reflecting on the objects of legislative action, arguing that authorising a legislative assembly to legislate changes who legislates but not what it is to legislate. The object of legislative deliberation and action should be the common good and securing this end requires agency. The assembly faces many challenges in exercising agency, which it is structured to overcome, partly by way of its relationship to government, a relationship that goes well beyond acts of legislation. The relationship between legislature and government shapes the character of a constitutional order and bears on the relationship between legislature and the people. The legislature’s duty is to represent the people, which makes self-government possible. The legislature should deliberate and act for the people and be accountable to the people, with legislative deliberation taking its place in a wider public conversation. The legislature’s capacity for agency informs how legislative acts should be understood to change the law and helps explain the moral importance of legislative freedom and the limits on that freedom.

Although they are stable, party constitutions are not immutable. Over the past decade, parties have become increasingly decentralized – especially with respect to leadership selection. Chapter 7 concludes by assessing the implications of the book’s findings for strategically motivated party leaders contemplating institutional change. The chapter also considers similarities and differences with US primaries and discusses how decentralized structures may shape candidate quality. Kernell concludes by discussing avenues for future research, arguing party – as well as electoral – institutions should be accounted for in studies of democratic responsiveness.

Chapter 6 shifts the focus from individual voter behavior to party responsiveness. Where decentralized rules foster internal competition, parties should select candidates and adopt positions that are more responsive to their core supporters and less responsive to the general electorate. To test these spatial hypotheses, Kernell employs computational simulations to identify vote-maximizing positions in the electorate and finds that decentralized parties adopt less competitive positions than their centralized competitors. All else equal, the electoral advantage for a party whose leaders select candidates over one whose members play a decisive role is close to 7 percent.

This chapter surveys some of the many types of models used in science, and some of the many ways scientists use models. Of particular interest for our purposes are the relationships between models and other aspects of scientific inquiry, such as data, experiments, and theories. Our discussion shows important ways in which modeling can be thought of as a distinct and autonomous scientific activity, but always models can be crucial for making use of data and theories and for performing experiments. The growing reliance on simulation models has raised new and important questions about the kind of knowledge gained by simulations and the relationship between simulation and experimentation. Is it important to distinguish between simulation and experimentation, and if so, why?

This chapter summarizes the primary explanations for women’s numeric underrepresentation and sets the stage for examining the gender dynamics of the candidate emergence process. Although several factors contribute to men’s dominance in US politics, we argue that the gender gap in political ambition continues to limit women’s full political inclusion. We recognize, of course, that women’s numeric representation has increased throughout the last two decades. But electing more women to state legislative and congressional seats – while certainly an important step – should not be conflated with closing the gender gap in political ambition more broadly. Because patterns of traditional gender socialization are so deeply embedded, socialized norms and behaviors still keep millions of women from envisioning themselves as candidates and perceiving the political arena as open to them. The chapter concludes with a description of our multiwave Citizen Political Ambition Study, our central tool for shedding light on gender differences in political ambition.

In this concluding chapter, we turn to the persistence of the gender gap in political ambition. Why hasn’t it begun to close? How can we reconcile its intractable nature with women’s steadily increasing numeric representation? What do women and men in the candidate eligibility pool believe contributes to the static gap? After providing a brief summary of the book’s central findings, these are the questions to which this chapter turns. Ultimately, we conclude that despite women’s significantly greater – and growing – presence in politics, women continue to be less likely than men to see themselves as candidates for elective office. They also continue to be less likely than men to be seen by others as candidates for elective office. There’s no question that “it takes a candidate” to achieve gender parity in US political institutions. But when it comes to breaking down long-standing beliefs about politics and the very nature of the political domain, this book makes it clear that it takes more than a candidate.

This chapter lays out the book’s central argument and theoretical framework: The enduring gender gap in political ambition results from long-standing patterns of traditional socialization that persist in US culture. More specifically, traditional family role orientations, in which women assume the majority of household and childcare responsibilities, lead many women to conclude that entering politics would restrict their ability to fulfill existing personal and professional obligations. A masculinized ethos in political organizations and institutions that have always been controlled by men continues to promote men’s, not women’s, full participation in the political arena. And a gendered psyche imbues many women with a sense of doubt as to their ability to compete in the electoral sphere. Thus, the enduring effects of traditional gender socialization that transcend all generations pose serious obstacles for true gender equality.