Panelist Biographies

Can Democracies Get Anything Done? Panelist Biographies Simone Chambers is a Professor of Political Science at the University of Toronto. She is writing a book Public Justification and the Ethics of Public Discourse, which investigates new models of liberal legitimacy. Her primary areas of scholarship include political philosophy, ethics, democratic theory and religion in the public sphere. She is the author of Reasonable Democracy: Jürgen Habermas and the Politics of Discourse (1996) and the co-editor of Deliberation, Democracy, and the Media (2000) and Alternative Conceptions of Civil Society (2001) as well as numerous journal articles. Jane Mansbridge (co-chair of the Task Force) is the Charles F. Adams Professor of Political Leadership and Democratic Values at the Kennedy School at Harvard University. Mansbridge is the author of Beyond Adversary Democracy and Why We Lost the ERA. She is editor or coeditor of several volumes, including Beyond Self-Interest. She is the recipient of the APSA’s Kammerer, Schuck, and James Madison awards and has held fellowships from the Institute for Advanced Study, the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, the Russell Sage Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, and the National Science Foundation. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and is currently APSA president. Yuli Tamir is an Israeli academic and former politician who served as a member of the Knesset for the Labor Party between 2003 and 2010, and as Minister of Immigrant Absorption and Education. She received a BA in Biology and an MA in Political Science from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and a PhD in Political Philosophy from Oxford. Between 1989 and 1999, she was a philosophy lecturer in Tel Aviv University and a research fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute of Jerusalem, Princeton and Harvard universities. From 1998 until 1999, she was chairwoman of the Israeli Association for Civil Rights. In 1999, she was appointed Minister of Immigrant Absorption. She was elected to the Knesset in the following 2003 election, and served on the finance, constitutional, law and order, public input, and culture and sport committees. She also served on the investigatory parliamentary committee into government corruption. She was elected to the Knesset again in the 2006 elections, and as of 4 May 2006, is the Education Minister in Ehud Olmert's Kadima-led coalition government. Tamir also served as acting Science, Culture and Sport minister following Ophir Pines-Paz's resignation in November 2006 until March 2007 when Raleb Majadele was appointed. She is currently the President of Shenkar College of Art, Design, and Engineering. Dennis F. Thompson is Professor of Government and the Alfred North Whitehead Professor of Political Philosophy in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. He is also a professor of public policy in the John F. Kennedy School of Government, and the founding Director of the University Center for Ethics and the Professions, (now the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics). He has served as Associate Provost and Senior Adviser to the President of the University. Thompson’s most recent books are: The Spirit of Compromise: Why Governing Demands It and Campaigning Undermines It (with Amy Gutmann); Restoring Responsibility: Ethics in Government, Business, and Healthcare; and Just Elections: Creating a Fair Electoral Process in the United States. His other books include: Democracy and Disagreement; Why Deliberative Democracy? (both with Amy Gutmann); The Democratic Citizen: Social Science and Democratic Theory in the 20th Century; John Stuart Mill and Representative Government; Ethics in Congress: From Individual to Institutional Corruption; andPolitical Ethics and Public Office, which won the American Political Science Association's Gladys M. Kammerer award for the best political science publication in the field of U.S. National policy in 1987. His articles have appeared in such journals as the American Political Science Review, Philosophy & Public Affairs, Political Theory, and Ethics. Mark E. Warren is a Professor in the Department of Political Science, and holder of the Merilees Chair for the Study of Democracy. Warren was charged with establishing the Centre for the Study of Democratic Institutions in the Faculty of Arts, which he directed from 2004-2007. His current research interests fall within the field of democratic theory. He is especially interested in new forms of citizen participation, new forms of democratic representation, the relationship between civil society and democratic governance, and the corruption of democratic relationships. He is author of Democracy and Association (Princeton University Press, 2001), and editor of Democracy and Trust (Cambridge University Press, 1999). Democracy and Association was the 2003 winner of the Elaine and David Spitz Book Prize for Democracy and Association, awarded by the Conference for the Study of Political Thought, and also received the 2003 Outstanding Book Award from the Association for Research on Nonprofit Organizations and Voluntary Action (ARNOVA). .

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