Representative Government and Environmental Management

Deciding what kind of environmental quality we are going to have and how we are going to pay for it requires the making of social or collective choices. Edwin T. Haefele believes these choices are ill made by the executive process and demonstrates that representative government is a utility mechanism with unique capabilities for aggregating individual preferences into social choices. The author reminds us that the founders of the American republic were in full possession of the political experience of seventeenth-century England, in which parliament cured the arbitrary power of Stuart kings.