Harvard Law School held a discussion between me and Ruth Greenwood about my new book, “Aligning Election Law.” Here are some excerpts from Harvard Law Today’s writeup about the event.

“The incredible evidence here … is that most voters are relatively moderate in their policy preferences,” he said. On the other hand, “Donors and spenders in the campaign finance world have extremely different views from the general public. They have sharply bi-modal policy preferences. Most donors are quite liberal or quite conservative, and there are very few moderate donors. And politicians’ voting records … turn out to be a perfect replica of the bi-modal distribution of donors.” Thus, it’s not simply a matter of the rich influencing the political agenda. . . .

That is among the issues that Stephanopoulos outlines in his new book “Aligning Election Law.” He discussed his findings at Langdell Library with Assistant Clinical Professor Ruth Greenwood, who directs the law school’s Election Law Clinic.

Alignment, Stephanopoulos explained, is the simple idea that the output of the government should correspond to what the people want the government to do. “This is a pretty intuitive value that lies at the core of many different conceptions of democracy,” he said. Alignment can be measured in political party affiliations, in representative stands that politicians take, and in the policies that are eventually enacted.

Yet there are significant areas in which the electorate’s wishes and the government’s output are greatly misaligned. One is the strong influence of donors and another involves gerrymandering —  something that he and Greenwood have done substantial work to combat.

“Partisan gerrymandering lets you take the same set of voters, with the same partisan and ideological preferences. You draw one district configuration instead of another, and all of a sudden you’ve dramatically altered the partisan makeup of the legislature.” This, he suggested, has an outsized effect on policy, since “Gerrymandering takes you from way too liberal outcomes if the Democrats gerrymander to way too conservative outcomes if the Republicans gerrymander. That influence, that delta, is an order of magnitude larger than you get with voting policies, for example.

“So, I think there’s one takeaway for current electoral rules, it’s that money and politics and partisan gerrymandering matter more than any other electoral rules today,” he said. For that reason, he described the current state of alignment in American politics as “pretty poor.” . . .

In many cases, he said, politicians simply get wrong information about public opinion. They “often misperceive what people want because they’re only hearing from the ideological fringes, the extremist loudmouth busybodies who approach members of the legislature. So more representative contact could help … Politicians often think that their constituents are much more left- or right-wing than they really are. One way to fix that might be for private actors to make available better data about public opinion.”

To that end, he and Greenwood have launched TrueViews (trueviews.org), which collects public opinion data on a variety of issues and filters them by area, allowing anyone to access how a particular state, city, or even school district stands on a particular topic. (It currently features data on gun control, environmental policies, criminal justice, and more.)