Jonathan Gruber, teaching MIT's 14.41 Public Finance and Public Policy, lays out the promises and pitfalls of representative democracy, the system where voters elect representatives to legislate on their behalf rather than deciding every policy by direct vote. Gruber examines how public choice theory explains gaps between voter preferences and actual policy outcomes, covering topics such as the median voter theorem, the role of special interests and lobbying, and reasons why representative systems can fail to aggregate citizen preferences efficiently. The seventy six minute session is part of the course's public economics sequence, following material on market failure and government intervention, and gives students the political economy framework needed to evaluate why public finance policy looks the way it does rather than what textbook efficiency would predict.