Skip to content
Search

Latest Stories

Follow Us:
Top Stories

Democracy reform: Do you have a plan for that?

Got a great idea for how to fix the electoral system? Now you can share your ideas with some of the reform community's leading researchers.

The newly created Electoral Reform Research Group put out a call this week for research papers "into how changes in electoral rules impact political participation, processes, partisanship, power, and policy outcomes."

Proposals are due Dec. 6 and selections will be discussed at a workshop in Washington in February. Chosen participants will receive a $500 honorarium and additional funds will be made available to run research programs based on the proposals.

The group is primarily focused on ranked-choice votingat this point, although its members acknowledge RCV is just one piece of the larger electoral reform debate.


"We're heavily focused on RCV because that's the live issue right now," said New America's Lee Drutman, one of the organizers of the research group. "It's getting a tremendous amount of momentum."

In addition to Drutman, this effort has been organized by Avi Green of the Scholars Strategy Network, Kevin Kosar of R Street Institute and Didi Kuo of Stanford University.

More details, including sample questions to guide proposal writing, are available here.


Read More

A young man holding a smartphone to his ear.

A California church models civil political dialogue through Living Room Conversations, showing how curiosity and listening can bridge divides and strengthen relationships.

Getty Images, Cultura Creative

A Conversation You’ve Been Putting Off?

The Episcopal church in Placerville, California, is not an obvious candidate for political harmony. Its congregation is roughly half conservative and half progressive — a split that, over the past decade, has torn apart faith communities across the country. But this one held together through the pandemic. Through two bruising election cycles and everything else, the congregation’s priest, Debra Sabino, managed to keep their core values front and center. And recently, its members decided they wanted to do more.

Start with what everyone already agrees on

Ken Futernick, co-lead of Bridging Divides El Dorado, was asked to facilitate an event after a recent Sunday service. He began with a simple exercise. He asked people to think about the most important things in their lives — and then to tell the person next to them where their relationships with friends and family ranked on that list.

Keep ReadingShow less
Democracy Isn’t Eroding. It’s Evolving. The Question Is: Toward What?
a group of flags

Democracy Isn’t Eroding. It’s Evolving. The Question Is: Toward What?

I fell in love with democracy before I fully understood it.

In high school civics classes in the 1990s, I learned about a system that was imperfect in its origins but evolving toward something better. I believed in that evolution. I believed that democracy, if nurtured, could become more inclusive than the one it started as.

Keep ReadingShow less
Macbeth’s Warning: How Ambition and Power Threaten Our Democracy

Engraving of three witches around a bubbling cauldron in a cave summoning an apparition of a rising demon in the background recalling a scene from Shakespeare's Macbeth..Image found in an 1881 book: "Zig Zag Journeys in the Orient" Published by John Wilson & Son, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Getty Images, KenWiedemann

Macbeth’s Warning: How Ambition and Power Threaten Our Democracy

“Something wicked this way comes…” chant the three witches in Shakespeare’s Macbeth, hailing the former general, now the new king of Scotland.

And indeed, something wicked this way has come to us, in the threat that we are facing to our democracy.

Keep ReadingShow less
The American Dream Now Comes with a Higher Price Tag

People protest for "family affordable Housing"

Photo provided

The American Dream Now Comes with a Higher Price Tag

Basma Ahmad leaves her apartment in Arlington, Va., just after 7 a.m., walking a few blocks to a Metro station before catching the train into Washington. By the time she reaches her office downtown, the commute has taken close to an hour.

Ahmad, 25, moved to the United States from Pakistan last year to work in policy research. She shares a three-bedroom apartment with two roommates, and her portion of the rent is about $1,100 a month.

Keep ReadingShow less