President Barack Obama delivers a health care address to a joint session of Congress at the United States Capitol

Democratic Reform

At the Ash Center, we’re working to generate new ideas to reform our democratic institutions for the 21st century.

Lucas, Flickr, Creative Commons

Many of our most basic democratic institutions, from the Electoral College to Congress itself, were born in the eighteenth century when American democracy and America looked markedly different than today. At the Ash Center, we’re working to modernize and reform these institutions for a healthy 21st-century democracy.

As political polarization continues to test the strength of even our most bedrock political institutions, the Ash Center brings together scholars, practitioners, and policymakers from across the country to discuss how to protect and modernize our democracy.

Through working groups and convenings, case studies, and research projects, the Ash Center is working to identify reforms both large and small that will help strengthen the future of American democracy for generations to come.

Upcoming Events


Debriefing the United States Election

Debriefing the United States Election

In-Person Event

Ash Center Seminar Room 225, Suite 200, 124 Mount Auburn Street
4:00 pm – 5:00 pm EST

The Latest News, Research, and Resources


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Bruce Schneier Wants to Recreate Democracy
Photo of the capitol building seemingly under construction with a tech background

Feature

Bruce Schneier Wants to Recreate Democracy

Arguing that American democracy has been hacked, the computer security expert doesn’t want to just fiddle on the margins when it comes to re-envisioning what a new 21st-century American democracy should look like.

Democracy on the Precipice?

Feature

Democracy on the Precipice?

Archon Fung on the threats to American democracy and what we can do about it.

Democracy on the Precipice?

Video

Democracy on the Precipice?

On Thursday, March 9, 2023, Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation Director Archon Fung, Winthrop Laflin McCormack Professor of Citizenship and Self-Government at the Harvard Kennedy School, spoke to Kennedy School community members about threats to American democracy and how we can overcome them.

Youth without representation

Q+A

Youth without representation

Aksel Sundström explores how the absence of young adults in our governing institutions is weakening our democracy.

What does it mean to have a strong multiracial democracy?

Feature

What does it mean to have a strong multiracial democracy?

The Ash Center’s Khalil Gibran Muhammad and Archon Fung discuss how without a more robust commitment to upholding and protecting multiracial democracy, the United States won’t be able to solve its democratic backsliding.

Democracy on the (down) ballot

Feature

Democracy on the (down) ballot

Ash panel unpacks election reforms at stake during the midterms

 

Democracy on the (Down) Ballot: Unpacking the Midterms, Voting Rights, and Local Electoral Reforms

Video

Democracy on the (Down) Ballot: Unpacking the Midterms, Voting Rights, and Local Electoral Reforms

During the 2022 midterms, voters not only cast a ballot to decide the balance of power in congress, but in in many states voters decided on a range of consequential ballot initiatives impacting the nuts and bolts of the electoral process including voter-ID laws, party primary reform, ranked choice voting, and proportional representation. The outcomes of these statewide and local level ballot initiatives have direct implications for future elections and participatory democracy.

This midterm recap webinar goes beyond the candidate horse race and focus on analysis and perspectives from advocates and scholars on recent voting-related ballot initiatives, immediate implications for future elections, and what’s ahead for emerging electoral reforms at the state and local level. See panelists Deb Otis, Director of Research at FairVote; Jenny Lee, Deputy Director of the Coalition of Communities of Color; and Wendy Underhill, Director of Elections and Redistricting at the National Conference of State Legislatures. Ash Center Reimagining Democracy Fellow Nick Chedli Carter moderated.

How to save democracy
Joan Donovan speaking to audience, seated to the right of panelist Gabriella Coleman.

Feature

How to save democracy

Events this week in JFK Jr. Forum examined what can be done to address grinding problems of race, internet’s power to exploit political, and cultural schisms to destructive ends.

“Lengthy and convoluted and vague”: HKS historian Alex Keyssar on the problems with the Electoral Count Act and how proposed reforms could fix it
Three persons standing at voting booths placed in an outside sitting, against a brick wall backdrop

Q+A

“Lengthy and convoluted and vague”: HKS historian Alex Keyssar on the problems with the Electoral Count Act and how proposed reforms could fix it

A law written in post-Civil War America to try to avoid problems with the counting of Electoral College votes has never been very clear. A new set of proposed reforms tries to change that.