Danielle Allen
Professor of Public Policy, HKS;
James Bryant Conant University Professor, FAS
Allen Lab for Democracy Renovation
Renovating our democratic institutions for the 21st century.
The Allen Lab for Democracy Renovation seeks to address the threats to American and global democracies with research and field-building to support a positive vision of what Danielle Allen has called “power-sharing liberalism.” This vision is grounded in the belief that just societies require robust political equality, fully inclusive institutions, and broader avenues for participation and connectedness, all of which will rest in turn on the material and social bases for human flourishing. To those ends, our multidisciplinary community of scholars, practitioners, and partner organizations work together to shepherd concepts and reforms into practice—to translate research into impact. From community-led initiatives to national-level policies and structural reforms, the Allen Lab seeks to renovate American democracy.
Meet the Lab
Ben Barsky
Doctoral Student, Harvard Chan School of Public Health
Sofia Corona
Researcher, Harvard College
Sadie Cox
Executive Assistant to Danielle Allen
Owen Ebose
Researcher, Harvard College
Eli Frankel
Research Coordinator, Allen Lab for Democracy Renovation
Darshan Goux
Senior Lab Director, Allen Lab for Democracy Renovation
Brian Highsmith
Doctoral Student, Harvard Government Department
Sarah Hubbard
Senior Fellow, Allen Lab for Democracy Renovation
David Knight
Principal Investigator;
Post-Doctoral Fellow, Columbia University
Hannah Kunzman
Researcher;
Doctoral Student, Harvard Government Department
Woojin Lim
Researcher, Harvard College
Tessel van Oirsouw
Visiting Fellow, Allen Lab for Democracy Renovation
Alexander Pascal
Senior Fellow, Allen Lab for Democracy Renovation
Charlotte Ritz-Jack
Researcher, Harvard College
Christian Schmidt
Researcher;
Master in Urban Planning Candidate, Harvard Graduate School of Design
Priyanka Sethy
Lab Program Manager, Allen Lab for Democracy Renovation;
Doctoral student, Harvard Gov Department
Allison Stanger
Senior Fellow, Allen Lab for Democracy Renovation;
Co-Director and Co-Investigator, GETTING-Plurality Research Network
Jama Willis
Communications, Harvard College
The lab currently supports four research workstreams, all with accompanying impact projects.
Work is carried out through weekly lab and workstream meetings, reading groups, stakeholder convenings, foundational paper development and publication, development of policy guidance, editorial meetings, and dissemination and engagement convenings and activities. Activities are supported with robust project management. The overarching outcome will be a new paradigm for policy-making, and exemplary policies, supportive of democracy in 21st century conditions of digitality, complexity, scale, mobility, heterogeneity, and climate change.
Research Workstreams
GETTING-Plurality: Governance of Emerging Technology and Tech Innovations for Next-Gen Governance through Plurality)
GETTING-Plurality is a multi-disciplinary research network linking philosophers, social scientists, computer scientists, legal scholars, and technologists. The team is building a unique collaborative that unites tech ethics initiatives at Harvard University with external impact partners across higher education and the tech industry, bringing philosophers and ethicists to the table for every project.
We’re at a pivotal moment. In order to promote universal well-being, we need to promote the responsible governance of innovation and responsibly innovate the way we govern.
The GETTING-Plurality teams seeks to advance the understanding of how to shape, guide, govern, and deploy technological development in support of democracy, collective intelligence, and other public goods. The focus is on how to do so, given the plural nature of human and artificial intelligence. The team pursues foundational analysis and theory, field-building, and policy development in key focus areas to foresee and mitigate potential harms to democracy and to strengthen the public benefit and democracy-supportive effects flowing from technology innovation.
PEPL: Political Economy for Power-sharing Liberalism—from Foundations for Flourishing to Abundance
The PEPL Team seeks to develop exemplary policies intended to anchor the paradigm of power-sharing liberalism. On this paradigm, inclusive and dynamic—or “empowering” —economies serve to support healthy democracy. Empowering economies depend on the integration of all members of society into production, and the benefits that flow from it. The economy should work for people, not the other way around. The focus is on supply-side progressivism with investment in foundations of flourishing (from housing to education) and pursuit of abundance in those critical goods through technological and organizational innovation (i.e. solutions to the collective action problems that cause scarcities). Exemplary policies have been developed in the domains of housing, transportation, education, good jobs, justice and safety, health, and climate.
Teams are currently working on innovating exemplary policy in the domains of education and public health and safety. The education team is working on infrastructure to support innovation in credentialing via next-generation badging of competency-based mastery. The public health and safety team is working on pathways to success for racial health equity in alternative emergency response programs.
The PEPL team also seeks to convene the many networks of scholars around the world working to develop a new paradigm in political economy that can respond effectively to the pressing political economy problems of our time—including stalled mobility and dysfunctional immigration policies; the climate crisis; social alienation, disempowerment, and violence.
Collaborating impact organizations include the Justice, Health, and Democracy Impact Initiative; the Democratic Knowledge Project; and Abundance California.
AF: Aspirational Federalism—Strategies for Jurisdictional Innovation in the US Federal System
The work of the AF Team starts from recognition of the value for social resilience and human flourishing of federalist, federated, and even decentralized structures of governance, especially as a response to the scale and complexity of human social organization in the 21st century. The team focuses on the specific case of U.S. federalism and the jurisdictional and organizational innovations that can improve state capacity and secure responsive governance in contemporary conditions. AF Teams are currently working on governance innovations to support accelerated siting of renewable energy projects, fiscal federalism, and a strategy of harmonized federalism in support of increased investment in civic education.
Collaborating impact organizations currently include Educating for American Democracy.
RAD: Reinventing American Democracy for the 21st Century
The RAD Team contributed to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences’ Our Common Purpose Commission and Report and to the development of a holistic, 360° degree standard for understanding the elements of healthy democracy. The Team continues to contribute to the ongoing Our Common Purpose research and strategy work, as well as exploring further challenges to full participation in U.S. democracy. Current projects are focused on civic education in higher education, digital civic infrastructure, America’s 250th anniversary, and immigrant integration and participation.
Collaborating impact organizations currently include the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Partners In Democracy and The Council on Civic Strength.
Upcoming Events
Conference on the Political Economy of Artificial Intelligence
In-Person Event
9:00 am – 6:00 pm EDT
AI and the 2024 Elections
In-Person Event
Virtual, Registration Required
9:00 am – 10:00 am EDT
The Latest News and Research
Commentary
How AI could write our laws
ChatGPT and other AIs could supercharge the influence of lobbyists—but only if we let them.
Commentary
We Don’t Need to Reinvent our Democracy to Save it from AI
When is it time to start worrying about artificial intelligence interfering in our democracy? Maybe when an AI writes a letter to The New York Times opposing the regulation of its own technology.
Digital Humanism: The Time Is Now
Digital humanism highlights the complex relationships between people, society, nature, and machines. It has been embraced by a growing community of individuals and groups who are setting directions that may change current paradigms. Here we focus on the initiatives generated by the Vienna Manifesto.
Commentary
How ChatGPT Hijacks Democracy
“… for all the consternation over the potential for humans to be replaced by machines in formats like poetry and sitcom scripts, a far greater threat looms: artificial intelligence replacing humans in the democratic processes — not through voting, but through lobbying.”
Cryptocurrencies and National Security: The Case of Money Laundering and Terrorism Financing
This Article reviews the anti-money laundering and counter-financing of terrorism (AML/CFT) framework and its application to cryptocurrencies. Then, it presents case studies demonstrating the important contributions that the AML/CFT toolkit has made to countries’ security.
Hybrid Intelligence: A Paradigm for More Responsible Practice
The authors propose an alternate approach to mainstream AI practice that broadens the focus beyond algorithms viewed in isolation to processes of human-algorithm collaboration.
Podcast
Consumers vs. Citizens in Democracy’s Public Sphere
Attempting to balance the challenging trade-offs between individual rights and our obligations to one another.
Big Tech’s Rise to Political Power
An interview with Allison Stanger
Decentralized Society: Finding Web3’s Soul
Web3 today centers around expressing transferable, financialized assets, rather than encoding social relationships of trust.
Policy Brief
How AI Fails Us
Researchers and funders should redirect focus from centralized autonomous general intelligence to a plurality of established and emerging approaches that extend cooperative and augmentative traditions as seen in successes such as Taiwan’s digital democracy project to collective intelligence platforms like Wikipedia.
Towards Platform Democracy: Policymaking Beyond Corporate CEOs and Partisan Pressure
Facebook, YouTube, and other platforms make incredibly impactful decisions about the speech of billions. Right now, those decisions are primarily in the hands of corporate CEO’s—and heavily influenced by pressure from partisan and authoritarian governments aiming to entrench their own power.
Aviv Ovadya proposes an alternative: platform democracy.
The Real Cost of Surveillance Capitalism: Digital Humanism in the US and Europe
Alison Stanger argues that the real threat to liberal democracies is not capitalism, but the growing inequalities that corporate surveillance in its unfettered form both reveals and exacerbates.
Truth from the machine: artificial intelligence and the materialization of identity
When AI is seen as a source of truth and scientific knowledge, it may lend public legitimacy to harmful ideas about identity.
Democracy’s Tripwire: Global Corruption and Whistleblowing in Europe and the U.S.
This paper compares whistleblower protection politics in Europe and the United States to bring into fuller relief the vital role insider truth-telling plays in combatting global corruption, keeping elites honest, and sustaining liberal democracy.