![Headshot of Danielle Allen](https://ash.harvard.edu/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/DanielleAllen-500x333.jpg)
Danielle Allen
Professor of Public Policy, HKS;
James Bryant Conant University Professor, FAS
Renovating our democratic institutions for the 21st century.
The Allen Lab for Democracy Renovation addresses the threats to American and global democracies with research and field-building to support power-sharing liberalism. Just societies require robust political equality, fully inclusive institutions, and broader avenues for participation and connectedness, all of which rest on the material and social bases for human flourishing. 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 works to renovate American democracy.
Professor of Public Policy, HKS;
James Bryant Conant University Professor, FAS
Doctoral Student, Harvard Chan School of Public Health
Researcher, Harvard College
Executive Assistant to Danielle Allen
Researcher, Harvard College
Research Coordinator, Allen Lab for Democracy Renovation
Senior Lab Director, Allen Lab for Democracy Renovation
Doctoral Student, Harvard Government Department
Senior Fellow, Allen Lab for Democracy Renovation
Principal Investigator;
Post-Doctoral Fellow, Columbia University
Researcher;
Doctoral Student, Harvard Government Department
Researcher, Harvard College
Visiting Fellow, Allen Lab for Democracy Renovation
Senior Fellow, Allen Lab for Democracy Renovation
Researcher, Harvard College
Researcher;
Master in Urban Planning Candidate, Harvard Graduate School of Design
Lab Program Manager, Allen Lab for Democracy Renovation;
Doctoral student, Harvard Gov Department
Senior Fellow, Allen Lab for Democracy Renovation;
Co-Director and Co-Investigator, GETTING-Plurality Research Network
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
In-Person Event
Ash Center Foyer, Suite 200, 124 Mount Auburn Street
4:00 pm – 6:00 pm EDT
An interview with Allison Stanger
Web3 today centers around expressing transferable, financialized assets, rather than encoding social relationships of trust.
Policy Brief
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.
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.
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.
When AI is seen as a source of truth and scientific knowledge, it may lend public legitimacy to harmful ideas about identity.
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.