Danielle Allen
James Bryant Conant University Professor
Allen Lab for Democracy Renovation
Renovating our democratic institutions for the 21st century.
The Allen Lab for Democracy Renovation aims to reinforce democracy through strengthening institutions, building interpersonal and informational trust, and reducing hyper-partisan affective polarization with research and field-building. 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.
Our Vision: Justice is achieved by means of democracy: through robust political equality, fully inclusive institutions, and broad avenues for participation and connectedness, all of which rest on and support the material and social bases for human flourishing.
Our Mission: The Allen Lab develops the policy innovations needed to achieve healthy democracy in the 21st century. Our applied research converts the theory of power sharing liberalism into reality. Healthy democracy in the 21st century must deliver responsive representation and effective decision-making for large, complex, digitally-powered societies with significant heterogeneity operating in a globalized economy.
Research Workstreams
The lab currently supports four key research workstreams:
- New Political Economy: Develop exemplary policies in support of a new paradigm in political economy that prioritizes equal dignity, voice, community, sustainability, and social relations free from domination. We call this paradigm power-sharing liberalism. The policies that embody this paradigm draw on the benefits of markets, civil society organizations, and the public sector, deploying diverse combinations of these forms of human coordination to solve public goods problems.
- Technology and Democracy: Research and develop policies such that public and private sector AI governance policy is democracy sustaining, industry is defined by professional norms that lead to technology development supportive of human pluralism, and the pool of people able to bring merged ethical and technical expertise into policy spaces and industry meets the need. Learn more about our work here.
- Civic Education Policy: Advance policy to ensure high quality universal civic learning, where excellent civic learning opportunities are available in the K-12, higher education, and life-long learning sectors and shared across political divides.
- Governance Mechanisms: Develop innovative solutions to tough policy problems that are stuck due to systemic democratic failures. These select projects cross the three sectors vital to healthy democracy—political institutions, civil society, and civic culture. Our Common Purpose: Reinventing American Democracy for the 21st Century, a report of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, provides the basis for this workstream.
Our work is carried out through the identification and development of exemplary policies that permit further testing and refinement of the power-sharing liberalism paradigm. The Lab is committed to supporting the development of emerging scholars and thought leaders, and our organizational structure reflects this commitment. Lab activities to support the development of emblematic policy solutions include team-based research collaborations (staffed by undergraduate and graduate level research assistants), independent Fellow-driven research, an active professional learning community, regular lab meetings and workshops, publications and special stakeholder convenings.
Lab Staff
Darshan Goux
PhD, Senior Lab Director
Sarah Hubbard
Associate Director for Technology & Democracy
Lab Members
Ben Barsky
PhD, UCSF College of Law
Mathis Bitton
Doctoral Student, Harvard Government Department
Felix Chen
Harvard College
Naomi Corlette
Harvard College
Charlie Covit
Researcher, Harvard College
Caroline Curran
Researcher, Harvard College
Owen Ebose
Researcher, Harvard College
Emma Ebowe
Doctoral Student, Harvard Government Department
Keren Elmore
Harvard College
Ami Fields-Meyer
Non-Resident Senior Fellow, Allen Lab for Democracy Renovation
July 2024-June 2026
Lab Alumni
Sofia Corona
Researcher, Harvard College
Eli Frankel
Researcher, Harvard College
David Knight
Principal Investigator;
Post-Doctoral Fellow, Columbia University
Woojin Lim
Researcher, Harvard College
Cris Moore
Professor, Santa Fe Institute
Christian Schmidt
Researcher;
Master in Urban Planning Candidate, Harvard Graduate School of Design
Tessel van Oirsouw
EthicAI and Former Visiting Fellow, Allen Lab for Democracy Renovation
Jama Willis
Communications, Harvard College
The Latest News and Research
Video
The Dark Side of AI: Crime and Adversarial Use Cases
“The Dark Side of AI: Crime and Adversarial Use Cases” webinar session featured the following speakers and topics:
- Bruce Schneier (Harvard): Hackers and Security Vulnerabilities
- Matt Groh (Northwestern): Deepfakes and Misinformation, see related paper The Art and Science of Generative AI
- Shlomit Wagman (Harvard): Financial Crime
- Jennifer Calvery (HSBC): Financial Crime
Video
Introduction to AI and Public Policy
The “Introduction to AI and Public Policy” webinar session featured the following speakers and topics:
- Danielle Allen (Harvard): AI and Democracy
- Sandy Pentland (MIT): A Practical Framework for Data and AI systems for Regulators
- Shayne Longpre (MIT): A Primer in Large Language Models
- Gabriele Mazzini (European Commission): Overview of the EU AI Act
Article
Bridging Systems: Open Problems for Countering Destructive Divisiveness across Ranking, Recommenders, and Governance
This working paper aims to articulate an interdisciplinary research and practice area focused around bridging systems.
Policy Brief
GETTING-Plurality Comments to White House OSTP on National Priorities for Artificial Intelligence
The GETTING-Plurality Research Network submitted a series of memos which respond to various questions posed around the topics of bolstering democracy and civic participation; protecting rights, safety, and national security; and promoting economic growth and good jobs.
Video
Optimizing for What? Algorithmic Amplification and Society
GETTING-Plurality Workstream Lead Aviv Ovadya recently discussed his work on bridging systems as part of “Optimizing for What? Algorithmic Amplification and Society.” This two-day symposium at Columbia University’s Knight First Amendment Institute explored algorithmic amplification and distortion as well as potential interventions.
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.