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
Cynthia Garcia
Researcher, Harvard College
Brian Highsmith
Doctoral Student, Harvard Government Department
Conner Huey
Researcher, Harvard College
Hannah Kunzman
Researcher;
Doctoral Student, Harvard Government Department
Saddat Nazir
Researcher, Harvard College
Alexander Pascal
Senior Fellow, Allen Lab for Democracy Renovation
Charlotte Ritz-Jack
Researcher, Harvard College
Priyanka Sethy
Doctoral Student, Harvard Government Department
Allison Stanger
Senior Fellow, Allen Lab for Democracy Renovation;
Co-Director and Co-Investigator, GETTING-Plurality Research Network
Andrei Stupu
Fulbright Doctoral Researcher, August 2024-May 2025
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
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.