Reimagining Democracy Program

At a time when many are rightly concerned about the health of American democracy, scholars and reformers are evaluating proposals to make democracy more functional and representative. One such proposal is to move beyond the winner-take-all electoral system used at the federal and state levels in the United States to enable adoption of proportional voting systems. What would be the impact of proportional voting in the United States, and what will it take to enact it?

Join panelists Rob Richie, President and CEO of FairVote, Rebecca Chavez-Houck, Community Engagement Consultant and Former Utah State Legislator, and Danielle Allen, James Bryant Conant University Professor at Harvard University in discussion. Archon Fung, Winthrop Laflin McCormack Professor of Citizenship and Self-Government at Harvard Kennedy School, Director of the Ash Center’s Democratic Governance Programs, moderated.

Following recent victories in San Francisco and New York City, Boston advocates are looking to expand the franchise to all residents with legal status for local elections.

As efforts get underway to expand the franchise to non-citizens in Boston, the Ash Center and the Rappaport Institute for Greater Boston hosted a conversation to learn about how non-citizen voting once was the norm and how it’s making a comeback.

Harvard Ash Center Senior Practice Fellow in American Democracy Miles Rapoport advocates that universal voting, a requirement that every citizen cast a ballot, could reduce polarization and pave a pathway to a more equitable American democracy.

Analysis by Harvard Kennedy School’s Pippa Norris and co-author Kseniya Kizilova shows nationalism and desire to protect democratic freedoms motivate Ukrainian citizens to resist Russia’s invasion.

To discuss the filibuster and its impact on voting rights and the Senate, we sat down with Archon Fung, Winthrop Laflin McCormack Professor of Citizenship and Democracy at Harvard Kennedy School and the director of the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation’s Democratic Governance Program.

We are in the midst of one of the most rancorous redistricting sessions in our country’s history. Partisan officials – mostly but not only in conservative legislatures – are using the drawing of new congressional, state and local election districts to amass disproportionate power for themselves. How successfully can this be resisted? Meanwhile, the many independent/nonpartisan commissions established in states in recent years were meant to help avoid this problem. Are they working to do so? If so, which ones are, which ones aren’t, where and why?

Join the Ash Center and Equal Democracy Project at Harvard Law School to learn about the state of redistricting in this moment, litigation that is occurring under a dramatically weakened Voting Rights Act, and how different redistricting commissions are faring, with:

Ben Schneer, Assistant Professor of Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School
Mitchell Brown, Counsel, Voting Rights, Southern Coalition for Social Justice
Colleen Mathis, former Chair of the Independent Redistricting Commission of Arizona
Cathy Duvall, Managing Consultant, Fair Representation in Redistricting

Moderated by: Nick Stephanopoulos, Harvard Law School

George R. Greenidge. Jr. HGSE ‘96, Ash Center Democracy Visiting Fellow, doesn’t draw a line between scholarship and community advocacy, using both to combat gentrification and racial injustice.

In this panel discussion, community organizers, leaders, and democracy advocates explored examples from communities all over the country where this is working today. Then, they discussed the challenge of replicating and expanding community civic infrastructure initiatives across the country.

Requiring citizens to vote, or actively abstain, would increase voter participation and make democracy more representative in the Bay State says Ash Center Senior Practice Fellow in American Democracy.

The Ash Center, Carr Center for Human Rights Policy, Center for Public Leadership, FXB Center for Health and Human Rights, and the Rappaport Institute for Greater Boston hosted a conversation on the urgent issues – from education and housing to economic development and communal violence – that the next mayor of Boston must address to rectify structural inequities and support Black and Brown communities.

The U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee issued a major report in October 2021 claiming to show “the American people just how close we came to a constitutional crisis” during the events before and after the January 6 “capitol insurrection.” This crisis was prevented only by “a number of upstanding Americans in the Department of Justice.” “Donald Trump was unable to bend the department to his will. But it was not due to a lack of effort,” the report goes on. But, the Republicans on the Judiciary Committee responded that Trump “did not weaponize DOJ for his personal or campaign purposes” in their own report. Join Harvard Kennedy School historian Alexander Keyssar and Harvard Law School law of democracy scholar Guy Uriel-Charles as they parsed the major revelations in these reports and helped us to understand how these events may foreshadow future crises in American Democracy. Archon Fung, Winthrop Laflin McCormack Professor of Citizenship and Self-Government at Harvard Kennedy School, moderated.

What would it be like to really rethink our Constitution? In this webinar, we learned about participatory constitution building, a way of writing a new constitution with full public participation. Participatory constitution building is common around the world, but how it is designed and the process by which it is undertaken is critical to making it a success anywhere. We learned with experts on participatory constitution building globally, in Chile at this moment, and among tribal governments. What are the practices we might think about as we reconsider the strengths and weaknesses of our own constitution in this country?

Speakers included:

• Erin Houlihan, Program Officer, International IDEA
• Pamela Figueroa Rubio, Académica, Facultad de Humanidades – Universidad De Santiago
• Joseph Kalt, Ford Foundation Professor of International Political Economy, HKS; Co-Director, The Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development
• Co-moderated by Archon Fung, Winthrop Laflin McCormack Professor of Citizenship and Self-Government, Harvard Kennedy School
• Pedro Arcain Riccetto, Democracy Visiting Fellow, Ash Center

In the nearly one year since the November 2020 elections, the diverging directions state legislatures took on expanding or contracting voting rights created a huge fault line in American democracy, described by some as ‘two Americas’. A Voting Rights Lab tracking report as of September 13, 2021, identified 27 states representing 70 million voters that had passed laws to expand voting opportunities, and 13 states with 55 million people that had passed sharply restrictive legislation. And state legislatures were still at work. What’s causing this divergence?

How are voting rights advocates advancing their work in such disparate political environments? What does it mean for upcoming elections and the future of American democracy? Join the Ash Center as voting advocates from two key states that have gone in opposite directions and policy experts evaluated the trends, discussed the present, and looked into the future.

Speakers include:

• Mimi Marziani, President and CEO Texas civil rights project
• Henal Patel, Director of the Democracy & Justice Program, New Jersey Institute of Social Justice
• Randy Perez, Program Director, Voting Rights Lab
• Jake Grumbach, Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Washington
• Miles Rapoport, Ash Center Senior Practice Fellow in American Democracy, Moderator