Through our books, case studies, journal articles, papers, and surveys, the Ash Center is home to some of the world’s most advanced research and publications on issues related to democratic governance and self-governance.
To explore all research authored by Ash Center faculty, please visit the Harvard Kennedy School website. You can view the Ash Center’s open access policy here.
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A recent event explored how sports have shaped movements for racial justice, gender equality, religious freedom, LGBTQ+ rights, disability rights, and broader inclusion in the United States.
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Case Study
The rules requiring public companies to open their books trace back to a “modest first installment” cobbled together in 1933, after the market lost 83 percent of its value. Every decade or so since, a new scandal has forced Congress to patch the system again: conglomerate collapses in the 1960s, brokerage failures in the 1970s, Enron in 2001. Now regulators are trying to force the same disclosure logic onto something far harder to standardize than a balance sheet: a company’s carbon footprint.
Case Study
In 1999, a landmark national report called for a simple fix: make hospitals publicly disclose their serious errors, the way New York already did for cardiac surgery. Bill Clinton backed it, half the country heard about it within weeks, and then doctors, hospitals, trial lawyers, and consumer groups spent two decades fighting over the details. By 2017, researchers could show that some hospitals killed patients at thirteen times the rate of others — but the data came with one catch that made it useless to the people who needed it most.
Case Study
For nearly a decade, Americans lived with a five-color scale meant to tell them how worried to be about terrorism — yet polls found most people had no idea what color the country was even on, and a psychologist warned the system was turning citizens into “worriers, not warriors.” Archon Fung, Mary Graham, and David Weil trace how a transparency tool designed to guide action ended up guiding almost nothing at all.
Case Study
Megan Kanka’s death in 1994 led to a wave of disclosure laws requiring states to publish the whereabouts of released sex offenders — and Washington State built one of the most aggressive versions, giving the public near-unlimited online access to names, photos, and addresses. But Archon Fung, Mary Graham, and David Weil found a wrinkle that disclosure advocates rarely mention: by one national estimate, roughly a quarter of offenders simply don’t register at all.
Case Study
In 1975, Congress forced banks to disclose, address by address, who got mortgages and who got turned away — a narrow bill that squeaked through the Senate by two votes. Fifty years, a savings-and-loan crisis, a subprime meltdown, and a new federal bureau later, regulators are still uncovering redlining, except now it’s harder to see: branches quietly placed outside Black neighborhoods, bias buried inside lending algorithms. The agency built to police all of it has spent much of the last decade fighting for its own survival in court.
Case Study
Since 1910, the theory has held: force candidates and donors into the light, and corruption shrinks. Congress kept building on that idea for a hundred years — new disclosure mandates in the 1970s, tighter rules in 2002 — until a single Supreme Court case blew a hole in it. Today, PACs with names like “Best of America” and “Ready to Win” can legally hide the identities of the people actually writing the checks. Even the committee tasked with policing all of it couldn’t agree on basic rules for internet ads until December 2022, and still has none for ads generated by artificial intelligence.
Case Study
After two years of Senate hearings exposed bribery and racketeering inside major labor unions, Congress passed a law forcing them to disclose their finances to the 13 million workers they represented. But for decades, getting that information meant a trip to a Labor Department reading room or a mailed request with a per-page fee — and in a typical year, barely eight thousand people bothered to ask. It took a Republican administration four decades later, not union members themselves, to finally force the disclosures that mattered.
Case Study
In 1997, a local news crew snuck cameras into restaurant kitchens and found rats, roaches, and food left to rot at room temperature. Within a month, Los Angeles County had passed an ordinance forcing every restaurant to post a letter grade — A, B, or C — right in its window. Revenue at A-graded restaurants jumped nearly 6 percent while C-graded ones lost customers, and hospitalizations for foodborne illness fell by double digits. But one researcher later found the grades didn’t always mean what diners thought they meant.
Case Study
For fifty years, global disease surveillance ran on an honor system: countries reported outbreaks to the WHO when they chose to, and reputation and trade concerns usually won out over early warning. That system quietly died in 2003, when cell phone messages out of Guangdong Province forced the world — and eventually Beijing itself — to confront a SARS outbreak the government hadn’t disclosed. Two decades, a rewritten rulebook, and a COVID death toll past six million later, the question isn’t whether informal networks can out-pace governments. It’s whether anyone funds the basic reporting systems meant to catch the next one before it spreads.