Open Access Resource
Open Book: Open-Source Budget Transparency for Municipalities
With a majority of municipalities publishing their budgets as PDFs, Open Book offers a free alternative that towns own and run themselves.
Research & Resources
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.
Newest
Article
Immigrant Earnings Assimilation, 1981–2021
A new paper in the Congressional Budget Office’s Working Paper Series, authored by Randall Akee—Director of the Project on Indigenous Governance and Development and Julie Johnson Kidd Professor at Harvard Kennedy School—along with his co-authors, draws on long-term administrative data to examine how immigrant workers’ earnings in the United States evolved between 1981 and 2021.
Article
Bootstrap Blackness: Black Men, Conservatism, and Party Politics
A new research article by Dr. Christine Slaughter, Research Fellow at the Allen Lab for Democracy Renovation and co-authors examines the narrative of black men’s political “shift right”. The study finds Black men remain overwhelmingly Democratic, despite growing public attention to ideological divides.
Paper
Improving Election Administrator-News Media Relationships for Effective Election Coverage
This paper explores practical mechanisms for improving the relationship between election officials and news media to increase public confidence in the electoral process.
Policy Brief
AI for Democracy Movements: Toward a New Agenda
A new report summarizes key insights from the Nonviolent Action Lab’s December 2025 convening on how artificial intelligence can empower pro-democracy movements.
Article
New Forms of Targeted Transparency
A summary of the March 30, 2026 event that welcomed Gerrit von Zedlitz to present on new and less-studied forms of targeted transparency—how they work, when they emerge, and whether they actually make a difference.
Additional Resource
VIDEOS: After Neoliberalism From Left to Right
After Neoliberalism: From Left to Right brought together hundreds of leading economists, political scientists, journalists, writers and thinkers from across the political spectrum to explore and debate emerging visions for the future of the political economy.
Panel videos below.
Paper
The Necessary and Valuable Partnership: Law Enforcement and Election Officials
This report by Christine Cole, Kim Wyman, and Tina Barton examines the complicated historical relationship between voting and law enforcement in the United States, highlighting how policing experiences can influence public attitudes towards the presence of law enforcement at voting locations.
Open Access Resource
Crocodile tears: Can the ethical-moral intelligence of AI models be trusted?
Allen Lab authors Sarah Hubbard, David Kidd, and Andrei Stupu introduce an ethical-moral intelligence framework for evaluating AI models across dimensions of moral expertise, sensitivity, coherence, and transparency in their recently published paper, Crocodile Tears: Can the Ethical-Moral Intelligence of AI Models Be Trusted? in Springer AI & Ethics.
Additional Resource
Storytelling Pathways to Civics Engagement
Watch Roadtrip Nation’s Living Civics documentary and hear from leading universal civic learning experts on the power of narrative for civic engagement.