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.
Case Study
In this latest report on providing access to registration and voting for the hundreds of thousands of Americans being held in jails without having been convicted, Tova Wang looks at how Denver – and the State of Colorado – have become a model for the nation.
Newest
Book
In Defending Democracy in an Age of Sharp Power, editors William J. Dobson, Tarek Masoud, and Christopher Walker bring together leading analysts to explain how the world’s authoritarians are attempting to erode the pillars of democratic societies—and what we can do about it.
Case Study
In this case study, the former mayor of Somerville, Joe Curtatone, reflects on his 18 years in office and illuminates the many ways in which civic engagement enabled Somerville’s renaissance.
Policy Brief
In this short web ethics research brief, the authors unpack and comment on the four-step logic at the core of GETTING-Plurality’s foundational white paper, Ethics of Decentralized Social Technologies: Lessons from Web3, the Fediverse, and Beyond. They outline four assertions from the paper that demonstrate the power and the challenge of web ethics – and above all, the urgency – of placing human flourishing at the center of technology governance.
Policy Brief
The IARA project investigates new and existing strategies for antiracist transformation in the healthcare sector.
Policy Brief
The authors highlight why we believe the problem of “plural publics” to be a core challenge of data governance, discuss existing tools that can help achieve it and a research agenda to further develop and integrate these tools.
This paper argues that the plethora of experiments with decentralized social technologies (DSTs)—clusters of which are sometimes called “the Web 3.0 ecosystem” or “the Fediverse”—have brought us to a constitutional moment.
Book
Additional Resource
“The onset of tribal self-determination through self-government in the late 1980s ushered in the only policy that has ever worked to improve economic and social conditions in Indian Country.”
Policy Brief
The subjugation of the Wabanaki Nation’s self-governing capacities is blocking economic development to the detriment of both tribal and nontribal citizens, alike.