Book
In Why Do We Still Have the Electoral College?, Alexander Keyssar explores the institution’s origins and persistent survival despite widespread public opposition, showing how partisan interests and constitutional barriers have repeatedly derailed reform.
With every presidential election, Americans puzzle over the peculiar mechanism of the Electoral College. The author of the Pulitzer finalist The Right to Vote explains the enduring problem of this controversial institution.
Every four years, millions of Americans wonder why they choose their presidents through the Electoral College, an arcane institution that permits the loser of the popular vote to become president and narrows campaigns to swing states. Most Americans have long preferred a national popular vote, and Congress has attempted on many occasions to alter or scuttle the Electoral College. Several of these efforts—one as recently as 1970—came very close to winning approval. Yet this controversial system remains.
Harvard University Press, 2020
Commentary
Allen Lab Policy Fellow Christine Slaughter makes the case that democracy must be understood through people’s lived experiences and agency, not just institutions.
Podcast
Co-hosts Archon Fung and Stephen Richer weigh conflicting predictions for the 2026 midterms and explore how to safeguard a free and fair election.
Feature
Economists and policy analysts broadly agree that more housing needs to be built in order to reduce costs in America’s most expensive cities. Using a novel survey of mayors of mid-sized and large cities to explore mayors’ views on the roots of America’s housing crisis and what solutions they believe will most effectively address their constituents’ housing challenges, the authors summarize mayors’ attitudes and perceptions on key issues related to expanding the housing supply, reporting how well these views correlate with mayors’ assessments of their own cities’ supply needs.
