How Do We Renovate American Democracy at the 250th?

Equality of voice and representation is a foundational value of American democracy and a prerequisite for democratic renewal and adaptation in the twenty-first century. This essay considers the potential and progress made toward three structural reforms—expanding the House of Representatives, implementing Supreme Court term limits, and introducing ranked-choice voting—designed to increase genuine representation. It also finds that their transformative potential is increased by a fourth reform: multimember congressional districts. America’s 250th anniversary offers a rare opportunity for democratic renewal that we cannot afford to waste or allow to succumb to partisan politics. The alternative—accepting institutional dysfunction and democratic decay—is unacceptable.

Americans’ dissatisfaction with Congress is long-standing; its public approval rating has hovered between 10 and 30 percent for the last two decades. This discontent threatens national unity and democratic confidence, especially amid polarization and partisan political conflict. Chief Justice Wallace Jefferson’s proposals to expand the House and adopt ranked-choice voting with multimember districts are worth serious consideration–as are their potential effects on the day-to-day functioning of Congress. Reformers, however, should give additional consideration to the sorry state of the institution of Congress. Its staffing, technology, and internal processes need upgrading to better direct popular energies and representative actions toward competent governance.

The United States has never achieved a truly representative democracy: women constitute half the population yet have never held close to half of elected offices. Responding to Chief Justice Wallace Jefferson’s case for a “fourth founding,” this response argues that the structural reforms he endorses—ranked-choice voting (RCV), multimember districts, House expansion—are all necessary but incomplete unless gender representation is treated as a foundational test of democracy, not an afterthought. Evidence from RCV cities, where women hold a majority of council seats, and from Australia’s RCV-elected Parliament shows what’s possible when electoral structure changes who can win. As the nation marks its 250th anniversary, the task is not to renew the democracy we inherited, but to build the one not yet realized. 

Responding to Chief Justice Wallace Jefferson’s assessment of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences’ Our Common Purpose report, this essay focuses on the proposal of term limits for Supreme Court justices. It argues that life tenure is not necessary for judicial independence and that in fact it produces a judiciary susceptible to permanent capture by a minority party. There is no theoretical reason to think that minority capture is a good thing. Historical analysis supports the point: when the composition of the Court departs from what it would have been if each president had equal influence, the Court tends to clash with the elected branches and render decisions that are later repudiated.

In the 2020 presidential election, the highest-turnout U.S. election in decades, only 67 percent of eligible voters participated; almost one-third stayed home. This essay explores how to activate nonvoters through electoral reforms such as those proposed in Our Common Purpose, many of which have been implemented in California. It also looks at the importance of voter education and mobilization efforts using effective messaging and trusted messengers to engage nonvoters. I argue that, if we want our democracy to be as healthy, robust, and inclusive as possible, then we need intentional action, as was laid out in Our Common Purpose. We need to change how we administer elections. And we also need to make the investments necessary to educate and mobilize disengaged eligible voters and scaffold them into the electoral process.

Meaningful voter engagement may require increasing sustained investment in four underutilized areas: low-propensity voters, civic education that fosters civic action, voter education that links ballots to local change, and trusted messengers. Advocates for election reform are correct to emphasize the need for more practical solutions to mobilize and scale these criteria, but what if a low-cost, scalable intervention already exists? This essay highlights the work being done by New Voters, a youth-led nonprofit that promotes peer-to-peer civic engagement and education efforts in U.S. high schools through student-led voter registration drives.

Scholars of American civic life have documented the decline of federated membership associations and the participatory costs of their replacement by professionally managed advocacy organizations. That literature treats cross-level coordination largely as a feature of a vanished organizational era. This essay offers a practitioner’s account of the mechanism operating today. Drawing on the recent litigation, election protection, and voter engagement work of the League of Women Voters, it describes how “federated coordination”—addressing problems identified at one organizational level with resources from another—can sustain civic infrastructure under contemporary conditions. Engaging Lisa García Bedolla’s analysis of disengagement among eligible voters, it suggests what durable voter participation requires.

Americans’ disconnect from their elected officials has reached crisis levels. What potential do citizens’ assemblies and participatory decision-making hold for restoring people’s trust in their democracy? This essay explores three case studies of participatory governance at three levels—in California, in Bowling Green, Kentucky, and in Fort Collins, Colorado; virtually and in person—and finds that Americans are ready and willing to participate in well-designed deliberative processes and are willing to accept the outcomes of deliberative bodies. But representativeness and accountability in those processes are essential and not easy to come by. This analysis invites the question of whether these democratic experiments can scale up to where they are needed most: our national politics.

A growing interest in collaborative governance has led to exciting new projects at both the state and local levels, aiming to expand and improve civic engagement by bringing communities more fully into public-sector decision-making. These innovations in co-governance will be critical to bolstering democratic institutions and practices, with the potential to reduce harmful polarization and rebuild trust in democracy. But we will need intentional design, careful implementation, and systematic research to ensure that new models of engagement do not reproduce existing inequalities in participation or produce largely symbolic interactions between government and communities that do not lead to real or meaningful reform.

Carolyn Lukensmeyer’s apt observations about Engaged California, BG2050, and the Fort Collins citizens’ assembly prove that, when given the chance, ordinary citizens can enrich the quality and legitimacy of the policy process. We share her enthusiasm but draw different conclusions about priorities, if not ultimate goals. Lukensmeyer’s emphasis is on continuing these sorts of experiments and moving them from cities to states to the national level. We urge reformers to prioritize embedding participatory and deliberative innovations (PDIs) into existing representative institutions. We draw on two decades of work studying deliberative town halls, alongside research on citizens’ assemblies and other PDIs, to argue that only by embedding such forums within statutory pathways can one-off experiments become durable democratic infrastructure.

Citizens’ assemblies are generating renewed interest as a tool for democratic renewal, but their promise requires honest assessment. While deliberative processes can improve the quality of public input, they consistently leave unresolved the harder challenge of converting consensus recommendations into durable policy outcomes with legislative champions. Carolyn Lukensmeyer’s case studies reveal a common pattern: citizens’ assemblies function best not as alternatives to representative institutions but as complements to them. Attempts to circumvent legislatures risk sidelining the very actors responsible for implementation. Scaling these models nationally compounds challenges of representativeness and political complexity. Democratic renewal depends not on expanding citizen input alone but on building better pathways from deliberation to decision to implementation within existing governing structures.

To advance Strategy 4 of the Our Common Purpose report and its first recommendation, the American Academy convened a working group in 2021 to incubate a national trust for civic infrastructure that could help dramatically expand civic bridging capacity. In 2024, the Trust for Civic Life was launched with the goal of deploying $50 million across five hundred communities in rural America by 2028. This essay covers where the Trust is now by exploring some of the primary successes and challenges from its first few years of operation. Discussion draws on annual survey reports of hundreds of rural leaders and community members and spotlights recent grantees who are exemplary builders of civic infrastructure.

The Our Common Purpose report stood out in 2020 for its emphasis on civic culture as a foundation for democratic renewal and on the role that philanthropy and Americans’ associational lives can play in strengthening it. Six years on, we can see that the report not only anticipated important developments but also helped catalyze them with its strategic recommendations to “dramatically expand civic bridging capacity.” Promising new philanthropic institutions and initiatives have emerged—as have new challenges that must be tackled to sustain bottom-up civic renewal.

This essay explores how renewed investment in national service can help restore the civic, social, and economic pathways that once made the American Dream attainable. It argues that a year of paid, full-time service offers a bridge between opportunity and belonging at a time when higher education and the workforce struggle to meet the needs of young Americans. In making service years a more common expectation and opportunity, we can move closer to attaining the vision laid out in Our Common Purpose of a citizenry emboldened to act with greater responsibility to one another and a commitment to our shared future.

In the six years since the Our Common Purpose report was released, dramatic shifts to the information ecosystem have transformed the relationship between citizens and the media, providing serious challenges to an informed and participatory democracy. Journalism faces business model challenges aggravated by a shift away from search and toward AI, as well as governmental attacks on journalistic independence and on public media. Influential technology platforms have retreated from the difficult, controversial work of fact-checking, seeking to reduce their political exposure, while platforms like Truth Social and X are now explicitly associated with political actors. We believe even larger changes are brewing, from promising experiments in community ownership and management of social networks to the emerging idea of AI sovereignty, which may see governments around the world challenge American and Chinese companies over the ownership of powerful AI tools. 

Technological innovation has a dual nature: it is propelled by visionary inventors but its ultimate trajectory is shaped by human behavior, which is messy, unpredictable, and resistant to neat explanations. Information infrastructures reflect this same tension: their design alone cannot guarantee purpose or alignment with collective goals. Only by asserting authority over how priorities are defined can we ensure that information architectures serve the social infrastructures they are meant to support.

The collapse of local newspapers and the decline in the number of local journalists is associated with a variety of democratic ills, including more corruption, fewer candidates running for office, less knowledgeable voters, less participation in civic associations, and increased polarization. In addition, the vacuum left by local news has been filled by national media institutions and social media, concentrating the control of information in a few powerful hands and deepening public mistrust of the media. It will take a combination of creative public policy, philanthropic support, social entrepreneurship, and business model innovation to counter these trends. But perhaps above all else, we need a sufficient number of local reporters on the ground in communities.

Platform monopolies have concentrated wealth and power over civic discourse at levels not seen since the first Gilded Age—and the public media system built to counter that concentration has never been adequately funded or broadly enough defined. But a new generation of civic media practitioners, relational technologists, and information stewards isn’t waiting for that system to be rescued. It’s building locally governed, human-scaled infrastructure for the information people need to participate in civic life—and in doing so, redefining what public media can be. Surviving the second Gilded Age requires recognizing and resourcing the full range of people already doing that work.

Strengthening American democracy will take more than reforming political institutions. Equally important is refreshing our civic culture. Specifically, the nation needs a reawakening of civic education, broadly defined. Priority one for a renewed education in civics is for Americans to learn how to disagree with one another. This is harder than it sounds, as most people are predisposed to avoid conflict. Research shows that the most effective form of civic education in K–12 classrooms entails the open discussion of controversial topics. Tragically but understandably, the current political environment makes teachers reluctant to engage in this type of instruction. But teachers should be encouraged to lead such discussions and model for our young people how to disagree agreeably. Civic education, however, should not be limited to the classroom. Civic organizations of all types—clubs, congregations, groups, and guilds—are also settings in which we learn to interact with our fellow citizens, including and especially people with different political views than our own. While the nation’s organizational life has been in decline, the 250th anniversary of America’s independence is a unique opportunity for Americans to once again come together in local groups to find common ground in spite of political disagreement.

Responding to David Campbell’s call to “learn to disagree,” this essay argues that disagreement alone is insufficient for revitalizing American democracy—it must be paired with collaborative problem-solving. As polarization and AI disrupt trust and discourse, civic culture should shift from “winning” arguments to building solutions together, benefiting both democracy and the economy, since employers increasingly value the same skills of dialogue and teamwork on which democracy relies. Colleges, K–12 schools, workplaces, and communities all have roles to play in making this solution-­oriented civic engagement universal rather than optional. Ultimately, the essay calls for a cultural shift toward “disagreeing to build, not to win.”

Support for college civic learning is growing, but what are advocates’ goals for student learning? This essay describes four distinct but potentially complementary college civics movements. It then shows why and how the CLDE Coalition approach draws from each movement to build students’ democracy knowledge, dialogue and problem-­solving skills, and practical preparation to tackle public-good questions both in civil society and in students’ careers. The essay outlines an “across-the-curriculum” approach that provides multiple touchpoints for civic and democracy learning: in general education, in all departmental majors and programs of study, and in students’ experiential learning.

Americans must disagree better to sustain a healthier civic culture. This is not only a matter of individual behavior and values but also a question of institutional design. An example of an institution that generally supported disagreement, conversation, and collaboration in the twentieth century was the metropolitan daily newspaper, but its business model has collapsed. To recover civic culture, we need business models (defined broadly) for new institutions that can enable discussion and self-governance.