A Letter from the President of the American Academy

October 2025
 

This report introduces a timely concept about political representation in a season marked by continuously evolving discussions about the role, power, capacity, and authority of the United States Congress. Does Congress alone have the power to declare war? To control our country’s purse strings? To advise the president and consent to his officers? To make laws, or to delegate such authority to executive branch rulemaking? While these debates have taken on new urgency in the first half of 2025, as a new presidential administration has vigorously pursued an executive-centric vision of the balance of power, they are not new. Congress has long been viewed as deadlocked or dysfunctional, and actors across the political spectrum have sought to bypass the legislative process.

Underlying these debates is a more fundamental question: Even if Congress could pass more laws, control the purse strings, exercise oversight, and direct foreign affairs, would it do so in a way that responds to the interests, desires, and preferences of the American people?

The challenges of our constitutional democracy today are well known: Americans are deeply polarized and increasingly distrustful of our institutions. Dissatisfaction with Congress, in particular, is so deep and so long-standing as to seem inevitable and unchangeable.

Our Common Purpose: Reinventing American Democracy for the 21st Century, the landmark report of the Academy’s Commission on the Practice of Democratic Citizenship, posits that declining trust and institutional dysfunction are interrelated—that “lack of representation is part of what is eroding our civic faith.” When the system seems not to be working, Americans disengage, further eroding the system and trapping us in a “vicious cycle.”

Our Common Purpose sets out a positive vision for the future of American constitutional democracy underpinned by a “virtuous cycle” in which responsive political institutions foster a healthy civic culture of participation and responsibility. That civic culture, in turn, ensures that political institutions remain responsive and inclusive. The report offers a set of key reforms to political institutions and processes to change how our system works and improve the responsiveness and representativeness of the first branch.

This publication elaborates on perhaps the most profound of these proposed institutional reforms. Replacing the current system of winner-take-all elections for members of the House of Representatives could fundamentally alter our constitutional democracy, giving new voice to millions of Americans and reshaping Congress as a result. Americans are ready for this change: as the survey research in this report highlights, they are overwhelmingly frustrated with the status quo and, more importantly, are open to something new.

This publication complements the Academy’s previous report on expanding the House of Representatives and offers a comprehensive look at the basic design questions policymakers would face in implementing a new electoral system. It collects the best available research to lay out how a shift away from winner-take-all elections might work.

Special thanks go to the working group, especially Lee Drutman, Deb Otis, Maria Perez, and Grant Tudor, who took the lead in writing this paper, and to John Carey, whose notes throughout the process were indispensable. Thank you also to Moon Duchin, Michael Hanchard, Charles Stewart III, Christopher Thomas, and Philip Wallach, who were involved in earlier stages of this project and whose perspectives helped shape the working group’s deliberations.

I am especially grateful to the cochairs of the Our Common Purpose project, Danielle Allen of Harvard University, Stephen Heintz of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, and Eric Liu of Citizen University, for their invaluable leadership and guidance as the Academy works to further the recommendations in the Our Common Purpose report.

Thank you to the Academy staff who supported the working group and contributed to this publication, including Betsy Super, Jessica Lieberman, Zachey Kliger, Phyllis Bendell, Scott Raymond, and Peter Walton.

Finally, the Academy’s work to strengthen American democracy would not be possible without the generous support of the S. D. Bechtel, Jr. Foundation, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Conrad N. Hilton Foundation, the Suzanne Nora Johnson and David G. Johnson Foundation, the Clary Family Charitable Fund, Alan and Lauren Dachs, Sara Lee Schupf and the Lubin Family Foundation, Joan and Irwin Jacobs, David M. Rubenstein, and Patti Saris.

Strengthening constitutional democracy has been part of this organization’s mission since it was founded. The Academy was chartered in 1780, at the height of the Revolutionary War, by John Adams, John Hancock, and other scholar-patriots of their day, “to cultivate every art and science which may tend to advance the interest, honor, dignity, and happiness of a free, independent, and virtuous people.” They recognized the need for continuous reflection about our political system and the vital role of knowledge in setting out a path for the future of this nation. The paper you are about to read follows proudly in that tradition.

Laurie L. Patton 
Cambridge, MA