Debating Democracy Renovation

The debate over how to fix democracy is heating up. That's a good sign.

I’ve been working in the democracy renovation field for a long time now — more than 20 years. I’m seeing signs that real transformation is getting nearer. This makes it even more important for democracy renovators to strengthen the conversation we are having about our reform choices.

How do I know transformation is coming?

For one thing, more democracy reformers are biting the bullet and jumping into the electoral ring. And they’re faring better than you might expect. I’m thinking of “democracy scientist” Sam Wang running for Congress in New Jersey, a state that was glad to send a “rocket scientist” to Congress; civic educator Ace Parsi running for Congress in West Virginia; tech and democracy maven Kinney Zalesne running for D.C. delegate; and democracy communicator Sam Hiersteiner running for Select Board here in Concord, MA. I’m sure there are many more. Please send me their names! As for these four, they all have my endorsement. I’ve pitched in for them, and I hope maybe you will too. Let’s see how far they can take us.

A second thing: More state-level democracy organizations are starting to adopt a holistic approach to democracy renovation. Partners In Democracy, an organization I founded in Massachusetts that is now led by Jerren Chang, is working on civic education in the state for both kids and adults, on driving structural change in democratic institutions, and on designing digital civic infrastructure to re-empower citizens to communicate with their representatives. These are all mutually reinforcing activities. None can succeed without success in the other lanes. That’s why it’s so important for democracy renovation work to be holistic. Now there is also Courageous Colorado, which is working to bring the same approach to the Rocky Mountain State. And there is undeniably a civic education renewal underway in the country. Forty-six of 50 states — so states red and blue — now have civic learning advocacy coalitions working closely with CivXNow, a national advocacy organization for civic learning.

Third, citizens assemblies and deliberation opportunities — in both real-life and digital forms — are springing up all over the country, from work with L.A. fire survivors through Engaged CA to an assembly that launched this month in Maine to tackle questions of education policy for the state.

In this context, it’s all the more important that the debate is also heating up about which reforms to pursue and the right tactics for pursuing them. I was glad to see Lee Drutman respond in the UnPopulist to my own recent essay arguing for a transition from traditional party primaries to all-party primaries. Lee’s piece, though, had a funny structure. While many people advocate for all-party primaries on the grounds that they will help elect more moderates, I did not make this argument in my piece. Lee, though, argued against that idea, conflating others’ arguments with mine.

In fact, I agree with Lee. There is no guarantee that an all-party primary system will lead to the election of moderates. All-party primary systems will elect the people who are the most broadly appealing to the electorates in their districts: a Mamdani in New York (where the race was a de facto all-party primary) or a Wu in Boston; or a Murkowski re-elected to the Senate against a MAGA challenger in Alaska.

The argument I did make was this:

Candidates from these states span the political spectrum. This reform seems to have brought Washington State a somewhat more progressive politics, while California has seen some moderation (possibly also the result of independent redistricting there). Louisiana and Alaska are both more conservative. But the crucial thing is that across the spectrum, these states have politicians who are more willing to make deals across party lines. They don’t have to live with the fear of being primaried for stepping out of line. And deal-making is good for doing work for America.

Here, in truth, we come to the difficulty of understanding what we can learn from America’s laboratories of democracy: our states. Currently, our laboratories are functioning with very few scientists equipped to extract the necessary learnings from them.

First, how do you analyze deal-making? An initial instinct might be to look at co-sponsorship of bills, but that is only one aspect of how deal-making shows itself. Of the seven senators who voted to convict Donald Trump in his 2021 impeachment, the only survivors currently in the Senate are from states without traditional party primaries:

• Lisa Murkowski (Alaska) — Top-four primary plus ranked-choice voting general election (adopted by voters in 2020, first used in 2022). The new system directly enabled her to survive the backlash and win reelection.

• Susan Collins (Maine) — Maine uses ranked-choice voting for federal elections (adopted 2016, first used 2018). Collins is up for reelection now.

• Bill Cassidy (Louisiana) — Louisiana had a similar all-party primary in place, though the state Republican Party killed it last year to try to make it easier to punish Cassidy, who is currently up for re-election.

Traditional partisan primaries:

• Richard Burr (North Carolina) — retired, did not run again.

• Pat Toomey (Pennsylvania) — retired, did not run again.

• Ben Sasse (Nebraska) — resigned to become president of the University of Florida.

• Mitt Romney (Utah) — retired, did not run again.

Another thing one would want to look at is behavior on committees. Also, one would need to look not only at the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives but also at state legislatures. We aren’t remotely close to having a body of scholarship that permits us to have a definitive view of this question.

I want to unpack a little further my argument that all-party primaries valuably change incentives for elected officials. Here is what they do definitively: expose more incumbents to competition; modestly lower the rate of incumbent retention; and shift the meaningful decision from the primary to the general election in a significant proportion of elections. These three features are their greatest value. Taken together, they reconnect elected officials to the population as a whole. The comparative politics literature does provide evidence that this yields less corruption and more responsiveness. Lincoln understood this intuitively when he argued that government would be “for the people” when it was “by the people.”

There are a few lessons from this exchange for how we handle the debates necessary for democracy renovation.

We desperately need to strengthen the science of democracy so that we can get better answers to questions like the ones I’ve posed above. We also need to make sure that we are responding to the actual arguments our fellow renovators are making; we should steelman, not strawman, their arguments.

At the same time, the hard fact about democracy renovation is that one has to make judgment calls. So, too, did the founders in 1788, as they surveyed the experiments in 13 colonies and tried to discern useful lessons. They did not have the benefit of statistical social science to answer their questions about whether unicameral or bicameral legislatures were better, and so on. Nor are we likely to have the voluminous body of scientific evidence that we often cite as the gold standard for decision-making. Our states are all so idiosyncratic in their institutional construction that it is hard to draw generally applicable lessons from their functioning. The work that needs to be done is too vast, and the resources for research in this space too paltry, to achieve that at anything other than a very slow pace. The question is: How can we improve the caliber of our judgment?

I’ve learned one other thing from the exchange with Lee and this reflection on the fact that the work of democracy renovation will ultimately depend on judgment. We should all perhaps acknowledge where we are making judgment calls and offer rather softer claims about what we think will or won’t work. This would help open more space for experimentation, the only way we will learn enough to start improving our judgments over time.

Lee is an advocate for proportional representation and fusion. I am an advocate for all-party primaries. I want to acknowledge that both pathways will bring benefit. For that matter, I helped integrate elements of fusion into the current Massachusetts all-party primary ballot initiative. I also stand by my judgment that all-party primaries — by transferring the meaningful vote to the general election — valuably reattach our elected representatives to the people.

The question, though, of what design in each state will best ensure that that state has government for the people, because it is by the people, will surely be a state-specific judgment call. The north star is to adhere to that design principle: government for the people because it is by the people.