Begun to shift momentum towards proportional multi-member districts through original research, organizing hundreds of top political scientists to publicly speak out, and generating new media coverage.
Shaping the Democracy of Tomorrow
Our Work
Sustainable democracy requires governing institutions that are representative of and responsive to the needs of all — not just the few or the loudest.
Today, the authoritarian threat doesn’t just come from specific politicians or political factions. Authoritarian-enabling features of our system — such as the non-representative composition of Congress or the inability of political parties to preserve democratic norms — are feeding cycles of polarization and rewarding authoritarian politics.
Stopping this threat requires bold and ambitious long-term strategies to ensure that the Democracy of Tomorrow better reflects the will of all Americans and is oriented towards collaboratively addressing our country’s most pressing challenges.
- Make our political parties more responsible promoters of democracy.
- Replace winner-take-all elections with more proportional systems of representation.
- Legalize fusion voting to help break the two-party doom loop.
Several provisions of the Protecting Our Democracy Act, a package of democratic guardrails reforms we helped Congressional leaders assemble, were signed into law by President Biden.
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Political Violence & US Democracy Political Violence & US Democracy
Proportional representation, explained
Proportional representation is an electoral system that elects multiple representatives in each district in proportion to the number of people who vote for them.
September 12, 2023
Fusion voting, explained
Fusion voting allows more than one political party to nominate the same candidate on the ballot, empowering minor parties to unite a cross-ideological coalition behind a single candidate
December 1, 2023
How open are Americans to electoral system reform?
A new Thanksgiving-themed poll finds a broad appetite for proportional representation.
November 21, 2023
What Trump’s courtroom antics are really telling us
Donald Trump's actions in court exemplify something dangerous: a former president resisting any accountability under the law.
November 7, 2023
Lessons from the history of proportional representation in America
In terms of PR, what matters is that majority coalitions can hold themselves together — be they single-party or alliances of parties.
September 13, 2023
How electoral reform happens
The experiences of New Zealand, Italy, and Japan provide a template, and show how reforming electoral systems can be a powerful way to address problems of parties, legitimacy, and democracy.
September 12, 2023
Proportional representation and gerrymandering
Proportional electoral systems largely eliminate both the built-in bias inherent to the single-seat model and the effects of partisan manipulation.
September 12, 2023
Proportional representation and presidentialism
A myth haunts conversations about proportional representation in America. It is the belief that proportional representation requires a parliamentary system. We’re here to kill this myth.
September 12, 2023
Proportional representation and polarization
With better representation and more equal weight given to citizens’ votes in elections, the zero-sum nature of politics could begin to change.
September 12, 2023
Proportional representation and political parties
Under PR, a party’s share of members in a legislature would roughly match its share of the vote in the last election, even for parties that only get 10 or 20 percent of the vote.
September 12, 2023
Proportional representation and the future of the Voting Rights Act
Proportional electoral systems present viable options for sustaining and building upon the gains in political representation that voters of color have achieved.
September 12, 2023
