Designing Democracy: Representation

American democracy is under considerable stress. Persistent and growing gaps in participation, representation, and accountability have contributed to political marginalization, non-responsive government, and democratic instability. The Designing Democracy Project’s mission is to train the next generation of democracy innovators. To do so, the project will put students into leadership positions for thinking about, and solving, democracy’s problems. In this, the second of three course laboratories, we will address problems of democratic representation. Studies have shown that marginalized groups and members of minority political parties are consistently under-represented in the democratic process. Our goal for this course is to develop model legislation that is responsive to the representation gap in the United States. We will start by examining data on democratic representation in the United States. As part of that examination, we will explore the historical bases and structural components of representation in the United States. We will then read studies on the sources of the representation gap and assess it from a comparative perspective. After the learning stage, we will work on advancing a novel remedy to the problem in the form of model legislation. After developing the remedial framework, we will examine relevant case law to assess any potential constitutional or legal limits to the proposed remedy. We will also examine relevant social science scholarship that might provide clues about the potential effectiveness of the proposed remedy. At the end of the semester, the group will produce a report to accompany the model legislation and present the report to state or federal legislators, their staffers, and/or policy makers focused on democracy. The model legislation will then be included in the Designing Democracy database.