in what other ways political reforms can be carried out
civics
Answers
As the Supreme Court has observed, the right to vote is the guarantor of all other rights. The laws and policies we enact as a people are heavily influenced by the electoral laws and policies that govern the political process. Sadly, the American electoral system is in many respects an outlier among Western democracies. USAID would not grant unconditional funding to a country whose democratic design looked like ours.
There is fairly widespread agreement among academics and policymakers about some of the fundamental problems with our democracy. We may quibble about which is the best alternative, but most of us agree that politicians should not have the power to draw their own districts, that money has played a corrosive role in the political process, and that the nuts and bolts of our election system are in dire need of repair.
So, working with the Tobin Project, a research organization based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, that connects leading academics and lawmakers, I asked a number of the top democracy scholars in the country for small-scale interventions that would improve the health of our democracy. While academics tend to value ambitious conceptual work and dramatic reform proposals, our goal was to offer members of Congress a diverse array of pragmatic policy proposals—reforms that could be implemented relatively easily without a full-scale retooling of the political system. We met with members of Congress in June in Washington, D.C., to present our group’s proposals. We envision this year’s gathering as part of a one-two punch: now that we have shared our small-scale proposals, in 2007 we will meet again to build on the lessons learned—particularly the feedback provided by members of Congress—and sketch out a blueprint for broader democratic reform.
While the following proposals are informed by a pragmatic approach to politics, don’t let the label “small-scale” fool you. These corrective actions might well have significant long-term and productive effects. They are wedge strategies, efforts to introduce a different dynamic into the political process and to create incentives for better, more productive politics in the future.