Courses

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. The project will be comprised of three course laboratories to run sequentially. The first laboratory to be taught in Spring 2022 will address problems of democratic participation, including low turnout and the participation gap between different groups of Americans. In the course laboratory, we will start by examining data on democratic participation in the United States. We will then turn to identifying a specific problem using the data and supplementing it with law, history, social science, and comparative materials. We will then seek to advance a novel remedy to the problem or supplement current proposed or enacted remedies to the problem. After developing a remedial framework for the problem, we will examine relevant case law to assess any potential constitutional or legal limits to the proposed remedy. We will also explore relevant social science scholarship that might provide clues about the potential effectiveness of the remedy and also propose ways to test the effectiveness of the remedy. We will then incorporate the remedy into model legislation and present the draft model legislation 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.