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Profile #2: Danielle Allen on Renovating Democracy [1]
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Date: 2024-01-03
Danielle Allen, a political philosophy professor at Harvard University, is actively advocating for an overhaul of democracy to meet the challenges of the 21st century, specifically to share power more broadly. Her premise is that a political system cannot serve the good of all without power being shared by all.
The country is pulling apart and needs to find ways of pulling together, Allen insists. Polarization, toxicity, and governmental dysfunction reflect the problem at hand. More democracy, not authoritarianism, is the solution to our predicament.
Fixing democracy is a cross-partisan project of spanning ideological divisions to stabilize the political system and enable a productive contestation of substantive policy issues. Allen believes there are presently three political parties in play—Trump’s MAGA Republicans, the Old Republican Party, and the Democrats—the latter two of which could choose to work together to secure constitutional democracy and restore norms of good governance.
Allen served as co-chair of a commission of the National Academy of Arts and Sciences, which released a report on “Our Common Purpose” in 2020, a report that argues for reinventing democracy. Subsequently, she wrote a series of Washington Post columns in 2023 to promote ways of achieving “democracy renovation.” What are these renovations? Three of them convey the overall tone and scope of her renewal project.
Renovation #1: Fix the House of Representatives
The key to democracy renovation, in Allen’s view, is enlarging the number of members in the House of Representatives to relieve the present paralysis and take a step toward functional government. The House is the first branch of government, the one closest to the people.
There was a view among the Founders that the House would increase in size with population growth as recorded in the national census taken each ten years. The size of the House, however, eventually was frozen at 435 members in 1929.[1] That cap meant House members would represent increasingly large districts as population grew.[2] The average size of Congressional districts today is 762,000 and is projected to increase to a million by midcentury. That compares to 34,000 in 1790.
The idea behind smaller Congressional districts and a larger House of Representatives is to keep representatives in touch with their constituents, allow for more legislative oversight of the inflated executive branch, reduce the cost of elections thereby making Representatives more dependent on voters than donors, and enhance equal protection and inclusivity. A larger House would also mean that Representatives would have to learn better deliberation practices.
How big a House is big enough? There are various models for answering this question, but Allen prefers something called the “cube root” rule, which is a mathematical method of calibrating the number of Representatives to the size of the population. By this measure, we would have a House of 692 members presently. Other ways of calculating size range from 585 and 592 to 909, 1572, 6,500, and 11,000.
Allen’s preferred method would raise the number from 435 to 585 seats now and grow the House over the next 40 years to 736 seats. Just how big a House could the Capitol hold? In her estimation, “we could actually take the House of Representatives up to 1,725 members without having to construct a new building.”
Renovation #2: Fix the Electoral College and Gerrymandering
Allen believes that growing the size of the House membership will have the added benefit of fixing the twin problems of the Electoral College and gerrymandering.
The Electoral College is out of balance. Its current number of 538 electors is determined by the current number of Senators and House members plus three for the District of Columbia. The number of electors has not grown with increased population since 1929, which means the bias in favor of representation of less populous regions of the country has grown to the point where the odds of electing a president who lost the popular vote have increased.
Similarly, Allen argues that the impact of aggressive partisan gerrymandering can be reduced if the size of the House is increased sufficiently to allow for multiple candidates to be elected in single electoral districts and a ranked-choice ballot is utilized (allowing voters to rank their first, second, and third choices among candidates). Allen would also replace partisan primaries with an all-comers preliminary to general elections to increase the opportunities for representation.
Renovation #3: Strengthen Civic Education and Participation
Civic education and citizen participation are necessary for democratic governance to thrive. Nevertheless, civic education in the US has “hit bottom,” and civic engagement is fraught with hostility. Democracy requires a citizenry that is capable of collective reflection, that can love their country, thoughtfully critique it, and find common ground. Investing only five cents per student per year in civic education compared to $50 for STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) education is not serving our democracy well.
Educating for democracy in our schools should be guided by certain principles, as expressed in the Educating for American Democracy Roadmap released in 2021. Cultivating “reflective patriotism” requires inquiry-based learning where “answers are not obvious in advance.” What’s good for K-12 learners is also good for 18-year-old and older citizens if we are to “shake our addiction” to “hate, rage and division.”
What does educating our children and ourselves for citizenship in a constitutional democracy entail? It should teach us why citizens need to be involved, provide a rounded account of America’s “plural yet shared story,” explore the need for compromise for the system to work, cultivate honest reflection, and help us become more informed about civic history and principles. All of this should enhance our collective ability to “disagree productively” as we exercise our civic roles of deliberating, voting, running for office, serving on juries, committees, and commissions, writing opinion pieces, joining civil-society organizations, participating in nonviolent protests, and so on.
Additional Considerations
Allen has more to say on related matters, including how to achieve term limits for Supreme Court justices short of a constitutional amendment, the need to counter the drift toward autocracy by returning legislative powers to Congress (powers that have been delegated to a bloated executive branch), fixing the paralysis of polarization exacerbated by social media, and regulating artificial intelligence to prevent the increased spread of misinformation.
Is Danielle Allen’s Curative Sufficiently Democratic?
All of this is worth thoughtful consideration. Much of it resonates with the views of Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, as outlined in Profile #1 of this series on democratic dissent from authoritarianism. The thrust of Danielle Allen’s project, however, is inclined less toward constitutional reform and more toward recovering a lost sense of collaboration and compromise. This difference in emphasis does not put the two profiles strictly at odds. They can complement one another by rounding out the set of ideas for building democracy and resisting authoritarianism.
Not every idea advanced will prove persuasive or possible, but together they can provide a sense of responsibility and direction, assure us that something can be done, and prompt us to action if we are to reverse democracy’s decline. Bolstering our long-term commitment to democracy and joining the movement for democratic reforms can also strengthen civic engagement and voter turnout in the general election of 2024 as an immediate test of the country’s ability to resist authoritarian impulses.
Dissenting democratically from authoritarianism is a double challenge of resisting tyranny and enacting democracy in the here and now with an eye on building for the future. Democratic dissent is an immediate practice and a continuing project. It is a mistake to think of democracy as something static, something established, something forever lasting. Taking democracy for granted and discounting the role and responsibilities of citizenship is dangerous.
Rather than presume liberal democracy will persist in the US, that it always has and always will dodge the authoritarian threats of demagogues, we are better advised to think of democracy as an unfinished project and an ongoing practice of dissent, a practice of resistance to the undertow of authoritarianism to which the country will otherwise succumb. From that standpoint, we need a fuller account not only of what to dissent from and for, but also the ways and means of democratic dissent.
Robert Ivie
January 3, 2024
[1] This number was set by law, not as a Constitutional mandate, making the House less democratic and more oligarchic. A key argument made in favor of keeping the number at 435 seats was efficiency: avoiding the extra cost of office space and of salaries for additional Congress members and clerks, and making deliberation less cumbersome. The underlying issue, which resulted in a decision that shackled democracy, was demographic and racial: rural southern states resisted losing power as a result of Black Americans moving in large numbers to northern cities. The result is that there is “an ever wider gulf between Americans and their representatives.”
[2] The 1920 census set the average size of a Congressional district at 243,728; the 1930 census set it at 280,675.
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