The purpose of this chapter is to provide an evaluation of U.S. electoral systems and electoral institutions more broadly, in comparative perspective. I will first determine how typical or untypical U.S. institutions are. I will then indicate how comparativists tend to judge these institutions. Finally, I will ascertain how well or poorly these institutions are seen to perform by citizens.

My argument is that the United States has odd institutions, which most comparativists judge negatively (and do not recommend for new democracies), yet American citizens seem to be relatively satisfied. I contend that comparativists are right and people are wrong....

The question posed in the title would have astonished the framers of our constitution, but not because they believed that they were proposing a republic rather than a democracy.¹ Contrary to Madison’s often-quoted comment in the Federalist, that distinction was not commonly accepted (Dahl 2003: 179–83; Adams 1980: 106ff). The terms “republic” and “democracy” were mostly used interchangeably, and Madison did not himself respect the distinction when he defined a republic as deriving its powers “directly or indirectly from the great body of the people” (Hamilton et al. 1961: 39).

The question would have been surprising not because of...

In the summer of 1997, a small group of inmates at Norfolk State Prison in Massachusetts formed a political action committee to influence public debate about criminal justice and social welfare issues. As had been true of inmates in the commonwealth since the American Revolution, the men in Norfolk were legal voters. An underlying goal of the political action group, according to one of its founders, Joe Labriola (a decorated Vietnam veteran serving a life sentence for murder), was “to make prisoners understand that we can make changes by using the vote.”¹

Within days of its founding, the prisoners’ PAC...

We know that the majority of Americans usually do not vote. At best roughly half of adults vote in national contests. At worst, fewer than 10 percent of adults vote in local elections (Bridges 1997; Hajnal and Lewis 2003). We also know that those who do turn out to vote look very different from those who do not. Study after study of American elections has found that individuals with limited resources—the poor, racial and ethnic minorities, the less educated—vote much less consistently than those with ample resources (Verba et al. 1995, Rosenstone and Hansen 1993).

The skewed nature...

As scientists and citizens, we would like to evaluate objectively the fairness and bias of electoral systems. However, this is claimed to be impossible by many political scientists, as well as by various practicing politicians and the U.S. Supreme Court. The argument commonly made is that there are multiple, competing conceptions of fairness; and that once you exclude the most egregious and obvious violations, you cannot talk about one electoral system being fairer or less biased than another, but only lay out the choices or tradeoffs between competing goals. The claim that there are many definitions of fairness then slides...

Parliamentary elections were held in a number of long-standing democracies in 2011, including Canada, Denmark, Finland, Ireland, New Zealand, Portugal, and Spain. With the exception of Ireland, turnout was significantly lower than the historical average in every country. In Portugal, turnout was the lowest in history (58 percent), and in New Zealand a smaller share of the eligible voting population (68 percent) went to the polls than in any election since the 1880s.

With low voter turnout comes a decline in partisanship and campaign activity (Dalton 2000; Dalton, McAllister, and Wattenberg 2000). Advances in education, mass media, and communications technology...

Over the last generation, Americans at the top of the economic ladder have pulled sharply away from everyone else. The share of pretax income earned by the richest 1 percent of households more than doubled, from 9 percent in 1970 to over 23 percent on the eve of the 2008 financial crisis (Piketty and Saez 2003; Saez 2012). Gains higher up the ladder have been more spectacular still, even as earnings growth for most Americans has slowed (Hacker and Pierson 2010a). At the same time, the Republican Party has become more conservative on economic issues. According to a widely used...

Political representation is experiencing an intellectual renaissance. A spate of new work (Manin 1997; Mansbridge 2003; Rehfeld 2006; Urbinati 2000, 2006; Urbinati and Warren 2008; Warren 2008; Williams 1998) has generated renewed interest in political representation—an idea that had been virtually silenced after Pitkin’s (1967) masterful treatment of the subject in The Concept of Representation. In this paper we focus on political representation in electoral democracies and make one claim—that political representation may not be possible in the absence of a well-functioning and well-disciplined bureaucracy.¹

We argue that a voter is represented by her elected representative when there...

This essay is about blogs, the online public sphere more broadly, and blogs’ role as a platform for political discourse. My central theme is that blogging is not what it used to be. In the years since the 2004 election, blogging has been normalized, professionalized, and institutionalized, and I try to detail what these interrelated changes mean for U.S. politics. I also propose concrete policy remedies to help address blogging’s civic failures.

Yet to some degree, discussions of blogging and the online public sphere have been overshadowed by other events. The past few years have seen a series of increasingly...

American citizens are represented not only through government institutions, but also through civic and political associations. Dating back to Tocqueville’s observation that America was a nation of joiners, social scientists have highlighted the important intermediary role that membership associations play in public life. Membership-based civic associations serve as “laboratories of democracy.” They impart democratic skills to their participants, foster social capital among their membership, and provide an organizational substrate for social movements. The composition of America’s associational universe has changed dramatically over time, however. Membership-based associations—particularly in the political realm—employ a range of different definitions of the roles...

Many chapters in this book focus on the proper relationship between citizens and their government: problems of inclusion, equality, political opportunity, political expression, representation, and responsiveness. But even if we managed to perfect the processes connecting citizens to their state, democratic ambitions would remain unsatisfied in light of the circumstances of twenty-first-century governance. The actions of many organizations—private corporations, nongovernmental organizations, and other states would still redound on citizens, and those citizens would have little influence over the actions of those organizations. For this reason, democratic theorists should expand their sights beyond the state to encompass those other organizations...

Democratic theorists commonly distinguish between direct democracy and representative democracy. In a direct democracy, citizens rule themselves, while in a representative democracy they elect representatives to rule on their behalf. Today’s democracies are all representative in structure—a form dictated by scale and complexity—with some direct elements such as initiatives and referendums, as well as some forms of citizen engagement. The concept of participatory democracy usually refers to these latter two elements: direct decision-making as well as citizen involvement in decision-making within representative structures. If, however, we consider these two forms of participation from the perspective of representation, the...