Purpose & Principle
This journal, launched at the beginning of 2024, aims to address issues concerning the structures and procedures of democracy.
The challenge of any democracy is how to combine the disparate preferences of citizens into a decision on behalf of all. This challenge becomes even harder when the preferences of citizens become increasingly divergent, or “polarized” in the parlance of political scientists and the journalists who cover politics. The institutions that worked well enough when citizens were less divided may no longer be adequate under current conditions.
Common Ground Democracy will explore options that might enable a self-governing republic to make choices that better reflect the totality of the citizenry’s collective preferences. As its name implies, its guiding principle will be to achieve outcomes that minimize the degree of disfavor with the decisions reached. Or, to put the point more positively, the goal is to achieve the greatest degree of assent possible—the maximum common ground.
While the journal’s main attention will be the condition of democracy in America, from time to time references may be made to comparable circumstances in our countries. After all, a doctor seeking to diagnose and cure an ailing patient will draw upon whatever sources of knowledge might be most illuminating.
About the Author
I teach election law and constitutional law at the Ohio State University, where I also direct its election law program. For the 2024-2025 academic, I am at Princeton University as a Crane Fellow in Law and Public Policy. For the first three months of 2024, I was the University of Arizona as part of a sabbatical year devoted to research related to the topic of this newsletter. My previous books include Ballot Battles: The History of Disputed Elections in the United States (2016, with a new edition in 2024) and Presidential Elections and Majority Rule: The Rise, Decline, and Potential Restoration of the Jeffersonian Electoral College (2020), as well as the co-edited volume Electoral Reform in the United States: Proposals for Combating Polarization and Extremism (2024).
Please subscribe to join me on this exploration of how best to repair—and, as necessary, even rebuild—the methods by which free and equal citizens can shape their shared destiny:
