Introducing GriffNotes

A Substack about Designing Democracy Better

Here’s a quiz: Which state has the country’s least competitive elections and the least productive legislature? If it helps, the same state’s communities of color are chronically underrepresented in elected offices, and its voter turnout numbers show disproportionate electoral power for white and wealthier voters.

If you are like most Bay Staters, your guess was probably a red state. We talk a lot about voter suppression in the Deep South, and most Massachusetts voters think the Commonwealth’s democracy outperforms the country’s. But the state with the dismal democracy record described above is not Mississippi. It’s my own state: deep blue Massachusetts.

Welcome to GriffNotes, a Substack whose aim is to draw the connection between these democracy failures and the concrete problems facing the Commonwealth and other states like it, from housing and transportation chaos to school quality and local government dysfunction. In making that case, I will suggest solutions to these problems in the spirit of democracy renovation: reconnecting people to civic life and redesigning political institutions to be more effective and responsive.

(Disclaimer: Outside this Substack, I am the Managing Partner for Strategy at Partners In Democracy, an organization founded by Danielle Allen to pursue state-by-state democracy renovation, starting in Massachusetts. This Substack reflects my own thoughts, not official PID positions, though my thinking certainly draws from my work there.)

Designing for Democracy Renovation

A renovated democracy, to my mind, aligns the political incentives of its institutions with the broad public good. That means that mass participation should be empowered in ways that push public officials to make policy for broad and shared prosperity—more housing, better schools, easier commutes.

In some cases, we may need to rethink the “how” of participation to achieve that design goal. Some offices may need redesigned elections to achieve higher turnout, more diverse candidates, and higher public awareness. Others, by contrast, could need selection models other than elections to “fit” their role in democratic governance. If our goal is to design responsive and effective institutions, we need to ask what “selection rule”—elections, appointment, or even the model of juries—best serves that goal for each public office.

This question of “how” the public should influence government decisions has immediate relevance to several debates in state-level politics. In education, for instance, one key question is whether it is ever appropriate for state-level officials to wrest control over education governance from locally-elected school committees. In housing, a similar question arises for zoning decisions: Should voters in towns or even neighborhoods have veto rights over state-level policies meant to expand housing opportunity?

(As we have seen in Massachusetts, it is possible to find yourself for overriding local objections to zoning rules from the state and against state-level agencies wresting control of local schools from elected school boards—or the reverse.)

At the national level, movements to champion ballot measures and citizens assemblies go a step further, asking whether true democracy requires elections at all. Some advocates point to emerging technologies as tools to discern public opinion: perhaps AI could eventually process millions of individual comments on a proposed law into a coherent sense of public will. Or maybe videoconferencing could allow large groups of randomly-chosen citizens to deliberate on policy questions instead of elected assemblies. The view in much of this field is that elections are no longer needed to enact the will of the people.

Sweeping, one-size-fits-all answers to these questions are probably unhelpful. Election, appointment, and even random selection all have potential benefits for democratic governance; the same is true for local- and state-level voices, popular opinion, and input from experts. Instead of asking which set of design choices is “best,” democratic policy practitioners should ask how each one can best be deployed to strengthen democracy.

Previewing What’s Next

This Substack will try to approach difficult questions in democratic governance by applying that design-first way of thinking to problems in Massachusetts politics. The next post, for instance, will ask whether one of Massachusetts’ elected bodies is designed to instill the virtues we might want in a body with its accountability-focused functions—and offer a redesign idea to make it work better for our democracy. Future posts will consider further government offices or attempt to chart a course through issues where opposing conceptions of democratic voice contribute to stalemate (like housing and education).

My hope is to make some contribution to helping Massachusetts renovate its democracy, and thereby leverage its well-known potential into stronger and more resilient governance. Given the Commonwealth’s enormous strengths in human capital and political stability, I think it could (and should) be a model of how new thinking and digital tools can strengthen democracy.

For now, though, I’ll start with one small example: suggesting some ways to make the Governor’s Council more relevant and functional. More on that next week. And thank you for reading!