Chapter 38 — Further Reading

The literature on democratic reform is large and growing rapidly. The selections below represent the strongest versions of multiple reform traditions. The chapter's discipline of steel-manning each side carries into the bibliography: the reading list does not endorse any particular reform agenda, and it includes serious works from across the spectrum.

On the structural-reform menu generally

Lee Drutman, Breaking the Two-Party Doom Loop: The Case for Multiparty Democracy in America (Oxford University Press, 2020). The most developed argument that the underlying source of American hyperpolarization is the combination of single-member districts and plurality voting, and that ranked-choice voting paired with multimember congressional districts could break the two-party binary. Drutman is direct about the empirical claims and clear about the constitutional path (federal statutory repeal of the 1967 single-member-district mandate, which is feasible but lacks current coalition).

Larry Sabato, A More Perfect Constitution: 23 Proposals to Revitalize Our Constitution and Make America a Fairer Country (Walker, 2007). A scholarly catalog of constitutional reforms — Senate apportionment reform, Electoral College reform, term limits, judicial reform, electoral process changes, and more — written with admirable analytical clarity. Sabato is a Center for Politics scholar who has been writing on reform for decades; the book is the best single-volume introduction to the constitutional-reform menu, even though Sabato takes positions that some readers will reject.

Sanford Levinson, Our Undemocratic Constitution: Where the Constitution Goes Wrong (and How We the People Can Correct It) (Oxford University Press, 2006). A more pointed argument than Sabato's that the Constitution's structural arrangements (Senate apportionment, the Electoral College, presidential succession, judicial life tenure) produce results that no contemporary democratic theorist would design. Levinson's title states his conclusion; the book steel-mans the constitutional-reform agenda from the left.

Yuval Levin, American Covenant: How the Constitution Unified Our Nation — and Could Again (Basic Books, 2024). A constitutional defense of the American system from a thoughtful conservative. Levin argues that the Constitution's structural arrangements — including those that critics like Levinson find indefensible — perform integrative functions that contemporary critics underweight. Read alongside Levinson for the strongest version of each side.

On the Court and judicial reform

Presidential Commission on the Supreme Court of the United States, Final Report (December 2021). Available at whitehouse.gov/pcscotus and in published form. The 294-page report is the single most thorough analysis of Court reform in print. Its co-chairs, Bob Bauer and Cristina Rodriguez, assembled a balanced panel; the report does not recommend reforms but analyzes them in admirable depth. Required reading for any serious engagement with judicial reform.

Joshua Braver, "Court-Packing: An American Tradition?" (Boston College Law Review, 2020). A scholarly defense of the constitutional permissibility and historical pedigree of Court expansion, addressing the legitimacy concerns directly.

Richard Re, "Personal Precedent at the Supreme Court" (Harvard Law Review, 2023). A sophisticated treatment of how the current Court's justices have been reshaping doctrine, useful for understanding the substantive context in which reform proposals have arisen.

On Congress

Yuval Levin, A Time to Build: From Family and Community to Congress and the Campus, How Recommitting to Our Institutions Can Revive the American Dream (Basic Books, 2020). Levin's broader argument that institutions perform formative functions that contemporary American culture has neglected, with specific application to Congress and to civic institutions. A conservative case for institutional renewal that overlaps in important ways with progressive concerns about institutional capacity.

Frances E. Lee, Insecure Majorities: Congress and the Perpetual Campaign (University of Chicago Press, 2016). Lee's analytical argument that the closeness of recent Congresses (and the prospect that the majority can flip every two years) shapes congressional behavior in ways that produce gridlock and message-voting rather than legislation. Influential among process scholars across the spectrum.

Sarah Binder and Steven Smith, Politics or Principle? Filibustering in the United States Senate (Brookings, 1996, with subsequent updates). The standard scholarly treatment of the filibuster's evolution and current operation. Binder's later work continues the analysis through 2010s and 2020s changes.

On the conservative reform tradition

Christopher Caldwell, The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties (Simon & Schuster, 2020). A controversial but rigorously argued conservative analysis of the post-1960s constitutional and political order. Caldwell's argument is that the 1960s produced what amounts to a second constitutional regime that operates alongside the original; the book's reform implications are conservative-coded but the analysis is taken seriously across the spectrum, including by critics.

Oren Cass, The Once and Future Worker: A Vision for the Renewal of Work in America (Encounter Books, 2018) and the broader American Compass project. The most developed statement of the national-conservative reform agenda, with applications across labor policy, industrial policy, family policy, and immigration. Cass's framing of conservatism as compatible with active state involvement in economic life represents a significant departure from late-twentieth-century libertarian conservatism.

Heritage Foundation, Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise (2023, also known as Project 2025). The 920-page conservative reform agenda that became the subject of extensive political controversy in the 2024 cycle. Read it directly. Whatever your politics, the book is the most comprehensive conservative reform agenda in print; engaging with the actual document is more useful than engaging with summaries by either supporters or critics.

Philip Hamburger, Is Administrative Law Unlawful? (University of Chicago Press, 2014). The scholarly foundation for the legal critique of the administrative state that has shaped doctrines from major-questions through Loper Bright. Demanding reading; not a popular book but a foundational one.

On the progressive reform tradition and political work

Eitan Hersh, Politics Is for Power: How to Move Beyond Political Hobbyism, Take Action, and Make Real Change (Scribner, 2020). The chapter's recurring touchstone for the civic-engagement layer. Hersh's distinction between political hobbyism and political work is the most useful framing in print for thinking about what readers can actually do. Direct, accessible, and demanding in the right way.

Heather Gerken, The Federalist Society's Originalism and the Roberts Court and other writings. Gerken's scholarship on what she calls "progressive federalism" — the argument that federalism's structural opportunities work for both ideological directions, and that progressives have underused federalism as a vehicle for their policy goals — represents a significant contribution to the reform conversation that does not align neatly with either standard partisan position.

Lawrence Lessig, They Don't Represent Us: Reclaiming Our Democracy (Dey Street Books, 2019) and America, Compromised (University of Chicago Press, 2018). Lessig has been the leading voice for systematic anti-corruption reform for two decades. His argument is that the dependence of representatives on donors produces structural distortions that operate independent of explicit corruption, and that addressing this requires fundamental campaign-finance reform plus broader anti-corruption infrastructure.

On structural reform organizations

The Brennan Center for Justice (NYU School of Law). Comprehensive analysis of voting-rights, redistricting, court reform, money in politics, and related topics. The Brennan Center's reports are the most-cited source on election-related reform; the institution's perspective leans progressive but the empirical work is rigorous.

The Niskanen Center. A center-left / center-right policy organization with a distinct identity — broadly market-friendly, broadly state-supportive, broadly skeptical of populism. Niskanen's work on permitting reform, regulatory reform, and institutional governance is among the most developed cross-partisan reform analysis in print.

The Bipartisan Policy Center. Founded by former Senate majority leaders Bob Dole, George Mitchell, Howard Baker, and Tom Daschle, BPC is the longest-running bipartisan reform institution. Its work on election administration, the budget process, and immigration reform represents sustained efforts at cross-partisan consensus.

On the civic-engagement layer

Robert Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (Simon & Schuster, 2000) and The Upswing: How America Came Together a Century Ago and How We Can Do It Again (with Romney Garrett, Simon & Schuster, 2020). Putnam's documentation of the decline of civic associations and his analysis of historical periods in which civic decline reversed. Required reading for thinking about the civic layer.

Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (vols. 1 and 2, 1835 and 1840). The classic source on American voluntary associations. Read in the Mansfield-Winthrop translation (University of Chicago Press, 2000) for the most reliable English text. Tocqueville's argument that American democracy depends on civic associations as much as on formal institutions remains foundational to thinking about the civic-engagement layer.

Danielle Allen, Our Declaration: A Reading of the Declaration of Independence in Defense of Equality (Liveright, 2014) and her work on civic education. Allen has been a leading voice in cross-partisan civic-education revival, including through the 2021 Educating for American Democracy initiative.

A note on contested sources

This bibliography includes works that some readers will find ideologically uncongenial. That is the point. The chapter's commitment is to steel-man each reform tradition, and the bibliography reflects the same commitment. Reading across the spectrum is the discipline that builds analytical capacity. Reading only within one's own tradition produces fluency in one's own arguments and uncertainty about everyone else's.

The most useful preparation for the Democracy Audit deliverable in Chapter 40 is to read at least one work you expect to disagree with, in addition to whatever else you read. The exercise of steel-manning a position you reject is the analytical capacity this book has tried to develop throughout its forty chapters.