First Principles of our Democratic Republic
We’re building a cross-partisan pro-democracy movement, working to build a stronger democratic republic, and tools to support that, including the Democracy Impact Assessment. Do you agree or disagree with our pillars, and approaches? Have suggestions for improvements? Please tell us.
What is democracy anyway? Or a democratic republic? And why should I care?
Here’s an awkward fact: after 250 years, we still don’t have a shared working definition for our American form of government. Some say democracy, some say republic, and each side suspects the other of loading the words to suit their political objectives.
In reality, we’re both a democracy and a republic, and the terms are largely interchangeable. The people hold the power and elect others to exercise it on our behalf, inside a constitution that protects everyone whether or not they won the last election. The whole design is a balance: majority rule on one side, protection of minority rights and protection from mob rule on the other.
Our founders also built it to prevent rule by a minority, whether that’s oligarchy, authoritarianism, or corporatism, at the expense of the rights and protections of the majority.
At least that’s how it’s supposed to work.
This kind of representative democracy is the best system we humans have come up with to protect individual liberties while providing foundations for broad-based human flourishing, but we know our system in the US is far from perfect, and there are some key gaps that impact all of us across the political spectrum.
Some highlight flaws: excessive money in politics; corruption; partisan redistricting; disruptions in our voting and election systems that take us away from free, fair, and trustworthy elections; politicized courts; and gaps in our media and information environment that make it difficult for citizens to get the information they need to make informed choices. And more.
And perhaps our biggest challenge: citizen disengagement and apathy.
While we have several substantive issues to discuss and work through, the naming issues should not be one of them. It’s largely a distraction, so let’s try to clear it up and move on.
So here’s our Democracy Week style guide for our democratic republic
At Democracy Week we’ll generally refer to our country and political system as a democratic republic, because that’s what it is, we appreciate and celebrate both terms, and because those terms resonate differently with people across the political spectrum. When we’re talking about society and social norms rather than the form of government, we’ll often just say democracy for convenience and shorthand. We hold both terms in high esteem, and celebrate that we are, in fact, part of an amazing democratic republic, and one that deserves our care and attention.
If anyone wants to spend time with you debating the terms, we encourage you to invite them to share more about what those terms mean to them, and what they think are their first principles for how our democratic republic should actually work, and to try to shift the conversation from terminology to other substantive issues.
The naming question should be an easy one to move beyond. Not having a shared understanding of the actual core pillars of our democratic republic though has contributed to a lot of confusion and inaction. So we’re drafting a shared framework: five pillars to help us think through critical issues and guide collective action across party lines. It’s a work in progress, and we’ll keep working at it until it’s something the vast majority of Americans would agree on, celebrate, sign, and defend.
The five core pillars of our American democratic republic
This is a draft framework, a work in progress, and we encourage feedback from across the political spectrum. Each pillar has to resonate with people on the left, right, and center, and we’ll keep revising it until we have cross-partisan supermajority support from around the country. This framework will then help us build towards having a “Democracy Impact Assessment” to help us score organizations, legislation, and candidates, and to guide us towards actions that can help strengthen our democracy and our country.
Select any pillar, on the wheel or by name, for a short summary. The full detail for each one is further down this page.
Pillar 01
Culture
A Culture of Liberty & Democracy
Rights that hold up in practice, and neighbors who can disagree and still get things done together.
- Participation: People show up. Voting, volunteering, jury duty, school boards, and local races with more than one name on the ballot.
- Community: People know and support their neighbors. People know and trust each other enough to disagree, still be friends, and support each other to improve their communities.
- Basic rights protected: Speech, assembly, worship, association. These hold up in practice, including for people whose views are unpopular where they live or work.
- Privacy holds. Limits on what gets collected about you and who can demand it later, and clarity and transparency about what does get collected.
- Groups can organize freely. Without being pressured by the powerful interests they criticize.
Pillar 02
Economy
Economic Liberty & Shared Prosperity
Freedom to build, a fair shot at competing, and prosperity that actually reaches people.
- Fair competition: The better product can win. New entrants aren’t locked out by incumbents, or chosen by elites or an authoritarian.
- Ownership is broad-based. We’re an entrepreneurial nation, nationwide. There shouldn’t be a small number of winners, in a small number of places.
- Opportunity is reachable. Work, tools, and capital are available without the right degree or the right contacts.
- Financial transparency and choice: Anyone with a pension or a 401K can find out how it’s invested, and make their own choices.
- We invest in the shared foundations. Communities can absorb economic shocks, including from automation, and the country keeps funding the things everything else is built on: infrastructure, education, public interest science and innovation, and more, to support broad-based human flourishing.
Pillar 03
Information
Free Speech & Information Integrity
A free press, and information people can actually trust.
- Local & independent coverage. Media independent of the people they report on. 213 counties have no local outlet at all, and another 1,524 have only one.
- Algorithmic transparency. The systems deciding what tens of millions of people see can be examined from outside the company that runs them.
- You can tell what’s real. An ordinary person can work out whether an image, a video, or a message is authentic and where it came from.
- Algorithmic and operational neutrality: The rules are written and consistent. What gets amplified and what gets taken down follows stated rules, applied the same way whoever is speaking.
Pillar 04
Elections
Free & Fair Elections
Easy to vote, hard to cheat, every vote counted, and power that isn’t for sale.
- Voting is easy for everyone eligible. Including the people whose jobs make it hardest.
- Elections are secure and run by the rules. That now includes clear rules for how campaigns and others use AI. Persuasion costs close to nothing, and agents can act, not just post.
- Non-partisan redistricting: Voters pick their representatives, rather than representatives picking their voters through unfair partisan redistricting.
- Financial transparency: You can see who’s paying, including money routed through trade associations and other intermediaries.
- Results are respected. Certified outcomes stand, and the people who run elections are safe doing it.
Pillar 05
Government
A Government That Works for the People
Same rules for everyone, and a government that delivers what people are paying for.
- The rule of law applies to everyone, across issues and parties. Regardless of your name, income, or friends.
- Courts stay independent. They can rule against whoever appointed them without being punished for it.
- Power stays where voters put it. A legislature that legislates, and oversight that works.
- Legislative transparency: Decisions happen in the open. Spending, contracts, and lobbying on the record, so capture is visible when it happens, and people can see and challenge decisions made about them, including decisions made by software.
- Citizens involved in decision making: People gather to talk through difficult issues, and where the solutions actually reach and guide decision makers, or the people are the decision makers (citizen assemblies, deliberative democracy, etc).
- A government that delivers, balancing regulation for the public good, and progress for the public good. It builds, maintains, and enables the infrastructure the people, communities and companies depend on, balancing safety, rights, sustainability, and the need to get things done at a reasonable cost and on a reasonable schedule.
The Democracy Impact Assessment is designed so that a city, a company, a fund, or a civic initiative could use to see where it stands and where to improve. It’s meant to be constructive rather than punitive, and we’re building it in the open. If you want to help shape it, come to the Innovators & Investors for Democracy Forum or send us a note.
We don’t have easy answers to some of those issues, but they’re the ones we need to figure out, or we’ll lose our democratic republic (along with various aspects of our freedoms, protections, and ways of life) while we watch from the sidelines.
This effort is organized under a nonprofit fiscal sponsor, so we don’t take positions on candidates or parties, but we do encourage everyone to vote, organize, and get involved in civics and our democratic system, across party affiliations.
Cross-partisan is not the same as neutral
We have gaps across the spectrum. Power keeps drifting away from the people who are supposed to hold it. Congress hands its authority to whoever runs the executive branch. Courts get treated as prizes to be won. Massive money consistently floods our elections, moving us further away from the idea of one person, one vote. Election officials get threatened for doing their jobs. Districts get redrawn so representatives can pick their voters. Local newsrooms close and local issues and candidates stop getting covered. And the cost of flooding the public with confusing fake messages has fallen to roughly nothing.
If you lean right, you might be thinking this is a partisan ploy behind a cross-partisan veil
Reasonable. Plenty of things labeled pro-democracy turn out to be one party’s platform (both parties use the term) with different branding. But we’re focusing on core issues that have broad consensus, and we actually have cross-partisan decision-making: key decisions or principles need support from the left, right and center. If there’s disagreement, we work through it until we have supermajority consensus, or we cut the principle. Concentrated power, excessive money in politics, and gerrymandering are live concerns in both red states and blue states, among people across the spectrum, and both parties are playing dirty. We need people across the spectrum to put people over politics, and country over party.
If you lean left, you’re probably waiting for us to take a stance, or you might think this is a way to whitewash the situation we’re in
Also reasonable. Discussing issues without taking stances is its own way of dodging, and false balance is not fairness. So let’s be clear: we believe our democratic republic is quickly declining, research confirms what we can see with our own eyes, and we believe this current administration is accelerating that decline. Decline also happened under Democrats. The US has been a struggling democracy for a long time, since the founding of our country, and the problems have accelerated in recent years and even in recent months. There are immediate issues at stake, and we need more people working on the side of cross-partisan democracy now, to protect this election and the ones after it from distortion and manipulation, and to rebuild systems of accountability and balance of power that both parties, and everyone else, abide by. A better democracy and a more perfect union will take work across the political spectrum, and we need Democrats, Republicans, independents, and others on board.
If you lean independent, or none of the above, you’re probably tired of the partisan bickering and corruption while the issues you care about get neglected
Fair. Many people would prefer more than two options, and independents are now the largest bloc in the country. A record 45% of US adults identified as independents in 2025, against 27% each for Republicans and Democrats, and a majority of Gen Z and millennials. That’s a real constituency, and organized independents change outcomes.
We’re not going to tell anyone where to register. What we will say is that most of the machinery that picks candidates, sets the agenda, and makes the rules currently sits inside institutions, including party committees, primaries, and local boards, and that machinery responds to whoever shows up. And not enough people are showing up. Wherever you land across the spectrum, showing up beats opting out.
We’re a cross-partisan work in progress. We know these are complicated issues, and they’re urgent ones. We need to figure out how to work through them and take clear steps towards improving our system, and quickly. We’re consistently adjusting things on our site and in our programming because of feedback from people across the political spectrum. If you see gaps in our framing or analysis, or in our programs or events, please let us know. partner@democracyweek.net
The fights that make the news are not the whole story
Our civic infrastructure has been eroding over the last few decades, largely unnoticed.
213
counties have no local news source at all, and about 1,500 more rely on a single outlet. Close to 3,500 newspapers have closed since 2005. Medill, 2025
500,000
elected local officials run the government closest to you. Most of those races are uncontested, and most voters can’t name one. Berry & Gersen
70%
of races are uncontested, vacant, or shift to appointment, including thousands of local races that shape daily life and local accountability. Ballotpedia, 2026
5.6
groups the average American active in a religious or spiritual organization takes part in, versus 2.1 for those who aren’t. Faith communities bring people together, and into sports leagues, neighborhood associations, charities, PTAs. Pew, 2011
On top of that, too many Americans feel disconnected, lonely, or are struggling to meet their basic needs. That’s bad for those people and for the country, and it makes civic engagement much harder.
Democracy is closer than you think
Most people think about democracy once every four years, if ever. But a democratic republic runs on several levels at once, and the ones nearest to you are usually the emptiest and the easiest to influence.
Your block
Neighbors, block parties, mutual aid, group chats. Usually not official, and it’s where trust most easily gets built.
Your congregation, club, or team
Churches, synagogues, mosques and temples. Volunteer groups, sports leagues, PTAs, service clubs. 40% of US adults take part in religious services at least monthly, in person or online, and 54% helped out a neighbor informally in the past year. These are the biggest regular gatherings of people who already show up for each other, and civic muscle gets built here first.
Your city
School boards, city councils, planning commissions, neighborhood councils, local branches of political parties. Decisions that touch your daily life, often made in half-empty rooms.
Your state
Where election rules, districts, and most of the guardrails are actually written. Secretaries of state, legislatures, ballot measures (in 23 states), courts.
The country
The part everyone argues about, and the part where one person has the least leverage. It’s critical, it needs much more of our attention, and it shouldn’t stop us getting involved in the others.
Democracy is not a spectator sport, and there are many ways to play
Most of what makes a democratic republic resilient doesn’t look like politics at all. It looks like a school board meeting, a block party, a church potluck, coaching a youth team, showing up when a neighbor is sick. Build that and the political layer gets easier. Skip it and no amount of voting fixes what’s underneath.
From there, there are lots of ways to get involved, from voting and social voting, to working on campaigns, signing up as a local election official, joining a local political party chapter, or even running for office. And yes, they can all be fun, so let’s make it so. The best way to make something fun is to have fun doing it. Working together in community, solving problems, helping others, and making things better are inherently rewarding.
The basics
Vote, and bring three people with you
- Register. Then check it again a few months later, because rolls get purged and people move. Deadlines vary by state, so check yours.
- Make a plan. Which day, what time, how you’re getting there, and what’s on the back of the ballot. In a field experiment with 287,000 voters, calls that walked people through a specific plan raised turnout by 4.1 points among those reached. Standard reminder calls did next to nothing.
- Vote the whole ballot. The local races and measures at the bottom usually affect your life more than the one at the top. Get together with friends and neighbors to work through the races and measures you don’t know yet.
- Get three friends to do all of the above. A text from someone you know beats any ad ever made.
Strengthen your own community
This part often gets skipped, but it matters, a lot, both in our day to day quality of life and in the functioning of our democracy.
Go to a school board meeting. Volunteer at your church, synagogue, mosque, temple, or community center. Help organize a block party, a cookout, a clean-up, a local league. Coach something. Learn your neighbors’ names, and which of them would need help in an emergency. Join a group that has nothing to do with politics and be useful in it.
A great deal of building a more vibrant and resilient democratic society has more to do with community cookouts, congregations, volunteering and sporting events than with anything in the traditional political arena. Those are the relationships that make disagreement survivable later.
Work an election, or help someone else run one
Poll workers and election officials are the people who make an election an election. Most jurisdictions are short-staffed, many roles are paid, and training is provided. Serving is also the fastest cure for wondering whether the process is trustworthy, because you’ll see exactly how it works, and you can help make it better.
You can also volunteer on a campaign you believe in, or with a nonpartisan civic organization doing voter registration, ballot education, or get-out-the-vote work.
Local party committees, and why they’re worth knowing about
We’re not telling you to join a particular party, or any party, but just know that these seats exist, a startling number of them are empty or run uncontested, and joining them carries far more leverage per hour than almost anything else available to an ordinary person.
County and precinct committee seats are the ground floor of all major parties, and they’re largely neglected. Empty seats get filled by appointment when nobody runs, they’re rarely competitive, and they’re where endorsements, local candidate recruitment, and party rules actually get decided. In Kansas City, Kansas, for example, more than 75% of both parties’ committee positions were empty.
Third parties and independent organizing matter too, and as above, independents are now the largest bloc in the country. Some organizations are deliberately structured so you can take part while staying registered elsewhere, so you don’t have to decide between being “independent-minded” and being part of a political party. In fact we encourage everyone, connected to all political parties or none, to always stay “independent-minded”, and to put people and the country above any political party.
Build something
If you write software, design, research, organize, or make things, this is a field with real problems and not nearly enough builders. We need better ways for people to understand what’s on the ballot. Help citizens and journalists make sense of what’s happening at local meetings. Improved deliberation tools that help large numbers of us, or large numbers of small groups of us, think through critical issues. Better ways for people to get balanced trustworthy information. Verification that can survive cheap synthetic media. More neighborhood organizers, and citizen assemblies with real power. And more.
Bring what you’re working on to showcase during Democracy Week, come to a civic jam and start something, or apply to the Democracy Accelerator. High tech or low tech, both are great: a good phone tree, a printed neighborhood guide, and a room set up so people actually talk to each other and can have a real impact are all democracy technologies.
Run for something
There are more than 500,000 elected local offices in the United States, and a large share of them go uncontested, or have nobody fill them at all. School board, water district, community college board, neighborhood council, city commission. If you’ve ever sat in a meeting thinking someone should fix this, or got frustrated about something in your community, the person who could fix it might be you. You might be the right person to run for higher office as well. Start local, or start higher up, but regardless, the country needs more good people to run for office, and then be an independent thinker and work on behalf of your constituents while in office.
Other ways to be a useful citizen
Show up to a public meeting. Subscribe to a local news outlet. Serve on a jury without trying to get out of it. Have a real conversation with someone who votes differently than you, and try to leave it still liking them. These might not seem glamorous, but all help build better communities, a stronger democratic republic, and a better country.
This is still a draft and a work in progress
We don’t have easy answers to most of this. The five pillars are part of our effort to build a shared cross-partisan framework that the vast majority of us can align on, be proud of, and defend. And it’s all a work in progress. Wherever you sit across the spectrum, we’d love your voice in there, either through upcoming events and discussions (online, offline, and hybrid), or by sending us an email: partner@democracyweek.net. We promise to listen openly, and we ask you to share with kindness. Together we can work through these issues, and build a better country, a better democratic republic, for all of us.