In recent years, scholars, journalists, and others have identified various possible causes for rising partisan polarization in U.S. government. They include underlying factors such as rising economic inequality, geographic sorting, new media, immigration, post–civil rights era party realignment and the Supreme Court's rulings on independent expenditures. In addition, there are contemporary political conditions, such as the white backlash against America's first African American president and the paralyzing consequences of divided government in Washington. Realistically, this means that any serious effort to dial down partisanship requires a comprehensive, multilevel strategy and a coherent, realistic vision of modern citizenship.

The dominant problem in U.S. politics in recent years can be characterized as democratic distortion – a skewing of process and policy in which the political system is too responsive to those with intense preferences, especially when they are ideologically extreme or oriented toward private gain at public expense. Ideally, the political process in a diverse, pluralist society should aggregate preferences fairly with a robust capacity for compromise. But the excessive influence of ideological extremists and the ability of concentrated economic interests to use the state for private gain suggest that we are drifting away from that goal.

The nub of the problem is that those with intense ideological preferences and/or concentrated material interests are better able and more willing to exert influence over elections and policy making in government. Preference intensity tends to increase with ideological extremity and the degree to which material interests are directly affected by government policies. Sometimes, ideology and material interests coincide (e.g., the Koch brothers) and sometimes they do not (e.g., Moveon.org). Party activists tend to have more polarized views than non-activists. Businesses, trade unions, and other regulated groups normally advocate for their narrow economic self-interests. Because those with intense preferences are also more willing to pay the opportunity and collective action costs associated with political participation (i.e., mobilizing the vote, contributing and spending money in campaigns, lobbying agencies, monitoring government actions, and the like), their influence is more constant and effective over time than that of less engaged citizens.

The desire to make politics more democratic has shaped the ethical standards of public office in distinctive ways. Over time, Americans have raised the bar with respect to appropriate government behavior. Actions by public officials that were once thought to be normal and appropriate such as accepting personal gifts, letting lobbyists pick up the tab at restaurants, profiting from public projects, accepting honoraria, and the like are now prohibited and more strictly regulated at all levels. Corruption reform typically emerges from a familiar, repeating cycle of public scandals followed by tighter controls followed by subsequent rounds of scandals and reforms. The revelation that Richard Nixon received a $2 million contribution from the Associated Milk Producers of America in exchange for increasing milk price subsidies helped pass the 1971 and 1974 campaign finance reforms. More recently, Jack Abramoff’s cynical manipulation of revolving-door opportunities for congressional staff prompted the 2007 congressional lobbying reforms.

Material political corruption – using public office for financial gain – violates both governance and democratic values. When officials place their own personal gains ahead of constituent interests, it can undermine the strength of the electoral mandate and democratic accountability. It can also seriously weaken government effectiveness, efficiency, and ultimately even stability by diverting resources to private gain for those in power at the expense of the broader constituent community. I use the word “can” purposely, because, as we shall see, the prospects of personal gain can also sometimes serve larger political purposes such as facilitating cooperation and limiting stalemate, particularly in a political system with highly fractured and decentralized power. A rigidly pure democratic system can be more politically accountable and less effective at the same time. Such trade-offs make institutional choices harder.

Many US reform discussions focus on achieving fair representation. Sometimes an allegation of “unfairness” is only the loser’s lament, a catchall phrase that really means “but for these rules or this process, we would have won.” But that is not always true. When derived from agreed-upon equality principles and cultural norms, fairness considerations can and have had considerable moral force in American politics, pushing political institutions toward a more equal division of democratic opportunities and outcomes. The pursuit of “fair representation” resulted in the expansion of the voting franchise to women, eighteen-year-olds, and African Americans as well as the elimination of malapportioned districts.

But more recent efforts to extend this value in new directions are highly controversial. What is a fair redistricting plan? Is proportional representation fairer than the first-past rules favored by Anglo-American democracies? Are supermajority rules more or less fair ways to decide issues? Is it right that some groups and individuals have more access and opportunities to influence policy than others?

Fair representation is quintessentially a democratic concept, one that does not apply to autocratic governments where authority rests on power, not popular approval. Although in principle, a democracy’s legitimacy rests upon its accountability to the citizenry, the very ambiguity of what this means in practice gives rise to multiple interpretations and disagreements. Holding governments accountable requires that officials face consequences (e.g., be removed from office) if citizens disapprove of their performance: that is, that political power is contestable.

The democratic imperative has shaped American politics and institutions in both good and bad ways: shifting the meaning of political corruption from official self-enrichment to democratic distortion, imposing conflict-of-interest rules on elected officials, opening up government through transparency measures, democratizing party nomination processes, and creating new opportunities for citizen governance though popular initiatives and experiments like participatory budgeting. The idiosyncratic structure and antiauthoritarian premises of US government have also guided and constrained America reform efforts distinctively. The Electoral College and the US Senate are constitutionally entrenched exceptions to “one person, one vote” electoral equality. The Supreme Court’s strong interpretation of First Amendment rights has blocked efforts to use campaign finance to create greater political equality. Election administration decentralization is a serious obstacle to achieving a uniformly fair political process. And the paths to fixing many of these problems with structural reforms at the national level are effectively blocked by politics and high institutional barriers for the foreseeable future. The latter is what Amy Guttman and Dennis Thompson call the reformer’s dilemma: “Most institutional reforms cannot get off the ground without changing some of the conditions that the reforms are intended to fix” (Gutmann and Thompson, 2014, pp. xx–xxi).

The pressure to expand democratic procedures will not likely abate. Fueled by a confluence of factors – inevitable disappointments with representative government, rising expectations of a more educated electorate, a general tendency to overestimate citizenship capacity and the allure of e-government – neopopulist reformers will continue to challenge older democratic practices and institutions. The democratic imperative has made some important contributions to American political reform – such as the expansion of the franchise or freedom of information laws. And a moderated populism (i.e., one that supplements and does not attempt to supplant representative government) can complement neutral expertise and pluralism.

US politics and government have generally become much more transparent over time. This trend encompasses not only greater disclosure of most government actions and policies, but also an increasing demand for more financial and personal information about public officials, spanning the full cycle from running or applying for public office to postservice activities. Even as formal requirements have become more numerous and complex, informal expectations have increased also. Presidential and congressional candidates, for instance, are now routinely pressured to reveal much more than the law demands about their financial assets, business dealings, and personal lives. Government agencies must comply with stricter freedom of information laws and provide more information than ever on their websites. But at what point does maximizing the democratic value of transparency undercut government effectiveness? This is the too-much-democracy question.

At the same time, some aspects of American government may not be sufficiently transparent: in other words, it is possible that too much accountability has been traded away for the sake of effectiveness. This question arises with national security and policing matters. With the challenges of modern international terrorism and the government’s increasingly sophisticated technical capacity to collect phone, social media, and other electronic information, Americans face the vexing problem of holding government espionage activities accountable without undermining their own safety. Clearly, full public transparency is not feasible since spying operations must be secret in order to be effective, but an unmonitored agency shrouded in secrecy is an open invitation to abuse. The American solution to this problem is a mix of checks and balances: inspectors general, congressional oversight, and a special judicial body (i.e., the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act – FISA – court). But the revelations following Edward Snowden’s release of NSA documents suggest that those may not be working very well.

Full citizen participation is the gold standard of democratic design. Engaged citizens have more interest in and knowledge about civic matters (Delli Carpini, 1996). Widespread participation also lessens potential biases in representation and policy (Bennett and Resnick, 1990; Hill Quaile and Leighley, 1992; Hill Quaile, Leighley, and Hinton-Andersson, 1995). Often participation rates are treated as measures of a democracy’s health, albeit cautiously since simple cross-national comparisons can be misleading as the result of important differences in laws and political structure (Kekic, 2007). But what Americans actually mean by full citizen participation continues to evolve, as do the consequences of falling short of this democratic ideal.

The earliest meanings of full citizen participation centered on electoral activities – voting to be sure, but also various related volunteer activities such as canvassing, distributing literature, getting out the vote, talking to others about elections, displaying lawn signs and the like. Because it was traditionally voting centered, citizen engagement was primarily timed to electoral cycles, focused on representatives and oriented toward retrospective accountability, not continuous monitoring and control.

Over time, the meaning of full citizen participation in the United States expanded in several dimensions. “Full” came to mean “more inclusive,” ending the franchise restrictions that excluded women and minorities. While those decisions are now settled doctrine (Issacharoff and Pildes, 1998a), the current franchise controversies are whether to extend voting rights to some noncitizen immigrants and restore them for ex-felons.

The American political system is a palimpsest of incremental institutional changes layered on top of a blended constitutional design. In some instances, older features have been wiped away entirely (e.g., the indirect election of the US Senate) and replaced by new ones. But in others, the residual rules and processes simply coexist with the novel features (e.g., a president elected by an Electoral College but every other federal office chosen by popular vote). Given the different motives and principles behind all these changes, the real puzzle is not why the American political system is imperfect, but how it has managed to absorb so much heterogeneous tinkering and still function as well as it does.

In an idealized world, wise and experienced citizens would deliberate at length in the manner of the Founders over the current problems with US government and offer coherent proposals for reform. One of their goals would surely be to harmonize the government’s different processes in a logically consistent manner. But the modern American political environment is complex and sophisticated with many vested interests and inertial forces. Convening a US constitutional convention would be difficult if not impossible. To date, none of the twenty-seven amendments to the US Constitution has been approved this way. Instead, they were proposed by a congressional supermajority vote and then ratified by the states. Even assuming that the convention initiating obstacle could be overcome, the external pressures and expectations on modern US convention delegates would almost certainly be very different from those the Founders had to deal with. The delegates would be more diverse. Monitoring by the press, interest groups, and the public would be greater. And the partisan and ideological policy divisions would likely incite rampant rule gaming for political advantage in the convention.

The merits of democratic reforms mostly rest on the implicit trade-offs in democratic values and governance considerations associated with them. Compared to the gradually evolving general consensus over such core democratic principles as an inclusive electoral franchise, disagreements over specific democratic forms are more often resolved in context-specific ways that are not always stable over time or linear in their historical path.

Consider the long-standing debate over the merits of proportional representation (PR) versus single member, simple plurality (SMSP). Proportional rules, of which there are many varieties, tend to reflect the electorate’s interests and characteristics more descriptively, and on average they encourage more political parties. The consequence is that political parties in PR systems usually have to coalesce to form governments. However, because alliances between political parties tend to be less stable than those within any one party, the value of more accurate representation comes at the expense of somewhat lessened government stability. By comparison, SMSP systems tend to shut out small parties and incorporate allied groups and interests into big-tent parties. This makes governance more stable, but represents the electorate less descriptively. In the abstract and absent the inevitable political calculations people bring to the table, the choice between these two types of rules for determining an electoral winner is at least implicitly about a trade-off between a democratic value (i.e., a finer degree of representation) and a governance considerations (i.e., more stability on average).

Americans have tried repeatedly to improve their political system in various ways. They have extended voting rights to women and racial minorities, ensured more regular presidential rotation, replaced indirect with direct Senate elections, and regulated congressional pay by constitutional amendments. State and local governments have experimented with nonpartisan elections, the citizen’s initiative, recall, referendum, participatory budgeting, and city manager government. Political jurisdictions at all levels have passed measures to reduce material corruption, control campaign finance, improve government ethics, and lessen government secrecy. The result is a complex assortment of limits, prohibitions, and requirements that regulate many facets of political activity.

American political improvement is also highly institutionalized. Nonprofit reform groups abound – some with broad agendas, such as Common Cause, the League of Women Voters, U.S. PIRG, and the Brennan Center, and others with more specific democratic goals, such as Open Secrets and Open the Government (transparency), the Fund for Constitutional Government (effective government oversight), No Labels (lessened partisanship), OMB Watch (fiscal responsibility), Democracy 21 and the Campaign Legal Center (tighter lobbying and campaign finance controls), and Little Sis and the Center for Voting and Democracy (better voting procedures). But despite some notable reform achievements, there is a nagging doubt about all of this activity: is America truly making progress, or is the goal of achieving a less imperfect democracy simply futile?

Rules and procedures are necessary for running elections properly. They determine such essential details as voter eligibility, candidate qualifications, balloting, and vote counting. Even though the United States has been conducting elections since the eighteenth century, America election administration issues are still unsettled. Indeed, they have become more politicized since the 2000 presidential election.

The Florida 2000 and Ohio 2004 presidential election controversies elevated the public salience of administrative arcana such as butterfly ballots, voter registration purges, provisional ballots, and recount procedures. As hanging chads and punch card machines receded from the spotlight, photo identification, voter caging (i.e. challenging a voter’s registration status), and third-party voter registration requirements took their place. Democrats and Republicans now routinely deploy teams of lawyers to watch for polling place irregularities and to contest rules that might work against their party’s interest. Election-related litigation has proliferated over the last decade (Hasen, 2012c).

America is distinctive among advanced democracies in this regard. Other OECD countries rarely fight over the nitty-gritty of casting and counting votes. And when they do, it is sometimes because they have adopted American electoral practices like party primaries, as was the case with the Union for a Popular Movement’s 2012 recount dispute in the nomination battle to replacing Nicholas Sarkosy (France 24,2012). Voting administration battles are primarily an American spectacle. Why is this so?

The existence of a broad consensus about core democratic features and values creates a basic reform template for democratizing authoritarian regimes and dictatorships. But because there is far less theoretical or political agreement about the relative merits of different forms of democratic representation and governance, there is no simple guide for improving established democracies. Democratic political institutions and practices have changed considerably over time and vary widely beyond the most basic attributes. Consequently, there is no international consensus about which country is the most democratic, which means that there are several perfectly acceptable alternative paths for emerging democracies to follow. This poses no serious problem for world peace and harmony, but it greatly complicates political reform in the United States. Simply put, it is difficult, if not impossible, to evaluate purported reform efforts absent a single, agreed-on democratic ideal form.

All democracies are based on the principle of popular sovereignty (i.e., that power resides in the people), but there is no universal consensus in the United States or internationally about what this means. Is direct voter control more democratic than representative government? Do less restrictive voter eligibility rules always make a system more democratic? Which rule for collective decisions is best: unanimity, supermajority, or a mere plurality of citizens? Are proportional seat allocation rules superior to single-member, simple plurality rules? Should popular sovereignty be limited for the sake of minority rights and fairness?