What the Democratic party needs - what it demands - is bold, persistent experimentation
Likely voters lean more Democratic for November's midterms, a change from past cycles
In every wave of our poll this year, screening for likely voters has nudged the congressional generic ballot a point or two bluer
Five dimensions of scaling democratic deliberation: With and beyond AI
DemocracyNext's new paper on Five dimensions of scaling democratic deliberation: With and beyond AI
Proportional Representation Would Fix That
We can change the structure of elections in America to make them more free, more democratic, and more fair to every voter.
Democratic voters want the party to be more moderate — and more socialist?
The trouble with polling about ideological labels
Priorities | celeste4sos.com
The right to vote, better representation and election integrity.
Do AI and bogus respondents threaten polling’s future?
Courtney Kennedy, vice president of methods and innovation, answers some common questions about the current polling landscape in the U.S.
What does it mean for AI to be democratic?
Some pushback on a specific fuzzy idea with some ominous implications
The Dispersion of Power: A Critical Realist Theory of Democracy
Abstract The Dispersion of Power is an urgent call to rethink centuries of conventional wisdom about what democracy is, why it matters, and how to make it better. Drawing from history, social science, psychology, and critical theory, it explains why elections do not and cannot realize the classic ideal of popular rule, and why prevailing strategies of democratic reform often make things worse. Instead, Bagg argues, we should see democracy as a way of protecting public power from capture—an alternative vision that is at once more realistic and more inspiring. Despite their many shortcomings, real-world elections do prevent the most extreme forms of tyranny, and are therefore indispensable. In dealing with the vast inequalities that remain, however, we cannot rely on standard solutions such as electoral reform, direct democracy, deliberation, and participatory governance. Instead, Bagg shows, protecting and enriching democracy requires addressing underlying inequalities of power directly. In part, this entails substantive policies attacking the advantages of wealthy elites. Even more crucially, deepening democracy requires the organization of oppositional, countervailing power among ordinary people. Neither task is easy, but historical precedents exist in both cases—and if democracy is to survive contemporary crises, leaders and citizens alike must find ways to revive and reinvent these essential democratic practices for the twenty-first century.
FiftyPlusOne - Latest Political Polls and Averages
A comprehensive list of polls and polling averages for elections and politician approval.
Opinion | This Is What Will Ruin Public Opinion Polling for Good
Instead of navigating the obstacles to conduct polls with human respondents, pollsters are running A.I. simulations instead. Why?
Is it time to think beyond Ranked Choice Voting?
We love being able to show our preferences. We want to vote our conscience. But is RCV really the best option?
Political Bias Audits of LLMs Capture Sycophancy to the Inferred Auditor
Large language models (LLMs) are commonly evaluated for political bias based on their responses to fixed questionnaires, which typically place frontier models on the political left. A parallel literature shows that LLMs are sycophantic: they adapt their answers to the views, identities, and expectations of the user. We show that these findings are linked: standard political-bias audits partly capture sycophantic accommodation to the inferred auditor. We employ a factorial experiment across three major audit instruments--the Political Compass Test, the Pew Political Typology, and 1,540 partisan-benchmarked Pew American Trends Panel items--administered to six frontier LLMs while varying only the asker's stated identity (N = 30,990 responses). At baseline, all six models lean left. When the asker identifies as a conservative Republican, responses shift sharply: the share of items closer to Democrats falls by 28-62 percentage points, and all six models move right of center. A mirror-image progressive-Democrat cue produces little change; rightward accommodation is 8.0$\times$ larger than leftward. When asked who the default asker is, models identify an auditor, researcher, or academic; when asked what answer that asker expects, they select the Democrat-coded option 75% of the time, nearly the rate under an explicit progressive cue. These patterns are inconsistent with a purely fixed model ideology and indicate that single-prompt audits capture an interaction between model and inferred interlocutor. Political bias in LLMs is therefore not a fixed point on an ideological scale but a response profile that must be mapped across realistic interlocutors.
Democracy is an epistemic discipline, it only works if truth can constrain power. Without a faster, more transparent architecture for shared reality, the arc of democracy bends away from substance, through simulation, and toward authoritarianism. Without major action, it's the inevitable end state.
