In the six years since the Our Common Purpose report was released, dramatic shifts to the information ecosystem have transformed the relationship between citizens and the media, providing serious challenges to an informed and participatory democracy. Journalism faces business model challenges aggravated by a shift away from search and toward AI, as well as governmental attacks on journalistic independence and on public media. Influential technology platforms have retreated from the difficult, controversial work of fact-checking, seeking to reduce their political exposure, while platforms like Truth Social and X are now explicitly associated with political actors. We believe even larger changes are brewing, from promising experiments in community ownership and management of social networks to the emerging idea of AI sovereignty, which may see governments around the world challenge American and Chinese companies over the ownership of powerful AI tools.
The collapse of local newspapers and the decline in the number of local journalists is associated with a variety of democratic ills, including more corruption, fewer candidates running for office, less knowledgeable voters, less participation in civic associations, and increased polarization. In addition, the vacuum left by local news has been filled by national media institutions and social media, concentrating the control of information in a few powerful hands and deepening public mistrust of the media. It will take a combination of creative public policy, philanthropic support, social entrepreneurship, and business model innovation to counter these trends. But perhaps above all else, we need a sufficient number of local reporters on the ground in communities.
Citizens' assemblies are generating renewed interest as a tool for democratic renewal, but their promise requires honest assessment. While deliberative processes can improve the quality of public input, they consistently leave unresolved the harder challenge of converting consensus recommendations into durable policy outcomes with legislative champions. Carolyn Lukensmeyer's case studies reveal a common pattern: citizens' assemblies function best not as alternatives to representative institutions but as complements to them. Attempts to circumvent legislatures risk sidelining the very actors responsible for implementation. Scaling these models nationally compounds challenges of representativeness and political complexity. Democratic renewal depends not on expanding citizen input alone but on building better pathways from deliberation to decision to implementation within existing governing structures.
Americans' disconnect from their elected officials has reached crisis levels. What potential do citizens' assemblies and participatory decision-making hold for restoring people's trust in their democracy? This essay explores three case studies of partici-patory governance at three levels-in California, in Bowling Green, Kentucky, and in Fort Collins, Colorado; virtually and in person-and finds that Americans are ready and willing to participate in well-designed deliberative processes and are willing to accept the outcomes of deliberative bodies. But representativeness and account-ability in those processes are essential and not easy to come by. This analysis invites the question of whether these democratic experiments can scale up to where they are needed most: our national politics
