Democracy's Cookbook
Recipes for political equality and popular sovereignty
Data-driven stories about electoral systems, representation, and the many ways people make democracy work around the world.
Featured Story
Amsterdam: Who Represents the Jordaan?
How migration, mosques, and municipal elections shape representation in one of Europe's most diverse cities. An interactive scroll through Amsterdam's neighborhoods, from the canal ring to the Bijlmer.
Read the story →What is this?
Democracy's Cookbook is a collection of data-driven stories exploring how different electoral systems shape who gets represented — and who doesn't. Each story combines interactive maps, precinct-level election data, and neighborhood demographics to show how votes become seats.
“One of the most pressing challenges of American democracy is finding an appropriate method of allocating political power among an increasingly diverse — in terms of race, ethnicity, religion, national origin, class, and ideology — and polarized people.”
The data comes from CLEO (Comparative Local Elections Observatory), an open dataset of municipal election results joined to precinct-level demographics across the Netherlands, Germany, and Brazil.