About

Democracy's Cookbook explores how political institutions shape representation through an integrated lens combining institutional design science with principles of political equality, popular sovereignty, and effective governance.

Just as every culture has developed its own culinary traditions, every democracy has its own recipe for translating votes into representation. The ingredients — district magnitude, allocation formulas, ballot structures — determine who gets a seat at the table. This project examines those recipes across cities and countries, asking: who is represented, who is left out, and what would it take to build longer tables?

Author

Michael Latneris a Director of Research on Democratic Reform at Harvard Law School's Center on the Legal Profession and a Professor of Political Science at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo. He is an electoral engineer and builder of longer tables.

Data

All election and demographic data comes from CLEO (Comparative Local Elections Observatory), an open dataset covering municipal elections in the Netherlands (Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Den Haag, Utrecht), Germany (Berlin, Hamburg, Köln, Dortmund, Frankfurt), and Brazil (São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Belo Horizonte).

Religion infrastructure is approximated using OpenStreetMap places-of-worship data. Candidate migration background in Germany is inferred using large language models.

The Guinier Project

This work builds on the Guinier Project: User's Guide to Electoral System Design, developed with the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice at Harvard Law School. The primer explores how design choices — seat product, ballot structure, and allocation formula — determine who wins representation and who is left out.

Newsletter

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