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The Laurence and Lynne Brown Democracy Medal recognizes outstanding individuals, groups, and organizations that produce exceptional innovations to further democracy in the United States or around the world. The inaugural medal winner, the Participatory Budgeting Project (PBP), is an innovative not-for-profit organization that promotes “participatory budgeting,” an inclusive process that empowers community members to make informed decisions about public spending. More than 46,000 people in communities across the United States have decided how to spend $45 million through programs that PBP helped spark over the last five years. This book provides a concise history of the organization's origins and its vision, highlighting its real-world successes in fostering grassroots budgeting campaigns in such cities as New York, Boston, and Chicago. As more and more communities turn to participatory budgeting as a means of engaging citizens, prioritizing civic projects, and allocating local, state, and federal funding, this volume aims to offer guidance and inspiration to others who want to transform democracy in the United States and elsewhere.

This book is an attempt to understand citizen development and engagement. It takes the reader through interpretations of development initiatives at the grassroots and what good governance means to ordinary people. The book unravels the power of citizen engagement through the author's experiences of leading civil society campaigns against corruption and towards strengthening democratic participation of people. It also deals with the philosophical underpinnings of public policies, drawing from the author's on-the-ground experience as well as engagement with those in the higher echelons of policymaking and implementation. The last section of the book provides glimpses into milestones of a development movement; milestones that are responsible for a continued faith in citizen engagement despite the hindering forces.

This book is the first to analyze the democratic effects of consumer activism, defined as boycotting, socially responsible investing, social media campaigns, and direct consumer actions. America has had a long and unique history of consumer activism, starting with the Boston Tea Party. Since the founding, activism in the marketplace has been used as a political tool for those who are politically disenfranchised, including the colonists who lacked formal representation in the British parliament, women before suffrage rights, and Black Americans during Jim Crow. More recently, consumer activism has become a countervailing force against overbearing corporate power in politics. This book blends democratic theory with data, historical analysis, and an examination of consumer campaigns for civil rights, environmental conservation, animal rights, gender justice, LGBT rights, and conservative causes. Consumer activism is a democratizing force that improves political participation, self-governance, government accountability, and corporate political accountability.

Why did election monitoring become an international norm? Why do pseudo-democrats invite international observers, even when they are likely to be caught manipulating elections? Is election observation an effective tool of democracy promotion, or is it simply a way to legitimize electoral autocracies? This book explains international election monitoring with a new theory of international norm formation. It argues that election observation was initiated by states seeking international support. International benefits tied to democracy give some governments an incentive to signal their commitment to democratization without having to give up power. Invitations to nonpartisan foreigners to monitor elections, and avoiding their criticism, became a widely recognized and imitated signal of a government's purported commitment to democratic elections. The book draws on cross-national data on the global spread of election observation between 1960 and 2006, detailed descriptions of the characteristics of countries that do and do not invite observers, and evidence of three ways that election monitoring is costly to pseudo-democrats: micro-level experimental tests from elections in Armenia and Indonesia showing that observers can deter election day fraud and otherwise improve the quality of elections; illustrative cases demonstrating that international benefits are contingent on democracy in countries like Haiti, Peru, Togo, and Zimbabwe; and qualitative evidence documenting the escalating game of strategic manipulation among pseudo-democrats, international monitors, and pro-democracy forces.

The Laurence and Lynne Brown Democracy Medal recognizes outstanding individuals, groups, and organizations that produce exceptional innovations to further democracy in the United States or around the world. In this book the 2015 winner of the Brown Democracy Medal argues that we need to rethink American democracy, as well as our own fundamental values and commitments, from a caring perspective. Asserting that Americans are facing a “caring deficit”—that there are simply too many demands on our time to care adequately for children, elderly people, and ourselves—the book asks us to reconsider how we allocate care responsibilities. At the same time, while democratic politics should help citizens to care better, most people see caring as unsupported by public life and deem the concerns of politics as too remote from their lives to make a difference in this sphere. The book traces the reasons for this disconnect and argues for the need to make care, not economics, the central concern of democratic political life.