APPLICATION DEADLINE IS MAY 15, 2026

AASCU invites faculty and staff passionate about civic and democratic engagement, innovation, and student learning to apply for Innovations in Democracy. Fifteen participants will be selected to explore democratic innovations, such as primary election reform and citizens' assemblies, and to apply new approaches to teaching and co-curricular civic engagement on their campuses. 

 Participants of This Cohort Will Receive: 

• A $1,000 summer stipend 

• Expert guidance 

• Mini-grants of up to $1,500 to support approved fall 2026 project activities as part of their on-campus initiatives

This cohort is supported by Unite America to strengthen democratic participation and build a more representative system of governance.
  | Apply Today | 

Learn more about the application process and what to expect. 

Applications are due Friday, May 15

In 2026 I became the American Democracy Project's lead faculty member on a project about which I'm very excited: Innovations in Democracy, a grant-funded national program supported by Unite America that brings together faculty and staff from AASCU's 350-member institutions to build their capacity to teach democratic innovation and translate that learning into concrete, campus-based student projects.

The program sits at the intersection of two commitments that have defined my scholarly and administrative career: the belief that regional public universities have an irreplaceable role in strengthening democratic participation, and the conviction that civic education at its best is not about transmitting information but about equipping students with the knowledge and tools to engage with democratic systems critically and constructively. Innovations in Democracy is built on exactly that conviction, and leading it nationally is among the most meaningful professional responsibilities I currently hold.

What the Program Does

Innovations in Democracy addresses a gap that most campus civic engagement programs do not reach: the structural dimensions of democracy itself. Voter registration and turnout work — the focus of most campus civic engagement programming — is essential, but it operates within electoral and governance systems whose design shapes participation in ways that most students, and many faculty, never examine directly. This program asks a different set of questions: How do electoral systems shape representation? What are the consequences of primary election design for candidate recruitment and partisan polarization? How do mechanisms like ranked choice voting, participatory governance, and citizen assemblies change the relationship between citizens and democratic institutions?

Selected faculty and staff learn about democratic innovations such as ranked choice voting, primary election reform, participatory governance, and other approaches designed to strengthen fair representation. Through expert-led sessions, peer exchange, and individual project coaching, participants connect these ideas to their teaching or co-curricular civic activities. By the end of the summer cohort, each participant develops a concrete, actionable campus project that launches in the fall — creating direct student learning experiences around democratic innovation rather than stopping at awareness. 

The program's topical scope is deliberately comprehensive. Cohort sessions address ranked choice voting and single transferable vote systems, alternatives to direct primaries, automatic voter registration and vote-by-mail, multi-member districts and geographic representation, campaign finance reform, citizen assemblies and participatory governance, and emerging civic technology. That breadth reflects the program's animating premise: that students who understand how democratic systems are designed — and how they could be designed differently — are better equipped to participate in, evaluate, and improve them.

My Role as Lead Faculty

As lead faculty for the program, my responsibilities extend across the full arc of the cohort experience — from curriculum design and session facilitation to individual project coaching and the development of assessment frameworks that measure whether participating campuses are producing the student learning outcomes the program promises.

That role draws directly on the full range of my professional experience. My research on primary elections and their unintended consequences — developed over two decades and most fully articulated in Primary Elections and American Politics (SUNY Press, 2022, co-authored with Joseph Romance) — gives me scholarly grounding in exactly the structural questions the program addresses. My twenty years of campus civic engagement practice, including voter engagement work across three institutions and the development of the Civic Incomes Assessment project at Radford, give me practitioner grounding in what it takes to translate a national program's ambitions into something that actually works in the specific, constrained, resource-limited context of a regional comprehensive university department or co-curricular office.

And my experience evaluating civic engagement programs — as an ALL IN Campus Democracy Challenge Action Plan reviewer, as an ADP Civic Fellow whose second term focused on ADP institutionalization, and as a member of the ADP National Steering Committee — gives me the evaluative perspective to assess whether what the program is producing is genuine civic learning or performative compliance with a grant requirement.

Why This Work Matters

The structural dimensions of democracy that Innovations in Democracy addresses are not academic abstractions. Primary election design shapes who runs for office and who wins. Electoral systems shape whose votes translate into representation. Participatory governance mechanisms shape whether citizens experience government as something that responds to them or something that happens to them. These are live, contested, consequential questions in American political life right now — and the students who will navigate that political life deserve an education that equips them to understand and engage with those questions rather than simply casting a ballot in a system they have never been asked to examine.

Regional public universities are particularly well-positioned to do this work. Our students are disproportionately the citizens most affected by the structural features of democracy that get the least scholarly attention — voters in low-competition primary states, residents of communities underrepresented in at-large electoral systems, workers whose political participation is constrained by registration and polling place design. Teaching democratic innovation at institutions like ours is not a luxury or an enrichment activity. It is part of the core civic mission that regional public higher education exists to fulfill.

Leading Innovations in Democracy is, in that sense, a direct expression of the civic architecture work that has organized my career — building national institutional infrastructure for the kind of civic education that changes not just what students know about democracy, but what they believe they can do within it and to it.