What Is Civil Society’s Transformative Vision for Democracy?

In Defense of Civil Society, a column from the staff at Protect Democracy, provides timely, research-driven analysis on why protecting American democracy requires protecting civil society and how nonprofits can navigate this moment, stand in solidarity, and continue our mission-oriented work.

The United States is in the midst of a polycrisis—multiple, interconnected crises that amplify each other—and at its center is a steady slide toward authoritarianism. We’re facing an imminent breakdown of civil rights, the rule of law, and the integrity of our Constitution; economic, climate, health, and military crises are accelerating in turn. Civil society, including the nonprofit sector, is rushing to respond on all these fronts, while also holding the line against a government fixated on self-enrichment, retribution, and control. Despite our efforts, these emergencies continue to compound.

The cause of our polycrisis, and our inability to find our way out, is systemic. It lies in our electoral system—the rules that translate our votes into representation, determining who wields political power and how effectively we can respond to our overlapping crises. Our electoral system was built in a different era, for a different country. It does not reliably turn what Americans want into what their government does, and it structurally advantages the authoritarianism now stifling civil society.

Leaders, organizations, and donors across the sector are looking to trade their current defensive crouch for an affirmative vision: a strategy for creating the future rather than merely surviving the present. To achieve this, civil society—those advocates, organizations, and other actors operating outside the government—must address the electoral system that keeps us trapped in this pattern. Fundamentally reforming this system could both protect us against authoritarian repression and empower us to win real progress on the causes for which we fight. Proportional representation is the transformational change that can get us there.

Playing Defense Isn’t Enough

Today, transformative change is the province of the authoritarian. The Trump administration has deployed every arm of the federal government to completely reshape American society and the government’s role within it: deploying military personnel to police American streets, chilling dissent through retaliatory investigations and prosecutions, and slashing federal funding to nonprofits.

The frequency, magnitude, and interconnectedness of these moves mean that responding to each one as they emerge—essential as it is—cannot be the whole strategy for protecting our democracy.

Take, for example, the administration’s effort to gain an advantage in the midterms through mid-cycle redistricting. Heeding the President’s call to tilt the playing field in his favor, Republican-led states have redrawn their maps for partisan gain, disempowering millions of their voters with the stroke of a pen. Democrats participated in this tit-for-tat battle, answering with gerrymanders of their own.

[Proportional representation] would reform the rules of our feeble democracy, stopping the authoritarian capture of power at the root.

Then, in April, the Supreme Court gutted Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. States like Louisiana and Alabama responded by swiftly moving to dismantle their majority-Black districts, creating a precedent that threatens all communities’ ability to build and keep electoral power. Just like that, the authoritarian movement enacted transformational change for the worse—and the opposition might feel powerless to do anything about it.

In response to crises like these, we need to think bigger. Tactical wins are real and necessary, but they can easily be overridden by another, more dramatic authoritarian action. Only a structural reform can both protect civil society from authoritarian capture and lay a new foundation on which it can build power. Proportional representation is that reform.

Proportional Representation, Explained

Proportional representation (or ProRep) is uniquely suited to counter our authoritarian crisis because it shifts how we earn and distribute electoral power. It’s now been a decade since Donald Trump was first elected. In that time, we have seen authoritarianism surface, be temporarily beaten back, and then resurge. This is not because the authoritarian has been consistently popular all this time. It’s because our democracy’s underlying structure makes it vulnerable to repeated capture. As historian Jefferson Cowie recently wrote in Democracy:

The subversion of American democracy is not a bad actor problem; it is a bad system problem. Stop worrying about how President Trump will destroy democracy and start thinking about how a feeble democracy produced him.

ProRep would reform the rules of our feeble democracy, stopping the authoritarian capture of power at the root.

Put simply, ProRep is a better electoral system—a method of translating votes earned by a candidate or party into seats won in a legislature. Its defining feature is the multi-winner district: rather than each district electing a single representative, each one elects several, and representation is allocated in proportion to how people vote.

Imagine a state that elects six representatives. Under ProRep, instead of that state being split into six districts, it could form one large six-winner district. A party that wins half the statewide vote takes about three of the state’s six seats; a party with a third of the vote takes two; a smaller party or community with a sixth of the vote takes one. Almost all voters—not just the largest faction—end up with someone in Congress who actually represents them.

By contrast, every American today lives in a single-winner district. Voters cast a vote for a candidate, one candidate wins, and everyone else loses. That makes our elections “winner-take-all”: a candidate with 51 percent of the vote takes 100 percent of the representation, and everyone who backed someone else is left without a voice. In a winner-take-all system, it’s possible for that state electing six representatives to send six members of its majority party to Congress, and give zero representation to everyone who voted differently.

ProRep does not tinker with our current rules in the hope of a better result. It does not keep our winner-take-all system (as many reforms do). It is a systemic change. And because it is a system-level reform, it would yield system-wide transformation: offering the potential to foster a representative multiracial democracy, stem the authoritarian tide stifling civil society, and open new opportunities for progress across our political landscape.

What ProRep Can Deliver for Civil Society

ProRep is unique among reform options because it sits upstream of all the others. Our democracy suffers many symptoms from our polycrisis—shrinking minority representation, accelerating polarization, and gridlock—but these are fed and sustained by our winner-take-all electoral system. The thoughtful electoral reforms currently on the table—from ranked-choice voting to independent redistricting commissions to open primaries—each treat a symptom or two. ProRep treats the disease itself.

ProRep can help us achieve true representational democracy.

In a winner-take-all system like ours, voters have meager choices, and most elections are essentially decided before a single vote is cast. By contrast, ProRep fosters meaningful competition by making nearly every election competitive, regardless of where you live. Proportionally electing legislators from multi-winner districts means that no district is “safely” red or blue; instead, parties vie for seats in proportion to their support.

ProRep sits upstream of all the others. Our democracy suffers many symptoms from our polycrisis—but these are fed and sustained by our winner-take-all electoral system.

This means that ProRep makes gerrymandering functionally impossible. With  larger, multi-winner districts proportionally electing representatives (instead of the single-winner districts we have now), district lines can’t be manipulated to advantage one party or the other. This means voters can’t be disempowered by getting boxed into districts they have no hope of winning.

ProRep prevents more than the manipulation of partisan power—it also restores political power to voters of color and ensures they keep it. By ensuring that all communities are represented, proportional systems produce more diverse and durable racial representation. This matters acutely right now, as organizations advocating for communities of color have become targets of authoritarian scapegoating. Under ProRep, those communities can win representation—and use it to defend themselves against authoritarian threats.

ProRep can make civic space safer by tempering extremism and political violence.

Civil society’s most immediate concern is its ability to operate safely. When nonprofit organizations and leaders face government intimidation, threats of political violence, and a hardening, polarized climate, they cannot carry out their work safely or effectively. Evidence from around the world demonstrates that ProRep helps democracies better manage polarization and mitigate political violence. ProRep can help expand our politics beyond a two-sided, us-vs-them divide, leaving less room for nonprofits and their work to become political targets and more room for the kind of problem-solving at the heart of their missions.

Two dynamics drive this. First, ProRep encourages multipartyism. Our rigid two-party system is a main driver of our spiraling polarization—and our winner-take-all electoral structure is the reason for its rigidity. By contrast, in multiparty systems, more viewpoints are represented, and parties have room to collaborate, evolve, and form coalitions rather than being locked into a zero-sum battle where the opposing party is an eternal enemy. This, in turn, counteracts affective polarization—where citizens don’t merely disagree with each other’s views, but distrust and dislike each other personally.

Second, ProRep lowers the stakes of losing elections by facilitating power-sharing. In winner-take-all systems, those who lose are shut out of power entirely and are more likely to turn to violence to influence outcomes. Under ProRep, even those who don’t come in first place in an election still maintain some voice in government. The result of this necessary power-sharing is that countries with ProRep see substantially less political violence. When citizens and politicians alike have room for discourse, coalition-building, and compromise, civic space is safer and freer.

ProRep creates new opportunities for civil society to drive progress.

Changing our electoral system changes the politics that follow. By increasing competition and accountability, representing more voters fairly, and opening the door to more than two parties, ProRep could break the two-party gridlock that currently forecloses real progress. It could give nonprofits a more dynamic, coalition-based landscape through which to advance their missions. It could increase voter turnout, drawing millions more Americans into civic life. And it could rebuild trust in democracy by giving people across ideologies, geographies, and backgrounds a stake in maintaining it.

At the same time, ProRep is not a pro-democracy panacea. America’s authoritarian movement will not vanish the moment we adopt a system that no longer favors it. But a proportional system would limit an authoritarian faction to the share of power its votes actually earn. Our two-party system does the opposite: it lets a determined faction capture one of just two major parties—and with it, the machinery of the federal government. Around the world, by contrast, diverse multiparty coalitions routinely form to isolate anti-democratic factions. In short, ProRep can deny authoritarians the concentrated power they so often turn against civil society.

Civil Society’s Stake in Reinventing Our Democracy

As our country reaches its 250th anniversary, civil society is rushing to plug the holes caused by our cascading crises. Despite our efforts, the boat is still taking on water, because the core problem is structural.

Proportional representation would set our democracy on a different course, one where we are relieved from the authoritarian onslaught and can safely engage with a truly representative and dynamic political system to create meaningful change. Rejecting the authoritarian movement will take an overwhelming, monumental effort over the next few years. But it will happen—and the window of opportunity that opens in its aftermath will decide the next turn our democracy takes. Pro-democracy forces must be ready to seize that moment and do something lasting with it.

Enacting a reform this consequential demands enormous coalition-building and political capital—exactly what civil society is suited to provide. Adopting ProRep is more achievable than its scale would suggest—it would take an act of Congress, not a constitutional amendment. The diverse representation, anti-authoritarian guardrails, and new political possibilities ProRep delivers belong to no single party, community, or class—they would benefit all Americans. With civil society leading, the cross-cutting base of support this change requires is within reach.

There is work the sector can begin now. Organizations can educate their staff, boards, and communities about how ProRep works and why it matters to their mission, bringing the case for structural reform into public conversations. Civil society leaders can build strong cross-ideological coalitions around this structural reform. And donors can resource the research, organizing, and advocacy that make ProRep viable, much as they already fund the downstream work it would protect.

American democracy is truly the sum of its parts. A healthy civil society has been this country’s moral compass in the modern era—holding leaders accountable while championing and cementing wins from civil rights to labor protections to climate policy and beyond. To keep driving that progress for the next 250 years, civil society must do more than defend the system beneath it—it must help reinvent it. Proportional representation is where that reinvention begins.