A Movement for Small-District, Web-Connected, Decentralized Democracy
About
Citizens Rising is about the future of representative democracy
Today congressional districts comprise an average of 760,000 inhabitants.
Many state legislative districts contain over 100,000 persons.
Even local governments, which are supposed to be closest to the people, may have only one elected city councilor or county supervisor for hundreds of thousands of constituents.
The result of political districts with huge populations is that elected officials no longer represent citizens.
Instead, they now serve the various political and corporate interests that allow professional politicians to successfully market themselves to large masses of people.
It doesn’t have to be like this. Not in the Information Age.
At Citizens Rising we intend to birth a revolution for small, Web-connected, political districts of 30,000 inhabitants or less, at all levels of government throughout the United States.
Together, we will restore government of, by and for, the people.
Why Small Districts
Small and decentralized political districts:
- Better mirror the values, interests and desires of ordinary people.
- Encourage citizen government instead of government by professional politicians.
- Further diversity in government, allowing for fuller representation of people and groups who are traditionally underrepresented.
- Remove the corrupting influence of money in politics as districts get smaller.
- Disempower lobbyists.
- Reduce incumbent advantages as districts get smaller.
- Make gerrymandering more difficult in most places.
- Promote better legislative committee work by distributing workloads more broadly and drawing from a large pool of citizen-representatives containing a wide variety of professional specializations.
Our Strategy
Start locally and build a movement
The holy grail of Small-district Democracy in the United States is the reformation of the US House of Representatives into many, small, legislate-from-home, congressional districts.
Along the way, many state and local political districts with extreme representative-to-citizens ratios can and should be reduced to vastly improve democratic representation.
In so doing, we will help nurture and develop a new transformative Information Age political culture that will empower people over politicians and special interests.
Learn More
Donate and Volunteer
Cities Rising!
Cities Rising is a new nonprofit charitable organization dedicated to public education and conversation about the best democratic practices for municipal government in the United States and beyond.
Did you know that some of the world’s most livable cities are governed by city legislatures consisting of many everyday people?
Did you know, too, that some of these same cities practice decentralized democracy, with representative government functioning near the people, at the borough level?
Parents Rising!
American schools are underperforming. School closures during the covid crisis set students back, and now they struggle to catch up. Meanwhile, political and social ideology is dividing school communities and distracting from the essential mission of educating students. School boards have become politicized, which is a natural outcome of educational systems run by politicians beholden to various interests. It’s time to consider new ideas for school system governance based firmly on parent control. It starts with small, community-sized, school board districts. Learn more at ParentsRising.net.