Revitalizing American Institutions

The Hoover Institution’s Center for Revitalizing American Institutions (RAI), in its first full year of operations, made an impressive mark on discourse and scholarship concerning civics, government institutions and democratic practice. Across a wide swath of subjects relevant to institutional renewal in America—from public pensions to the judiciary, Congress, and civic education—RAI scholars offered concrete steps to reverse the decline in trust in US institutions. Below are highlights of RAI’s very impactful 2024.

Governmental Institutions

Hoover Cosponsors Major Report on US House of Representatives Reform

Scholars from the Hoover Institution joined forces with former members of Congress, congressional staffers, and other academics to write and present a comprehensive report aimed at improving the lawmaking process within the US House of Representatives.

The report, “Revitalizing the House: Bipartisan Recommendations on Rules and Process,” recommends distinctive procedure and rule changes as well as more general adjustments to working conditions, which its authors believe will empower committees and members in ways that will foster more bipartisanship and create more sound legislation.

This effort was cosponsored by RAI and the Sunwater Institute.

The lead authors of the report include RAI director Brandice Canes-Wrone, Sunwater Institute founder Matthew Chervenak, the Honorable Daniel Lipinski, a Hoover distinguished visiting fellow and former representative for Illinois’s Third District from 2005 to 2022, and Philip Wallach, senior fellow with the American Enterprise Institute.

“Revitalizing the House” was released on September 17 with a lunchtime presentation on Capitol Hill and an evening event  at the Sunwater Institute offices in Washington, DC.

The authors recommend a variety of changes to legislative procedure, committee scheduling, and staff recruitment; more opportunities for bipartisan social activity to promote collegiality; and possibly increasing members’ pay, which has stayed the same since 2009.

Click here to read more.

Hoover Hosts Administrative Law Conference

In January, RAI held a one-day conference examining the legitimacy of administrative law in the United States. It explored the proper role of administrative agencies in the American constitutional order, considering recent Supreme Court decisions that have questioned and sought to rethink basic elements of administrative law, including the nondelegation doctrine, the Chevron deference, administrative adjudication, standing, removal, and more.

Conference participants asked: Have courts and administrative agencies overstepped their bounds? Is this what could be contributing to a decline in Americans’ trust in them? Following the conference, RAI commissioned four essays assessing the role and value of administrative law in the United States:

• “Power Corrupts” by Emily S. Bremer
• “Administrative Harms” by Philip Hamburger
• “The Major Questions Doctrine: Right Diagnosis, Wrong Remedy” by Thomas W. Merrill
• “The Administrative State, Inside Out” by Cass R. Sunstein

Read more about the essays here.

Executive-Judicial Relations Conference

On June 6–7, Visiting Fellow Sharece Thrower brought together leading experts at Hoover for an RAI conference to discuss the mechanisms that define the US governing framework of separation of powers, specifically interactions between the executive and judicial branches. A key theme throughout the discussion was how factors including ideology, ambition, political salience, and the merits of individual cases can sway judicial decisions and executive or prosecutorial actions.

Presenters raised issues such as disputes between the executive and judicial branches on the release of politically sensitive or controlled information; the relationship between US attorneys’ degree of autonomy and their plea/conviction rates; and the idea of Supreme Court term limits, which could reshape the court’s ideological composition more rapidly than the current arrangement allows.

To read more about the conference, click here.

RAI Hosts Public Pensions Conference

RAI brought together analysts, scholars, and public officials in March 2024 to discuss the looming challenge of public pension reform. Under the guidance of Visiting Fellow Sarah F. Anzia, participants presented a mixed picture of the health of public pension plans in the United States. Analysts in attendance who had examined more than 200 major state and municipal pension funds revealed their findings that in 2023 the assets of these funds met only 78 percent of their liabilities. Combined, the pension liabilities of these various jurisdictions amounted to a total of $1.44 trillion in 2023, up from $1.35 trillion in 2009. As more and more money must be diverted to these plans from general operating revenues to keep them afloat, there is a risk that they “crowd out” other funding priorities, such as the operation of a school district or core public works.

Click here to read more.

Analysis of Presidential Transitions

RAI’s Reimagining American Institutions webinar series is continuing, with a recent episode broadcast live on C-SPAN Radio.

In a webinar broadcast on October 24, Hoover Institution director Condoleezza Rice joined Stephen Hadley, who replaced her as White House national security advisor when she became secretary of state, to discuss how an effective changing of the guard is critical to national security. Hadley cited advice from Hand-Off, an edited volume of 30 declassified National Security Council memoranda prepared by experts to smooth the transition between the Bush and Obama administrations. This conversation focused on what must happen in the upcoming presidential transition to ensure the United States is kept secure from national security challenges that include threats posed by China, Russia, and the Middle East, as well as terrorism, nuclear proliferation, cybersecurity, pandemics, and climate change.

View the episode here.

Organizations and Democratic Practice

Hoover’s Eugene Volokh Debuts Free Speech: Unmuted Podcast

In January 2024, the Hoover Institution debuted Free Speech: Unmuted,  a new podcast featuring senior fellow and RAI affiliate Eugene Volokh and Jane Bambauer, professor of law and communications at the University of Florida. Together, they explore current issues surrounding the First Amendment. Initial episodes have dealt with school district book bans, the constitutionality of state laws prohibiting social media content moderation, whether the government can ask social media platforms to remove certain posts it deems harmful, and whether artificial intelligence companies can be held legally liable when their AI products generate false information. Volokh offers listeners a deep base of knowledge and widely cited legal scholarship in matters involving the First Amendment.

Click here to access episodes of Free Speech Unmuted.

Ballots and Battlegrounds Event in Michigan Demonstrates Hoover’s Commitment to Election Integrity

As part of his ongoing commitment to ensuring the accurate results of the 2024 election are accepted and believed by the electorate, Distinguished Visiting Fellow Ben Ginsberg helped convene the Ballots and Battlegrounds: Ensuring Election Safeguards event in Ann Arbor, Michigan, on September 23.

Read more here.

Ginsberg also spoke at Hoover’s Washington, DC, offices on September 12, alongside his longtime peer and partner in the Pillars of the Community election-trust initiative, Bob Bauer, as part of Hoover’s Ideas Uncorked Series. The pair spoke about the various efforts they are undertaking to restore public confidence in the electoral process.

Ginsberg also joined Michigan secretary of state Jocelyn Benson and elections expert David Becker for an appearance on PBS’s The Firing Line with Margaret Hoover, discussing safeguarding the vote and instilling public confidence in the electoral process ahead of November 5.

You can watch the interview here.

Democratic Citizenship

Good American Citizenship Working Group

Senior Fellow Chester E. Finn Jr.’s Good American Citizenship Working Group released the results of its 2023 State of American Citizenship Survey. In it, Finn and Jed Ngalande find that that many Americans are distrustful of the federal government, elected officials, and politics and that their understanding of government structures and functions is declining. But traditional American sentiments such as patriotism are still widely held. Also, most respondents value democracy, support the public display of the American flag, and want their elected representatives to seek compromise more often. The group also published a content analysis of 87 civics textbooks from 1885 to 2000 and found the texts gradually shifted from an emphasis on government structure to studies of the actions of historically significant individuals.

US National Election Panel

Senior fellows Douglas Rivers and David Brady continued their ongoing series of interviews of very large cohorts of voters—100,000 per quarter and 12,000 per month—in the approach to the January 2025 presidential inauguration. The participants are asked questions including their ratings of candidates, vote intention, positions on key policy issues, economic expectations, income, and employment status. The dataset now includes more than 600,000 interviews, enabling a very close examination of what events in the current election cycle changed voters’ minds.

Stanford Civics Initiative

As part of the Stanford Civics Initiative, many Hoover fellows, including Senior Fellow Josiah Ober, Director Condoleezza Rice, RAI director Brandice Canes-Wrone, senior fellow and Hoover History Lab director Stephen Kotkin, and Senior Fellow Peter Berkowitz are teaching courses to instill and revive ideas about democratic citizenship among Stanford undergraduates.

Ober also gathered university educators on April 13 to discuss the decline of civics education at US universities, along with innovative ways to reinvigorate the teaching of civics at the undergraduate level.

Deliberative Democracy Lab Hosts America in One Room: The Youth Vote

Stanford’s Deliberative Democracy Lab, in concert with RAI and several other organizations, convened a panel of 500 young first-time voters in Washington, DC, on July 19–22, 2024. Participants were asked a series of questions related to the economy, the rise of AI, healthcare, the environment, and their personal voting intentions. The group came to some interesting conclusions, all of which can be found here.

A video of the event can be found here.