Connecting to Congress is an initiative born from, and rooted in, rigorous research and evaluation. The principles and practices of “directly representative democracy” were devised by a collaborative team of notable scholars with a great depth of relevant expertise. Results of initial experiments implementing deliberative online town halls in Congress are shared in a new book, Politics with the People: Building a Directly Representative Democracy (Cambridge University Press, 2018).

This new initiative is led by the Institute for Democratic Engagement and Accountability (IDEA) at The Ohio State University, in collaboration with an inter-university consortium of scholars, including faculty from The Ohio State University, University of Houston, University of California-Riverside, and Stockton University. This initiative is supported in part by The Democracy Fund, the Charles F. Kettering Foundation, and other bi- or non-partisan civil society organizations.