About the series

Narrowing the gap between research and public dialogue, the primers responsibly advance conversations and strategy about proposed changes to our political institutions. Launched in 2024 by the University of Chicago’s Center for Effective Government (CEG), the series is now led in partnership between CEG and Johns Hopkins University’s School of Government and Policy.

Each primer focuses on a particular reform idea, clarifies its intended purposes, and critically evaluates what the best available research has to say about it.

The primers do not serve as a platform for either authors or the institutional partners to advance their own independent views about the reform. To the contrary, they serve as an objective and authoritative guide about what we actually know—and what we still don’t know—about the likely effects of adopting prominent reforms to our political institutions.

The available evidence may clearly support or cut against the claims of a reform’s advocates, and be mixed, indeterminate, or altogether silent.

Without partisan judgment or ideological pretense, and grounded in objective scholarship, these primers set the record straight by clarifying what can be said about democracy reforms with confidence and what requires further study. 

About the editor

Anthony Fowler

Anthony Fowler is the founding editor of the Democracy Reform Primer Series, a professor at the Harris School of Public Policy, and the director of the Center for Effective Government at the University of Chicago. His research applies econometric methods for causal inference to questions in political science, with particular emphasis on elections and political representation. Fowler is currently the co-editor in Chief of the Quarterly Journal of Political Science, and the co-author (with Ethan Bueno de Mesquita) of Thinking Clearly with Data: A Guide to Quantitative Reasoning and Analysis (Princeton University Press, 2021). Fowler earned his Ph.D. in government from Harvard University and completed undergraduate studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

About the director

Brooke Brower

Brooke Brower is the director of the Democracy Reform Primer Series at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Government and Policy. For more than two decades, he worked at the center of American political journalism — producing and leading coverage at ABC News, CNN, and MSNBC that shaped how millions understood elections, policy, and democratic institutions. Before joining Johns Hopkins, he was executive producer of ABC’s This Week with George Stephanopoulos, earning four Emmy nominations, and previously served as the managing editor of CNN’s digital political coverage. Earlier in his career at MSNBC, he launched programs and produced presidential primary debates. He has taught courses at Georgetown and Northwestern, where he earned a master’s degree, and holds a B.A. from the University of Virginia.