Democracy's Second Act: Why Politics Needs the Public

Democracy isn’t broken - it’s stuck. Around the world, people are growing angry and polarized - not because they’ve stopped caring, but because democracy has stopped evolving.The result isn’t apathy - it is a rising sense of political futility. In Democracy’s Second Act, Peter MacLeod and Richard Johnson argue that the First Act of democracy - anchored in voting rights and representative government - achieved extraordinary gains.Free elections, near-universal suffrage, and the peaceful transfer of power reshaped societies and expanded human freedom.But these achievements represent the promise of democracy, not its completion. Their book offers a hopeful, clear-eyed vision for what comes next.Drawing on ground-breaking citizens’ assemblies in Ireland, Canada and France - as well as democratic innovations from more than a dozen countries - MacLeod and Johnson show how we can build on the legacy of the First Act by creating new institutions that tap into the talents, judgement, and capabi