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The result of political districts with huge populations is that elected officials no longer represent citizens.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 decentralized 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.
Donate and Volunteer
California Rising!
A Campaign to Bring True Representative Democracy to California
California today, at all levels of government, is the least democratic state in the nation when it comes to democracy’s most essential metric: representation.
- California State Assembly districts comprise 500,000 inhabitants, by far the biggest of any state.
- California State Senate Districts contain almost one million people, which is also unheard of in any other state.
- Many California county governments have citizen-to-elected-official ratios of hundreds of thousands to one. In Los Angeles County, one County Supervisor is supposed to represent 2 million people.
- The cities of Los Angeles, San Diego, San Jose and San Francisco have city-council-member-to-population ratios of 1 to 266,000, 159,000, 100,00 and 80,000 respectively.
In California, government has moved so far from the control of the people that in most places the people are hardly represented at all. Instead, elected officials serve the special and political interests that keep them in power.
But in California the people, themselves, have power also. Through citizens’ initiatives, the people of California can amend the State Constitution, and revise local charters, to realize an Information Age political system of decentralized, Web-connected, small district, democracy.
It is a big and essential task for us, our families, and for generations to come. We need the help of every citizen who cares about democracy. Please join us.