Douglas J. Amy, PhD

Douglas J. Amy is a Professor Emeritus of Politics at Mount Holyoke College. He has spent much of his career researching alternative voting systems. Beginning in the 1990s, he was among the first political scientists who began to advocate for voting system reform in the United States. He has been particularly interested in promoting the use of proportional representation elections. This advocacy has taken a number of different forms, including op-ed pieces, public lectures, legal affidavits and depositions, and court testimony. He has consulted with a varietyof political groups working on voting system reform, ranging from his local League of WomenVoters, to state groups like Voter Choice Massachusetts, and national organizations likeFairVote and RepresentUS.

His academic work on this subject can be found in numerous textbooks, journal articles, andbooks, including Behind the Ballot Box: A Citizen's Guide to Voting Systems (2000) and RealChoices, New Voices: How Proportional Representation Elections Could Revitalize AmericanDemocracy (2002), which won the George H. Hallett Award from the American Political ScienceAssociation.

Professor Amy’s latest effort is a wide-ranging web project entitled, Second-Rate Democracy:Seventeen Ways America is Less Democratic than Other Major Western Countries and How WeCan Do Better. (https://secondratedemocracy.com) It details the many ways that ourdemocracy is failing, exposes the political and economic interests that benefit from theseproblems, reveals why other countries are better at doing democracy, and identifies thepolitical reforms we need to adopt. It addresses not only the need for voting system reform,but also reforms in lobbying, campaign financing, the filibuster, life-tenure for Supreme Courtjustices, the Electoral College, and our unrepresentative Senate.