Josh Lerner, “Making Democracy Fun: How Game Design Can Empower Citizens and Transform Politics” (MIT Press, 2014)

Josh Lerner is the author of Making Democracy Fun: How Game Design Can Empower Citizens and Transform Politics (MIT Press, 2014). Lerner earned his Ph.D. in Political Science from The New School for Social Research, and is now the Executive Director of The Participatory Budgeting Project, a nonprofit organization that empowers communities to decide how to spend public money.

Lerner asks the question at the start of the book: Can games make democratic participation more fun? He does not mean game theory, he means actual games. Designed activities aimed to infuse the rules of a game to political decision making. He traces the use of gaming to advance public participation through Latin America, with particular attention on Rosario, Argentina.