Democracy today is at a crossroads. Conventional wisdom suggests democracies are founded upon the notion of a government by the people, yet have all people been represented by modern democracies? Joel Migdal, professor of international studies at the University of Washington, investigates the exclusion of the poor from the very institutions that determine their fates. What, then, is democracy? And can the “Seattle model,” based upon working from the ground up, provide an expansion of true democracy?