Grassroots democracy is a tendency towards designing political processes where as much decision-making authority as practical is shifted to the organization's lowest geographic level of organization: principle of subsidiarity.^{[clarification needed]}

To cite a specific hypothetical example, a national grassroots organization would place as much decision-making power as possible in the hands of a local chapter instead of the head office. The principle is that for democratic power to be best exercised it must be vested in a local community instead of isolated, atomized individuals, essentially making it the opposite of national supremacy. As such, grassroots organizations exist in contrast to so-called participatory systems, which tend to allow individuals equal access to decision-making irrespective of their standing in a local community, or which particular community they reside in. As well, grassroots systems also differ from representative systems that allow local communities or national memberships to elect representatives who then go on to make decisions.

John Peter Spyros Sarbanes (born May 22, 1962) is the U.S. Representative for Maryland's 3rd congressional district, serving since 2007. He is a member of the Democratic Party. The district includes the state capital of Annapolis, central portions of the city of Baltimore, and parts of Anne Arundel, Howard and Baltimore counties.

John Sarbanes is the eldest son of former U.S. Senator Paul Sarbanes (who represented the 3rd from 1971 to 1977) and Christine Dunbar Sarbanes, a teacher. He was born in Baltimore and graduated from the Gilman School there in 1980. He received a B.A., cum laude, from the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University in 1984 and a Juris Doctor from Harvard Law School, where he was co-chair of the Law School Democrats, in 1988.

After college, Sarbanes clerked with Baltimore Judge J. Frederick Motz on the U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland. Sarbanes spent his professional legal career at the law firm of Venable LLP in Baltimore from 1989 to 2006, where he was chair of health care practice from 2000 to 2006 and a member of the hiring committee from 1992 to 1996.

Amy Goodman (born April 13, 1957) is an American progressive broadcast journalist, syndicated columnist, investigative reporter and author. Goodman is the host of Democracy Now!, an independent global news program broadcast daily on radio, television and the Internet.

Goodman was born in Bay Shore, New York on April 13, 1957 to George, an ophthalmologist, and Dorothy (née Bock) Goodman, and graduated from Bay Shore High School in 1975. She graduated from Radcliffe College in 1984 with a degree in anthropology. She spent a year studying at the College of the Atlantic in Bar Harbor, Maine.

Goodman had been news director of Pacifica Radio station WBAI in New York City for over a decade when she co-founded Democracy Now! The War and Peace Report in 1996. Since then, Democracy Now! has been called "probably the most significant progressive news institution that has come around in some time" by professor and media critic Robert McChesney.

In 2001, the show was temporarily pulled off the air, as a result of a conflict with a group of Pacifica Radio board members and Pacifica staff members and listeners. During that time, it moved to a converted firehouse from which it broadcast until November 13, 2009. The new Democracy Now! studio is located in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan.

Cynthia Ann McKinney (born March 17, 1955) is an American politician and activist. McKinney was a member of the United States House of Representatives as a member of the Democratic Party, she served six terms as a member of the United States House of Representatives. In 2008, the Green Party of the United States nominated McKinney for President of the United States. She was the first African-American woman to have represented Georgia in the House.

In the 1992 election, McKinney was elected in the newly re-created 11th District, and was re-elected in 1994. When her district was redrawn and renumbered due to the Supreme Court of the United States ruling in Miller v. Johnson, McKinney was easily elected from the new 4th District in the 1996 election, and was re-elected twice without substantive opposition.

McKinney was defeated by Denise Majette in the 2002 Democratic primary. Some people believe she was defeated because of Republican crossover voting in Georgia's open primary election, which permits anyone from any party to vote in any party primary and "usually rewards moderate candidates and penalizes those outside the mainstream." Others believe that her defeat was due to her "her controversial profile, which included support for Arab causes and a suggestion that Bush knew in advance of the September 11 attacks."

Jeffrey Stout (September 11, 1950 in Trenton, NJ –) is a contemporary scholar of religion who focuses on ethics. His works focus on the possibility of ethical discourse in a religiously pluralistic society. Recently, he has championed what he calls "the moral tradition of democracy" as a "background of agreement" shared by participants in the political/social debates taking place in America today. This is his answer to such thinkers as Alasdair MacIntyre and Stanley Hauerwas who believe that participants in such debates do not share enough common ground to prevent their arguments from being intractable. Stout has been influenced by Richard Rorty and more recently Robert Brandom and, albeit with qualifications, aligns himself with the school of philosophy known as American Pragmatism.

Since obtaining his Ph.D in 1976 from Princeton University, Stout has remained there as a Professor of Religion.

His two most well-known books, for both of which he won the American Academy of Religion Award for Excellence, are Ethics After Babel (1989) and Democracy and Tradition (2003). His most recent book, Blessed Are the Organized: Grassroots Democracy in America (2010), takes an ethnographic turn, investigating the engaged democratic practices that he has endorsed in his previous work.