Place. Limits. Liberty.
Join us for FPR’s 2025 Conference on “Work and Leisure”

Pete Peterson

Pete Peterson is a leading national speaker and writer on issues related to civic participation, and the use of technology to make government more responsive and transparent. He was the first executive director of the bi-partisan organization, Common Sense California, which in 2010 joined with the Davenport Institute at the School of Public Policy to become the Davenport Institute for Public Engagement and Civic Leadership.

Articles by Pete Peterson

Title-town

The Green Bay Packers – like America itself - are a study in ironies: the smallest city owning a franchise in the largest professional sport, a non-profit corporation in one…
February 8, 2011

Home of the Brave?

At what price security? A call for national fortitude.
November 24, 2010

The City of Bell and the Problem of Local Control

“It enabled us to create our own vision for the future. That was the way I look at it then and now.” I guess part of that “vision” was Tammany…
August 3, 2010

The “New Normal:” A Communitarian Moment?

It’s been almost exactly a year since the “Miracle at Polihale” occurred, and the answer to the “aloha question” is now clear: we are entering a “new normal.”
June 5, 2010

Cameron’s “Big Society” and its Discontents

I can’t seem to get the Orwellian thought of a “National Department of Bigness” out of my head – where everything is kept small and local…except the Department.
April 9, 2010

Cocktails at the Dump

My father in-law, Ron, tells me a story of what life was like when he moved his young family (my wife not yet born) to the bucolic Southern California college…
August 4, 2009