Joe Mathews is California columnist and editor for Zócalo Public Square,, the media nonprofit in Los Angeles. He writes the weekly syndicated Connecting California column for Zócalo; it appears in 30 media outlets around California.
Joe was formerly a reporter at the LA Times, Wall Street Journal and Baltimore Sun, and served as a senior fellow at the New America Foundation.
Joe is co-president of the Global Forum on Modern Direct Democracy (2019globalforum.com), through which he led the process of creating a new Magna Charta for Democracy Cities, adopted in Rome in 2018. He is co-author, with Mark Paul, of California Crackup: How Reform Broke the Golden State and How We Can Fix It (University of California Press, 2010). Joe’s previous book was The People’s Machine: Arnold Schwarzenegger and the Rise of Blockbuster Democracy (PublicAffairs, 2006).