Local news and democracy have been intertwined since the days of Alexis de Tocqueville. As we've discussed on this show before, news outlets are one way that people who live in a city or town keep up on what's happening in their local government. However, our guest this week argues the "watchdog" effect of local journalism might be overstated, along with the correlation between local news consumption and political participation.
Nikki Usher is an associate professor in the College of Media at the University of Illinois and author of News for the Rich, White, and Blue: How Place and Power Distort American Journalism. In the book and in this conversation, Usher recasts the challenges facing journalism in terms of place, power, and inequality. She questions longstanding beliefs about the relationship between local news and civic engagement and separates observed behavior from myths about American democracy and the media's role within it.
This conversation originally appeared on New Books in Journalism, part of the New Books Network.
News for the Rich, White, and Blue: How Place and Power Distort American Journalism
Are the crises facing American democracy really a failure of imagination? Our guest this week argues that they are and has ideas for what to do about it.
Lee Drutman is a senior fellow in the Political Reform program at New America. He is the author of Breaking the Two-Party Doom Loop: The Case for Multiparty Democracy in America and The Business of America is Lobbying. He is also the co-host of the podcast Politics in Question, and writes for the New York Times, Vox, and FiveThirtyEight, among other outlets. He holds a Ph.D. in political science from the University of California.
Hear more from Drtuman at a virtual event on "Democracy's Crises and Failure of Imagination" sponsored by The Democracy Group podcast network. Lee will be joined by Carah One Whaley of James Madison University, democracy entrepreneur Turi Munthe, and Democracy Works host Jenna Spinelle. Join us Wednesday, July 7 at 2 p.m. ET or watch the recording at democracygroup.org.
July 7 event with The Democracy Group
Breaking the Two-Party Doom Loop: The Case for Multiparty Democracy in America
Does Congress promote partisan gridlock?
This episode comes from our colleagues at Democracy in Danger, a production of the Deliberative Media Lab at the University of Virginia. Journalist and author Masha Gessen joins hosts Will Hitchcock and Siva Vaidhyanathan to discuss democracy in Russia.
Three pillars hold up autocracy in Russia, author and New Yorker staff writer Masha Gessen says: media control, sham elections and downright terror. But the opposition movement spearheaded by imprisoned activist Alexei Navalny has struck at the heart of all three. This time on the show, Gessen explains how — and measures the power of democratic aspirations in a country struggling against corruption with hope, against the past with visions of a happier future.
Navalny, a lawyer who has become President Vladimir Putin’s chief political rival, leads the Russia of the Future party, whose motto is “Russia will be happy.” In prison, his health failing, and recently off a 24-day hunger strike, Navalny continues to command respect — and a vast YouTube following — in part because he is brave enough to fight the system, even if it costs him his life, Gessen says.
It’s a powerful message for a generation from whom many of the tools of critical social analysis have been withheld. Against the odds, Navalny’s resistance is inspiring young people who have grown up with no ruler other than Putin, a former KGB officer who views the totalitarian past with nostalgia.
Surviving Autocracy by Masha Gessen
Some of the most talked-about issues in Congress these days are not about the substance of policies or bills being debated on the floor. Instead, the focus is on the partisan conflict between the parties and the endless debate about whether individual members of Congress will break with party ranks on any particular vote. This behavior allows the parties to emphasize the differences between them, which makes it easier to court donors and hold voter attention.
Some amount of competition between the parties is necessary in a healthy democracy, but have things gone too far? Frances E. Lee joins us this week to explain.
Lee is jointly appointed in the Department of Politics and the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, where she is Professor of Politics and Public Affairs. She is the author of Insecure Majorities: Congress and the Perpetual Campaign and The Limits of Party: Congress and Lawmaking in a Polarized Era with James M. Curry.
Lee's book, Insecure Majorities: Congress and the Perpetual Campaign
Her lecture at Penn State on lawmaking in a polarized era
This week, we bring you an episode from the Democracy Paradox podcast. Jan-Werner Müller of Princeton University joins host Justin Kempf to discuss his new book, Democracy Rules.
Democracy and populism diverge at a single point. It’s like a fork in a road where both traditions depend on a common history, but they split in two. At first it may seem the choice doesn’t matter. You believe that eventually they will both lead to the same destination except they don’t. The choice leads to two different outcomes. Populism uses some of the same language of democracy. It has a similar vocabulary. But as we go farther down its path, the less in common they have with each other.
Jan-Werner Müller is among the most recognizable voices on the subject of populism and democracy. This conversation from the Democracy Paradox podcast touches on some of their most challenging aspects from political leadership to majority rule to militant democracy. This conversation explores some of the ideas at the heart of this podcast. Ideas that give definition to the very meaning of democracy.
Müller is a professor of politics at Princeton University and author of Democracy Rules and What is Populism?
As redistricting begins across the country, we revisit our conversation with journalist and author David Daley about the consequences for American democracy if gerrymandering happens again this time around. This episode originally aired in January 2021, not long after the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.
David Daley has spent the past decade covering attempts by politicians to draw those maps to their advantage in a practice known as gerrymandering. He's also covered the groups of citizens across the country who pushed back against them to win some major reforms that will make the process look different now than it did in 2010.
Daley is a journalist and author of Unrigged: How Citizens are Battling Back to Save Democracy. His work has appeared in the New Yorker, the Atlantic, Slate, the Washington Post, and New York magazine. He is a senior fellow at FairVote, the former editor of Salon, and lives in Massachusetts.
Daley's op-ed on democracy deserts in The Guardian
Unrigged: How Americans are Battling Back to Save Democracy
One state's fight for fair maps
Next-generation democracy: An interview with high school student Kyle Hynes, who won Pennsylvania's citizen mapmaking contest.
Jonathan Haidt is part of the newly-announced University of Austin, created in response to what its founders deem a lack of viewpoint diversity among college faculty. Haidt was beginning to explore those themes when he joined on the show in March 2019.
We say on this show all the time that democracy is hard work. But what does that really mean? What it is about our dispositions that makes it so hard to see eye to eye and come together for the greater good? And why, despite all that, do we feel compelled to do it anyway? Jonathan Haidt is the perfect person to help us unpack those questions.
We also explore what we can do now to educate the next generation of democratic citizens, based on the research Jonathan and co-author Greg Lukianoff did for their latest book The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas are Setting Up a Generation for Failure.
Jonathan is social psychologist at New York University’s Stern School of Business. His research examines the intuitive foundations of morality, and how morality varies across cultures — including the cultures of American progressive, conservatives, and libertarians.
The Coddling of the American Mind
This week, we broadcast a recording from a virtual event with Andrew Yang and Charlie Dent on political parties and democracy reform. We discuss open primaries, ranked-choice voting, universal voting, and more.
Dent was the McCourtney Institute for Democracy’s fall 2021 visiting fellow. This is his last official engagement with us during his fellowship and we’ve really enjoyed having him with us this semester. He spent seven terms in Congress representing Pennsylvania’s Lehigh Valley and served in the Pennsylvania state legislature before that. He’s currently executive director of the Aspen Institute Congressional Program, a CNN political analyst, and a 501c3 adviser for the Renew America Movement, which supports candidates who are committed to democracy and the rule of law.
Yang ran for president in 2020 and mayor of New York City earlier this year. Most recently, he founded the Forward Party, a movement that brings together people interested in solving America’s problems, debating ideas in good faith, and advocating for policies like open primaries and ranked-choice voting. Before that, he started Humanity Forward to advance policies aimed at ending poverty. His latest book is Forward: Notes on the Future of Our Democracy.
Both Dent and Yang spend a lot of time thinking about how to fix what’s broken in American politics but have different ideas about how to do that and where go from here, which made for a very interesting discussion.
Forward Notes on the Future of Our Democracy
Your guide to ranked-choice voting
This week, we present an episode of the No Jargon podcast from the Scholars Strategy Network. Candis Watts Smith joins the show to discuss her research on racial attitudes among Millennials.
Millennials are often seen as a progressive-minded generation – as 80’s and 90’s kids, they grew up in a digital landscape that exposed them to a diversity of perspectives. But while expectations were high that this generation would be on the frontlines in the fight for racial equality, recent research by Democracy Works host Candis Watts Smith paints a different picture.
During this conversation with Lisa Hernandez and Lizzy Ghedi-Ehrlich, host of the Scholars Strategy Network's No Jargon podcast, Candis discussed how white millennials’ really think about race and the ways in which their views and beliefs have largely halted progress for Black Americans and other racial minorities in the United States.
Racial Stasis: The Millennial Generation and the Stagnation of Racial Attitudes in American Politics
Stay Woke: A People’s Guide to Making All Black Lives Matter
From COVID-19 policies to reproductive rights, conversations about freedom and liberty seem to be front and center in politics and the culture wars. This week, we take a deep dive into the philosophical underpinnings of these concepts and how different interpretations of them impact our ability to sustain a democracy. We also examine how bringing the idea of freedom into political debates can obscure what's really at stake and make it difficult to come to meaningful resolution.
Democracy Works host and McCourtney Institute for Democracy Managing Director Chris Beem talks with John Christman, professor of philosophy, political science, and women's studies at Penn State and director of the Humanities Institute. He is the author of numerous articles and books in social and political philosophy, specializing in topics such as the social conception of the self, theories of justice and oppression, and the idea of freedom. He is the editor of the newly-published Positive Freedom: Past, Present, and Future. The book includes both historical studies of the idea of positive freedom and discussions of its connection to important contemporary issues in social and political philosophy.
We are part of The Democracy Group, a network of podcasts that examines what’s broken in our democracy and how we can work together to fix it.