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PODCAST

Democracy Works

Penn State McCourtney Institute for Democracy

The Democracy Works podcast seeks to answer that question by examining a different aspect of democratic life each week — from voting to criminal justice to the free press and everything in between. We interview experts who study democracy, as well as people who are out there doing the hard work of democracy day in and day out. The show’s name comes from Pennsylvania’s long tradition of iron and steel works — people coming together to build things greater than the sum of their parts. We believe that

government

All Episodes

00:37:24

Jon Meacham on creating a more perfect union

Democracy Works ·

2022/04/11

Jon Meacham is one of America's leading thinkers on how the country's political history can inform the present. He recently visited Penn State to present a lecture on his 2018 book The Soul of America and joined us for a wide-ranging conversation on the war in Ukraine (and whether Zelensky really is like Churchill), American polarization polarization, the changing media landscape, and more. Meacham is author of multiple New York Times bestsellers, a distinguished visiting professor at Vanderbilt

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00:46:16

The roots of radical partisanship

Democracy Works ·

2022/04/04

Political violence is rising in the United States, with Republicans and Democrats divided along racial and ethnic lines that spurred massive bloodshed and democratic collapse earlier in the nation’s history. The January 6, 2021 insurrection and the partisan responses that ensued are a vivid illustration of how deep these currents run. How did American politics become so divided that we cannot agree on how to categorize an attack on our own Capitol?In the new book Radical American Partisanship,

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00:40:54

How democracies can win the war on reality [rebroadcast]

Democracy Works ·

2022/03/28

Peter Pomerantsev will visit Penn State March 31 and April 1 to discus Ukraine, Russian misinformation, and more. To get ready for his visit, we're rebroadcasting our conversation with him from May 2021. Click the link below to register to watch his lectures via livestream.Misinformation, disinformation, propaganda — the terms are thrown around a lot but often used to describe the same general trend toward conspiratorial thinking that spread from the post-Soviet world to the West over the past two

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00:41:16

Ro Khanna on dignity and democracy

Democracy Works ·

2022/03/21

The concept of dignity comes up a lot when we think about the condition of American democracy. Francis Fukuyama wrote about the demand for dignity and the politics of resentment and Chris Bail talked with us how dignity offline impacts our behavior online, just to name a few.Rep. Ro Khanna combines his experience in politics and technology policy to address the question of dignity in his new book, Dignity in the Digital Age. Khanna presents a vision for how the digital economy can create

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00:34:55

Russia and Ukraine: How we got here

Democracy Works ·

2022/03/14

Was the war in Ukraine inevitable? What is Vladimir Putin trying to achieve? What does the conflict say about Ukraine as a democracy? Those are just a few of the questions Michael Berkman explores this week with Donna Bahry, professor emerita of political science at Penn State and an expert in Soviet and post-Soviet politics and democratization. Donna has studied Russia and the Soviet Union for decades and traveled to the country dozes of time from late Gorbachev era through 2018. She also talks

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00:42:27

Defending democracy at home and abroad

Democracy Works ·

2022/03/07

Robert Kagan is a foreign policy expert who turned his focus to the United States last fall in a Washington Post column titled "Our Constitutional Crisis Is Already Here" that became one of the Post's most-read pieces of 2021. We're lucky to have Kagan with us this week to discuss the ongoing crises of democracy at home and abroad as Russia's war on Ukraine continues to unfold.Kagan has argued that there was nothing inevitable about the relatively peaceful liberal democratic order that followed

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00:43:55

What academic freedom really means in a democracy

Democracy Works ·

2022/02/28

What should academic freedom look like in 2022? How has it become conflated with the idea of free speech? Who should decide how issues regarding faculty speech should be adjudicated? Those are just a few of the questions we explore this week with Michael Bérubé and Jennifer Ruth, authors of It's Not Free Speech: Race, Democracy, and the Future of Academic Freedom. The book considers the ideal of academic freedom in the wake of the activism inspired by outrageous police brutality, white supremacy,

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00:42:28

Tracing the rise of illiberalism

Democracy Works ·

2022/02/21

Thomas Main's new book The Rise of Illiberalism explores the philosophical underpinnings of this toxic political ideology and documents how it has infiltrated the mainstream of political discourse in the United States. By the early twenty-first century, Main writes, liberal democracy’s failure to deal adequately with social problems created a space illiberal movements could exploit to promote their particular brands of identity politics as an alternative. While illiberalism has found a home across

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00:42:57

Moving beyond news deserts and misinformation

Democracy Works ·

2022/02/14

We've talked a lot on this show about the problems that news deserts, misinformation, and information silos present to democracy. Our guest this week says these things are all downstream from a much more fundamental disconnect between the need for a free press in a democracy and the models the United States has set up to make it happen.Victor Pickard is the C. Edwin Baker Professor of Media Policy and Political Economy at the University of Pennsylvania and author of Democracy Without Journalism

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00:42:23

How national parties are breaking state politics

Democracy Works ·

2022/02/07

Over the past generation, the Democratic and Republican parties have each become nationally coordinated political teams. American political institutions, on the other hand, remain highly decentralized. In his forthcoming book, Laboratories Against Democracy, Jake Grumbach argues that as Congress has become more gridlocked, national partisan and activist groups have shifted their sights to the state level, nationalizing state politics in the process and transforming state governments into the engines

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00:40:44

Can the courts save civics education?

Democracy Works ·

2022/01/31

Recent elections and the January 6, 2021 U.S. Capitol insurrection have underscored worrisome trends in the present state of our democracy: the extreme polarization of the electorate, the dismissal of people with opposing views, and the widespread acceptance and circulation of one-sided and factually erroneous information. Only a small proportion of those who are eligible actually vote, and a declining number of citizens actively participate in local community activities.In Flunking Democracy,

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00:37:55

When religion and democracy collide

Democracy Works ·

2022/01/24

Correction: In this episode, we referred to St. John's Church in Lafayette Square as a Presbyterian Church. It is an Episcopalian Church. We apologize for the error.Around the world, religion is being used to fuel "us vs. them" narratives and undermine the foundations of democracy. This week, we dive into what this means and how people of faith can chart a different path forward.Faith, Nationalism, and the Future of Liberal Democracy highlights the use of religious identity to fuel the rise of

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00:40:50

Sore losers are bad for democracy

Democracy Works ·

2022/01/17

We're back for a new season and our 200th episode! Penn State's Jim Piazza returns to the show this week to discuss a new study on why the loser's consent is a critical part of a healthy democracy — and what happens when politicians and other elites fail to abide by it. Piazza found that countries where one of the main political parties lost the election but refused to accept the results experienced five domestic terrorist attacks per year, compared to one attack every two years in countries where

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00:39:10

On democracy's doomsayers

Democracy Works ·

2021/12/20

There's no shortage of articles these days about how democracy is doomed in 2022 and/or 2024. Michael, Chris, and Candis discuss them this week and work through how much weight to give the doomsayers and how to take antidemocratic forces seriously without falling too far into despair. We also touch on what's happened in schools and at school board meetings over the past year, and what these developments mean for long-held theories about the power and stability of local government. Finally, we

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00:39:56

What does it take to sustain democracy?

Democracy Works ·

2021/12/13

Political disagreements are everywhere these days and most experts agree that too much political polarization is bad for democracy in the long run. How do we move beyond those disagreements, or at least not make them worse? Does the solution come from individual actions or institutional reform? Or perhaps a mix of both? This is what Robert Talisse describes as the "democrat's dilemma" and he argues the solution starts with introspection that he calls "democratic reflection."Drawing on social science

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00:39:59

Fannie Lou Hamer's fight continues today

Democracy Works ·

2021/12/06

In her book Until I Am Free, Keisha N. Blain situates Fannie Lou Hamer as a key political thinker alongside leaders such as Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, and Rosa Parks and demonstrates how her ideas remain salient for a new generation of activists committed to dismantling systems of oppression in the United States and across the globe.Despite her limited material resources and the myriad challenges she endured as a Black woman living in poverty in Mississippi, Hamer committed herself to making

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01:14:47

Andrew Yang and Charlie Dent on the future of...

Democracy Works ·

2021/11/29

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. 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,

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00:37:34

The soul of democracy

Democracy Works ·

2021/11/22

As we've heard from Carol Anderson and others on this show, the fight for voting rights often breaks down along racial and partisan lines. Desmond Meade saw that as a problem and set out to change it by channeling our shared sense of humanity and the common good to push for change.Meade is a formerly homeless returning citizen who overcame many obstacles to eventually become the President of the Florida Rights Restoration Coalition (FRRC), Chair of Floridians for a Fair Democracy, and a graduate of

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00:41:44

Jonathan Haidt on democracy's moral foundations...

Democracy Works ·

2021/11/15

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

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00:44:05

Why social media is so polarizing — and what we can...

Democracy Works ·

2021/11/08

In an era of increasing social isolation, platforms like Facebook and Twitter are among the most important tools we have to understand each other. We use social media as a mirror to decipher our place in society but, as Chris Bail explains, it functions more like a prism that distorts our identities, empowers status-seeking extremists, and renders moderates all but invisible. Bail's book, Breaking the Social Media Prism, challenges common myths about echo chambers, foreign misinformation campaigns,

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243 results

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