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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

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All Episodes

00:46:35

Sustaining democracy during wartime

Democracy Works ·

2024/12/09

Balazs Trencsenyi, co-director of Invisible University for Ukraine (IUFU), joins us to discuss the university's work to uphold education and democracy in Ukraine amid the country's ongoing war with Russia. IUFU, an initiative of Central European University was founded shortly after the start of the war in 2022. Since then, more than 1,000 students have taken online and in-person courses taught by faculty around the world.Trencsenyi is a professor of historical studies at CEU and and director of the

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00:43:11

Telling America's story at the National Archives

Democracy Works ·

2024/11/25

Colleen Shogan, archivist of the United States, joins us for a conversation about democratizing access to national records and running a non-partisan organization in an increasingly polarized country. Shogan was appointed by President Biden and has been criticized by both sides of the political spectrum for trying to use the National Archives to tell a partisan story about America's history. Shogan is a political scientist by training and talks about making the transition from academia to government

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00:41:04

Bad Watchdog: The Red Herring

Democracy Works ·

2024/11/18

We're excited to bring you an episode from Bad Watchdog, the podcast from the Project on Government Oversight and one of our colleagues in The Democracy Group podcast network. This is the first episode of the show's second season, which takes a deep dive on the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).Established in the wake of September 11, the DHS was entrusted with protecting the U.S. from national security threats. Since then, much of the agency’s focus has been on the southern border — with tens

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00:33:49

How strong is support for democracy?

Democracy Works ·

2024/11/11

We are collecting our thoughts about what's next for democracy following the 2024 election and will take up the question during our end-of-year episode in December.Democracy Works host Michael Berkman, director of the McCourtney Institute for Democracy and professor of political science at Penn State talks with Christopher Claassen, a political scientist at the University of Glasgow, about how to measure support for democracy across countries and across generations. Claassen grew up in South Africa

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00:45:41

How the Supreme Court could shape the 2024 election

Democracy Works ·

2024/10/28

Dahlia Lithwick has covered the Supreme Court since the landmark Bush v. Gore decision in 2000. In that time, she's seen a sea change in the court itself, as well as the way that journalists cover it. We discuss those trends in this episode, as well as how former President Trump's legal team has changed since the 2020 election.Lithwick is the host of Amicus, Slate’s podcast about the law and the Supreme Court, and author of "Lady Justice: Women, the Law, and the Battle to Save America." She has held

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00:45:31

Eddie Glaude Jr. on the peril of outsourcing democracy

Democracy Works ·

2024/10/14

With just weeks to go before the election, voting and candidates are top of mind of many of us. It's easy to think that once our preferred candidates win, our obligations to democracy are finished until the next election. Scholar and author Eddie Glaude Jr. has spent his career studying the perils of that approach throughout history, particularly when it comes to Black politics and power. Glaude joins us to discuss how he's thinking about the 2024 election, the difference between hope and joy, and

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00:38:43

Liberalism is a lifestyle

Democracy Works ·

2024/09/30

Chris Beem talks with political theorist Alexandre Lefebvre about why liberalism is more than just a political ideas and procedures, and how abiding by liberal principles can enhance your life far beyond politics. In his book Liberalism as a Way of Life, Lefebvre argues that liberalism isn’t just a set of neutral procedures; it’s a comprehensive way of life that shapes the way we live and think and work and love in innumerable ways. He also argues that it’s a way of life worth robustly defending,

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00:41:12

The immigration stories that aren't told

Democracy Works ·

2024/09/16

Immigration is a perennial issue in American politics, but the rhetoric we hear from candidates on the campaign trail is often very different than the day-to-day experiences of migrants traveling from central America to the United States and the smugglers who help them make the often dangerous journey to get here. In an effort to better understand this essential yet extralegal billion dollar global industry, anthropologist Jason De León embedded with a group of smugglers moving migrants across

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00:47:30

How the National Popular Vote could change...

Democracy Works ·

2024/09/02

We're back from summer break with a deep dive on the National Popular Vote campaign, an effort to render the Electoral College obsolete when states pledge their electors to the winner of the nationwide popular vote.As of August 2024, National Popular Vote has been enacted by 17 states and the District of Columbia, accounting for 209 of the 270 electoral votes needed to make it a reality nationwide. Guests Patrick Rosenstiel and Alyssa Cass have a plan to get to 270 by the 2028 presidential

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00:33:21

Making Peace Visible: In search of good conflict

Democracy Works ·

2024/07/08

While Democracy Works is on summer break, we bring you an episode from our friends at Making Peace Visible, a podcast that ignites powerful conversations all over the world about how the media covers peace and conflict. This episode features journalist and author Amanda Ripley. We've wanted to have Amanda on the show for a long time and are grateful to the Making Peace Visible team for sharing this conversation with us!After over two decades as a journalist, including ten years covering terrorism

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00:36:34

Season finale: Protests, debates, and the "meh" election

Democracy Works ·

2024/06/03

We've reached the end of another school year and another season of Democracy Works. Before we go on summer break, Michael Berkman, Chris Beem, and Candis Watts Smith reflect on recent events and what's to come this summer. We do this by taking a look back at some of our previous episodes:The real free speech problem on campus: Penn State's Brad Vivian on the problems with "campus free speech" discourse and media coverage. We discuss how this narrative has been applied to protests about the war in

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00:41:51

How elected strongmen weaken democracy

Democracy Works ·

2024/05/20

Democracies today are increasingly eroding at the hands of democratically-elected incumbents, who seize control by slowly chipping away at democratic institutions. Penn State political science professor Joseph Wright is and his coauthors explore this trend in their new book, The Origins of Elected Strongmen: How Personalist Parties Destroy Democracy from Within . Wright joins Michael Berkman, McCourtney Institute for Democracy director and professor of political science at Penn State, on the show

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00:44:31

30 years of democracy in South Africa

Democracy Works ·

2024/05/06

Please join us in welcoming a special guest host for this episode! Cyanne Loyle is Associate Professor of Political Science and International Affairs at Penn State and a Global Fellow at the Pease Research Institute Oslo. Her research focuses on transitional justice and democratic rebuilding after conflict, which makes her the perfect person to reflect on South Africa's democratic transition.One additional programming note — Chris Beem lost power during this recording so the closing segment is

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00:48:44

David Hogg on leaders we deserve

Democracy Works ·

2024/04/22

The shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida happened around the same time Democracy Works launched in 2018. In fact, one of the first episodes featured students who organized a march event in State College, Pennsylvania. At the time, we thought it would be fantastic to get David Hogg on the show. Six years later, he's finally here to talk about what his life has been like since that fateful day in February 2018 and his work to change gun policy at the state and federal

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00:45:51

Democracy is the sum of us

Democracy Works ·

2024/04/08

Heather McGhee made her career in pushing for economic policy changes at the think tank Demos. But she couldn't help but feel that something was missing from her work. So she embarked on a cross-country road trip to understand what's at the heart of what ails America's economy and our democracy. The result is her book The Sum of Us, which she joins us to talk about in this episode. In the book, McGhee explores what we lose when we buy into the zero-sum paradigm—the idea that progress for some of us

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00:40:16

Cassidy Hutchinson on what comes after January 6

Democracy Works ·

2024/03/25

Cassidy Hutchinson, and aide to former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows whose testimony captured the nation's attention in the January 6 Congressional hearings, joins us this week to discuss her time in the Trump administration and her new role safeguarding American democracy. Hutchinson was faced with a choice between loyalty to the Trump administration or loyalty to the country by revealing what she saw and heard in the attempt to overthrow a democratic election. She bravely came forward to

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00:38:17

How discontent destabilizes demoracy

Democracy Works ·

2024/03/11

If there's one thing that people across the political spectrum can agree on, it's a sense of discontent with the current state of American politics. This week, we explore the origins of that discontent and why it's damaging to democracy. Our guest is Matthew Rhodes-Purdy, an assistant professor of political science at Clemson University and one of the authors of The Age of Discontent: Populism, Extremism, and Conspiracy Theories in Contemporary Democracies.Rhodes-Purdy and his co-authors argue that

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00:36:17

A different take on social media and democracy

Democracy Works ·

2024/02/26

We've talked about social media a lot on this show over the years — usually focusing on algorithms, echo chambers, polarization, and the other ways it's damaging to democracy. This week, however, we hear a different take from V Spehar, who has more than 3 million followers on the TikTok account Under the Desk News. V built a reputation providing recaps of the daily news for an audience who might not consume news anywhere else. The Under the Desk News audience is politically diverse and V talks about

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00:37:09

How to combat political extremism

Democracy Works ·

2024/02/12

Cynthia Miller-Idriss, one of America's leading experts on the far right, joins us this week to discuss what draws people to political extremism online and offline — and what we can do to combat it. Miller-Idriss is the director of the Polarization and Extremism Research and Innovation Lab (PERIL) at American University and author of the book Hate in the Homeland: The New Global Far Right. As you'll hear, PERIL takes a public health approach to preventing violent extremism and provides tools and

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00:39:58

A different kind of political divide

Democracy Works ·

2024/01/29

As a Democracy Works listener, you probably follow politics pretty closely. And we're going to go out on a limb and say that many of the people in your life do, too. But what about everyone else? People who casually keep up with political news or maybe tune iit out entirely. Scholars Yanna Krupnikov and John Barry Ryan argue that America might not be as polarized as we think because the media and political observers over-index on people who are deeply invested in politics at the expense of those who

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243 results

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