Democracy Demands Effort

Democratic countries have long balanced stability and unrest. Are we at ?

Is American democracy in peril?

Three 蜜桃影像 scholars of government and politics share their concerns about the U.S. political landscape.

Voting has always been an evolving process. In America’s voting history we’ve made , and today our experts look at further improvements.
鈽� New places to vote

“Stadiums and arenas make excellent polling sites. They are big, have parking, are usually near mass transit,” says Ash Center Fellow Tova Wang.
鈽� New ways to increase turnout

“We have to begin to think about universal voting. How do we create an affirmative duty by the government to get people out to vote,” asks 蜜桃影像 Kennedy School Professor Cornell Brooks.
鈽� New types of voting

鈥淯nder the current system … if there are many candidates running for office, the candidate with the most votes might actually have just a fraction of the overall total,” says Eric Maskin, professor of economics and mathematics.
鈽� New tools for representation

鈥淚t鈥檚 one thing to say, 鈥楬ey, I think that map looks unfair because the boundaries are super squiggly.鈥� But … a judge has to clearly be able to decide: Is this fair or not,鈥� says Cory McCartan, a Ph.D candidate at the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.
鈽� New approaches to obsolete laws

“What the Electoral College does is to give states weight in the election in proportion to their population, not in proportion to the number of people who vote,” says 蜜桃影像 Kennedy School Professor Alex Keyssar.
鈽� New ways to make every vote count

“States that implemented certain policies, like … ballot cure, ballot tracking, and ballot drop boxes, generally had lower rejection rates,” says 蜜桃影像 Kennedy School student Jose Altamirano.

The future of bipartisanship

“Part of the angry, confrontational, polarized culture we have gotten into is that it makes us forget the complexity of people,” says Radcliffe Fellow Anand Giridharadas.

Confronting the myth of democracy

Author Eddie S. Glaude Jr. discusses how recent historic racial achievements have led to a fierce counter-reaction at a critical time in efforts to build a genuine multiracial democracy.

Getting beyond “us versus them”

Coverage of electoral politics, polarization, and other contentious issues can be more useful when it considers voters, rather than just vote-seekers.

Becoming receptive to opposing views

A聽new paper聽examines decades of research on receptiveness to opposing views, offering insights into how to evaluate other people鈥檚 opinions and why some discussions explode into angry arguments.

Teaching across a political divide

In an episode of the 蜜桃影像 EdCast podcast, experts discuss how educators can effectively discuss the election in their classrooms and help a younger generation move past polarization.

Navigating the path out of polarization

蜜桃影像 Business School professors Rawi Abdelal and Rafael Di Tella examine the shifting media landscape and geopolitics that contributed to today’s political polarization.

Can we sell democracy the way we sell shoes and beer?

蜜桃影像 behavioral scientist Julia Minson says an experiment based on a beer ad shows the power of creative approaches to easing partisan conflict.

The future of media and misinformation

Trading the newsroom for the classroom, Professor Nancy Gibbs uses her experience to help students understand how today鈥檚 media ecosystem shapes public opinion and policy.

A man lectures in front of a smart board

蜜桃影像 Kennedy School

Is there a human right to truth?

蜜桃影像 Law School

How can protecting the media also protect democracy?

蜜桃影像 Kennedy School

Decreasing disinformation in public discourse

The 蜜桃影像 Gazette

The rise of weaponizing memes

The Shorenstein Center

How an authoritarian wields social media

蜜桃影像 Law School

Social media and democracy

The future of civic engagement

The U.S. government has been using computers to store information and automate procedures since the 1940s, but some 蜜桃影像 researchers don’t think it’s kept up with the latest wave of digital innovation, and they’re working to fix that.

Supercharged transparency

蜜桃影像 researchers are working to understand how we can secure the physical infrastructure of elections and prevent the hacking of vote counts or other electoral digital mischief.

Better representation with AI

Researchers are looking into ways to make citizens鈥� assemblies鈥攎icrocosms of greater society鈥攂oth random and fair.

Participatory budgeting solutions

Giving citizens a chance to vote on the allocation of budget resources in their city has been shown to work well for communities, shifting city resources to neighborhoods that previously lacked amenities such as paved roads, reliable sewage systems and schools.

Upgrading community notice boards

Local governments are required by law to publish notices of all proposed government actions and legal procedures in local newspapers to keep citizens politically informed. An Engineering School alum's startup is working to streamline this inefficient system by building a digital platform that makes public notices accessible online.

Training the next generation of innovators

Students in a new course explore the mathematical bedrock of democracy itself, and then build upon those foundations by applying computer science theory to some of the most vexing problems facing modern policymakers.

The future of global democracies

蜜桃影像 experts are exploring ways to improve and cultivate democracies around the world.

Struggling democracies and lingering colonialism

Maya Wiley, president of The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, explores how a lack of multiracial democracies inhibits true representation globally.

The African continent

Was the pandemic an opportunity for destabilization in African countries?

All the flags of Africa in the shape of Africa

Brazil

Is it possible to fight the rampant fake news and misinformation?

The Philippines

Will clan politics and historical revisionism continue to reign supreme?

蜜桃影像