Democracy Works

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 of thousands of people held in its detention centers on a daily basis. Host Maren Machles explores how this came to be and delves into what happens to people held in immigration detention centers with the presumption that they may be national security threats. And she asks the question: How does this relate to the way DHS addresses the most dangerous threat currently facing our nation — far-right violent extremism? To find out, host Maren Machles talks with Daryl Johnson, who recounts his work as the former lead analyst for domestic terrorism at DHS. She also speaks with Alejandro Beutel, a criminologist who focuses on domestic terrorism, and Berto Hernandez, who shares their story of being brought into the U.S. as a child and held in detention by Immigration and Customs Enforcement years later.Listen to Bad WatchdogLearn more about The Democracy Group

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 and was 16 when the country held its first democratic elections. His interest in democracy continued through college and into his career as a political scientist. Today, he is a professor of political behavior at the University of Glasgow. One area of his research focuses on how to measure support for democracy. In a recent paper, he and colleagues developed 17 survey questions that cover all eight components of liberal democracy as defined by the V-Dem project in an effort to refine what people mean when they say the support or don't support democracy.Berkman and Claassen also discuss how support for democracy is part of the 2024 U.S. election. Note that this interview was recorded in late October 2024 before the election took place.Referenced in this episode: McCourtney Institute for Democracy Mood of the Nation PollEpisode with Cynthia MIller-Idriss on communities and political extremism

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 visiting faculty positions at the University of Georgia Law School, the University of Virginia School of Law, and the Hebrew University Law School in Jerusalem.Referenced in this episode:How Chief Justice Roberts shaped Trump's Supreme Court winning streak - New York Times"Stop the Seal" 2.0 is here and it's scarily sophisticated - SlateWe helped John Roberts construct his image as a centrist. We were so wrong. - Slate

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 why we can't outsource democracy solely to elected representatives. One of the nation's most prominent scholars, Glaude's work examines the complex dynamics of the American experience. He is the author of "We are the Leaders We Have Been Looking For," "Democracy in Black: How Race Still Enslaves the American Soul,"and "Begin Again: James Baldwin's America and Its Urgent Lessons for our Own." He is the James S. McDonnell Distinguished University Professor of African American Studies, a program he first became involved with shaping as a doctoral candidate in Religion at Princeton. He is also on the Morehouse College Board of Trustees. He frequently appears in the media, as a columnist for TIME Magazine and as an MSNBC contributor.

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, drawing on examples from pop culture and recent history.Lefebeve is a professor of politics and philosophy at the University of Sydney. He teaches and researches  political theory, the history of political thought, modern and contemporary French philosophy, and human rights. 

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 Mexico over the course of seven years. The result is the book "Soldiers and Kings: Survival and Hope in the World of Human Smuggling," which we discuss on this episode. The book is a finalist for the 2024 National Book Award!De León is Professor of Anthropology and Chicana/o Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles with his lab located in the Cotsen Institute of Archaeology and Executive Director of the Undocumented Migration Project, a research, arts, and education collective that seeks to raise awareness about migration issues globally while also assisting families of missing migrants be reunited with their loved ones. He is also a 2017 MacArthur Foundation Fellow and a Penn State alumnus.Finally, we are excited to welcome Cyanne Loyle, associate professor of political science at Penn State, to the Democracy Works team. She was a guest host in the spring and will be joining the permanent lineup with Michael Berkman, Chris Beem, and Candis Watts Smith.

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 election.Rosenstiel is a senior consultant for National Popular Vote and has visited 45 states on behalf of the campaign. As a Republican political field director, he successfully directed grassroots efforts across the West and Midwest to garner Senate support for U.S. Supreme Court candidates John Roberts and Samuel Alito.Cass is a partner at Slingshot Strategies and founded its communications practice. During the 2022 cycle, she spearheaded the communications strategy for two of New York's most competitive, most watched congressional elections, leading media and messaging strategy for Representative Pat Ryan (in both the NY-19 special election and the NY-18 general election) and Carlina Rivera in New York's 10th Congressional District.After the interview, Chris Beem and Candis Watts Smith discuss whether the National Popular Vote will survive a Supreme Court challenge and how it could change the way elections and campaigns are run. 

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 and disasters for TIME Magazine, Amanda Ripley thought she understood conflict. But when momentum started to build around the candidacy of Donald Trump, she questioned what she thought she knew. Ripley interviewed psychologists, mediators, and people who had made it out of seemingly intractable conflicts for her book, High Conflict: Why We Get Stuck and How We Get Out.  In this conversation with host Making Peace visible host Jamil Simon, she shares insights about how people in conflict can move forward, and how journalists can get at the "understory" of what's beneath any conflict. Order Amanda Ripley’s book, High Conflict: Why We Get Stuck and How We Get Out. Watch Amanada’s talk on High Conflict for The Alliance for Peacebuilding. Follow her column in the Washington Post.

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 Gaza that happened on some campuses near the end of the spring semester. Follow Brad's Substack for his more recent work on the Gaza protests and more.A different kind of political divide - Yanna Krupnikov from the University of Michigan on the divide between people who follow politics closely and those who don't. We're seeing this divide play out in recent polling that shows support for Donald Trump is higher among people who say they are not politically engaged, while support for Biden is higher among those who follow news and politics more closely. Debating the future of debates: John Hudak from Brookings talks about the value of presidential debates to democracy. We recorded this episode in 2022 after the RNC announced it would not participate in events organized by the Commission for Presidential Debates. Now that two debates are scheduled for the next few months, we discuss whether they'll actually happen and how much they'll matter. This is our last new episode until early September. We'll use the next few months to plan for our fall season. Please send us an email if you have ideas for topics we should tackle or guests we should interview.  Have a great summer!

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 this week to explore how the rise of personalist parties around the globe facilitating the decline of democracy. The book examines the role of personalist political parties, or parties that exist primarily to further their leader's career as opposed to promote a specific policy platform.The Origins of Elected Strongmen will be released June 11 from Oxford University Press. Wright's co-authors are Erica Frantz, associate professor of political science at Michigan State University, and Andrea Kendall-Taylor, senior fellow and director of the Transatlantic Security Program at the Center for a New American Security.

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 Cyanne and Jenna reflecting on the interview.At the end of April, South Africa marked the 30th anniversary of its first post-Apartheid election — the first in the country where everyone could vote. South African writer and scholar Antjie Krog join us for a look at the state of South African democracy today, the impact of the country's Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and how South Africa has served as a model for other countries in democratic transition. Krog is a South African writer, scholar, and activist. She covered the Truth and Reconciliation Commission for the South African Broadcasting Corporation and wrote about the experience in the book Country of My Skull. She has published more than a dozen volumes of poetry and translated Nelson Mandela's biography into Afrikaans. She is currently a professor at the University of the Western Cape.  

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 level. Hogg also discusses his new project, Leaders We Deserve, which helps young people run for elected office. Finally, we discuss youth voter turnout and waning enthusiasm for Donald Trump and Joe Biden among young people ahead of November's election.

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 must come at the expense of others. She details how public goods in this country—from parks and pools to functioning schools—have become private luxuries; of how unions collapsed, wages stagnated, and inequality increased; and of how this country, unique among the world’s advanced economies, has thwarted universal healthcare. Finally, she offers examples of how this paradigm is changing in communities across the country when people work across differences to achieve a shared goal. At the beginning of the episode, we reference our conversation with Rhiana Gunn-Wright, one of the architects of the Green New Deal.

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 become the pivotal witness in the House January 6 investigations, as her testimony transfixed and stunned the nation. In her memoir, Hutchinson reveals the struggle between the pressures she confronted to toe the party line and the demands of the oath she swore to defend American democracy.Hutchinson's memoir, Enough, was published in September 2023 and is a New York Times bestseller.

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 the most successful populist and extremist movements of the past 20 years have focused largely on cultural grievances, rather than on economic discontent. The book outlines what they describe as  the troubling implications of discontent on the long-term compatibility of liberal democracy and free-market neoliberalism. Looking at case studies from around the world, the authors imply that democratic states must renew their commitment to social regulation of markets and to serve as conduits for citizen voice for  democracy and market economies are to survive. 

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 some of the conversations that happen in the comments section. V's also seen how social media can bring people together in real life and encourage people to become civically informed and engaged.Check out V’s new podcast, American Fever Dream. 

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 resources to help communities create resilient democracies. In the interview, Miller-Idriss discusses how extremism and political violence are linked to our desire for community. This dynamic means that extremist ideas can pop up in seemingly innocuous places from martial arts groups to online wellness communities. She says understanding this dynamic is key to moving people away from extremist spaces and into constructive communities.Miller-Idriss visited Penn State as part of the Mellon-funded Sawyer Seminar exploring the theme, "Birthing the Nation: Gender, Sex and Reproduction in Ethnonationalist Imaginaries."

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 are not as engaged. They call this phenomenon "the other divide" and it's the subject of their most recent book. Krupnikov and Barry Ryan join us on the show this week to share their research on levels of political involvement and how it translates to media coverage.As Candis Watts Smith says at the end of the episode, we hope that this conversation will inspire some epistemic humility. Krupkniov is a professor of communication and media at the University of Michigan. Barry Ryan is associate professor of political science at the University of Michigan. They are the authors of The Other Divide: Polarization and Disengagement in American Politics.

Chris Beem talks with journalist Tim Alberta about the role that Evangelical Christians play in the Republican Party — and what that means for the future of American democracy.Alberta is a staff writer at The Atlantic and author of the books The Kingdom, The Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age  of Extremism and American Carnage: On the Front  Lines of the Republican Civil War and the Rise of President Trump. He's also the son of an evangelical pastor. This conversation covers both books and how the evangelical movement and the Republican party have been corrupted. They also discuss the role that religion should play in politics, and Alberta's answer might surprise you.

The past few years haven't been easy for election officials and their teams. They had to pivot during the pandemic and face ongoing threats that have resulted in unprecedented staff turnover. This turmoil brings more scrutiny of errors that occur when people make honest mistakes. Despite these challenges, Tammy Patrick, CEO for programs at the National Association of Election Officials, is confident that the tens of thousands of people charged with election administrators across the country this year will deliver free, fair, and secure  elections. She's also optimistic about their ability to rise above threats and uphold their commitment to democracy.Patrick has been working in the election administration space since 2003, most recently as the Senior Advisor to the Elections Program at Democracy Fund. Focusing on modern elections, she works to foster a voter-centric elections system and support election officials across the country.In this conversation, we dive deeper into what's in store for election workers this year and how Patrick and her team are helping them prepare to stand up against everything from misinformation campaigns to threats of physical violence.