Democracy Works
Penn State McCourtney Institute for Democracy
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Top 10 Democracy Works Episodes
Goodpods has curated a list of the 10 best Democracy Works episodes, ranked by the number of listens and likes each episode have garnered from our listeners. If you are listening to Democracy Works for the first time, there's no better place to start than with one of these standout episodes. If you are a fan of the show, vote for your favorite Democracy Works episode by adding your comments to the episode page.
What makes a campaign deplorable?
Democracy Works
11/01/21 • 42 min
Political campaigns in the United States, especially those for the presidency, can be nasty—very nasty. And while we would like to believe that the 2020 election was an aberration, insults, invective, and yes, even violence have characterized U.S. electoral politics since the republic’s early days. By examining the political discourse around nine particularly deplorable elections, Mary E. Stuckey seeks to explain why.
Stuckey is the Sparks Professor of Communication Arts and Sciences at Penn State. She specializes in political and presidential rhetoric, political communication, and American Indian politics.
After the interview, Michael Berkman and Candis Watts Smith discuss how the despicable discourse Stuckey describes trickles down to local politics, particularly school board races in the current election cycle.
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Deplorable: The Worst Presidential Campaigns from Jefferson to Trump
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What can we learn from early democracies?
Democracy Works
09/25/23 • 33 min
This week, we're handing the microphone to Penn State student Joey Picarillo for an interview about the rise and fall of early democracies and what lessons we can learn from them today. Joey is a studying political science at Penn State World Campus and has already read many of the most influential books on democracy by Robert Dahl and others. He brought this book to our attention and did a wonderful job with the interview.
Historical accounts of democracy’s rise tend to focus on ancient Greece and pre-Renaissance Europe. The Decline and Rise of Democracy by David Stasavage draws from global evidence to show that the story is much richer—democratic practices were present in many places, at many other times, from the Americas before European conquest, to ancient Mesopotamia, to precolonial Africa. Stasavage makes the case that understanding how and where these democracies flourished—and when and why they declined—can provide crucial information not just about the history of governance, but also about the ways modern democracies work and where they could manifest in the future.
Stasavage is the Dean for the Social Sciences and the Julius Silver Professor in NYU’s Department of Politics and an Affiliated Professor in NYU’s School of Law.
The Decline and Rise of Democracy: A Global History from Antiquity to Today
A path forward for social media and democracy
Democracy Works
02/15/21 • 39 min
Sinan Aral has spent two decades studying how social media impacts our lives, from how we think about politics to how we find a romantic partner. He argues that we're now at the crossroads of a decade of techno-utopianism followed by a decade of techno-dystopianism. How to reconcile the promise and peril of social media is one of the biggest questions facing democracy today.
Aral is the David Austin Professor of Management, Marketing, IT, and Data Science at MIT; director of the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy; and head of MIT’s Social Analytics Lab. He is the author of The Hype Machine: How Social Media Disrupts Our Elections, Our Economy, and Our Health — And How We Must Adapt .
In his book and in this conversation, Aral goes under the hood of the biggest, most powerful social networks to tackle the critical question of just how much social media actually shapes our choices, for better or worse.
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Direct democracy's dark side
Democracy Works
02/01/21 • 37 min
From gerrymandering to ranked-choice voting to expanding voting rights, the ballot initiative has been essential to expanding and reforming democracy in recent years. However, the initiative has also been used to constrain minority rights and push the public to act on polarizing issues like the death penalty and immigration.
Ted Lascher and Joshua Dyck are the authors of Initiatives Without Engagement: A Realistic Appraisal of Direct Democracy's Secondary Effects. In the book, they develop and test a theory that can explain the evidence that the ballot initiative process fails to provide the civic benefits commonly claimed for it, and the evidence that it increases political participation. Ultimately, they argue that the basic function of direct democracy is to create more conflict in society — something that runs counter to the way initiatives are often framed by scholars and democracy reformers.
Lascher is Professor of Public Policy and Administration at California State University, Sacramento. Dyck is Associate Professor of Political Science and Co-Director of the Center for Public Opinion at the University of Massachusetts Lowell.
Additional Information
Initiatives Without Engagement: A Realistic Appraisal of Direct Democracy's Secondary Effects
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The democracy rebellion happening in states across the U.S.
Extreme maps, extreme politics
Democracy Works
01/18/21 • 38 min
Despite ongoing threats of violence, the wheels of democracy continue to turn, and in 2021, that means redistricting. States will draw new electoral maps this year using data from the 2020 Census.
Our guest this week 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.
David 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.
Additional Information
Unrigged: How Americans are Battling Back to Save Democracy
Fair Districts PA on judicial gerrymandering
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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.
American democracy's violent disruption
Democracy Works
01/11/21 • 32 min
Democracy Works hosts Michael Berkman, Chris Beem, and Candis Watts Smith reflect on the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol and what it says about the condition of American democracy. They also discuss whether it's possible to learn from this moment and what guideposts they'll be looking for to determine whether all the talk about protecting and restoring democracy we've heard since the attack will translate into action.
This episode was recorded on Friday, January 8, 2021.
Additional Information
Statement from Michael Berkman and Chris Beem on January 6, 2021 attack
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Andrew Sullivan on democracy's double-edged sword
What neoliberalism left behind [rebroadcast]
Democracy Works
01/04/21 • 39 min
Neoliberalism is one of those fuzzy words that can mean something different to everyone. Wendy Brown is one of the world’s leading scholars on neoliberalism and argue that a generation of neoliberal worldview among political, business, and intellectual leaders led to the populism we’re seeing throughout the world today. But is it mutually exclusive to democracy? Not necessarily.
Brown joins us this week to help make sense of what neoliberalism is, and where things stand today. We were lucky enough to get an advance copy of her book, In the Ruins of Neoliberalism, which will be released in July. It’s a follow up to her 2015 book, Undoing the Demos, and you’ll hear her talk about how her thinking has changed since then.
Brown is the Class of 1936 First Chair at the University of California, Berkeley, where she teaches political theory.
Additional Information
Wendy’s books: In the Ruins of Neoliberalism, Undoing the Demos
How conspiracies are damaging democracy [rebroadcast]
Democracy Works
12/28/20 • 37 min
From Pizzagate to Jeffrey Epstein, conspiracies seem to be more prominent than ever in American political discourse. What was once confined to the pages of supermarket tabloids is now all over our media landscape. Unlike the 9/11 truthers or those who questioned the moon landing, these conspiracies are designed solely to delegitimize a political opponent — rather than in service of finding the truth. As you might imagine, this is problematic for democracy.
Democracy scholars Russell Muirhead and Nancy Rosenblum call it “conspiracy without the theory” and unpack the concept in their book A Lot of People Are Saying: The New Conspiracism and the Assault on Democracy. Russell is the Robert Clements Professor of Democracy and Politics at Dartmouth. Nancy is the Senator Joseph Clark Research Professor of Ethics in Politics at Harvard.
As you’ll hear, the new conspiricism is a symptom of a larger epistemic polarization that’s happening throughout the U.S. When people no longer agree on a shared set of facts, conspiracies run wild and knowledge-producing institutions like the government, universities, and the media are trusted less than ever.
Additional Information
A Lot of People Are Saying: The New Conspiracism and the Assault on Democracy
The people want pot
Democracy Works
12/14/20 • 41 min
Lee Hannah and Dan Mallinson have been studying marijuana policy for several years and watching as initiatives pass in states across the country. We discuss how the process of organizing around a ballot initiative has changed as the marijuana industry grows, and whether the growing number of states legalizing marijuana will lead to changes at the federal level.
Hannah is associate professor of political science at Wright State University and Mallinson is assistant professor of public policy and administration at Penn State Harrisburg. Both received their Ph.Ds from Penn State, where they worked with Democracy Works host Michael Berkman.
This episode hits many of the items on the Democracy Works bingo card — federalism, states as laboratories of democracy, ballot initiatives, social justice, and more.
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Andrew Sullivan on democracy’s double-edged sword
Democracy Works
10/14/19 • 40 min
This is one of the most pessimistic episodes we’ve done, but it’s worth hearing. Andrew Sullivan, New York magazine contributing editor, Daily Dish founder, and former editor of The New Republic, is a longtime observer of American politics who does not shy away from controversial opinions. In this episode, we discuss the tension between liberalism and democracy, and how that tension manifests itself around the world.
The way Sullivan sees it, the “us vs. them” rhetoric and attitudes in our culture have gone so far that the moderating values and virtues of liberalism will no longer be able to intervene. We also discuss the relationship between dignity and identity politics, and the parallels between the United States and the United Kingdom.
Thank you to our sponsor, Penn State World Campus. Learn more about their Master of Professional Studies in the Psychology of Leadership at worldcampus.psu.edu/leadership.
If you like what you hear on this show, please take a minute to share it on social media or text it to a friend, family member, or colleague who might enjoy it, too.
More from Andrew Sullivan
His lecture at Penn State on “American Democracy in the Age of Trump”
Interview Highlights
[6:18] How do you think about democracy in your work?
There are two core types that I think about, liberal democracy and illiberal democracy. Democracy itself I think is a two-edged sword. Pure democracy, Plato would tell you and so would Aristotle, is extremely unstable and the founders certainly believed that as well. They were very cognizant of what happened to the Rome of Republic. Liberal democracy requires certain virtues. It requires the ability to have a deliberative conversation to use reason, as well as emotion, but reason is the core function of it, and openness to other ideas and toleration of radical different world views than you, within the same culture. And that’s hard. It’s really, really hard. It’s harder than we think.
[7:56] Of those things, what concerns you most right now?
I think that it is human nature in fast changing societies and fast changing economies and the world is changing extremely fast, to seek security. Democracy’s promise is not ultimately security, it’s freedom. And there are moments in history where freedom is more popular than non-freedom. And I think the massive migrations across the world and the globalizing of the economy has created the seeds for the need for not having every view represented and not being tolerant of everything. And actually stopping things that might otherwise be associated with liberal democracy.
[10:20] What role does dignity play here?
I think one of the eternal human demands is meaning and youthfulness. And I think large numbers of people in the West, especially those who are unskilled. Who’ve earned their livings in the past by rather honest labor, but aren’t educated or intelligent or in the new media. I think they’re confronting the fact, and it’s not that they’re inventing this or imagining this. The fact that they’re not really needed anymore for the economy, for the society. And that’s a terrible thing to feel. I think that simultaneously, we see a decline in religion and that also helps people keep it together. You see across the West, but especially in the U.S., a huge crisis in opioid addiction in these very communities that feel that meaning has disappeared.
[13:40] Is democracy equipped to respond to our current political moment?
One can certainly hope so. It’s certainly been rather resilient facing other crises, but the last time we had a major, huge global economic crisis, the 30s, it didn’t do too well. And liberal democracy has also been I think held up somewhat by the generations who still remember that and don’t want to return to it. But as generations emerge who don’t remember that at all, liberal democracy will seem like as if, maybe we should do away with this.
That’s why I’m concerned that younger generations seem to have much less support for democracy than older generations. I don’t think they see very clearly, what the alternative actually is, and it tends not to good. I mean, democracies are actually better adapting than authoritarian societies to change. But authoritarian societies can arrest change more successfully. They can seal off a country, they can make it so that, they’re more resilient against it and that changes that are happening also don’t happen there.
[17:54] Can small-scale efforts to reform democracy add up to a greater change?
Yes, they do because liberalism is also about the maintenance of rules and norms and institutions that keep a society free and open. And wha...
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FAQ
How many episodes does Democracy Works have?
Democracy Works currently has 305 episodes available.
What topics does Democracy Works cover?
The podcast is about Election, Constitution, Democracy, Podcasts, Education, Politics and Government.
What is the most popular episode on Democracy Works?
The episode title 'Direct democracy's dark side' is the most popular.
What is the average episode length on Democracy Works?
The average episode length on Democracy Works is 38 minutes.
How often are episodes of Democracy Works released?
Episodes of Democracy Works are typically released every 7 days.
When was the first episode of Democracy Works?
The first episode of Democracy Works was released on Mar 12, 2018.
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