This week, we bring you an episode from the Democracy Paradox podcast. Jan-Werner Müller of Princeton University joins host Justin Kempf to discuss his new book, Democracy Rules.
Democracy and populism diverge at a single point. It’s like a fork in a road where both traditions depend on a common history, but they split in two. At first it may seem the choice doesn’t matter. You believe that eventually they will both lead to the same destination except they don’t. The choice leads to two different outcomes. Populism uses some of the same language of democracy. It has a similar vocabulary. But as we go farther down its path, the less in common they have with each other.
Jan-Werner Müller is among the most recognizable voices on the subject of populism and democracy. This conversation from the Democracy Paradox podcast touches on some of their most challenging aspects from political leadership to majority rule to militant democracy. This conversation explores some of the ideas at the heart of this podcast. Ideas that give definition to the very meaning of democracy.
Müller is a professor of politics at Princeton University and author of Democracy Rules and What is Populism?
Some of the most talked-about issues in Congress these days are not about the substance of policies or bills being debated on the floor. Instead, the focus is on the partisan conflict between the parties and the endless debate about whether individual members of Congress will break with party ranks on any particular vote. This behavior allows the parties to emphasize the differences between them, which makes it easier to court donors and hold voter attention.
Some amount of competition between the parties is necessary in a healthy democracy, but have things gone too far? Frances E. Lee joins us this week to explain.
Lee is jointly appointed in the Department of Politics and the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, where she is Professor of Politics and Public Affairs. She is the author of Insecure Majorities: Congress and the Perpetual Campaign and The Limits of Party: Congress and Lawmaking in a Polarized Era with James M. Curry.
Lee's book, Insecure Majorities: Congress and the Perpetual Campaign
Her lecture at Penn State on lawmaking in a polarized era
This episode comes from our colleagues at Democracy in Danger, a production of the Deliberative Media Lab at the University of Virginia. Journalist and author Masha Gessen joins hosts Will Hitchcock and Siva Vaidhyanathan to discuss democracy in Russia.
Three pillars hold up autocracy in Russia, author and New Yorker staff writer Masha Gessen says: media control, sham elections and downright terror. But the opposition movement spearheaded by imprisoned activist Alexei Navalny has struck at the heart of all three. This time on the show, Gessen explains how — and measures the power of democratic aspirations in a country struggling against corruption with hope, against the past with visions of a happier future.
Navalny, a lawyer who has become President Vladimir Putin’s chief political rival, leads the Russia of the Future party, whose motto is “Russia will be happy.” In prison, his health failing, and recently off a 24-day hunger strike, Navalny continues to command respect — and a vast YouTube following — in part because he is brave enough to fight the system, even if it costs him his life, Gessen says.
It’s a powerful message for a generation from whom many of the tools of critical social analysis have been withheld. Against the odds, Navalny’s resistance is inspiring young people who have grown up with no ruler other than Putin, a former KGB officer who views the totalitarian past with nostalgia.
Surviving Autocracy by Masha Gessen
Are the crises facing American democracy really a failure of imagination? Our guest this week argues that they are and has ideas for what to do about it.
Lee Drutman is a senior fellow in the Political Reform program at New America. He is the author of Breaking the Two-Party Doom Loop: The Case for Multiparty Democracy in America and The Business of America is Lobbying. He is also the co-host of the podcast Politics in Question, and writes for the New York Times, Vox, and FiveThirtyEight, among other outlets. He holds a Ph.D. in political science from the University of California.
Hear more from Drtuman at a virtual event on "Democracy's Crises and Failure of Imagination" sponsored by The Democracy Group podcast network. Lee will be joined by Carah One Whaley of James Madison University, democracy entrepreneur Turi Munthe, and Democracy Works host Jenna Spinelle. Join us Wednesday, July 7 at 2 p.m. ET or watch the recording at democracygroup.org.
July 7 event with The Democracy Group
Breaking the Two-Party Doom Loop: The Case for Multiparty Democracy in America
Does Congress promote partisan gridlock?
Local news and democracy have been intertwined since the days of Alexis de Tocqueville. As we've discussed on this show before, news outlets are one way that people who live in a city or town keep up on what's happening in their local government. However, our guest this week argues the "watchdog" effect of local journalism might be overstated, along with the correlation between local news consumption and political participation.
Nikki Usher is an associate professor in the College of Media at the University of Illinois and author of News for the Rich, White, and Blue: How Place and Power Distort American Journalism. In the book and in this conversation, Usher recasts the challenges facing journalism in terms of place, power, and inequality. She questions longstanding beliefs about the relationship between local news and civic engagement and separates observed behavior from myths about American democracy and the media's role within it.
This conversation originally appeared on New Books in Journalism, part of the New Books Network.
News for the Rich, White, and Blue: How Place and Power Distort American Journalism
This week, we bring you an episode from the Democracy Matters podcast, produced by the Center for Civic Engagement at James Madison University. Hosts Abe Goldberg, Carah Ong Whaley, and Angelina Clapp talk with government ethics expert Walter Shaub about what officials and the public can do to create and implement long-lasting reforms to shore up the barricades against authoritarianism.
Can transparency, oversight, ethics and accountability save American democracy? What can Congress do to create lasting ethics reforms? How would the For the People Act change ethics rules for the legislative, judicial, and executive branches of the U.S. government and are the changes enough? How can the Office of Government Ethics and Office of the Inspector General contribute to democratic accountability? How can Congress get a toe hold into reigning in presidential power?
In this episode of the Democracy Matters podcast from the JMU Center for Civic Engagement, hosts Abe Goldberg, Carah Ong Whaley, and Angelina Clapp talk with Walter Shaub, who leads the Ethics and Accountability Initiative at the Project on Government Oversight about what elected and other government officials and the public can do to create and implement long-lasting reforms to shore up the barricades against authoritarianism.
Many of us can recall the experience of scrolling through our phones or streaming TV apps without ever choosing something to focus on. Pete Davis describes this an "infinite browsing mode" and argues that it creates a culture where democracy can't fully thrive.
Davis is cofounder of the Democracy Policy Network and author of Dedicated: The Case for Commitment in an Age of Infinite Browsing. His work is grounded in the notion of "long-haul heroes," or the people who show up day in and day out to make progress on the issues they care about while building stronger communities in the process. This could be anyone from the go-to event organizer in your town to people who work on nationwide campaigns for issues like racial equality and LGBTQ rights.
This work has always been difficult, but Davis argues it's even harder now because of the constant distractions that our media environment provides, along with the FOMO and related feelings that prevent us from dedicating ourselves to anything in the long term. We unpack all of that in this episode and discuss how Davis is turning his ideas into action through the Democracy Policy Network.
Dedicated : The Case for Commitment in an Age of Infinite Browsing
The New York City mayoral primary is this week and will be the first one to use ranked-choice voting. This week, we revisit an episode that aired not longer after the city's voters approved RCV via ballot measure in November 2019.
What is ranked-choice voting? How does it work? And, is it more democratic than the single-vote method we’re used to? This week’s guest has answers to all of those questions.
Burt L. Monroe is Liberal Arts Professor Political Science, Social Data Analytics, and Informatics at Penn State and Director of the university’s Center for Social Data Analytics. He says ranked-choice voting is generally a good thing for democracy, but not entirely without problems of its own. We also talk about bullet voting, donkey voting, and other types of voting that have been tried around the world.
As Michael and Chris discuss, ranked-choice voting falls into a category of grassroots organizing around pro-democracy initiatives like gerrymandering and open primaries. These efforts signal a frustration with the status quo and a desire to make the rules of democracy more fair and equitable.
Fairvote, an advocacy group for ranked-choice voting and election reform
We often talk about democracy in the context of politics and institutions, but this week's guest draws from Walt Whitman, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and John Dewey to offer a different perspective.
We live in an era defined by a sense of separation, even in the midst of networked connectivity. As cultural climates sour and political division spreads, our guest this week suggests there is no better time to reconsider ideas of unity in democracy.
In his book, The Ethics of Oneness, Jeremy David Engels argues that if the lessons of oneness are taken to heart, particularly as they were expressed and celebrated by Whitman, and the ethical challenges of oneness considered seriously, it is possible to counter the pervasive and problematic American ideals of hierarchy, exclusion, violence, and domination.
Engels is professor of communication arts and sciences at Penn State and the Barry Director of the Paterno Fellows Program. He's also a yoga and meditation instructor who has spent time studying yoga and philosophy in India. He is the author of The Ethics of Oneness: Emerson, Whitman, and the Bhagavad Gita, The Art of Gratitude, The Politics of Resentment, and Enemyship: Democracy and Counter-Revolution in the Early Republic.
As we enter summer vacation season and emerge from pandemic isolation, Robert Talisse thinks it’s a good idea to take a break from politics. In fact, he might go so far as to say democracy is better off if you do.
Talisse is the W. Alton Jones Professor of Philosophy at Vanderbilt University and author of a new book called Overdoing Democracy: Why We Must Put Politics in Its Place. The book combines philosophical analysis with real-world examples to examine the infiltration of politics into all social spaces, and the phenomenon of political polarization.
Talisse's next book,Sustaining Democracy: What We Owe The Other Side, will be out later this year. He's also the host of the Why We Argue podcast.
Overdoing Democracy: Why We Must Put Politics in Its Place
Sustaining Democracy: What We Owe the Other Side
We are part of The Democracy Group, a network of podcasts that examines what’s broken in our democracy and how we can work together to fix it.