We are excited to share the first episode of a new narrative series on ballot initiatives from the McCourtney Institute for Democracy: When the People Decide.
In this reported series, Jenna Spinelle tells the stories of activists, legislators, academics, and average citizens who changed their cities, states, and the country by taking important issues directly to votes — like Medicaid expansion in Idaho, sentencing reform in California, and LGBTQ workplace protections in Ohio.
This episode tells the story of a campaign in Michigan to end partisan gerrymandering in 2018 and shows how it is part of a legacy of ballot initiatives dating back to the 1800s. After becoming disillusioned with the results of the 2016 election, Katie Fahey took to Facebook to gauge the interest of grassroots mobilization amongst her colleagues, friends and family.
Now the executive director of a nonpartisan voter reform organization, Fahey shares how the ballot initiative excited everyday people about becoming active in politics, including its 10,000 volunteers, and how they were inspired to make political changes in their communities. We also hear from historian Steven Piott about the unlikely origin of the initiative and referendum in the United States at the turn of the 20th century.
New episodes will be released throughout the summer. Subscribe to When the People Decide in your podcast app:
It's no secret that there's a partisan divide in the media, but thus far, solutions to bridge that divide have been few and far between. Our guest this week had an idea that seems to be taking hold and building a readership across the political spectrum.
Isaac Saul is the founder and publisher of Tangle, a non-partisan news and politics newsletter that summarizes the best arguments from across the political spectrum on one issue each day. He a politics reporter who grew up in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, one of the most politically divided places in the United States. In 2020, he created Tangle in an attempt to get people out of their information bubbles.
Jake Grumbach's book "Laboratories against Democracy: How National Parties Transformed State Politics" is out now from Princeton University Press. We were lucky enough to receive and advance copy and are rebroadcasting our conversation with him from earlier this year.
As many liberals were saying "thank God for federalism" in the Trump era, Grumbach saw some different — and disturbing — patterns emerging. He argues that as Congress has become more gridlocked, national partisan and activist groups have shifted their sights to the state level, nationalizing state politics in the process and transforming state governments into the engines of American policymaking in areas from health care to climate change. He also traces how national groups are using state governmental authority to suppress the vote, gerrymander districts, and erode the very foundations of democracy itself.
Grumbach is an assistant professor of political science at the University of Washington.
Laboratories Against Democracy: How National Parties Transformed State Politics
From COVID-19 policies to reproductive rights, conversations about freedom and liberty seem to be front and center in politics and the culture wars. This week, we take a deep dive into the philosophical underpinnings of these concepts and how different interpretations of them impact our ability to sustain a democracy. We also examine how bringing the idea of freedom into political debates can obscure what's really at stake and make it difficult to come to meaningful resolution.
Democracy Works host and McCourtney Institute for Democracy Managing Director Chris Beem talks with John Christman, professor of philosophy, political science, and women's studies at Penn State and director of the Humanities Institute. He is the author of numerous articles and books in social and political philosophy, specializing in topics such as the social conception of the self, theories of justice and oppression, and the idea of freedom. He is the editor of the newly-published Positive Freedom: Past, Present, and Future. The book includes both historical studies of the idea of positive freedom and discussions of its connection to important contemporary issues in social and political philosophy.
This week, we present an episode of the No Jargon podcast from the Scholars Strategy Network. Candis Watts Smith joins the show to discuss her research on racial attitudes among Millennials.
Millennials are often seen as a progressive-minded generation – as 80’s and 90’s kids, they grew up in a digital landscape that exposed them to a diversity of perspectives. But while expectations were high that this generation would be on the frontlines in the fight for racial equality, recent research by Democracy Works host Candis Watts Smith paints a different picture.
During this conversation with Lisa Hernandez and Lizzy Ghedi-Ehrlich, host of the Scholars Strategy Network's No Jargon podcast, Candis discussed how white millennials’ really think about race and the ways in which their views and beliefs have largely halted progress for Black Americans and other racial minorities in the United States.
Racial Stasis: The Millennial Generation and the Stagnation of Racial Attitudes in American Politics
Stay Woke: A People’s Guide to Making All Black Lives Matter
This week, we broadcast a recording from a virtual event with Andrew Yang and Charlie Dent on political parties and democracy reform. We discuss open primaries, ranked-choice voting, universal voting, and more.
Dent was the McCourtney Institute for Democracy’s fall 2021 visiting fellow. This is his last official engagement with us during his fellowship and we’ve really enjoyed having him with us this semester. He spent seven terms in Congress representing Pennsylvania’s Lehigh Valley and served in the Pennsylvania state legislature before that. He’s currently executive director of the Aspen Institute Congressional Program, a CNN political analyst, and a 501c3 adviser for the Renew America Movement, which supports candidates who are committed to democracy and the rule of law.
Yang ran for president in 2020 and mayor of New York City earlier this year. Most recently, he founded the Forward Party, a movement that brings together people interested in solving America’s problems, debating ideas in good faith, and advocating for policies like open primaries and ranked-choice voting. Before that, he started Humanity Forward to advance policies aimed at ending poverty. His latest book is Forward: Notes on the Future of Our Democracy.
Both Dent and Yang spend a lot of time thinking about how to fix what’s broken in American politics but have different ideas about how to do that and where go from here, which made for a very interesting discussion.
Forward Notes on the Future of Our Democracy
Your guide to ranked-choice voting
Jonathan Haidt is part of the newly-announced University of Austin, created in response to what its founders deem a lack of viewpoint diversity among college faculty. Haidt was beginning to explore those themes when he joined on the show in March 2019.
We say on this show all the time that democracy is hard work. But what does that really mean? What it is about our dispositions that makes it so hard to see eye to eye and come together for the greater good? And why, despite all that, do we feel compelled to do it anyway? Jonathan Haidt is the perfect person to help us unpack those questions.
We also explore what we can do now to educate the next generation of democratic citizens, based on the research Jonathan and co-author Greg Lukianoff did for their latest book The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas are Setting Up a Generation for Failure.
Jonathan is social psychologist at New York University’s Stern School of Business. His research examines the intuitive foundations of morality, and how morality varies across cultures — including the cultures of American progressive, conservatives, and libertarians.
The Coddling of the American Mind
As redistricting begins across the country, we revisit our conversation with journalist and author David Daley about the consequences for American democracy if gerrymandering happens again this time around. This episode originally aired in January 2021, not long after the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.
David Daley 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.
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.
Daley's op-ed on democracy deserts in The Guardian
Unrigged: How Americans are Battling Back to Save Democracy
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.
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
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.