We've talked about generational politics on the show before with episodes on Millennials and Baby Boomers. This week, we turn our focus to Gen Z, those born from the late 1990s to early 2000s. This generation's formative experiences include school shootings, a global pandemic, and reckonings with racial and economic inequality.
In his book Fight: How Gen Z is Channeling Their Fear and Passion to Save America, John Della Volpe argues that Gen Z has not buckled under the weight of the events that shaped them. Rather, they have organized around the issues America has left unsolved, from gun control to racial and environmental justice to economic inequality, becoming more politically engaged than their elders were at their age and showing a unique willingness to disrupt the status quo.
Della Volpe joins us this week to unpack what he's learned from thousands of conversations with members of Gen Z and what this generation's growing power means for the 2024 election and beyond. Della Volpe is the director of polling at the Harvard Kennedy School Institute of Politics, where he has led the institute’s polling initiatives on understanding American youth since 2000.
Fight: How Gen Z is Channeling Their Fear and Passion to Save America
Peniel E. Joseph, author of The Third Reconstruction: America's Struggle for Racial Justice in the 21st Century, joins us this week to discuss how the era from Barack Obama's election to George Floyd's murder compare to the post-Civil War Reconstruction and the Civil Rights Movement.
Joseph argues that racial reckoning that unfolded in 2020 marked the climax of a Third Reconstruction: a new struggle for citizenship and dignity for Black Americans, just as momentous as the movements that arose after the Civil War and during the civil rights era. However, Chris Beem and Candis Watts Smith are not so sure he's right about that conclusion. We hope you'll listen to the arguments and think critically about where you land on the question of whether America has experienced or is in the midst of a Third Reconstruction.
Joseph is based at the University of Texas at Austin, where he holds the following titles:Associate Dean for Justice, Equity, Diversity and Inclusion Barbara Jordan Chair in Ethics and Political Values, Professor of History and Public Affairs, and Founding Director of the Center for the Study of Race and Democracy. His career focus has been on "Black Power Studies," which encompasses interdisciplinary fields such as Africana studies, law and society, women's and ethnic studies and political science. He is a frequent commentator on issues of race, democracy and civil rights.
Between democracy and autocracy is an anocracy, defined by political scientists as a country that has elements of both forms of government — usually one that's on the way up to becoming a full democracy or on the way down to full autocracy. This messy middle is the state when civil wars are most likely to start and the one that requires the most diligence from that country's citizens to prevent a civil war from breaking out.
Barbara F. Walter, author of How Civil Wars Start: And How to Stop Them has spent decades studying civil wars around the world and working with other political scientists to quantify how strong democracy is in a given country. She joins us this week to discuss those findings, how the democratic health of the United States has shifted over the past decade, and more.
Walter is the Rohr Professor of International Affairs at the School of Global Policy & Strategy at the University of California, San Diego. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Chicago and completed post docs at the Olin Institute for Strategic Studies at Harvard University and the War and Peace Institute at Columbia University.
At the end of March, millions of Americans lost access to Medicaid as pandemic-era expansions to the program were rolled back. At the same time, North Carolina's legislature voted to expand Medicaid, marking a demonstration of bipartisan agreement in these polarizing times. This backdrop makes it a very interesting time to talk with Jamila Michener, who studies both the specific politics of Medicaid and how the political fights over Medicaid illustrate larger issues in federalism and democracy.
In this episode, we discuss how receiving government benefits like Medicaid impacts political agency, whether it's possible to square federalism and equality, and more.
Michener is associate professor of government at Cornell University and author of Fragmented Democracy: Medicaid, Federalism, and Unequal Politics. In the book, Michener examines American democracy from the vantage point(s) of those who are living in or near poverty, (disproportionately) Black or Latino, and reliant on a federated government for vital resources.
Fragmented Democracy: Medicaid, Federalism, and Unequal Politics
Juries have been at the center of some of the most emotionally charged moments of political life, especially in high profile cases like the trial of Derek Chauvin for George Floyd's murder in 2021. This week, we explore juries as a democratic institution. Our guest, Sonali Chakravarti, argues that juries provide an important site for democratic action by citizens and that their use should be revived. She says juries could be a forward-looking institution that nurtures the best democratic instincts of citizens like examining their own perceptions and biases and engaging in dialogue and deliberation.
Chakravarti is a professor of government at Wesleyan University and the author of Radical Enfranchisement in the Jury Room and Public Life , published by the University of Chicago Press in 2020. Her work focuses on public participation in legal institutions and the relationship between law and politics.
Radical Enfranchisement in the Jury Room and Public Life
More than ever, civic learning is needed to ensure each and every person across this country has the necessary tools to engage as members of our self-governing society. However, schools are also a growing part of the culture wars. According to a 2022 National Education Association Survey, nearly half of schools reported challenges teaching about race and racism and practices related to LGBTQ students in the classroom. As we've discussed before on the show, book bans, funding cuts, and teacher shortages are also making teaching anything — let alone civics — more difficult.
At this critical juncture, Civic Learning Week unites students, educators, policymakers, and private sector leaders to energize the movement for civic education across the nation. This week's episode includes two experts who talk about the theory and practice of strengthening civics education in these polarizing times.
Emma Humphries is Chief Education Officer and Deputy Director of Field Building for iCivics, the non-profit founded by Justice Sandra Day O’Connor to reinvigorate civics through free, interactive learning resources. Emma serves as iCivics’ pedagogical expert, ensures its resources evolve to a place of greater equity and deeper learning for all students, and advocates for more and better civic education across the country.
Ashley Berner is Director of the Johns Hopkins Institute for Education Policy and Associate Professor of Education. She served previously as the Deputy Director of the CUNY Institute for Education Policy and as an administrator at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia. Her most recent book is Pluralism and American Public Education: No One Way to School.
iCivics poling on bipartisan support for civic education
Diffusing the History Wars: Finding Common Ground in Teaching America's National Story
Many of us can conjure moments when politics made us feel sad. But how often do those feelings translate into more serious forms of depression or other mental health issues? And if politics does make us depressed, what do we do about it? Christopher Ojeda has spent the past few years exploring these questions and joins us this week to talk about the relationship between depression and democracy.
Ojeda is an assistant professor of political science at the University of California Merced and author of the forthcoming book The Sad Citizen: How Politics Makes Us Depressed. He visited Penn State to give us a sneak preview of this important work on the relationship between democratic engagement and individual mental health. We discuss how to meet the demands that democracy places on us without sacrificing our mental health in the process.
Why has the underrepresentation of women and racial minorities in elected office proved so persistent? Some experts suggest that women lack sufficient ambition to run for office relative to men, while others say that districts with majority white populations do not provide adequate resources or opportunities for minority candidates to succeed. These approaches tend to treat women and racial minorities as parallel social groups, and fail to account for the ways in which race and gender simultaneously shape candidacy.
In her book, Nowhere to Run, Christian Dyogi Phillips introduces the intersectional model of electoral opportunity, which argues that descriptive representation in elections is shaped by intersecting processes related to race and gender. The book and this conversation shed new light on how multiple dimensions of identity simultaneously shape pathways to candidacy and representation for all groups seeking a seat at the table in American politics.
Phillips is an assistant professor of Political Science at the University of Southern California, and holds affiliations with the USC Institute for Intersectionality and Social Transformation and the USC Dornsife Equity Research Institute. Prior to becoming an academic, Phillips led organizing and political campaigns in the American labor movement.
Nowhere to Run: Race, Gender, and Immigration in American Elections
How much news is too much? Or not enough? News Over Noise, the new podcast from Penn State's News Literacy Initiative explores that question and offers guidance on how to consume news that enhances your participation in our democracy without becoming overwhelmed by all the noise on social media and the 24/7 news cycle.
News Over Noise co-hosts Matt Jordan and Leah Dajches join us this week to discuss how the news impacts our mental health, the future of media literacy education, and more. Jordan is a professor of media studies Dajches is a post-doctoral researcher, both in the Bellisario College of Communications at Penn State.
News Literacy Week- January 23-27, 2023
We've had some incredible guests on the show in 2022. For our final episode of the year, we're taking a look back at what we've learned from them. Michael Berkman, Chris Beem, Candis Watts Smith, and Jenna Spinelle revisit our episodes with:
A programming note: Democracy Works will be moving to a bi-weekly release schedule in 2023. If you have ideas for people we should be talking to or topics we should cover, please get in touch!
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.