Democracy Works

Changing the world is difficult. One reason is that the most important problems, like climate change and democracy reform are structural. They are larger than any one person can solve on their own, yet we're bombarded with information about individual actions like attending a public meeting or lowering your carbon footprint. Do these individual actions even matter? Should we focus instead of fixin...

Democracy Works host Candis Watts Smith joins Cara Santa Maria on the Talk Nerdy podcast to discuss her new book, Black Evidence: A History and a Warning . From Reconstruction to Redemption, from the enactment of landmark civil rights legislation to the execution of the Southern strategy, from 2020’s multiracial protests to the swift elimination of policies etching out a more inclusive society, Am...

From the COVID-19 pandemic to debates over vaccines and the Make America Healthy Again movement, politics and medicine are intertwined in ways not seen in previous generations. When politics enters the doctor's office, what does it mean for the health of our democracy? Julianna Pacheco is working to answer that questions and joins Democracy Works host Chris Beem for a conversation about medicine a...

Danielle Allen's work straddles the line between past and present. On one hand, she's on the road this year talking about America's 250th anniversary in the context of her book on the Declaration of Independence. On the other hand, she's hard at work on Substack writing and talking about democracy reform (or renovation she calls it). She's also leading a coalition working to bring nonpartisan prim...

What is the role of higher education in a democracy? To what extent should American universities respond to the demands of those in power? Are we meeting this moment? As a former governor, cabinet secretary, and university president, Secretary Janet Napolitano is uniquely positioned to address these questions. She spoke with Michael Berkman, director of the McCourtney Institute for Democracy and p...

Ayesha Rascoe, host of NPR's Weekend Edition Sunday and Weekend Up First, joins us to discuss what it's like being a political reporter in a polarized country and what the "public" in public media looks like amid the loss federal funding. Rascoe joined NPR in 2018 and served as White House correspondent during the first Trump administration and the Biden administration. We talk about covering the...

Democracy is often framed as a battle between political candidates or parties that have opposing viewpoints and are trying to win over voters to join their side. However, there’s another way to think about democracy as a system of self governance that everyone shares and has a stake in preserving and protecting. Jeremy David Engels articulates the latter point of view in the book, On Mindful Democ...

AI is changing many aspects of our lives, so it's reasonable to expect that it will impact democracy, too. The question is how? Two experts in technology and politics join us to discuss how we can harness AI's power to strengthen democracy. Yes, there will be deepfakes and automated misinformation, but there can also be greater opportunities for the government to serve people and for all of us to...

In the aftermath of the U.S. intervention in Venezuela, we explore how rising political divides are leading to bigger swings in America's foreign policy — and what that means for our future in the liberal international order. In her book Polarization and International Politics: How Extreme Partisanship Threatens Global Security, Rachel Myrick argues that polarization reshapes the nature of constra...

While Democracy Works is on winter break, we're bringing you an episode from our colleagues at The Context , a podcast from the Charles F. Kettering Foundation and a fellow member of The Democracy Group podcast network. Host Alex Lovit looks back at the advice from the show's guests this year about how everyday people can get involved in fighting authoritarianism and encouraging citizen engagement...

We end this season where we started — a conversation about higher education and democracy. This time, Michael Berkman, McCourtney Institute for Democracy director and professor of political science at Penn State, sits down with Brad Vivian, professor of communication arts and sciences at Penn State and author of Campus Misinformation: The Real Threat to Free Speech in American Higher Education . ...

It's easy to blame algorithms and AI for corroding our information ecosystem, but our guest this week argues that we have just as much, if not more of a role to play in creating the environment we want to see.  Ray Block Jr . is the Brown-McCourtney Career Development Professor at Penn State and the Michael D. Rich Chair in Countering Truth Decay and RAND Corporation. He joins us to discuss the ne...

Paul Martin was fired from his role as USAID Inspector General after he published a report warning that the Trump administration’s plans to dismantle USAID placed more than $480 million in food and other commodities in danger of spoilage or theft. Martin joins us to recount the chaotic few months leading up to his termination from USAID and how his firing fits into a broader assault on independent...

We bring you a special crossover episode with Disorder, a show that explores the fundamental principles lurking behind today's most pressing global issues. Jenna Spinelle talks with Disorder host Jason Pack, an associate fellow at the Royal United Services Institute and author of Libya and the Enduring Global Disorder . They discuss the state of democracy around the world and why making America's...

This episode is a collaboration with our colleagues at News Over Noise , the podcast from Penn State's News Literacy Initiative. We recorded this interview on October 27, the first day of U.S. Media Literacy Week, an event that highlights the power of media literacy education and its essential role in education all across the country. The conversation focuses on how AI complicates and already-comp...

Civic education is full of nostalgia. Horace Mann, John Dewey, and the Cold War era often come up in conversations about the current state of affairs. Judge Marjorie Rendell knows this well because she grew up in the postwar era and understand how different today's civic education is from what she received as a young student. She saw it firsthand when she visited classrooms across Pennsylvania dur...

The movement to end gerrymandering is something we've covered on the show several times over the years. Until recently, the conversation focused on independent redistricting commissions formed as a result of grassroots action from voters who felt that gerrymandering led to elected officials who didn't represent the values of the communities they served.  The issue is now decidedly more partisan th...

The last time Cynthia Miller-Idriss was on the show, we discussed how political extremism was making its way to the mainstream through a variety of channels. This time, we're looking at how misogyny and gender-based violence have become mainstream and the implications for our democracy.  Miller-Idriss write about this trend in her new book, Man Up: The New Misogyny and the Rise of Violent Extremis...

Summer is typically a quiet time for higher education but this summer has been anything but quiet amid funding cuts, lawsuits, and questions about the value of American colleges and universities. Our guests this week are part of Stand Together for Higher Ed , a new nonpartisan movement of university faculty and staff focused on building collective power to uphold the core values of higher educatio...

For our final episode of the season, we present a conversation with Ben Rhodes recorded at in Washington, D.C. at the end of May. Democracy Works is going on summer break. We'll be back with new episodes in September! The Democracy Group's first live podcast recording featuring foreign policy expert and fellow podcaster Ben Rhodes  in conversation with Kamy Akhavan of Let's Find Common Ground and...

In a rebroadcast from 2023,  we discuss how to meet the demands that democracy places on us without sacrificing our own personal mental health in the process.  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? Ch...

Jeff Sharlet has spent the past few years embedded in the deepest corners of the growing far-right movement in the United States. He's come to think of it as a black hole, something that can pull people in with ever-shifting grievances and a desire for power. He chronicles the movement and the characters in it in his book  The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War and joins us to discuss the book...

From fights over masks and vaccines to the loss of social connection, the year 2020 accelerated many of the trends that were already happening in America and created new obstacles for the country to overcome. In his book 2020: One City, Seven People, and the Year Everything Changed, sociologist Eric Klinenberg takes on a journey back to that year and everything that happened in it through the eyes...

Last week's Wisconsin Supreme Court election put a spotlight on state-level politics and the way that national politics can influence what happens in the states. But there are a lot of other developments happening at the state level that you might have missed. We catch up on what's happening with Alex Burness, a reporter who covers state and local democracy and criminal justice issues for Bolts ....

Cory Doctorow coined the term "enshittification" to describe how tech platforms have eroded over time. According to him, the process goes something like this:  First, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die. Doctorow joins us i...