essay about undemocratic practices

The Undemocratic Dilemma

• Yascha Mounk

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Over the past decades, the ability of liberal democracies around the world to translate popular views into public policy has declined. This is a result of two major developments: Legislatures have become less reflective of popular opinion because of the growing role of money in politics. At the same time, they have also become less powerful because of the growing importance of bureaucratic agencies, central banks, judicial review, free trade, and international institutions. But there are no easy solutions, since some of these institutions are needed to meet high expectations on government performance. The “technocratic dilemma” thus poses a real threat to liberal democracy’s ability to meet the public’s twin demands of responsiveness and performance.

F or decades, developed democracies in North America, Western Europe, and beyond appeared to be remarkably stable. Moderate parties and politicians were dominant. Independent institutions were strong. A broad political consensus created a sense that the future was highly predictable. This seeming stability shaped the theories of most political scientists. They believed that in countries that were affluent and in which the government had repeatedly changed hands through free and fair elections, democracy had “consolidated.” Unless these countries suffered some unexpected calamity, such as a major war, it was safe to assume that their political systems would remain stable for the foreseeable future.

About the Author

Yascha Mounk is associate professor of the practice of international affairs at Johns Hopkins University and the author of The Great Experiment: Why Diverse Democracies Fall Apart and How They Can Endure (2022).

View all work by Yascha Mounk

The past few years have called these supposed certainties into doubt. Many developed democracies are experiencing the most rapid political change they have seen in decades: Citizens are becoming increasingly angry. Party systems that had long been stable are disintegrating. Most strikingly, in a wide swath of countries across Europe and North America, a new crop of populists has entered parliament or even ascended to executive power.

While academics are sometimes slow to adjust their long-held theories, these events have already triggered a much-needed set of challenges to the prevailing scholarly consensus. Erstwhile optimists from Adam Przeworski to Francis Fukuyama have publicly expressed their concerns for the stability of liberal democracy. Leading comparativists such as Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt are examining the circumstances in which supposedly consolidated democracies might die. Others are mounting a  [End Page 98]  major effort to monitor whether the “bright lines” that need to remain in-violate for the liberal-democratic system to endure are now being crossed in the United States.

These challenges to the older scholarly consensus have, in turn, stimulated a set of important debates, many of which have been playing out in the pages of the  Journal of Democracy  over the past two years: Are citizens merely disappointed with existing political elites, or are they actually becoming open to authoritarian alternatives to democracy? Are the causes of the populist rise primarily cultural, or are they economic? And what might the answers to these questions imply about potential remedies?

One key set of questions centers on the nature of the new class of political challengers, which includes such populist politicians as France’s Marine Le Pen, Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, and Donald Trump in the United States. Some scholars have argued that today’s populists, having shed the outright preference for authoritarian systems shown by older movements on the far left and far right, should be understood as deeply democratic, since they channel the views of the majority. Others, pointing to the worrisome political goals and strategies favored by populists, have responded that they are in fact antidemocratic (or at least dangerously illiberal).

Some of this debate can be settled by distinguishing between the  form  and the  effect  of the current wave of populist politics. When it comes to form, Fareed Zakaria’s term “illiberal democracy” offers an apt description. Most populists are democratic in that they do actually seek to translate popular views on issues such as migration into public policy. At the same time, they are illiberal in their readiness, once in power, to attack independent institutions, undermine the rule of law, and violate the rights of minorities.

The illiberal nature of the regimes that populists erect is in itself a good reason to oppose them. But even people who care only about the democratic component of liberal-democratic systems have reason for concern: While the form populism takes may initially be democratic, its long-term effect is to undermine not only liberalism, but democracy as well. As we have seen in countries from Venezuela to Hungary, attacks by populists on independent institutions and the rule of law ultimately erode the conditions for free and fair elections to such an extent that populist leaders cease to be effectively constrained by the will of the people.

This is why we can see the danger posed by the current political moment with greater clarity if we adopt a “thin” definition of democracy which recognizes that liberal-democratic systems are the sum of two core components, democracy  and  liberalism, rather than a “thick” definition of democracy that includes all desirable characteristics under this single heading. Once populists gain control, they turn liberal democracies into illiberal democracies by attacking independent institutions, undermining  [End Page 99]  the rule of law, and violating the rights of minorities. Illiberal democracies are thus a distinctive regime type in their own right—yet they may not prove to be a stable one. Evidence from countries including Hungary, Turkey, and Venezuela suggests that illiberal democracies are always in danger of degenerating into electoral dictatorships.

The rise of populists who champion illiberal democracy may, in turn, reflect popular dissatisfaction with preexisting systems that suffered from the inverse defect:  undemocratic liberalism . Such systems are liberal, yet fail to live up to democracy’s promise to let the people rule. Although they (mostly) respect the rule of law and (largely) protect the rights of minorities, they fail to translate popular preferences into public policy. Over the past decades, many countries in North America and Western Europe have, in effect, unwittingly adopted undemocratic liberal regimes.

This poses a deep “antidemocratic dilemma.” On the one hand, the people’s dispossession is troubling for both normative and prudential reasons. It betrays one of the core promises of liberal democracy and inspires a deep distrust in the political system that grows more corrosive with each passing year. The stability of the system may thus depend on finding ways to make ordinary citizens feel that they are in charge again. On the other hand, the technocratic institutions that have been a major factor in the rise of undemocratic liberalism are doing important work that is necessary for democratic governments to deliver on key issues such as public safety and economic growth: Abolishing these institutions would likely make the lives of many citizens worse, and erode the performance legitimacy on which democracies have always, to some extent, relied. Precisely because it cannot be overcome simply by returning power to the people, the decomposition of liberal democracy into its constituent parts will be one of the defining challenges of the coming decades.

The Rise of Technocratic Institutions

Since the end of World War II, the complexity of the regulatory tasks facing the state has vastly increased. Technology has advanced, and economic processes have become more intricate. Monetary policy has  [End Page 100]  evolved into a core tool for stabilizing the economy. Even more important, some of the most pressing political challenges now facing mankind, from climate change to growing inequality, are global in origin and seemingly outstrip the ability of individual nation-states to find an adequate response.

Each of these changes has prompted a shift of power away from national parliaments. To deal with the need for regulation in highly technical fields, bureaucratic agencies staffed with subject-matter experts began to take on a quasi-legislative role. To make increasingly complicated decisions about monetary policy while resisting political pressure to create artificial booms, more and more central banks became independent. Finally, to develop rules, plans, and standards on issues ranging from trade to climate change, an array of international treaties and organizations were founded.

This transformation is not the result of an elite conspiracy. On the contrary, it has occurred gradually, and often imperceptibly, in response to real policy challenges. But the cumulative result has been a creeping erosion of democracy: As more and more areas of public policy have been walled off from the fray of democratic politics, the people’s ability to influence their government has been drastically curtailed.

Bureaucracy

One crucial factor narrowing the sphere of democratic contestation has been the growing role of state bureaucracies, which have taken ever more issues under their jurisdiction. Indeed, government agencies have not only grown more influential in designing the laws passed by parliaments over the past decades; at the same time, they themselves have also increasingly assumed the role of quasi-legislators.

A traditional bureaucratic body is charged with implementing legislation drawn up by the legislature and is led by a politician—often an elected member of parliament—who has been appointed by the president or prime minister. But in a growing number of policy areas, elected legislators have been supplanted as the key decision makers by “independent agencies” with the authority to formulate policy, entities that are remarkably free from oversight either by the legislature or by the elected head of government. Once established, these bodies take on a life of their own, gaining the authority to design, implement, and at times even enforce broad rules in such key areas as finance and environmental protection.

In the United States, independent agencies of this kind include the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB). Collectively, these bodies make key decisions in a wide range of crucial policy areas. The United States is not alone: Equivalents to these independent agencies exist in a variety of countries. In Britain in 2010, there were  [End Page 101]  more than nine-hundred quasi-autonomous nongovernmental organizations (QUANGOs)—governmental bodies that are funded by taxpayer money yet have little or no democratic oversight. While some are performing essential tasks, the rapid increase in their number and in the breadth of their mandates has worried the public. In 2010, Parliament listened to the critics, promising to cut or merge about a third of existing QUANGOs. But in the event, most QUANGOs survived the cull, and many changes turned out to be cosmetic, with authorities resorting to “bureau-shuffling” rather than eliminating agency functions. 1

Perhaps the most powerful “independent agency” in the world is the European Commission. In most countries, the bureaucracy’s power is at least somewhat limited by a strong head of government and a legislature with real backing from ordinary citizens. By contrast, the European Union has its broad policy priorities set by a summit of the heads of government of individual member states that meets only a few times a year. The European Parliament, meanwhile, wields little real power, and its members are chosen in low-turnout elections that voters treat chiefly as an opportunity to protest against unpopular national governments. As a result, the European Commission, an organization of career bureaucrats, has historically been the motor of most EU activities, initiating, writing, and implementing much of EU law.

After World War II, many Germans blamed the collapse of the Weimar Republic on hyperinflation spurred by political meddling with the money supply. To avoid a slide back into chaos or even fascism, they concluded, the new Bundesbank would have to be as independent as possible. This entailed more than just a ban on elected politicians interfering with the bank’s day-to-day operations or freely choosing its governors. In stark contrast to other central banks around the world, the Bundesbank also gained the right to determine its own policy objectives, deciding on its own whether to prioritize low inflation or low unemployment.

Germany’s postwar economic success and the stability of the deutschmark soon became objects of national pride. So when European political elites decided to embark on the process of monetary union in the course of the 1980s, German leaders insisted that the new European Central Bank (ECB) follow the model of the Bundesbank. That is exactly what came to pass: “The ECB,” according to Daniel Gros, “was the Bundesbank 2.0, but even a bit stronger in terms of its independence.” 2  Its institutional design, writes Christopher Alessi, was geared toward ensuring that it would be “governed by unelected technocrats who fell outside the purview of political accountability.” 3

Over the course of the 1970s and 1980s, economists began to make more far-reaching arguments for central-bank independence on the German model. Since politicians have a strong incentive to create short-term  [End Page 102]  booms when they are coming up for reelection, leading scholars argued, central banks subject to political influence would boost inflation in the short-run without sustainably decreasing unemployment in the long-run. 4  Making central banks independent would insulate them from such short-term incentives and thereby boost long-term economic performance. And so over the course of the 1990s more than fifty countries moved toward increased independence for their central banks. 5

For most of the history of liberal democracy, central banks had only limited tools at their disposal. For much of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, most currencies had their value tied to the state’s gold reserves. In the Bretton Woods system that prevailed in the wake of World War II, exchange rates were largely fixed, and on the relatively rare occasions when they had to be adjusted, elected politicians rather than unelected bureaucrats usually made this call. During this period, Simone Pollilo and Mauro Guillén write, central banks “played a relatively limited and quiet role in economic and financial policy making.” 6

Only after the demise of the Bretton Woods currency controls in the early 1970s did central banks gain the leeway to set interest rates in keeping with their policy objectives. Long consigned to keeping stable a system designed by elected politicians, they have today become the key institutions deciding whether to focus on minimizing inflation or unemployment. As a result, technocrats now make some of the most important economic decisions facing countries around the world.

The rise of judicial review is yet another way in which important issues have been taken out of democratic contestation. Historically, judges have used their authority to check whether legislative acts might violate a written constitution or time-honored legal principles for some extraordinarily noble purposes. Many of the most important advances in the rights of U.S. citizens, for example, were handed down from a judicial bench. There can also be no doubt, however, that the nine unelected justices who sit on the U.S. Supreme Court now hold a vast amount of power—and a case can be made that they grew more willing to exercise that power over the course of the twentieth century.

The geographical spread of judicial review has been even more clear-cut: Only eight of the twenty-two countries that could be classified as democracies in 1930 had judicial review at that time. Today, twenty-one of these countries do, with the Netherlands as the only (partial) exception. 7

Even in countries where the constitution does not explicitly grant the power of judicial review to the courts, they have to all intents and purposes started to exercise this power. The United Kingdom had long prided itself on parliamentary sovereignty, but as Britain became a member of the European Community, incorporated the European Convention of Human Rights into domestic law, and established a new Supreme Court  [End Page 103]  of the United Kingdom to take on functions previously handled in the House of Lords, its judges gradually gained de facto powers of judicial review. A similar story could be told about other countries. With the 1982 Charter of Rights and Freedoms, Canada effectively moved from parliamentary to constitutional sovereignty. In France, the powers of the Conseil d’État, the land’s highest court with regard to administrative matters, have gradually expanded, with its judges now making roughly ten-thousand rulings every year. Even in the Netherlands, where Article 120 of the Constitution makes clear that no court can review the constitutionality of parliamentary acts, the introduction of international human-rights treaties has amplified the powers of unelected judges.

There is a direct democratic cost to the rise of judicial review: Decisions are taken out of the hands of the people and turned over to unelected technocrats. Francis Fukuyama has argued that there may also be a more indirect cost. Together with the influence of other entrenched interests, he suggests, the U.S. judiciary’s assumption of tasks properly belonging to other institutions is fueling a process of “political decay” that has rendered certain parts of the political system “dysfunctional”—and has made it difficult even to imagine how to go about fixing them. 8

Trade treaties

The point of an international agreement is to coordinate the actions of participating states, thereby setting stable expectations and helping these countries to achieve a common goal. So the loss of national control over certain matters is not a bug of such agreements; it is their primary feature. This is as true of treaties regulating the emission of noxious gases as it is of those establishing organizations such as the World Bank or the United Nations.

Trade treaties are a key case in point. Free trade offers big benefits to all countries that enjoy it. But to enter into free-trade agreements, a state needs to abdicate some of its power to make independent decisions: If signatory states could reintroduce import tariffs at will, for instance, the agreements would fail to set the stable expectations that account for much of their economic benefit.

As a result, the limitations imposed by free-trade treaties restrict signatories’ freedom of maneuver in important ways. In the past, many developing countries managed to foster high-level domestic industries by temporarily shielding them from competition. The United States did this for steel in the nineteenth century, just as Japan and Taiwan did it for cars and electronics in the twentieth century. Today, developing countries subject to the rules of the World Trade Organization or to even more onerous regional trade agreements are effectively barred from employing the same strategy.

The surrender of control that modern trade deals require goes well beyond decisions about tariffs. Prohibitions on protecting domestic industries from foreign takeover make it harder for governments to slow  [End Page 104]  the job loss from globalization or to cushion its social effects. Measures aimed at eliminating hidden barriers to trade, including divergent regulatory and technical standards, can limit governments’ ability to pass new environmental protections. More ambitious agreements such as NAFTA also include provisions for short-term work visas, lessening participating countries’ control over the inflow of immigrants. Finally, the rise of “investor-state dispute settlements” is giving corporations far-reaching powers to demand compensation for local regulations that might dampen their profits before international tribunals.

Free-trade treaties constitute only a small subset of the agreements and organizations that now structure the international system. These international arrangements offer immense benefits to the world, but this normative fact should not blind us to an even simpler empirical fact: As these treaties proliferate, they increasingly restrict the extent to which legislators within nation-states can make autonomous decisions or react to shifts in popular preferences.

The Cooptation of Electoral Institutions

Whether due to the expanding authority of bureaucrats, the independence of central banks, the rise of judicial review, or the growth of international treaties and organizations, the withdrawal of important topics from domestic political contestation is one major reason why political systems throughout Western Europe and North America have become less democratic. This might imply that we face a straightforward problem of legislatures hamstrung in their ability to enact the wishes of the people. But there is also another big piece of the undemocratic puzzle: Even in areas where parliaments retain real power, they do a poor job of translating the views of the people into public policy.

Although elected by the people to represent their views, legislators have become increasingly insulated from the popular will. The role of money in the political process has grown, with ever larger sums needed to be competitive in elections and lobbying expenditures increasing by an order of magnitude. At the same time, the personal and professional experiences of legislators, as well as their levels of wealth and education, increasingly place them in a class apart from most of their constituents.

Campaign contributions are an especially large problem in countries where existing limits on political spending are weak. In the United States, total spending on elections has grown rapidly over the past few decades, with federal campaign expenditures in 2012 reportedly amounting to nearly US$6.3 billion 9 —more than twice the annual GDP of Burundi. The amount of money spent on lobbying in the United States has also grown rapidly, doubling in the first fifteen years of the twenty-first century alone (from slightly less than $1.6 billion in 2000 to slightly  [End Page 105]  more than $3.2 billion in 2015). 10  And as Lee Drutman has carefully chronicled, the vast majority of that money is spent by large corporations rather than by trade unions or mass-based interest groups. 11

One of the most insidious ways in which lobbying and campaign finance distort the political system is by helping to shape the worldview of politicians, who must spend a large chunk of their time interacting with donors and lobbyists. While nobody has yet studied the magnitude of this effect in a systematic manner, anecdotal evidence suggests that members of Congress now spend up to half their working hours on fundraising activities. A similar shift has occurred in the executive: Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan went to a fundraiser about once every twenty days during their first terms in office. Unlike Reagan, Barack Obama reportedly hated fundraisers. Even so, he remained captive to the exigencies of his political age, and put in an appearance at a presidential fundraiser roughly once every five days. 12

Many Europeans like to think that things are much better on the Continent than in the United States, where democracy, they assert, was long ago captured by a hypercapitalist mindset and the corporations it emboldens. These claims contain a grain of truth. In most European countries, limits on campaign contributions are more stringent. Although payments to lobbyists have skyrocketed, political expenditures remain much lower. 13  Yet estrangement between voters and legislators is pervasive in Europe as well. Indeed, while restrictions on campaign finance are real, this setup may be giving incumbents who favor special interests an advantage that is just as big—and even more difficult to track.

For one thing, the difficulty of raising campaign contributions legally also makes it much more tempting for politicians to raise them illegally, a temptation to which prominent officeholders in Germany, France, and other European democracies have repeatedly succumbed in the past decades. In addition, when politicians find it harder to control their own message through ad buys, the relative importance of their portrayal in major media outlets grows. This effectively allows an individual owner who controls vast swaths of a country’s media landscape—as do media tycoons in places from Italy to Great Britain—to become a political kingmaker.

The fact that the people or corporations who put their cash into politics may enjoy “influence over or access to elected officials,” Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote in the 2010 U.S. Supreme Court case  Citizens United , “does not mean that these officials are corrupt.” 14  This is true. It does not constitute bribery for lobbyists to write legislation on behalf of elected representatives and for the companies the lobbyists serve to send lavish campaign donations a few weeks later. Yet these accepted practices may cumulatively add up to what Lawrence Lessig has called “dependence corruption.” 15

Kennedy is right to point out that there is an important legal—and  [End Page 106]  probably even moral—distinction between dependence corruption and cases of actual bribery. Yet at the end of the day, both work in similar ways to undermine the health of democratic institutions: Thanks to the spending of private money, the powerful profit and public policy changes course. Legislators are, to a disheartening degree, captured by special interests and diverted from the task of translating popular views into public policy.

To be sure, the reasons for the cooptation of electoral institutions go beyond the rising role of money in politics. As Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels have shown, most U.S. voters barely pay attention to politics. Even insofar as they have political preferences, these seem to be incoherent. 16  It is tempting to use such findings to excuse unresponsive political systems: Perhaps voters just do not put much store in exercising effective control over their government.

But this line of defense overlooks two important problems. First, voters may be disengaged partly because they believe that the system would not be very responsive even if they did pay attention. Second, in the absence of an engaged citizenry that strongly defends its own interests, the growing influence of money may lead to such skewed economic outcomes that support for democracy will gradually erode. Even if the blame partly lies with a people who fail to live up to their duties as citizens, a political system in which money talks while the people tune out the noise fails to live up to the double promise of liberal democracy.

The Wages of Discontent

Democracy has nearly as many definitions as there are political thinkers. But one need not pull the old scoundrel’s trick of reaching for a dictionary to call into doubt whether the United States—or France, or the United Kingdom—is fully democratic today.

At a minimum, I suggest, any democracy should have in place a set of effective institutional mechanisms for translating popular views into public policy. In many developed democracies, these mechanisms have become significantly impaired over the past decades. These states’ commitment to liberal rights has, until recently, remained deeply ingrained, but their liberalism has taken an increasingly undemocratic form. From lobbying to campaign donations to bureaucratic institutions to international treaties, the forces insulating the system from the popular will have grown—and with them the gulf that separates political elites from the people they are supposed to represent.

Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way argue that “unfair competition” defines “competitive authoritarian” regimes, in which elections retain some real significance but the playing field is systematically tilted in the government’s favor. 17  Similarly, many supposed democracies now resemble competitive oligarchies: Even though debates about proposed  [End Page 107]  laws seemingly retain significance, an unfair policy-making process gives ruling elites a huge advantage in advancing their own interests.

This claim, of course, is easily subject to political appropriation. After all, populist rhetoric centers on the premise that ordinary people have been disempowered by the establishment, together with a pledge to set things right by giving expression to the people’s unadulterated voice. For too long, Donald Trump claimed in his speech accepting the party’s presidential nomination at the 2016 Republican National Convention, ordinary men and women had been forgotten. They “no longer have a voice.” But, Trump claimed, he would change all of that. This promise became the central theme of the speech. And though widely ridiculed in the following days, it was a brilliant distillation of the core promise populists around the globe have made to their voters all along. Marine Le Pen ran her 2017 presidential campaign “in the name of the people.” “We are the people,” Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan once said to his opponents, “Who are you?” Norbert Hofer, a leading member of Austria’s far-right Freedom Party, made much the same point in his 2016 presidential campaign: “You have the high society behind you,” he said. “I have the people with me.” 18

There are many reasons for the rapid rise of authoritarian populists. The stagnation of living standards for ordinary citizens has significantly undermined faith in liberal democracies. High levels of immigration and broad challenges to socially entrenched racial hierarchies have led to a potent backlash against the principles of an equal multiethnic society. Meanwhile, social media have made it much easier for radical voices—or ideologically moderate citizens alienated by the manifold disappointments of the past decades—to challenge the political establishment. If these long-term drivers are not confronted in a concerted and intelligent manner, the rise of populism is likely to continue. But in order to win the necessary public trust to carry out reforms in a way that respects and safeguards liberal-democratic norms, politicians will first have to combat the widespread sense that the government serves its own bureaucratic agenda and has stopped listening to the concerns of voters.

The Antidemocratic Dilemma

The few scholars who have written about the degree to which today’s political elites are now insulated from popular preferences tend to argue that the problem’s roots are as simple as its remedies are clear. Elites, on this view, have engineered the sundry institutions that keep power from the people for their own selfish ends. Rich individuals and big corporations favor trade treaties, independent central banks, and powerful bureaucratic agencies because they can capture the professionals who work for these institutions, bending their work until it furthers the interests of the wealthy and powerful. In short, most members  [End Page 108]  of the political class favor technocracy because its opaque institutional apparatus makes it easier for them to ignore the popular will.

For those who accept this reading of the origins of undemocratic liberalism, returning power to the people is both the obvious solution and a straightforward task. Experts argue that independent central banks are good for economic growth, that trade treaties drive down consumer prices, and that big bureaucratic agencies and powerful international organizations are needed to deal with issues too complicated for the common man to understand. But these claims are merely the virtuous gloss that elites have put on their self-centered schemes, tenets of a neoliberal ideology promoted by wealthy donors, by universities, and by think tanks. Once tutelary institutions are exposed as complicit in a conspiracy to disinherit the people, the remedy to the ills of undemocratic liberalism seems clear: Abolish the institutions, boot the elites out of power, and put the people back in charge.

This basic set of intellectual instincts manifests itself in debates about a large range of issues and holds significant sway on both the far left and the far right. Simplistic as it may be, it should not be dismissed too easily. After all, it does highlight the need to move forward with those reforms that would make the political system more responsive to popular preferences without undermining the rule of law or violating individual rights. There is no reason special-interest groups should continue to enjoy their disproportionate level of political influence. Reformers can make a real contribution to winning back popular trust by reducing the outsized role that money now plays in the politics of virtually all countries in North America, Western Europe, and beyond.

But while the cooptation of electoral institutions corrupts the political system without bringing any obvious compensating benefits, the rise of bureaucratic institutions is a more complicated case. The simple anti-technocratic narrative caricatures the origins, operation, and purpose of these entities. It is true that political elites are overly comfortable with technocratic institutions that happen to give them a great deal of power. It is obvious that financial elites spend considerable money and effort to mold these institutions to their own advantage. And there can be little doubt that funding streams favor some ideas over others, helping to set narrow bounds on the range of “serious” opinion. Yet technocratic institutions cannot be abolished wholesale without significantly impairing the state’s ability to deliver in core policy areas.

Indeed, the history of most institutions that constrain popular influence is much more complicated than their detractors are willing to admit. The European Union, for example, has its origins not in a conspiracy of corporations, but rather in an idealistic attempt to rebuild the continent in the aftermath of World War II. Meanwhile, technocratic entities from the EPA in the United States to the International Atomic Energy Agency were designed to respond to genuine problems—such as pollution and [End Page 109]  nuclear proliferation—that were proving difficult for existing institutions to address.

Just as the history of technocratic institutions is rather more complicated than their critics claim, so too the solution to the problem of undemocratic liberalism is rather less clear than they posit. For while it is easy to malign imperfect institutions as useless or self-serving, they do play three important roles. The challenges faced by developed liberal democracies are very complex. To keep the economy moving and avoid major disasters, we need to regulate banks and enforce consumer-safety standards, to monitor hurricanes and inspect power plants. There are many different ways of structuring how these tasks are carried out. It makes sense to search for reforms that would give legislatures more power to set the necessary rules and hold the bureaucratic agencies that enforce them accountable. But in the end, both the design and the implementation of these regulations really do require considerable technical expertise. It really is difficult to imagine that most citizens would take an active interest in them—or that elected politicians could come to master all their intricate details. And so it remains unclear how these tasks could be accomplished if we simply abolished technocratic institutions.

The challenge is even bigger when it comes to policy areas that require extensive international cooperation. To slow climate change or contain the spread of nuclear weapons, virtually all of the world’s nations have to come to an agreement about what to do. At the moment, these kinds of decisions are usually made by heads of government (or the ministers they appoint). In democratic countries, these are of course elected. But the chain of delegation is extremely long, and the ability of ordinary citizens to influence international treaties highly restricted. Agreements such as the Paris Treaty on climate change do suffer from a real democratic deficit. And yet, it is once again difficult to see what the realistic alternative might be. A true world parliament is nowhere near in sight and would, in any case, feel incredibly remote to most citizens. Conversely, allowing each country to go its own way makes it impossible to confront a whole range of global challenges, including climate change. In the end, the choice thus seems to be between achieving international cooperation on key issues by a troublingly undemocratic path—and not achieving it at all.

Finally, the relationship between liberalism and democracy is much more intricate than the opponents of technocratic institutions like to claim. For all of their shortcomings, countermajoritarian institutions such as constitutional courts do have a proud record of protecting individual rights. So their opponents should at least take seriously the possibility that the members of ethnic and religious minorities might become more vulnerable if these institutions were abolished. More broadly, independent institutions have historically proven very important in keeping democracy on an even keel. As the recent experience of countries  [End Page 110]  including Hungary and Turkey demonstrates, a system in which the will of the people can override judges and bureaucrats may appear more democratic in the short run; in the long run, however, it also makes it easier for an autocrat to extinguish democracy.

The problem of this political moment, then, is not only that populists are on the march, threatening to erect illiberal democracies in countries across North America and Western Europe. Nor is it that their rise is partly fueled by the degree to which the political systems of many of these countries have become insulated from the popular will, making them less democratic than we would like to think. It is, rather, that there is no easy way to overcome the gradual emergence of undemocratic liberalism without harming the ability of governments to solve some of the most pressing challenges of the coming decades.

This is one of the deepest—and most rarely heralded—dilemmas that developed democracies will have to face in the twenty-first century: Either they return power to the people in a manner that is liable both to violate some of the core liberal values of our political system and to lead to an even greater crisis of legitimacy when government performance suffers as a result. Or they maintain key technocratic institutions that both violate some of the core democratic values of our political system and are liable to make a populist rebellion even more likely.

Undemocratic liberalism is a type of political regime that has been woefully undertheorized; that alone makes it worthy of greater attention. But a better understanding of its nature and its remedies is of much more than academic interest. Indeed, it may hold the key to preserving the unique achievement that has historically made liberal-democratic systems so stable: the ability both to protect individual rights and to pay heed to the popular will.

1.  Kate Dommett, “Finally Recognising the Value of Quangos? The Coalition Government and a Move Beyond the ‘Bonfire of the Quangos,’” Democratic Audit UK, 14 January 2015,  www.democraticaudit.com/2015/01/14/finally-recognising-the-value-of-quangos-the-coalition-government-and-a-move-beyond-the-bonfire-of-the-quangos .

2.  Quoted in Christopher Alessi, “Germany’s Central Bank and the Eurozone,” Council on Foreign Relations, 6 February 2013,  www.cfr.org/backgrounder/germanys-central-bank-and-eurozone .

3.  Alessi, “Germany’s Central Bank.”

4.  Robert J. Barro and David B. Gordon, “Rules, Discretion and Reputation in a Model of Monetary Policy,”  Journal of Monetary Economics  12 (July 1983): 101–21.

5.  Simone Polillo and Mauro F. Guillén, “Globalization Pressures and the State: The Worldwide Spread of Central Bank Independence,”  American Journal of Sociology  110 (May 2005): 1770.

6.  Polillo and Guillén, “Globalization Pressures,” 1767.  [End Page 111]

7.  Based on the 2014 Polity IV dataset, 22 countries scored well enough on the DEMOC indicator in 1930 to qualify as a democracy for present purposes: Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Costa Rica, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Luxembourg, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, South Africa, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Of these countries, only Austria, Denmark, Luxembourg, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland and the United States had judicial review at the time. Special thanks to Daniel Kenny for research assistance on this point.

8.  Francis Fukuyama, “The Decay of American Political Institutions,”  American Interest , 8 December 2013. See also Fukuyama,  Political Order and Political Decay: From the Industrial Revolution to the Globalization of Democracy  (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014).

9.  Daniel P. Tokaji and Renata E. B. Strause,  The New Soft Money: Outside Spending in Congressional Elections  (Columbus: Ohio State University Michael E. Moritz College of Law, 2014), 32.

10.  “Lobbying Database,” Open Secrets, Center for Responsive Politics, 2018,  www.opensecrets.org/lobby .

11.  Lee Drutman,  The Business of America Is Lobbying: How Corporations Became Politicized and Politics Became More Corporate  (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015).

12.  Brendan J. Doherty,  The Rise of the President’s Permanent Campaign  (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2012), 16–17.

13.  Arthur B. Gunlicks, ed.,  Campaign and Party Finance in North America and Western Europe  (Lincoln, NE: iUniverse, 2000); Daniel P. Tokaji, “The Obliteration of Equality in American Campaign Finance Law: A Trans-Border Comparison,”  Journal of Parliamentary and Political Law  5 (2011): 381–98; Nick Thompson, “International Campaign Finance: How Do Countries Compare?” CNN, 5 March 2012,  www.cnn.com/2012/01/24/world/global-campaign-finance .

14.  Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, 558 U.S. 310 (2010).

15.  Lawrence Lessig,  Republic, Lost: How Money Corrupts Congress—and a Plan to Stop It  (New York: Hachette, 2011), 107–24.

16.  Christopher H. Achen and Larry M. Bartels,  Democracy for Realists: Why Elections Do Not Produce Responsive Government  (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016).

17.  Steven Levitsky and Lucan A. Way,  Competitive Authoritarianism: Hybrid Regimes After the Cold War  (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 9–12.

18.  Jan-Werner Müller, “Trump, Erdoğan, Farage: The Attractions of Populism for Politicians, the Dangers for Democracy,”  Guardian , 2 September 2016,  www.theguardian.com/books/2016/sep/02/trump-erdogan-farage-the-attractions-of-populism-for-politicians-the-dangers-for-democracy .   [End Page 112]

Copyright © 2018 National Endowment for Democracy and Johns Hopkins University Press

Further Reading

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Democracy Embattled

• Marc F. Plattner

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Why Latin America’s Democracies Are Stuck

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• Aníbal Pérez-Liñán

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Civic Engagement • Education • Research • Practice

Invited essay: educating for democracy in undemocratic contexts: avoiding the zero-sum game of campus free speech versus inclusion.

• Post author: Charles Whitaker
• Post published: April 19, 2018
• Post category: 7.1 / Research

Nancy Thomas

Tufts University

The debate over free speech and inclusion in higher education is not new, but it has reached new levels of vitriol and confusion as legislators and others beyond the academy argue for unfettered speech. Mandating speech rights on campuses undercuts decades of learning around diversity, inclusion, and equity in higher education and in public life by mainstreaming undemocratic forces in some factions in U.S. society that thrive on creating divisiveness and fear of “the other.” Those with an absolutist perspective take a zero-sum game approach by pitting the important American principles of freedom and individualism against the equally important principles of equity and community. Not only is this an unnecessary choice, but it infringes on academic freedom and the right of academics to decide how best to educate for the health and future of democracy. Academic content, standards, norms, and pedagogy should be based on educational goals and objectives. The solution lies in fostering discussion about democratic principles and practices as well as a sense of shared responsibility among members of a campus community for student learning and success.

academic freedom, free speech, diversity, equity, inclusion, civic learning and engagement, political learning, campus climate, campus culture, educating for democracy, student activism, dialogue, deliberation

Author Note

Nancy Thomas, Institute for Democracy and Higher Education, Tisch College, Tufts University.

Correspondence regarding this article should be addressed to Nancy Thomas, Director, Institute for Democracy and Higher Education, Tisch College of Civic Life, Tufts University, Lincoln Filene Hall, Medford, MA 02155. E-mail: [email protected]

Since the 2016 election season, many people and organizations outside of academia—legislators, partisan pundits, and self-appointed watchdogs—have weighed in on the state of free speech on college and university campuses. For instance, in August 2017, drawing from model legislation drafted by the Goldwater Institute (Goldwater, 2017), North Carolina passed the Restore Campus Free Speech Act, which mandated that the Board of Regents adopt regulations protecting controversial speakers and disciplining students who interrupt those speakers. The law also requires academics to remain “neutral” about political controversies. Campus free-speech laws have been passed in California, Colorado, Florida, Missouri, Tennessee, Utah, Virginia, and Wisconsin, and have been proposed in Georgia, Illinois, Michigan, Nebraska, and Wyoming (see Appendix); the Louisiana governor, however, vetoed proposed legislation in June 2017 (Deslatte, 2017), and the Kansas Senate narrowly rejected a bill in March 2018 (Hancock, 2018). Though they all fall under the category of free-speech legislation, the laws vary from state to state: Some allow speakers to seek monetary damages from institutions from which they are disinvited; others mandate that students who interfere with speakers face disciplinary action; and others eliminate free speech “zones.” The federal government has also become involved in such matters. In October 2017, U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced that the Justice Department would intervene in cases related to speech on campus and since then the department has filed a “statement of interest” in at least three cases (Greenwood, 2017; U.S. Department of Justice, 2018).

People on both sides of the political aisle have derided free speech codes and zones, as well as “coddling” students by “creating a culture in which everyone must think twice before speaking up, lest they face charges of insensitivity, aggression, or worse” (Lukianoff & Haidt, 2016). Jeffrey Herbst, current president of the Newseum, has insisted that the “real problem” facing colleges and universities is “an alternative understanding of the First Amendment” as a right to “prevent expression that is seen as particularly offensive to an identifiable group, especially if that collective is defined in terms of race, ethnicity, gender, or sexual identity” (Herbst, 2017, p. 2).

Meanwhile, in August 2017, academics—indeed, the entire nation—watched in horror as White supremacists carrying torches marched in Charlottesville and a man plowed his car into a crowd of counter-protesters, murdering Heather Heyer and injuring dozens of others. Two weeks later, 100 White nationalists, marching in a self-described “Free Speech Rally” in Boston, faced a response from over 40,000 counter-protesters (Danner, 2017). Shortly thereafter, a unanimous, bi-partisan Congress passed a joint resolution denouncing what had happened and decrying White supremacy and neo-Nazism as “hateful expressions of intolerance that are contradictory to the values that define the people of the United States” (Joint Resolution 49, 2017). Countering bad speech with more speech and good speech has seemingly been embraced as a sensible solution, not only in the public square but on campuses.

I regularly serve on conference panels or work with faculty or administrators on this topic. In my conversations with leaders of public higher education institutions, [1] they have made clear their legal parameters. They may not prohibit or censor speech absent (1) violence or dangerous actions, (2) imminent safety concerns, (3) disruption to in-class education (and, in some cases, to living spaces or professional offices), or (4) repeated harassment targeting individuals, not groups, because of their social identity. [2]

While I do not agree that public institutions have no choice but to allow all speech, I also do not think that the occasional racist speaker who addresses a few dozen people largely from off-campus represents the most significant challenge facing campuses. I am more concerned by how students and faculty who express hateful or discriminatory views can deeply affect the learning experiences of other students, particularly those who are the targets of that speech. The University of Alabama recently expelled such a student (Kerr, 2018) while the University of Nebraska allowed another student to stay (Quilantan, 2018). On campuses where these toxic students persist, faculty and administrators breathe a sigh of relief when they graduate, after which the campus climate improves, not just for minoritized groups but for all students. Yet, I have an even deeper concern about the rise of undemocratic forces in some segments of American society and the ability—or, rather, inability—of colleges and universities to name and teach about those forces without government intrusion. Both are matters of academic freedom, particularly of how colleges and universities educate for responsible citizenship [3] in a diverse democracy.

I certainly understand the appeal of the argument that colleges and universities should be places of unfettered speech. Of all the ideals expressed in the Bill of Rights, freedom of speech is arguably the most cherished. Most Americans support the right to free speech and strongly oppose government censorship (Wike & Simmons, 2015). In fact, free speech possesses transcendent value in the United States; citizens feel strongly that they should be free to express their views on the most controversial ethical, political, and social issues of the day. Free speech is widely held as an essential individual protection against unreasonable government intrusion. It is also critical to democratic governance, since the robust exchange of information and ideas is central to responsible civic engagement, such as voting and informed oversight of public affairs and policy making. Without free expression, civil rights and other social movements could be suppressed. Without a doubt, these are valid and powerful arguments.

That said, I encourage a more rigorous discussion about free speech on campus, one that is framed by educators, not partisan lawmakers or self-appointed watchdogs outside of higher education. Not only do these laws infringe on students’ rights to speech (protest and activism), they overreach. In 1973, in a case about obscenity in commercial speech, Chief Justice Burger warned against adopting “an absolutist, ‘anything goes’ view of the First Amendment” ( Miller v. California , 1973). Free speech is not, nor has it ever been, “absolutist,” particularly on college and university campuses, which are not synonymous with public square or streets; rather, they are learning environments with educational standards and goals.

Despite its legal backing, unfettered speech on campuses may undermine decades of learning around diversity, inclusion, and equity in higher education and public life, and allow undemocratic forces that thrive on creating divisiveness and fear of “the other” to seep into the mainstream. An absolutist perspective takes a zero-sum game approach to this issue by pitting the important American principles freedom and individualism against the equally important values of equity and community. This is an unnecessary and ill-advised choice, since it infringes on the right of academics to decide how best to educate for the health and future of democracy. Content, standards, norms, and pedagogy should be based on educational goals and objectives, not politically motivated external mandates.

Civic learning for a strong democracy and academic freedom are symbiotic. Academics enjoy the privilege of academic freedom so they can fulfil their responsibilities to educate for a stronger democracy (Thomas, 2015). Campuses must discuss and establish institutional norms for achieving and sustaining this symbiosis.

How Did We Get Here? Decades of Work on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion

Much of the current debate about speech on campus traces back decades to efforts in higher education to serve new populations of students. Affirmative action, increases in minority student enrollment, and the introduction of interdisciplinary programs such as women’s studies and African-American studies prompted fierce backlash from people who disagreed with the critical frameworks informing these emerging disciplines or who wanted (whether consciously or subconsciously) to maintain racial and gender hierarchies. Higher education came under attack for diluting “the canon” and “closing minds” (Bloom, 1987), for enabling “tenured radicals” (Kimball, 1990), and for separating groups of people through multiculturalism and political correctness (D’Souza, 1991).

As a new university attorney specializing in academic and student affairs in the late 1980s, I spent more time addressing this topic (and in loco parentis) than any other issue. From my perspective, campuses at that time looked like hotbeds of bigotry and intolerance. Some incidents were characterized as sophomoric, misguided attempts at humor. Student groups, for instance, raised money by selling t-shirts that read, “15 reasons why beer is better than women” (“#1: Beer doesn’t get jealous when you grab another one” and “#7: When you are finished, the bottle is still worth 5 cents”). Fraternity pledges wore blackface while performing skits in front appreciative audiences. Some “pranks” were both abhorrent and dangerous; one fraternity was suspended after two members passed out and were left naked, their bodies painted with racial slurs, at a nearby Black college (Applebome, 1989).

Many of these incidents represented intentional expressions of hatred and bigotry: Swastikas and racist graffiti on walls; anonymous notes containing racist or homophobic; hate mail sent to women attending formerly men’s colleges. Professors also faced personal attacks. Students directed vicious and belittling verbal attacks at faculty based on their personal characteristics and social identity (e.g., see Casey, 1989). In a 1989 survey of Black students at predominantly White colleges across the country, four out of five respondents reported having experienced some form of racial discrimination (Applebome, 1989). These acts of blatant hatred and bigotry still happen, but in the 1980s and 1990s, their frequency—and the fact that they were largely student-peer-driven—shocked educators. Bewildered and outraged, well-meaning administrators (and their lawyers) sought to shield new students from intimidation and from negative educational experiences that were substantially different from and unequal to the learning experiences of traditional students.

Responses varied. Most colleges and universities already had in place anti-discrimination policies that protected employees and students on the basis of race, gender, ethnicity, national origin, religion, physical ability, and, increasingly, sexual orientation. Between 1987 and 1992, an estimated one third of colleges and universities adopted hate speech codes (Gould, 2005, pp. 16-17), which were met with charges of censorship, identity politics, and political correctness. Courts consistently struck down speech policies at public institutions as vague or overly broad and therefore unconstitutional (e.g., see Doe v. University of Michigan , 1989). Campuses had a difficult time making the case that hate speech directed at groups protected under nondiscrimination laws rose to a level of targeted, repeated harassment that created truly hostile, illegal learning environments.

Dissuaded from attempting to regulate student speech, campuses responded by implementing curricular and co-curricular interventions, such as cultural studies and centers, intergroup-relationship programs, interfaith centers, first-year experiences, living-learning communities, internal assessments of institutional climates for diversity, and more. Part of the motivation behind these efforts was practical. Prospective employers sought diverse candidates, especially as research repeatedly demonstrated an association between gender and racial workforce diversity and greater profits, earnings, and customer share (Herring, 2009) and enhanced leadership, innovation, and productivity (Robinson, Pfeffer, & Buccigrossi, 2003; Thompson-Reuters, 2016). In other words, campuses needed to admit and graduate diverse groups of students to keep up with employer demands.

Over time, efforts to diversify programs and people became more mainstream, with many colleges and universities eventually supporting offices and senior positions in diversity and inclusion. Legal challenges to considering race in admissions failed, at least temporarily ( Gratz v. Bollinger , 2003; Grutter v. Bollinger , 2003), and though racist speech and incidents still occurred, they were normatively unacceptable and were often subject to stringent disciplinary responses. I will not pretend that all became quiet, inclusive, and equal. Significantly, income gaps between people of color and Whites remain as extreme as they were five decades ago (Campos, 2017). Organizations like the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Anti-Defamation League highlight, through rigorous tracking, the sickening numbers of hate crimes against racial, religious, LGBTQ, and ethnic groups. Structural inequality continues to plague this nation, particularly in the criminal justice and education systems. The academy continues to struggle to differentiate among naïve or uninformed statements, senseless but intentional insults, genuine injury, and provocative yet productive conflict and dissent. These trends notwithstanding, I found it hopeful that, over the course of three decades, the right and responsibility of colleges and universities to educate for a diverse workforce and democracy became well established and that racist, sexist, and other forms of hate speech became more normatively, culturally, and institutionally unacceptable.

Arguably, things changed during and since the 2016 election season. According to statistics collected by the U.S. Department of Education, the number of hate crimes rose approximately 25% in the latter part of 2016 (Bauman, 2018). In January 2018, the Anti-Defamation League reported that racist fliers, banners, and stickers were found on college campuses 147 times in the fall of 2017, three times more than the 41 cases reported the previous year; 15 incidents had already taken place in January (Anti-Defamation League, 2018). In the Spring 2018 issue of Intelligence Report, the Southern Poverty Law Center reported that the number of hate groups rose to 954 in 2017, up 4% from 2016 (Beirich & Buchanan, 2018, p. 35). Neo-Nazi groups saw the greatest growth in 2017, up from 99 to 121 (pp. 35-36). Anti-Muslim groups also rose for the third straight year, tripling in 2015-2016 and increasing another 13% in 2017 (p. 36). Distressingly, colleges and universities seem to be primary targets of White supremacist and hate groups.

The states’ free-speech laws may mainstream these perspectives and, in the process, set the nation back decades. The academy has been here before and responded with concerted educational initiatives. Academics do not need to rehash this debate or roll back progress.

Pitting Freedom Against Equity

I argue that Americans have been duped into playing a zero-sum game between the core democratic principles of freedom and equity. Clearly, Americans value freedom, but when freedom means “I demand my right to live free of any responsibility for others or for society,” it can result in harm, if not sustained inequality, for others. Unfortunately, academics oftentimes feel forced to choose between the two.

First published in 1985, Habits of the Heart (Bellah, Madsen, Sullivan, Swidler, & Tipton) was discussed widely at the time I returned to school to study education leadership and policy. Using Alexis de Tocqueville’s 1831 visit to America as a launching off point for their book, the authors identified individualism as the driving cultural force in society. Individualism, they argued, caused (and causes) Americans to form small communities of family and friends and isolate themselves from broader society—an observation that still resonates today. In their chapter entitled “Pursuit of Happiness,” the authors wrote:

Freedom is perhaps the most resonant, deeply held American value. In some ways, it defines the good in both personal and political life. Yet freedom turns out to mean being left alone by others, not having other people’s values, ideas, or styles of life forced upon one…. [I]f the entire social world is made up of individuals, each endowed with the right to be free of others’ demands, it becomes hard to forge bonds of attachment to, or cooperation with, other people since such bonds would imply obligations that necessarily impinge on one’s freedom. (Bellah et al., 1985, p. 23)

They concluded that individuality and community are not opposed but, instead, mutually dependent. Americans recognize that too much freedom undermines a democratic republic, which is why they accept representative systems in which lawmakers are charged with making just laws that, for example, prohibit discrimination.

More recently, the work of Danielle Allen (2014) has made a compelling and, to my mind, persuasive case that defining documents in U.S. history identify equality [4] as a core democratic principle in American society. Relying on the first line in the Declaration of Independence —“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal”—and other historical sources, she echoed the concerns expressed in Habits of the Heart :

Political philosophers have generated the view that equality and freedom are necessarily in tension with each other. As a public, we have swallowed this argument whole. We think we are required to choose between freedom and equality.… Such a choice is dangerous. If we abandon equality, we lose the single bond that makes us a community, that makes us a people with the capacity to be free collectively and individually in the first place. I for one cannot bear to see the ideal of equality pass away before it has reached its full maturity. (Allen, 2014, p. 21)

I am not arguing for neutrality, that colleges and universities should somehow remain agnostic about which social ends—that is, freedom and individualism or equity and community—carry more heft. There are also other important considerations, such as individual and collective well-being, personal and shared responsibility, and social connectedness. When the relative weights of democratic principles are “objectively” balanced to force a choice, the outcome all too often reflects the opinions and preferences of those in power. Any exploration of these tensions that places free speech in the default position and starting point will tip the discussion in favor of freedom and individualism and away from equity and community.

Higher education’s responsibility to educate for democratic citizenship and the hierarchy of prevailing democratic principles is an inherently political task rendered more difficult by today’s hyper-partisan context. Both Americans and elected officials have become increasingly polarized over the past 30 years (Pew Research Center, 2017) and it is affecting perspectives on higher education. In July 2017, the Pew Research Center reported that 58% of Republicans indicated that colleges and universities have a negative effect on “the way things are going in this country” (Fingerhut, 2017). [5] In October 2017, Gallup reported that 67% of Republicans had “some” or “very little” confidence in higher education because they believed that colleges and universities are “too liberal,” “push their own agendas,” and “don’t allow students to think for themselves” (Gallup, 2017). In contrast, Democrats in the same poll believed that higher education is “essential to the nation” but too expensive (Gallup, 2017).

A critical examination of freedom and equity should include an explicit examination of power and opportunity. For freedom to have meaning, everyone in the society should live in a climate of acceptance and tolerance in which choices can be made freely. The nation has yet to eradicate economic, social, and political inequality, in its systems and structures and in the hearts of its citizens. Colleges and universities should model for society ways to make equity more than an aspiration—which may mean adopting a view of freedom as essential but also accountable to the campus community.

Academic Freedom and Campus Climates

Academic freedom is most often understood as comprising protections for individual faculty members against unreasonable censorship of or interference by governments, administrations, or boards in their teaching, scholarship, or expressions of public opinion. At private institutions, academic freedom is usually interpreted as a contractual right; at public institutions, it is both contractual and constitutional. However, faculty academic freedom has limits. Institutions can sanction faculty for unprofessional conduct, ineffective teaching, false statements, arbitrary grading, or refusal to adhere to certain policies (e.g., accreditation requirements).

It is widely accepted that, subject to professorial professional standards (e.g., fair grading), professors have academic freedom in the classroom. They have the right to establish standards for student learning, behavior, civility, and respect. They may establish requirements regarding the expression of students’ opinions, insisting that statements be supported by evidence and facts. Likewise, they may demand acceptable sources for intellectual arguments. They may also forbid students from interrupting classroom learning by, for instance, bringing in disruptive guests or insulting the professor.

Academic freedom also belongs to individual institutions. U.S. Supreme Court Justice Frankfurter in Sweezy v. New Hampshire (1957) wrote:

It is the business of a university to provide that atmosphere which is most conducive to speculation, experiment, and creation. It is an atmosphere in which there prevail the “four essential freedoms” of a university—to determine for itself on academic grounds who may teach, what may be taught, how it shall be taught, and who may be admitted to study.

The freedom of a university to make its own educational judgments served as one rationale in the major affirmative action cases allowing institutions to determine, on academic grounds, whether race could be considered in admissions decisions ( Grutter v. Bollinger , 2003; Regents of the University of California v. Bakke , 1979).

People outside of academia, such as lawyers and politicians, draw lines on campus demarcating the limits of speech: In certain spaces, mainly the classroom, educators may control speech because that is where learning happens, while in other spaces (e.g., the quad), speech cannot be limited. These arbitrary and outdated lines fail to reflect the current research on how students learn and the importance of context, institutional culture and climate, and the learning environment.

Numerous studies have pointed convincingly to the significant impacts of the larger learning environment, not just the classroom, on student learning and success. For example, in their review of 30 years of research on how to improve student learning, Pascarella and Terenzini (1998) found that multiple forces shape learning and success and called for a broad range of interconnected changes and improvements. Reason and Terenzini identified the “organizational context” as critical to the student experience (Reason, 2009), while campus culture and climate have become common concerns of academics seeking proactive rather than reactionary approaches to challenges on campus (Peterson & Spencer, 1990; Ryder & Mitchell, 2013 ) and to improving student learning outcomes (Hurtado, Griffin, Arellano, & Cuellar, 2008; Tierney, 2008). In fact, some researchers have used the terms culture and climate interchangeably (Glisson & James, 2002; Hart & Fellabaum, 2008). Educators typically study campus climates to gain an understanding of and to address a particular problem (e.g., alcohol use, sexual misconduct) or to gain insight into the experiences of students with different social identities (e.g., women, students of color, historically marginalized groups) (Hurtado et al., 2008; Kuh et al., 2005). The research institute I direct studies campus climates in the context of political learning and engagement in democracy, exploring students’ perceptions about culture (norms, traditions, and symbols), structure (offices and programs), human attributes (compositional diversity, behaviors), and internal (decision making) and external (political context) forces (Thomas & Brower, 2017).

It simply does not make educational sense to conclude that learning is relegated to the classroom when decades of research suggest that learning is deeply connected to a complex ecosystem across campus. Colleges and universities have the academic freedom to set educational standards and goals beyond the classroom.

In research conducted by the Institute for Democracy and Higher Education at Tufts University, my colleagues and I found that students want free expression but draw the line at hateful speech (Thomas & Brower, 2017). More recently, a March 2018 Gallup/Knight Foundation survey of U.S. college students revealed that while students supported the First Amendment generally, they approved of limits to speech in support of a campus learning environment in which diversity and inclusion are respected and protected. Specifically, 53% of students supported limiting hate speech on campus (46% supported unlimited speech) and 37% believed that shouting down speakers is sometimes acceptable (Gallup/Knight Foundation, 2018).

These attitudes help explain the motivations behind student protests and attempts to shut down speakers whose views they believe to be racist, sexist, homophobic, or xenophobic. Three decades ago, administrators drove efforts to diversify higher education and create welcoming campus learning conditions for new student populations. Today, the drivers are the students.

I agree that shouting down or blocking access to controversial speakers is not good practice. In addition to potentially disrupting learning, shouting down speakers has the potential to garner support for that speaker’s viewpoints. Instead of censoring or punishing student protesters, educators (and decision makers, including state legislators) need to listen to students and hear what they are saying when they try to interrupt speakers or demand a disciplinary response to classmates who unapologetically espouse hate against minorities, since those students may also be responding to toxic and exhausting learning conditions. Movements like #MeToo and #BlackLivesMatter serve as critical reminders that discrimination is embedded in structures, cultures, attitudes, behaviors, and political systems that impact lives; students expect their colleges and universities settings to be different and better. Campuses are their temporary homes, and when students protest, they may be taking responsibility for those homes, effectively saying, “Not in my back yard.” They want institutional leaders to acknowledge that not all attitudes and speech belong in a learning environment, particularly, as the U.S. Congress articulated in the wake of the Charlottesville march, “hateful expressions of intolerance that are contradictory to the values that define the people of the United States.”

Academic freedom gives educators the right to teach toward the goals of diversity and inclusion and maintaining healthy campus climates for all, not just some, students. Ultimately at stake is the ability of colleges and universities to educate not only fordemocracy but also against undemocratic forces emanating nationally and globally.

I write this article under the assumption that U.S. colleges and universities share certain goals, namely that students will learn and graduate with the knowledge and skills they need for individual success and prosperity, and that students will be prepared to participate in and shape a democracy that is truly participatory and deliberative, representative and equitable, educated and informed, and effectively and ethically governed (Thomas, 2014). How higher education institutions achieve these goals should be shaped by academics, not external policy makers. In the concluding sections, I offer some concrete suggestions for college and university educators.

Assess the Campus Climate for Political Learning and Engagement in Democracy

Do not assume that students, faculty, and staff feel a certain way (e.g., oppressed, insulted, angry, apathetic, hopeless), that normative values espoused by the institution (e.g., respect, social responsibility) shape the campus community, or that curricular efforts (e.g., civic learning experiences) achieve their goals. Assess your campus climate and identify the strengths and weaknesses surrounding political learning, discourse, equity, and participation. At the Institute for Democracy and Higher Education, my colleagues and I developed a conceptual framework for examining an institution’s structures, norms and culture, attitudes and behaviors, and internal decision-making process, as well as the external political forces surrounding an institution. We recommend qualitative approaches—predominantly focus groups—because “the medium is the message.” Campuses need to develop habits of discussion across differences of social identity, political perspective, and lived experiences. Embed those practices in the assessment process.

Bolster Student Well-Being and Social Cohesion

Our research found that creating conditions for political learning was connected to the social-emotional well-being of students and social cohesion among diverse groups of students. Students need to develop trusting relationships with each other and with faculty. Colleges and universities can support strong faculty-student relationships and advising, establish hotlines and services for students who may be at risk emotionally, academically, or financially, and create welcoming physical spaces for historically underserved, commuter, nontraditional, and international students. These efforts should also include providing opportunities for students with more conservative perspectives to find each other and find a niche on campus.

Host Campus-Wide Dialogues on Institutional Norms and Structures

Campus-wide dialogues should be carefully organized and facilitated. It helps if a campus already teaches students, faculty, and staff the arts of facilitation and discussion. On four of the most politically engaged campuses we visited to conduct studies of political climates, students, regardless of their discipline, took required courses in which they were taught, as one student explained, to “disagree without being disagreeable.” In these courses, students learned to frame issues; to examine multiple, even unpopular, perspectives; to advocate, often for a position they did not personally hold; and to discuss controversial issues across differences of social identity and political ideology. The professors had been trained and were viewed by the students as skilled discussion leaders capable of defusing conflict without stifling viewpoints. One caveat, however, is that the professors held students to high intellectual standards and required them to support opinions with evidence and facts. Students reported that, despite contentious debates, they left the classroom “still friends.”

On other campuses, students learned to engage in difficult discussions in co-curricular experiences. On one campus, students could not participate in community-based learning or study abroad without participating in intergroup dialogue training and mock conversations. Two of the institutions supported centers for public dialogue and local problem solving. On one campus, seniors in student government trained incoming student government members and leaders of SGA-supported clubs in the arts of dialogue and collaborative decision making.

Host Discussions on Free Speech and Inclusion

Colleges and universities should host campus-wide dialogues on the First Amendment, its history and current application in higher education, and the many perspectives on it. Present the “absolutist” perspective alongside the perspective that hate speech is not welcome on a college campus. This will increase knowledge about the importance of free speech, enhance awareness of how some speech affects different people, and advance discourse skills.

As I noted earlier, colleges and universities struggle to differentiate among naïve or uninformed statements, senseless but intentional insults, genuine injury, and provocative yet productive conflict and dissent. Students share responsibility with others in the campus community for making their learning experiences, and those of their peers, positive and productive. Yet, there should be room for mistakes, naiveté, and dissent. Conflict is almost always an opportunity for learning.

Again, I am no fan of speech codes, and I do not think that institutional dialogues should result in speech codes or regulations. The best response, as campuses learned in the 1990s, is through educational programming. Speech “zones” and “walls” where people are encouraged to share their views, even if unpopular, can spur discussions and ideas; however, free speech should not be exclusively relegated to these spaces.

Revisit Symbols and Traditions

Traditions and symbols matter. Students and faculty at the campuses the Institute visited could point to events—a first-day celebration, a convocation parade in which faculty wearing academic regalia walked with the students, or a graduation with a community picnic—that sent messages to the campus community about the importance of community and social cohesion. Alternatively, imagine students walking onto campus the first day and facing a banner espousing White nationalist groups, which nearly happened at Appalachia State University in the fall of 2017 (Bawab, 2017). Such messaging is antithetical to the aims of higher education and will negatively impact an institution’s ability to achieve its educational goals.

Many campuses today are engaging in discussions about buildings named after people who held anti-Semitic or racist views. These discussions offer myriad learning opportunities for students about democracy’s history, principles, practices, and tensions. When done well, they can bring a campus together around shared goals and means for achieving those goals.

Support Student Activism and Leadership; Listen to Student Perspectives

Student activism is nothing new to higher education, but it may be approaching levels not seen in nearly a half century. In the 1960s and early 1970s, students protested the Vietnam war, gender discrimination, and racial discrimination. In the 1980s, they fought against apartheid in South Africa, demanding that their institutions divest from companies that supported racist regimes and, later, sweatshop labor. In that era, students also demanded changes in curricula, expanding interdisciplinary and cultural studies to the point that they are now common in higher education. On some campuses, student activism has been met with punishment, sometimes driven by pressure from legislators, donors, or trustees. The most extreme response to student activism, of course, happened at Kent State University, where the Ohio National Guard opened fire on demonstrators, and, two weeks later, at Jackson State University, where two Black students were killed by campus police during a confrontation.

The Black Lives Matter movement against police violence and institutionalized racism triggered demonstrations and “die-ins.” As a result of the 2016 election, students have left campus to participate in women’s marches and other protests nationwide. Likewise, the recent surge of interest in decreasing gun violence among high school students has spread to colleges and universities.

Higher education institutions can expect more activism on the part of students, including activism about limiting free speech in the interest of eliminating hateful rhetoric, discrimination, and undemocratic forces in parts of the nation, as well as activism against policies viewed as liberal, such as affirmative action. Rather than trying to quash these efforts, colleges and universities should view them as opportunities to work with students to teach the arts of organizing, social change, and collaborative leadership. Activism should be welcomed as perhaps the clearest example of students taking initiative and exercising leadership. Students want to be heard. Perhaps the best response is to listen.

Make Decisions Based on Sound Academic Grounds, Not Partisan Perspectives

Making decisions about educational content based on party affiliation is impermissible. College and university administrators need to be honest about their motives when screening speakers or censoring viewpoints. Understandably, this is challenging. When members of political parties stand behind policies and actions that are antithetical to educational values and goals, including inequality and discrimination, it is hard to condemn ideas without sounding partisan. Hopefully, the lines will get easier to draw. Tellingly, influential Republican leaders have come out against the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville. Conservatives and liberals do and should debate issues such as crime, mass incarceration, terrorism, gun control, etc., and in doing so, welcome all perspectives. The problem is not Republicans or even conservative perspectives per se; the problem is White supremacy, White nationalism, and demagogic populism, as well as inequality and discrimination. Talking about ideas, not parties, will help academics avoid conflating these many influences.

Resist Partisan Intrusion in Academic Affairs

The assumption that students are easily indoctrinated and that they are not allowed to think for themselves, as revealed in the 2017 Gallup report, is unsupported by research. According to the Higher Education Research Institute at UCLA, incoming students arrive with already formed political viewpoints. In fact, the first-year class in 2016 was the most politically polarized group in the 50-year history of the Freshman Survey (Eagan et al., 2017). In addition, several studies have refuted the claim that students change their political orientation while in college (Colby, Beaumont, Ehrlich, & Corngold, 2007; Mariani & Hewitt, 2008; Woessner & Kelly-Woessner, 2009). Examining a nationally representative sample of more than 7,000 undergraduates, Mayhew, Rockenbach, Selznick, and Zagorsky (2018) concluded that after the first year of college, 48% of students viewed liberals more favorably than when they arrived on campus and 50% viewed conservatives more favorably. The authors concluded that “college attendance is associated, on average, with gains in appreciating political viewpoints across the spectrum, not just favoring liberals” (Mayhew et al., 2018). This is precisely the kind of outcome educating for democracy should yield.

Uphold Democratic Principles and Practices

Inevitably, academics will find themselves forced to make statements and take positions that promote democratic principles and practices—and there are many opportunities. Many states have strict voter identification laws that disallow the use of student IDs for voter registration. In New Hampshire, the legislature is currently considering a bill that would prevent students from voting in their places of domicile, despite a clear mandate from the U.S. Supreme Court conferring that right to students. In other legislation, North Carolina lawmakers forbid the removal of Confederate statues from public property, despite the governor’s admission that the law “overreaches” into local affairs (Campbell, 2015). They had also passed a regulation prohibiting law students at a civil rights clinical program from engaging in their core work, litigation (Roll, 2017). These efforts undermine students’ ability to participate in democracy, and colleges and universities must take a firm stance against them.

Colleges and universities need to move beyond viewing speech as a mandate and appreciate the current conditions as a learning opportunity. They need to provide students, faculty, staff, and, arguably, communities external to the campus (legislators, too) with forums for understanding why these tensions exist and how, collectively, members of the campus community can create the kind of educational environment where democratic principles and practices thrive. In this process, colleges and universities, particularly public institutions, will need to make some hard choices when faced with unapologetic White nationalists, for instance. In making these choices, colleges and universities will need to consider the undemocratic forces at work nationally and globally, as well as higher education’s role in educating for democracy’s health and future. Ultimately, I hope that academics will grapple with what it means to educate for the democracy that most want but that we do not have.

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Author Biography

Free Speech Laws Passed or Proposed as of March 1, 2018

Laws Passed

  State: California

Title: Campus Free Speech Act

URL: https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtml?bill_id=201720180ACA14

State: Colorado

Title: Right to Free Speech at Public Higher Ed Institutions

URL: https://leg.colorado.gov/bills/sb17-062

State: Florida

Title: The Campus Free Expression Act

URL: http://www.flsenate.gov/Session/Bill/2018/4/BillText/er/HTML

State: Missouri

Title: Campus Free Expression Act

URL: http://www.senate.mo.gov/15info/pdf-bill/perf/SB93.pdf

State: North Carolina

Title: North Carolina Restore/Preserve Free Speech Act

URL: https://www.ncleg.net/gascripts/billlookup/billlookup.pl?Session=2017&BillID=H527

State: Tennessee

Title: Campus Free Speech Protection Act

URL: http://www.capitol.tn.gov/Bills/110/Amend/SA0333.pdf

State: Utah

Title: Campus Individual Rights Acthttps://le.utah.gov/~2017/bills/static/HB0054.html

URL: https://le.utah.gov/~2017/bills/static/HB0054.html#53b-27-101

State: Virginia

Title: Higher Educational Institutions’ Free Speech on Campus

URL: https://lis.virginia.gov/cgi-bin/legp604.exe?171+sum+HB1401

State: Wisconsin

URL: http://legis.wisconsin.gov/assembly/59/kremer/media/1316/17-2408_1.pdf

Legislation Proposed but Not Yet Passed

State: Georgia

Title: Georgia Campus Free Speech Act

URL: http://www.legis.ga.gov/legislation/en-US/Display/20172018/SB/339

State: Illinois

Title: Campus Free Speech

URL: http://ilga.gov/legislation/billstatus.asp?DocNum=2939&GAID=14&GA=100&DocTypeID=HB&LegID=104448&SessionID=91

State: Michigan

URL: http://www.legislature.mi.gov/(S(cybxwk00twt33clqpyzm1gsh))/mileg.aspx?page= getobject&objectname=2017-SB-0349

State: Nebraska

Title: Higher Education Free Speech Accountability Act

URL: https://nebraskalegislature.gov/FloorDocs/105/PDF/Intro/LB718.pdf

State: Wyoming

Title: Higher Education Free Speech Protection Act

URL: http://legisweb.state.wy.us/2018/Introduced/HB0137.pdf

The First Amendment applies to government actors, which include public colleges and universities but not private institutions. Private institutions have more leeway, but for most, free expression is important to robust learning and ideas, and as a result is often a normative value, if not a written principle, in institutional handbooks or the written materials of both public and private institutions. ↑

The First Amendments is the subject of thousands, if not millions, of pages of judicial decisions, law review articles, books, chapters, articles, and courses, so I cannot provide a “primer” in this space. I have, however, recorded a webinar that offers a short overview of the law. I also recommend Chemerinsky and Gillman’s Free Speech on Campus (2017). ↑

I use the terms citizen , citizenry , and citizenship throughout this article to denote residency and civic participation, not legal status. ↑

Space constraints in this article prevent the important discussion clarifying the terms equity , equality , and equal opportunity . I distinguish them this way: providing fair access (equal opportunity) or treating everyone the same way (equality) is not the same as considering differences in order to achieve fair outcomes (equity). The terms are related but not interchangeable. ↑

This compares with the results of the 2015 survey in which 37% of respondents said higher education’s effect was negative, and 54% said it was positive. ↑

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Research-backed ways to bridge America’s political divide

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Researchers successfully tested 25 different approaches. Two proved most effective.

As a country we are deeply divided. That much we can agree upon. But there may be ways to bridge the chasm, according to a new megastudy published in Science .

The researchers discovered that some attitudes—specifically, support for undemocratic practices (such as trying to curtail free speech, spreading intentional misinformation, or attempting to curb voting in certain precincts) and partisan violence—are clearly distinct from partisan animosity (a strong dislike of or deep distrust between supporters of the opposite party). Thus, lessening animosity does not necessarily lead to a reduction in the other two attitudes.

On the flip side, successful interventions that reduced partisan animosity tended to reduce a host of other problems, such as social distrust, social distance, opposition to bipartisan cooperation, biased evaluation of politicized facts, and support for undemocratic candidates.

According to James Druckman , the Martin Brewer Anderson Professor of Political Science at the University of Rochester (one of the six original researchers to start the megastudy), two of the evaluated approaches were particularly effective across outcomes—even for reducing support for undemocratic practices and partisan violence:

• Correcting misperceptions of the other side
• Using cues to show that elites, such as political candidates or officeholders, place great importance on upholding democratic norms

“People tend to exaggerate the antidemocratic attitudes or the violent inclinations of the other side. And they exaggerate just how different the other side is from your own,” says Druckman, who is an expert on democracy and political division. “When you provide information or opportunities to interact with people from the other side and learn about some commonality, that seemed to be a pretty effective approach. The focus on addressing misperceptions seems to be very, very useful.”

What is a megastudy?

Megastudy assesses 250-plus approaches.

Back in 2019, when Druckman first got involved with the project as a faculty member at Northwestern University, he figured the task ahead would be considerable. Little did he know the gargantuan undertaking it would become.

Pockets of people—academics in various disciplines and civic organizations alike—had begun working on behavioral interventions to address the three most pertinent threats to US democracy: partisan hostility, antidemocratic attitudes, and noticeable support for political violence. But the findings remained fragmented. What was needed was one large, unified collection of ideas where the best could be tested in rigorously controlled, scientific experiments.

The resulting study spans a whopping 32,059 study participants, 252 treatment ideas (whittled down to 25 interventions), 85 coauthors, five countries, and dozens of universities, institutions, and organizations. The researchers come from the fields of political science, sociology, psychology, economics communications, and marketing, as well as from civic organizations.

One approach does not fit all

While most of the tested interventions (self-administered online modules about 8 minutes in length) worked to reduce partisan hostility, only about a quarter successfully lowered support for undemocratic practices. And just one-fifth proved useful in reducing support for political violence.

The degree to which those interventions worked was also telling.

The researchers found that it’s much easier, for example, to reduce a person’s animosity toward someone of the opposite political opinion than it is to reduce someone’s support for political violence. According to Druckman, that’s in part because support for violence is already relatively low, so there’s less room for reduction. Yet, Druckman notes, the minority who supports violence is “likely more extreme in its opinions and, therefore, harder to convince to change its views.”

Of the 25 tested interventions in the megastudy:

• 23 significantly reduced partisan animosity by up to 10.5 percentage points
• 6 significantly reduced support for undemocratic practices by up to 5.8 percentage points
• 5 reduced support for partisan violence by up to 2.8 percentage points

At times, the results were surprisingly mixed.

Druckman tells the story of one video that showed a montage of political violence around the globe—in Venezuela, Russia, and Zimbabwe—where pro-democracy supporters engaged in violent struggles. The video was effective in lessening partisan animosity and antidemocratic attitudes. However, it backfired when it came to study participants’ condoning partisan violence, which the video increased .

“I think people may have thought that you need a kind of defensive violence to counteract the tearing down of democracy, perhaps, but it’s hard to say for sure,” Druckman notes.

Which megastudy interventions work best?

The answer may depend on what specific undemocratic problem you are trying to address.

Partisan animosity

Highlighting sympathetic, politically dissimilar people and emphasizing their common ground was effective in reducing partisan animosity . For example, a top-scoring intervention (“correcting division misperceptions”) involved watching a four-and-a-half-minute Heineken commercial from 2017, titled “Worlds Apart.”

In the video, perfect strangers of diametrically opposite views are paired: a feminist with a man who equates feminism with “man hating,” a homophobic man with a transgender woman, a climate activist with a climate change denier.

The twist? They get to know each other first and find commonalities before they are revealed to each other as holding views the other abhors. Then they are given a choice: walk out or discuss the issue over a beer (no points for guessing the brand). In the video, every single person opts for the discussion, which looks civilized and friendly.

The second-highest scoring intervention (and a close second to the Heineken video) came from a team that includes Cameron Hecht , then a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Texas at Austin and now an assistant professor in the University of Rochester’s Department of Psychology . Hecht focuses on developing solutions to societal problems, such as disparities in academic motivation, mental health issues, and, yes, political polarization.

His team’s approach—titled “common exhausted majority identity”—managed to reduce partisan animosity by more than 10 percentage points. How? The researchers gave study participants information that reframed polarizing content from news and social media companies as a calculated manipulative strategy. They explained that this strategy is designed to artificially deepen political division and manufacture outrage—because companies use manipulation as a tool to maximize and maintain their own audiences.

The team’s intervention, which uses text, images, and voiceover narration as part of an online module, takes advantage of people’s reactance, a well-established psychological concept in which any blatant attempt to change a person’s behavior is likely to result in negative reactions and push back.

The researchers used the participants’ natural reactance to harness it against someone else.

“We show them how they’re already being manipulated by a third party, in this case news media, and explain that the way to fight back against that control and regulation is to engage in the behavior that we think is good and beneficial,” says Hecht.

Undemocratic practices

Correcting misperceptions about another person’s political views and instead highlighting the risk of a democratic collapse was especially effective in lowering support for undemocratic practices .

The highest scoring intervention here (titled “correcting democracy misperception”) asked participants eight questions about what they thought people from the other party believed when it came to democracy-undermining actions. Participants then guessed the other side’s willingness to use violence, to reduce the number of polling stations in unfriendly districts, or to accept the results of elections if they lost.

After each guess, participants received the correct answer, based on recent surveys. The answers clarified that most supporters of the other party do not , in fact, condone actions that undermine democracy and instead also support key elements of democracy.

Partisan violence

Strategies that involve political elites who model healthy democratic behavior, such as having rival candidates stress the importance of sticking to democratic principles, were especially effective in reducing support for partisan violence . For example, the megastudy researchers found that a video (referred to as a “pro-democracy bipartisan elite cue”) featuring the 2020 Republican and Democratic gubernatorial candidates in Utah was one of the most successful interventions in this category.

In the video, Republican Spencer Cox (who went on to win the election) and Democrat Chris Peterson, standing opposite each other, tell the viewer that “we are currently in the final days of campaigning against each other but our common values transcend our political differences, and the strength of our nation rests on our ability to see that.”

Translating the findings into the real world

“Just because the Utah governor ad worked in this study setting, we can’t just play it a few times and expect it to unify the country,” cautions Druckman.

But the video’s success in changing hearts and minds (at least in the study’s setting) offers important insights.

“If we take a more aggressive stance toward trying to get partisans from different sides to show some agreement,” says Druckman, “that could have a really positive effect over time.”

Besides creating a unifying research framework and providing a theoretical understanding of the mechanisms and psychological tenets that were driving antidemocratic attitudes, the researchers were also looking for effective, scalable interventions.

To that end, Hecht and his team members have already begun work on a follow-up study of their intervention. This time the team examines whether participants, after experiencing the intervention, were switching away from divisive news sources, unfollowing social media accounts that made them angry at other Americans, or removing social media apps from their phone.

Early data, Hecht says, looks promising.

Meet your experts

James druckman martin brewer anderson professor of political science.

An expert in political behavior and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Druckman studies public opinion formation, political polarization, political and scientific communication, political psychology, and experimental and survey methods. He has published approximately 200 articles and book chapters. His latest coauthored book, Partisan Hostility and American Democracy: Explaining Political Divisions and When They Matter (University of Chicago), was published in 2024.

• Learn more about Druckman.

Cameron Hecht Assistant Professor of Psychology

Hecht’s research “seeks to identify psychological processes that contribute to societal problems, develop theory-based interventions that target these processes, and identify the features of contexts that enable these interventions to be effective.” His recent studies have been published in the Journal of Research on Adolescence and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

• Learn more about Hecht.

Can Democracy Be Established Undemocratically?

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November 29, 2019, the ethical and political dilemmas of the czechoslovak velvet revolution.

By Muriel Blaive

• Czechoslovakia
• Velvet Revolution

Photo Credit: Jiri Igaz / Shutterstock.com

November 17 th , 2019 was the thirtieth anniversary of the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia. This revolution, marvelous though it was, and its aftermath, I believe, demonstrates that creating a mature democracy out of thin air is exceedingly difficult, if not impossible. The apparent success of the revolution hid flaws that seemed to be of secondary importance at that pivotal moment, but came back to haunt the fragile democracy. The premium placed on legal continuity and on the disarming of any potential violence in 1989 would be paid for dearly later on, in terms of the popularity, and even the legitimacy, of the country’s post-communist regime.

The Czech dissidents were confronted at the beginning of the 1989 revolution with two major obstacles: they were not professional politicians, which is a diplomatic way of saying that they were complete amateurs in organizational, political, and economic matters; and, crucially, they were not representative of the majority of the population. In a private poll undertaken at the beginning of December, just a couple of weeks after citizens first protested in Wenceslas Square, Czechoslovakia’s most famous dissident,  Václav Havel , was mentioned as a potential presidential candidate by only a negligible part of the population. The dissidents did represent the right side of history — the collapse of communism in Europe, that was unthinkable at the beginning of November. It was the new normal by January. But their unilateral claim that they alone were best situated to attain the country’s primary goal of democracy led them to take many liberties with it. As the subsequent decades would show, the fact that the dissidents were legitimized by the first post-communist elections did not erase the damage to standards of acceptable political behavior that they unwittingly made.

At least three of their choices were ethically debatable: they had Havel elected by the communist parliament; they turned down the direct election of the president by the people in the name of constitutional stability at a time when a popular revolution was supposed to be ongoing; and they purged the communist deputies in a process worthy of communist practices.

The support of workers was ensured thanks to false promises such as “there will be no unemployment and no harsh economic measures.” The Slovaks were treated with contempt. The fear of what the masses could do was mobilized, the communist MPs were intimidated, communist authorities were left free to tamper with the Secret Police files, and in order to isolate the Slovak reform communists and Havel’s potential political rival, 1968 throwback Alexander Dubček, the Czech (and soon-to-be neoliberal) economists were coopted and given free reign.

What else could the dissidents have done, however, one might ask? The moment, after all, was sudden, and decisions had to be made fast. Certainly, any scenario for exiting communism would most likely have led to its own set of impossible choices and deleterious effects. Michael Kocáb, the famous singer and dissident, recapitulated various possible paths in a recent interview for the Czech news site,  Deník N . None was satisfying.

One important key to understanding this present popular dissatisfaction is to be found not so much in the  outcome  of the revolution as in the  way it was achieved , confronting what Jeffrey Goldfarb calls  “the social condition ,” i.e. dilemmas that are inevitably built into the fabric of society. It proved to be as impossible to get rid of a dictatorship with democratic means, as it was to start a healthy democracy based on undemocratic practices. There was, apparently, no good solution, all the more so considering that many communist ideals were still popular. Not one country was fully satisfied with its own exit from communism — not even East Germany, the only region that benefited not only from massive investments in its economy, but from an unspoiled well of judges, policemen, teachers, administrators and all other essential professionals needed for the establishment of the rule of law and a viable economy. Despite all its shortcomings, seen from Poland, Hungary, or Romania today, the Czechoslovak path does not look so bad. In fact, until recently, the Velvet Revolution was understood as a satisfactory rupture.

Yet the Czech population has become deeply dissatisfied with certain aspects of the change, particularly the growth of poverty and inequality ( see for instance the remarkable work of journalist Saša Uhlová, who, for six months, held some of the worst paid jobs in the country to report on the living conditions of the new proletariat) and the loss of social security. The scale of the corruption, as well as the sense of impunity, have rivaled and in fact outperformed the worst excesses of communism. Even more problematic, the political atmosphere has become execrable.

In consequence, the last years have witnessed the beginnings of a momentous re-evaluation of the Velvet Revolution. The historical and sociological literature had long neglected to admit that in contrast to the laboriously negotiated Hungarian and Polish exits, the Czech version, as an intellectual feat led by heroic dissidents, was no ideal model either. Václav Havel, it is now underscored, was critical of democracy long before 1989. In his celebrated 1978 essay,  The Power of the Powerless , he even discussed something he called “post-democracy.” During the Velvet Revolution, he and other dissidents played a power game quite removed from the ethical standards he had made famous as a writer, intellectual, and dissident. The (communist-elected) parliament, in particular, was treated with an alarming level of disdain.

That the dissidents were political amateurs was pardonable; it is the way they made the argument that they represented the proverbial “people’s will” — and then acted on it — that is problematic. Unconsciously mimicking the arguments of party leader Klement Gottwald, who had put similar pressure on the democratic president Beneš in 1948 to sign in the new communist government, Havel insisted at every round of the negotiations he led with the communist authorities that the people were getting impatient and that even his popular Civic Forum might soon lose favor with the mob. In response, the representatives of the outgoing dictatorship all of a sudden became stauncher supporters of the rule of law than the dissidents themselves.

This irony became frankly absurd when the question of the voting system for the new president arose. It was once again the communists who were in favor of the more democratic mode (a direct election by the people), rather than an indirect election by parliament. The communists indeed counted on their genuine support amongst the population to have the communist candidate, outgoing Prime Minister Ladislav Adamec, elected. This communist wager did not take into account the dynamic of power and popularity that dramatically evolved over the next few weeks. But as a snapshot of the situation at the beginning of December 1989, it does speak volumes as to the dissidents’ lack of popularity and the level of legitimacy that the communists still enjoyed. The dissidents were claiming to represent the will of the people but were so concerned about Havel’s chances of winning a free election that, in the name of “constitutional stability,” they argued instead for retaining the election of the president by the (communist-elected) parliament. In other words, they bypassed the public. This disregard for the popular vote, and the means used to ensure a parliamentary vote, are problematic from an ethical point of view. No wonder the expression “velvet hangover” was already in use by the 1990s.

Continuities with past practices continued to surface. The constitutional lawyer who on November 29 th , 1989, endeavored to have parliament erase the three articles from the Czechoslovak constitution that guaranteed the leading role of the Communist Party was none other than the author of this very same communist constitution in 1960: Zdeněk Jičínský. During the interim, he had become a dissident and  Charter 77  signatory. But how could the 1989 revolutionaries convince the communist MPs to elect their archenemy Havel? Jičínský was the author of a November 28 th  proposal to have dozens of deputies recalled for “abusing their mandate and not minding the will and interest of the people.” An existing law, passed in 1971 to formalize the  post-1968 purges  of reform communist MPs, Dubček sympathizers, and Prague Spring enthusiasts, allowed for this. One of its victims had been none other than Zdeněk Jičínský.

Historian Kieran Williams reminds us of other troubling parallels with past practices. Several institutions were established in 1989-1990 to deal with the Ministry of Interior, which encompassed the infamous Secret Police (StB) and its archives: one of those was a network of “three-man screening commissions.” These troikas consisted of one former StB officer, discharged after 1968 for having supported the Prague Spring, one member of a citizens’ committee, and one current employee of the ministry. Such networks of “vigilant citizens” and “screening troikas” are yet again unnervingly reminiscent of the Action Committees that stormed the country after the February 1948 communist takeover and fired many citizens who were not vocally committed to the nascent communist dictatorship from their positions.

Once the Round Table negotiations were progressing and the communist President Gustáv Husák had resigned, a new president had to be elected. Michael Žantovský claims that the presidential election was settled between Václav Havel and communist Prime Minister Marián Čalfa on December 15th, adding with his customary humor: “… this was a parliament so used to taking orders it would have elected Dracula if told to do so by the government.”

This statement is amusing but is contradicted by old and new research. According to Jiří Suk, the communist MPs were in fact strongly determined to resist the pressure from below and above, to engage themselves fully in the democratic process, and to gain greater social recognition for their role as MPs. On December 13 th , they endorsed the resignation of the most compromised apparatchiks among them, elected a new presidium, and declared their intention to have the new president elected directly by the people. This path offered them greater moral satisfaction than being humiliated into electing Havel before they were discarded and purged. But the revolutionary constitutionalists — Zdeněk Jičínský, Pavel Rychetský and Petr Pithart — publicly disavowed a direct election and pleaded for the continuity of legal practices. MPs who disagreed would be “helpers of the devil”, they said. The only way for them to redeem themselves was to elect Havel president and adopt the new constitutional order on the basis of which many would be soon dismissed. As Jiří Suk explains it, “In the name of a radiant, democratic future, the MPs — who had indeed been elected undemocratically but who were now professing to respect democracy — were forced to adopt non-democratic practices.”

It got worse. Jiří Suk cites Jiří Svoboda, the soon to be president of the Czech and Moravian Communist Party (KSČM), according to whom several communist MPs refused to endorse this “arrangement” and planned to demonstratively resign from their mandate. In view of this impending fiasco, a meeting of the parliamentary club of the communist MPs was called on December 27 th . Secretary Vasil Mohorita and Prime Minister Marián Čalfa threatened the communist MPs with “a criminalization of their political attitudes” and with “hangings on the lampposts.” The MPs were made to vote repeatedly until they reached unanimity, says Svoboda. Čalfa later acknowledged that he had been “very brutal.”

Two days later, on December 29 th , Havel was unanimously elected Czechoslovak President by the parliament. When the positions of many communist MPs were indeed redistributed in January, they tended to favor Czech over Slovak MPs. The Slovaks were indignant — this was the beginning of the end for Czechoslovakia. Moreover, Havel’s choice for the post of Minister of Interior, Richard Sacher, kept the head of the Secret Police in place for several weeks. General Alojz Lorenc was thus free to tamper with police files, which fatefully discredited the entire transitional judicial process. Czech memory politics have not recovered from this blow.

It might be time today to reevaluate the course of the Velvet Revolution: to accept Czechoslovakia’s exit from communism as better than some (violence would of course have been worse) but as an imperfect process nonetheless. It would be useful for the Czech Republic today to acknowledge that many of the problems of post-communism originated in the material impossibility of finding a way out of a deeply ingrained dictatorship without compromising democratic principles. There is no shame in having wanted democracy to succeed, and in improvising amidst great constraints to make that happen. What  has  become problematic over the decades since is the refusal to acknowledge the shortcomings of the revolution and to address them, and thereby to finally turn the page of “post-communism.”

We are not there yet. On November 17 th , 2019, for the thirtieth anniversary of the Velvet Revolution, President Zeman skirted any state commemoration while Prime Minister Babiš only held an indoor celebration with the prime ministers of the Visegrád group — while 200,000 to 300,000 demonstrators had called for his resignation the day before. He extolled Václav Havel’s courage and admitted he was not proud to have been member of the Communist Party before leaving the country for Slovakia. The heads of the Czech state could not face the public at what should have been a festive and symbolic time. Democracy still waits to be built.

Muriel Blaive is a historian and researcher at the Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes in Prague.

Image: Editorial credit:  / Shutterstock.com

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335 Democracy Essay Topic Ideas & Examples

🏆 best democracy topic ideas & essay examples, 🥇 most interesting democracy topics to write about, 👍 good essay topics on democracy, ✅ simple & easy democracy essay titles, 📌 democracy writing prompts, 🔍 good research topics about democracy, ❓ essay questions about democracy.

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• “Inequality, Democracy, and the Environment” by Downey Liam Downey examines in his work Inequality, democracy, and the environment, the nature of these problems and tries to explain the causes of their occurrence.
• Organizational Culture: Democratic Leadership Democratic leadership would be an effective approach to leading others in the workplace because members of a group are allowed to offer their ideas that are applied to solve problems.
• Democracy Emergence in Ancient Greece and Why Plato Was Opposed to It The result of this war was the defeat of Athens by Sparta at the end of the fifth century which led to the overthrow of many democratic regimes.
• Democracy: Forms, Requirements and Homosexuality Democracy exists in two major forms there is the liberal democracy which is a very capitalistic economic approach in nature while the other form is a socialist democracy that embraces economic aspects like subsidies and […]
• Democratic Governance and Policy Networks The contribution of each of these actors was valuable for improving the quality of legislation which became the result of the collaborative work of the interested parties.
• Rape as a Weapon of War: Democratic Republic of Congo While some researchers argue that the occurrence of wartime rape, with its frequency, savagery and systematic organization during these times, is inherently entwined with the nature of the conflicts, most of them emphasize that the […]
• A Government and Basic Democratic Requirements to It In pluralism, the people who make policies are the top government officials and they do not involve the public. The relevance of involvement in the implementation of government policies is not clear to the citizens.
• “Jihad Versus Mcworld” by Benjamen Barber: Tribalism and Globalism Threat to Democracy The forces of Jihad and the forces of McWorld are fighting for sovereignty and neither supports democracy. It is the decentralization of confederations that may save democracy, according to Barber.
• Parliamentary Democracy: Will of the People Representation The party with the majority votes is sought to be representing the will of the people. In The will of the people: Notes towards a dialectical voluntarism, Peter Hallward states that the will of the […]
• Terrorism and Liberal Democracy: What We Should Know When confronted with external coercion like global terrorism, democracies react like a pendulum by first of all providing security and then vacillating back in the direction of moderation, the quest of lenience, and the encouragement […]
• Is the Constitution Supportive of Today’s Democracy? Additionally, one of the dominant elements in most constitutions is the principle of democracy which refers to the government by the people for the people themselves.
• Jihad vs. Mcworld Article: How Globalization Hinders Democracy In the recent past, most economies in the world have been adopting strategies aimed at increasing democracy in all areas of the economy i.e.political, economic, social, etc.globalization is one of the factors that influence the […]
• Benjamin’s Concept of Democracy Against Bennett’s Propositions on News and Democracy However, what seems good to many seems to work better and much more acceptable, from this point of view it is fair to reiterate Churchill’s pronouncement that, the present democracy is the best of all […]
• Democratic Transition in Asian Communities As long as the authorities in some Asian countries are elected, democracies in these countries still lack the characteristics which can be associated with democracy in other parts of the world.”In other words, if a […]
• A Dream Deferred and Democracy by Langston Hughes But if they over dry, they will become hard to chew and lose all the nutrition, This warns us of the consequences that may befall us if we sit there and wait for conditions to […]
• The Sources of Leadership and Democracy in Britain Also, the powers of the British Government are derived from the appeal or iron authority of the British rulers to the party blocs rather than from the power of the influence of the leaders to […]
• Democratization Theories at the Present Political Map The world history witnessed a great number of changes in the political state of countries, in the form of ruling and the change as well as the form of power in every state existing nowadays.
• Democracy in Modern World All these events in the world history strengthened the thought that democracy is the only right and progressive form of authority in a state that will finally bring the overall population of the state to […]
• Democracy Is the Best Form of Government for All the World’s Inhabitants The challenge to the leaders, therefore, is to provide good leadership and governance to reciprocate the good work of the voters.
• Democratic Empowerment via Village Elections During Imperial China The villager assembly oversees the progress of the VCs and ensures that the decisions they make are for the common good of the rest of the villagers.
• Anti-Democratic Movement and Path of Democratization According to Lijphart, the Westminster model of democracy provides a throughout insight into the essence of democracy not only in the United Kingdom but in the rest of the world as well.
• Study of Liberal Democracy In the true sense of liberal democracy, the government is chosen by the voters, and in this sense, the government should answer to the people.
• Torture and Democratic Society 1948, United Nations General Assembly, after the second world war adopted the Universal declaration on human rights, which prohibits the use of torture or any other form of inhuman or demeaning treatment or punishment In […]
• The State, Democracy and Globalization In order for people to understand the government there should be a system of communicating the state policies to the local individuals.
• Ideology of Race and the New Democratic Nation His main argument in this matter is that whilst racism did not at first lead the colonists in enslaving the blacks, the concept of the native hereditary inferiority on the component of Africans and African […]
• Comparing Democracy Effort Between Mali and the USA Abraham Lincoln defined it as a government of the people, for the people and by the people. The main function of the judiciary in Mali is the protection and guard of human rights and freedoms.
• Venezuela: A Democracy Under Siege This essay will critically evaluate Venezuela in different aspects in the following order : democratic principles and the constitution, political systems, economic policies and institutions, the media, and civil societies to show how Chavez is […]
• A Critique on Deliberative Democracy The belief that the United States of America is a democratic country automatically create the assumption that it is a government by the people, for the people, and of the people as laid down by […]
• Will China Become Democratic in Near Future? China, being one of the countries yet truly to begin the process of democratization, stands on a point that future progress will be important not only for the people in China but also for the […]
• Relationship Between Democracy and Violence in Colombia The escalating violence in the 1980s has in fact, watered-down Colombia’s democratic governance mainly because of the country’s incapacity to tame the violence.
• Relationship Between Democracy and the State If leaders are not visionary and their ideas are not cohesive, the situation leads to the formation of splinter groups within the state, a condition that is unbefitting for the health of a democracy.
• The Role of Education in Democracy Propaganda is in itself an aspect of education where the Public Information Committee provided some knowledge on the certain issues surrounding the war in order to win public support.
• Descriptive Meaning of Democracy This term is however modified in meaning nowadays and it can be used in various applications; that is, it is used in a variety of ways depending on the time of use, the place where […]
• Democracy Threats in Australia Governance as the rule of the people by the people has been more subjected to the teachings of democracy that have been adopted as a form of governance.
• Modern China – Is True Democracy Still a Dream? There is a dormant-volcano kind of “sub-terranean tensions” that seem to herald the beginning of the end for communism in China.
• The Battle Over Democracy Within Burma However, the military government in Burma remained controlling the political affairs and economy of the country which made the condition of the people to get worse.
• The Synergy Between Capitalism and Democracy Democracy and its success: Democracy refers to a political system in which the political part of the government is elected through adult suffrage.
• The Nature of Democracy in the Period 1871-1914 Moreover, the doctrine emphasized the essence of human rights, such as treatment of every citizen equally notwithstanding gender, race or class, the essence of the rule of law and the essence of having a government, […]
• American Imperialism and Democracy It comes with increased control as well as the subjection of the conquered to the rules and the demands of the conqueror.
• Elements of Democracy and Constitutionalism A country’s system of governance, which may be termed as democratic, should carry in its constitution the empowerment to reflect the freedom of the people to choose, as well as other issues, the rule of […]
• Aspect of Democracy in Seattle The Seattle Convention Centre in the city was the setting of the final session of the World Trade Organization of the millennium.
• Democracy and Dictatorship in Ancient Greece and Today Recalling the speech of Thucydides, democracy is when the power is in the hands of not a minority but of the whole people when all are equal before the law when political life is free […]
• Habermas’s Theory of Democracy His views are widely regarded as crucial in such issues as economic and social development, the role of the responsible intellectual, the issues of the Holocaust, the roots of authoritarian power, and the prospects for […]
• The Level of Democracy in Singapore and Thailand It is worth noting that since the collapse of Russia and seeming the end of the communism empire, most countries in East Asia like China and Vietnam have been slowly moving to more democratic governments […]
• Canada as a Liberal Capitalist Democracy It includes also the re-organization of the enterprises in order to make a profit, for instance, changing management of the enterprise or adding new departments in the organization.
• Democracy Within the Realm of a Republic The two systems have been in conflict since antique times, and are of special evidence in the actual and in the philosophic histories of antique Greece, particularly in the writings of Plato and Aristotle.
• Urban Democracy and Capitalism For example, surveys show that people increasingly identify with the planetary scale, the local scale, and a whole series of spaces in between.
• Democratic Consolidation in Africa As defined by Arinze, democratic consolidation is a necessary process that ensures the protection and feasibility of democracy upon its initiation, which is the aspect that lack representation in the African countries.
• Public Opinion: The Image of Democracy by Lippmann He is of the opinion that America political writers and the political class deliberately blocks public opinion to serve their own interests; “The existence of a force called public opinion is in the main taken […]
• Citizenship Education and Democracy In simple terms, the role of educators is to teach children to be true citizens who can contribute to the evolvement of their countries.
• Success of Democracy in US: Comparative Approach for Explaining Therefore, the present paper claims that the comparative approach can be used to explain the success of democracy in the United States and provides sufficient evidence to prove the point.
• Enemies of American Democracy First of all, it is important to discuss the historical development of the concept of American nationalism. Trump’s idea will have to be supported by the money of American taxpayers.
• Democracy Development in the World up to 1500 CE
• Greek Legacy in a Contemporary Democratic State
• Republican Versus Democrat Political Beliefs
• Strangers in the US Democracy
• Capitalism and Democracy – Social System Analysis
• “Terror and Democracy at the Age of Stalin” by Goldman
• Western Liberal and Democratic Values
• UNDP and USAID: Source Evaluation
• “Democracy and International Relations in Asia” by Acharya
• Democratic Globalization and Its Benefits
• Comparative Democratization and Dictatorships
• Technology and Democratic Education
• Empire and Democracy Conflict by Thucydides
• Democracy: Perception and Application
• Democracy and Oligarchy: the Meaning of Equality
• Democracy in Sudan: Key Factors
• Earth Democracy: Beyond Dead Democracy and Killing Economies
• Politics of the Democratic Republic of Congo
• “Democracy for the Few” by Michael Parenti
• Community Engagement in Democracy Building
• Democratic Deficit in the European Union
• Democracy Concerns and Exaggerated Challenges
• Struggle for Democracy: President Interview
• The United States of America and Its Democracy
• Okuma Shigenobu and Modern Democracy in Japan
• Ruling America: Wealth and Power in a Democracy
• The Taisho Democracy Period in Japanese History
• The United States Promoting Democracy in Africa
• Democratic Leadership, Value System, Followership
• “American Democracy is Doomed” by Matthew Yglesias
• Tunisian Transition to Democracy and Its Specificities
• Kuwait’s Democratization and Its Challenges
• To What Extent Is Burma Democracy?
• Religious Fundamentalism’ and Democracy’ Comparison
• American Democracy and Equality Criticism
• Egyptian Democracy and Citizens’ Readiness for It
• Democracy and Religion: Modern Theories
• The Taliban Insurgency: Democracy in Dangerous Places
• Human Development: Democratization and Economy’ Relations
• US Promotion of Democracy: Tools and Approaches
• Democracy in the United States System
• Can Democracy Be Successfully Exported by Force?
• Chinese Democratic Dictatorship Essence
• Sustainable Democracy in Developing Countries
• Democracy Versus Other Forms of Government
• The US’s Democracy Features
• Democracy and Wealthy Americans Policy
• The History of Democracy in Libya
• The Development of America’s Democracy
• American Democracy and Society
• Can Judicial Review Be Reconciled With Democracy?
• Canadian Social Democracy Historical Evolution
• America’s Democracy History: Constitutional Perspectives
• China’s Democracy Movement
• Machiavelli’s Views on Democratization and Their Relation to Modern Politics
• Outbreak Democratic Institutions
• Propaganda in the Democratic Society
• Major Shifts in the Politics of Republican and Democratic Parties
• The National Curriculum for England and Wales From an Ideal Democratic Learning Society Perspective
• The Foundation of Democracy: Waiting for the King to Come
• Possibility of Attaining a Democracy in the Middle East
• Conflicts in Syria Present No Opportunity for Future Democratization
• Democracy and Global Peace
• Principles of Democratic Structuring
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• Is Sectarianism an Obstacle to the Democratization of Iraq?
• Islam and Democracy in Egypt
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• Should Democracy Be Adopted by All Nations?
• “The Globalization Paradox: Democracy and the Future of the World Economy” by Rodrik, D
• Liberal Democracy, Anti-Semitism and the Holocaust
• Partial Democracy and Governance Assessment in Egypt
• Rohr and Rosenbloom on Democracy
• Is Majority Rule Democratic?
• Danish Aid to Africa: Implication for Civil Society & Democracy
• What Is More Valuable in a Liberal Democracy: Positive or Negative Liberty?
• FDR’s New Deal: Democratic Platform
• Capitalism, Democracy and the Treaty of Waitangi are Three Ways Through Which We in Aotearoa ‘Organise’ Ourselves
• Taxes, Capitalism, and Democracy: Karl Marx vs. Plato
• Amu Chua: How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability
• Democracy Measures in United Kingdom, France, Japan and China
• Democracy and Power in Online World
• Democracy and Custom in Samoa
• Brazil: Embracing Structural Changes to Consolidate Democracy
• Democracy Strategy for the Middle East Countries
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• Views of American Muslims on Democracy
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• Democratic Governments Role in the Global Economy
• The Main Impacts of the Civil War in the Democratic Republic of Congo
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• Democracy in the Policy of United States of America
• Was Kant Wrong to Argue that Democracy Brings Peace Between States?
• Is America a True Democracy?
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• What Are the Differences Between Democracy and Dictatorship?
• Why Is the Oldest Democracy in Asia Doomed to Failure?
• What Can Valid Criticisms Be Made of Liberal Democracy?
• Why Isn’t Democracy Slowing Down the Rise in Inequality?
• What Effect Does Facebook Have on Democracy?
• Why Does Unregulated Capitalism Undermine the Legitimacy of Liberal Democracy?
• Why Does the Kuwaiti Parliament Misunderstanding the Idea of Democracy for Women?
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• What Factors Affect the Survival of a Liberal Democracy?
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• What Is the Connection Between Economic Inequality and Democracy?
• What Is True Majority Democracy Is About?
• How Has the Magna Carta Affected American Democracy?
• What Are the Pros and Cons of Pressure Groups on Democracy in the United Kingdom?
• How Does the Population of the United States Fight for Democracy?
• What Challenges Are Posed by International Terrorism to Democracy?
• What Hope Can Democracy Bring to S&T Policy Making in Latin America?
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• Why Japan Was Able To Build a Successful Democracy?
• What Is the Role of Political Parties in Democracy?
• Why Does Democracy Facilitate Development?
• What Are the Defining Elements of Democracy Politics?
• Why Does the American Democracy Not Work?
• Why Did Democracy Develop in Britain After 1850?
• What Characteristics Are Vital for a Democracy To Succeed?
• What Are the Unique Traits of Athenian Democracy?
• Where Is Indian Democracy Heading Today?
• What Is the Role of Cultural Factors in Moving a Country Towards Liberal Democracy?
• What Was Wrong With the Ancient Athenian Democracy?
• Dictatorship Topics
• Capitalism Paper Topics
• Individualism Topics
• Cultural Relativism Questions
• Human Rights Essay Ideas
• Utilitarianism Research Ideas
• Conservatism Essay Titles
• Economic Inequality Questions
• Chicago (A-D)
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IvyPanda . "335 Democracy Essay Topic Ideas & Examples." November 23, 2024. https://ivypanda.com/essays/topic/democracy-essay-examples/.