Democratic Renewal

Columbia World Projects’ (CWP) research and engagement work on democratic renewal explores what sustains and ails liberal democracies around the world and how to revitalize democratic institutions that appear fragile and fraying.

By developing a comparative understanding of the trends and factors that best sustain the institutions undergirding democracies, our work identifies new choices that encourage effective problem-solving and civic participation.
 
CWP has three working groups that meet regularly and bring together researchers and practitioners to address pressing issues facing liberal democracies. We held our first set of working group meetings in fall 2019. Details on the topics that each group focuses on, the meetings held so far, and plans for future activities, are below.

In addition to our working groups, CWP has held several public events that tie into our work on democratic renewal. These include an event featuring Tiana Epps-Johnson, Kate Gage, and Amber McReynolds with Hollie Russon Gilman on repairing our voting infrastructure ahead of the 2020 U.S. election; a conversation with María Teresa Kumar and Nsé Ufot with Olatunde Johnson on democracy in the time of pandemic and protest; a discussion with Wally Adeyemo and Glenn Hubbard on higher education, the economy and COVID-19; a lecture with Secretary Jack Lew and Raghuram Rajan on politics and public institutions; and the inaugural Campbell Leadership Lecture with Eric Schmidt.

Voter Mobilization and the Grassroots

This working group focuses on the United States and aims to assess and offer solutions to close the gap between the activities of grassroots organizations involved in voter mobilization, and the ideas of foundations, individual donors, the party system, and research informed by political science.

The group consists of legal scholars, political scientists, political sociologists, and heads of grassroots organizations. Together they assess the metrics that donors, foundations, and parties use when deciding where to offer support and the negative consequences that inadvertently emerge from those decisions.

The group also works with select grassroots organizations to establish a more appropriate and thoughtful set of metrics that they can use to demonstrate impact. The group’s launch meeting was held in November 2019; the group will meet again in spring 2020.

Renewing Parties

No successful democracy can thrive without a vibrant, legitimate and effective party system. Successful political parties usually attract support from broad coalitions. Such backing helps parties in office to govern effectively by addressing both fundamental long-term challenges and more immediate issues voters view as urgent priorities. Increasingly, parties can be seen to have fallen short both in building sufficiently broad coalitions and in addressing the big questions of the day. These circumstances have produced two distinct trajectories: in some countries, notably including the United States, an ever-deeper and more narrow partisanship; in others, once-dominant parties come to resemble each other more and more, opening the field to formerly peripheral and intensely populist alternatives.

CWP has assembled a working group consisting of political scientists, historians, legal scholars, and political sociologists to map what ails parties and offer concrete ideas for overcoming this failure of the political present. We are also exploring partnerships with think tanks, policy bodies, and other entities as we enhance this working group. This working group’s launch meeting was in December 2019, and subsequent meetings are planned for fall 2020.

Constructive Politics in Europe

This working group will explore how we might restore the capacity of political parties to act on the most pressing challenges of the moment. Our goal is to spur constructive dialogue — mediated by academics and journalists — between newly elected younger politicians from across the political spectrum. We initially intend to focus on three countries: Denmark, Germany, and France.

Through partnerships with European academic institutions, think tanks, and journalism centers, we are developing a series of exploratory conversations with members of parliament in these countries. These discussions will identify processes in political life that lead to polarization and find ways to mitigate them. We are also assessing practices and tools to promote dialogue and the shaping of policy across party lines.

The working group’s first meeting will take place in Zagreb in March 2020 as part of a partnership with Friends of Europe, a Brussels-based think tank.

Participants will be announced at a later date.

Additional Activities

In addition to these working groups, the CWP research and engagement team holds regular meetings with experts to consider questions crucial to our work on democratic renewal. We look at liberal democracies throughout the world that appear vexed by a similar set of crises, but whose precise contours vary greatly across political systems and locations.

In these meetings we ask:

• Which democratic problems are the same from place to place?
• Which are unique to one place?
• What opportunities and challenges do the answers to these questions provide?

The meetings aim to answer these questions by assessing changes in the institutions that connect people to politics, including religion, parties, trade unions, and social media.

An October 2019 meeting exploring electoral dynamics in India and a March 2020 meeting exploring electoral dynamics in South Africa (with members of the judiciary, policymakers, social activists, and university-based researchers) are among our explorations on this theme.