Introducing Democracy Insights
Democracy lies at the core of the HKS mission. Many faculty, students, and alumni are working to deepen democratic institutions and practices around the world. To assess the challenges and explore potential solutions to the many crises facing democracies around the world—and to explore how to strengthen them—HKS is delighted to launch Democracy Insights, a new digital publication that will guide you through the efforts of many in the greater HKS community to understand and improve democracy.
Public service is the watchword of HKS, and so naturally democracy infuses much of our work. Democracy is a good way, perhaps the best that human ingenuity has thus far devised, to harness the powers of society to the will of people in that society. Our research centers and the scholars who help drive our research agenda forward are central to our mission of developing powerful new ideas to make our democracy more responsive, transparent, and inclusive. From all of us here at the Kennedy School, we look forward to sharing our work with you in this space.
Archon Fung
Winthrop Laflin McCormack Professor of Citizenship and Self-Government | | | |
How can societies successfully pursue multiracial democracy?
In our increasingly diverse and interconnected country and world, the question isn’t whether to strive for a multiracial democracy, but—if you don’t fully reckon with how race has shaped our system of governance—can you really have democracy at all? In a new episode of PolicyCast, Professors Khalil Muhammad and Archon Fung discuss the importance of multiracial democracy, and how crucial it is for the United States and societies around the world to grapple with how race shapes democracy. “It’s very difficult to imagine a multiracial democracy going forward in which different groups deal with each other on a foundation of justice, unless they have a common understanding of the injustice that preceded that,” Fung says. Fung and Muhammad explain the benefits as well as the barriers to building and sustaining healthy and equitable democracies. The challenge, “both in the United States and abroad, will only intensify as the world shuffles around issues of austerity, climate change, and the mobility of members of the Global South,” Muhammad says. | | | |
How willing are democracies to sacrifice rights during a pandemic?
Research conducted by a multinational team, including Harvard Kennedy School Professor Marcella Alsan, examines whether the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic threatened democracies and made people living in democratic countries more likely to forgo civil liberties for public health concerns. The researchers' results suggest that “the start of the COVID-19 crisis was a particularly vulnerable time for democracies.” Survey respondents from five Western liberal democracies were presented with stringent COVID-19 policies adopted by China and South Korea to gauge how willing they would be to adopt these measures. China and South Korea adopted some of the most severe COVID-19 containment policies, such as forced state quarantines and house-to-house temperature checks. “We were specifically interested in the respondents’ views of the trade-off between civil liberties and public health conditions,” the researchers write. Ultimately, they concluded that once made aware of civil liberties infringements undertaken by China and South Korea to counter COVID-19, subjects “became less willing to sacrifice rights and more worried about their long-term-erosion.” | | | |
What WE ARE READING
Justin J. Pearson discusses why his expulsion from the legislature carries a warning for democracy beyond his state's borders. | | | | | |
Democracy in Hard Places
HKS Professor Tarek Masoud's research focuses on how countries that lack democracy can get it and keep it. As the director of the Belfer Center’s Middle East Initiative and of the Ash Center’s Initiative on Democracy in Hard Places, as well as through the co-editorship of the Journal of Democracy, Masoud has created a scholarly community studying democracy around the world. This has included a major conference and the publication of a book, Democracy in Hard Places, offering case studies exploring why democracy has survived in countries as diverse and underdeveloped as India, Benin, and Timor-Leste and as unstable as Argentina and Moldova. But Masoud has also created venues for dialogue between academics and hands-on practitioners, such as the first democratically elected president of Tunisia, Mohamed Moncef Marzouki, and Venezuelan opposition leader Freddy Guevara. “Instead of throwing up our hands and concluding that some countries are just not good candidates for democratic governance, we thought what we really should be doing is thinking about how to meet that challenge,” Masoud says. “Is there something we can learn from the few democracies that emerged against great odds?” | | | |
ON ACHIEVing Reparative Justice
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Democracy. The unfinished project of democracy. What does that look like when a full reparations program, including the financial component, needs to be administered in order for there to be any acquisition of a reckoning of a democracy, of racial justice?” | |
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— Dreisen Heath, a racial justice advocate, at a Forum on reparations moderated by Professor Cornell William Brooks. | | | | |
The fight against authoritarianism and corruption
Brazilian jurist Luís Roberto Barroso, a leading voice in efforts to protect the electoral process and democratic institutions in South America’s largest democracy, has been examining strategies to counter the rising threats of authoritarianism and corruption as a senior fellow with the Kennedy School’s Carr Center for Human Rights Policy. In an interview with the center, Barroso argues that “democracy needs to defeat some of its internal enemies, such as poverty, unjust inequalities, and the state’s appropriation by extractive elites who put it to their service.” He points to the expensive cost of mounting political campaigns in Brazil and other countries as a key source of corruption. “In Brazil, one of these causes [of corruption] is the electoral system, which is excessively expensive,” Barroso says. “Many of the corruption scandals in the country are associated with electoral financing.” As part of a series of anti-corruption recommendations, he urges a limit on campaign expenditures to help remove money, and the temptation it represents, from the political system. | | | |
What WE ARE Watching
“The trouble is that that long-term liberal arc has produced losers, cultural losers, people who feel that their values are not respected.” HKS Lecturer Pippa Norris at a Forum event on democracy during HKS alumni reunion. | | | | | |
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