Dismantling “inequitable and undemocratic” jury exclusion policy
While jury service is one of the core rights and responsibilities of citizenship, across Massachusetts and much of the United States, people are commonly barred from jury service due to a criminal record, notes a new report from the Roundtable on Racial Disparities in Massachusetts Criminal Courts, an initiative of the Malcolm Wiener Center for Social Policy’s Program in Criminal Justice and Management. The report points to a wide body of research demonstrating that eliminating the felony jury exclusion in Massachusetts—where about 95,000 people are disqualified from jury service at any one time—is likely to produce fairer, more representative juries. “The lack of diversity in the jury pool and the jury box has negative consequences for Black and Brown people with cases before the court,” HKS Professor and Wiener Center Director Sandra Susan Smith said in a recent interview. “Indeed, during the last few years, multiple convictions have been reversed by Massachusetts’ Supreme Judicial Court based on allegations of racial bias in jury selection—prosecutors removing jurors of color at higher rates than white jurors, often through peremptory strikes or for cause challenges.” | | | |
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We’re still learning how to build a political system that genuinely supports fully inclusive power-sharing.” | |
— Danielle Allen, James Bryant Conant University Professor and director of the Allen Lab for Democracy Renovation, writing in the Washington Post. | | | | |
Are the voices of increasing numbers of youth and LGBTQ+ protestors being heard?
Though the number of nonviolent protests has grown in recent years, scholars and policymakers alike still lack a comprehensive understanding of the impact that youth and LGBTQ+ participants may have on the outcome of many of these movements. Building on the work of the Nonviolent Action Lab at HKS, HKS faculty members Erica Chenoweth and Zoe Marks, and researchers from the United States Institute of Peace coauthored a paper earlier this year examining that issue. They found that movements with large numbers of youth participants were likely to succeed in obtaining their political objectives, and that the prevalence of young protestors was associated with overall improvements to democracy. Their report urged protest leaders and their supporters to “be more intentional about empowering youth and LGBTQ+ participants with the tools, skills, and enabling environment that these groups need, not just for their immediate participation in nonviolent action campaigns, but also for sustained political advocacy in the years that follow. “Supporting youth and LGBTQ+ civil society should therefore be a key priority in the effort to support democracy in general,” Chenoweth and Marks said in an interview discussing their findings. | | | |
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Somerville’s renaissance wasn’t just for the people; it happened because of the people. Their civic engagement made it possible at every step of the way.” | |
— Bloomberg Center for Cities Senior Fellow and former Somerville Mayor Joe Curtatone in Civic Engagement in Somerville. | | | | |
Liz McKenna on the vexing question of popular authoritarian leaders
As large multi-racial democracies, Brazil and the United States serve as an ideal laboratory for Assistant Professor of Public Policy Liz McKenna’s research into how different types of political participation and civil society both enhance and undermine democracy. McKenna, who was trained as a political sociologist, has been working to understand what she sees as the contradiction of how authoritarian leaders come to power with considerable public support, but then implement regressive policies often aimed at rolling back redistributive laws and other initiatives which might have benefited their own electoral base. “So that’s a puzzle—the fact that more participation does not necessarily mean more democracy,” McKenna said in a recent interview. | | | |
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City leaders need to maintain legitimacy and build trust in an era of political polarization, rampant misinformation, and growing public anxiety.” | |
— From the Bloomberg Center for Cities’ Civic Engagement City Leader Guide. | | | | |
How AI could take over elections—and undermine democracy
Does AI have the power to influence millions of voters—completely undetected? Harvard Kennedy School’s Archon Fung and Harvard Law School’s Lawrence Lessig introduced Clogger, a hypothetical political campaign in a black box. Powered by AI, Clogger could create highly personal, increasingly persuasive messages that influence voters on behalf of politicians or corporations—far beyond the bounds of traditional campaign tactics. The pair hypothesize how Clogger, unbound by a regard for truth and ethical limitations, could work at unprecedented speeds and go largely unnoticed. To counter the potential scenario of a Clogger-like tool putting its digital thumb on the scale of an election, Fung and Lessig urge policymakers to adopt new regulatory mechanisms to constrain political AI. "The possibility of a system like Clogger shows that the path toward human collective disempowerment may not require some superhuman artificial general intelligence. It might just require overeager campaigners and consultants who have powerful new tools that can effectively push millions of people’s many buttons," they warned. | | | |
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While true innovation in politics is a lot harder than innovation in technology, especially without a violent revolution forcing change, it’s something that we as a species are going to have to get good at—one way or another.” | |
— Bruce Schneier, public interest technologist and HKS adjunct lecturer, in The Conversation. | | | | |
Protecting democracy by mitigating harms from digital platforms
Earlier this summer, researchers from the Kennedy School’s Belfer and Shorenstein Centers proposed a new risk-based framework for understanding and managing the personal and societal harms that can result from powerful, unregulated digital platforms. The Democracy and Internet Governance Initiative’s final report provides lawmakers and regulators with a framework for assessing and acting on the growing dangers posed by social media to mental and physical safety, privacy, financial security, and social well-being. The team behind the report hope their approach will help policymakers break what they regard as a stalemate blocking effective governance of social media platforms in the United States and confront the litany of dangers flowing from them in recent years as big platforms have consolidated their influence. “It is long past time we act—to protect individual rights and freedom; to protect our public goods and information ecosystem; and, ultimately, to protect democracy,” writes Professor and Shorenstein Center Director Nancy Gibbs, who co-chaired the report alongside the late Belfer Center Director Ash Carter. | | | |
For more HKS insights on democracy and governance, visit our policy topic page. | | | | | |
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