For our final episode of the season, we present a conversation with Ben Rhodes recorded at in Washington, D.C. at the end of May. Democracy Works is going on summer break. We'll be back with new episodes in September! The Democracy Group's first live podcast recording featuring foreign policy expert and fellow podcaster Ben Rhodes in conversation with Kamy Akhavan of Let's Find Common Ground and Stephanie Gerber Wilson of Freedom Over Fascism about America’s place on the world stage and how the ...
Jun 09, 2025•1 hr 4 min•Ep. 285
In a rebroadcast from 2023, we discuss how to meet the demands that democracy places on us without sacrificing our own personal mental health in the process. Many of us can conjure moments when politics made us feel sad. But how often do those feelings translate into more serious forms of depression or other mental health issues? And if politics does make us depressed, what do we do about it? Christopher Ojeda has spent the past few years exploring these questions and joins us this week to talk ...
May 19, 2025•45 min•Ep. 284
Jeff Sharlet has spent the past few years embedded in the deepest corners of the growing far-right movement in the United States. He's come to think of it as a black hole, something that can pull people in with ever-shifting grievances and a desire for power. He chronicles the movement and the characters in it in his book The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War and joins us to discuss the book and how he's thinking about its thesis in the context of the new Trump administration. We also discu...
May 05, 2025•48 min•Ep. 283
From fights over masks and vaccines to the loss of social connection, the year 2020 accelerated many of the trends that were already happening in America and created new obstacles for the country to overcome. In his book 2020: One City, Seven People, and the Year Everything Changed, sociologist Eric Klinenberg takes on a journey back to that year and everything that happened in it through the eyes of seven New Yorkers, one from each of the city's boroughs. Klinenberg, who recently delivered the ...
Apr 21, 2025•47 min•Ep. 282
Last week's Wisconsin Supreme Court election put a spotlight on state-level politics and the way that national politics can influence what happens in the states. But there are a lot of other developments happening at the state level that you might have missed. We catch up on what's happening with Alex Burness, a reporter who covers state and local democracy and criminal justice issues for Bolts . As the name suggests, Bolts covers the "nuts and bolts of power and political change, from the local...
Apr 07, 2025•46 min•Ep. 281
Cory Doctorow coined the term "enshittification" to describe how tech platforms have eroded over time. According to him, the process goes something like this: First, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die. Doctorow joins us in a collaborative interview with News Over Noise to discuss how enshittifiation has affected our abil...
Mar 24, 2025•46 min•Ep. 280
As the lead investigator into both the 2017 racist riot in Charlottesville and the January 6 insurrection, Tim Heaphy has a unique perspective on the cynicism and anger that also fueled Trump’s return to the presidency. All three events, both the violent protests and the peaceful and lawful decisions made at the ballot box in November 2024, reflect an increasing lack of trust in institutions among a growing number of Americans. He reflects on his work and where we go from here in the book Harbin...
Mar 03, 2025•46 min•Ep. 279
Chris Beem, McCourtney Institute for Democracy managing director and research professor of political science at Penn State, talks with author Jonathan Rauch about why the current crisis in American Christianity is also a crisis in American democracy. In his new book Cross Purposes: Christianity's Broken Bargain with Democracy , Rauch (a lifelong atheist) asks what happens to American democracy if Christianity is no longer able, or no longer willing, to perform the functions on which our constitu...
Feb 17, 2025•34 min•Ep. 277
It's easy to feel defeated in the face of political challenges, but this episode shows that everyone has the capacity to create positive change and contribute to a culture of peace in their communities. In her book " Peace by Peace: Risking Public Action, Creating Social Change ," Lisa Silvestri shows how ordinary people addressed issues in their communities form the West Bank to Baltimore. Silvestri found those stories through a process she calls "crowdsourcing hope" and found that deliberately...
Feb 03, 2025•43 min•Ep. 276
Instances of political violence around the 2024 election and vote certification on January 6, 2025 did not come to fruition the way some experts feared they would throughout last year. But that doesn't mean that we can forget about threats of political violence until it's time for the next election. In fact, political violence continues to rise in the United States and throughout western Europe. Our guests this week, Rachel Kleinfeld of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and Nicole B...
Jan 20, 2025•46 min•Ep. 275
The results of the 2024 election — from Donald Trump's victory to the failure of democracy reform efforts like ranked-choice voting and citizen-led redistricting — took some in the pro-democracy movement by surprise. How could voters make decisions up and down the ballot that would weaken democracy? Scott Warren argues that it's because "democracy" has become too closely associated with the Democratic Party. He laid out the case in a Stanford Social Innovation Review article published shortly af...
Jan 06, 2025•39 min•Ep. 274
This episode marks the first time that all five of our hosts (Michael Berkman, Chris Beem, Cyanne Loyle, Candis Watts Smith, and Jenna Spinelle) are together on one episode. It's also the first time we've all been together since the election. We take some time to reflect on changes in America's political party, the decline of liberal democracy in the U.S., and how to harness the good from social media amid growing extremism and misinformation. Along the way, you'll hear from some of the guests w...
Dec 23, 2024•44 min•Ep. 273
Balazs Trencsenyi, co-director of Invisible University for Ukraine (IUFU), joins us to discuss the university's work to uphold education and democracy in Ukraine amid the country's ongoing war with Russia. IUFU, an initiative of Central European University was founded shortly after the start of the war in 2022. Since then, more than 1,000 students have taken online and in-person courses taught by faculty around the world. Trencsenyi is a professor of historical studies at CEU and and director of...
Dec 09, 2024•47 min•Ep. 272
Colleen Shogan, archivist of the United States, joins us for a conversation about democratizing access to national records and running a non-partisan organization in an increasingly polarized country. Shogan was appointed by President Biden and has been criticized by both sides of the political spectrum for trying to use the National Archives to tell a partisan story about America's history. Shogan is a political scientist by training and talks about making the transition from academia to govern...
Nov 25, 2024•43 min•Ep. 271
We're excited to bring you an episode from Bad Watchdog , the podcast from the Project on Government Oversight and one of our colleagues in The Democracy Group podcast network. This is the first episode of the show's second season, which takes a deep dive on the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). Established in the wake of September 11, the DHS was entrusted with protecting the U.S. from national security threats. Since then, much of the agency’s focus has been on the southern border — with ...
Nov 18, 2024•41 min
We are collecting our thoughts about what's next for democracy following the 2024 election and will take up the question during our end-of-year episode in December. Democracy Works host Michael Berkman, director of the McCourtney Institute for Democracy and professor of political science at Penn State talks with Christopher Claassen , a political scientist at the University of Glasgow, about how to measure support for democracy across countries and across generations. Claassen grew up in South A...
Nov 11, 2024•34 min•Ep. 270
Dahlia Lithwick has covered the Supreme Court since the landmark Bush v. Gore decision in 2000. In that time, she's seen a sea change in the court itself, as well as the way that journalists cover it. We discuss those trends in this episode, as well as how former President Trump's legal team has changed since the 2020 election. Lithwick is the host of Amicus , Slate’s podcast about the law and the Supreme Court, and author of "Lady Justice: Women, the Law, and the Battle to Save America." She ha...
Oct 28, 2024•46 min•Ep. 269
With just weeks to go before the election, voting and candidates are top of mind of many of us. It's easy to think that once our preferred candidates win, our obligations to democracy are finished until the next election. Scholar and author Eddie Glaude Jr. has spent his career studying the perils of that approach throughout history, particularly when it comes to Black politics and power. Glaude joins us to discuss how he's thinking about the 2024 election, the difference between hope and joy, a...
Oct 14, 2024•46 min•Ep. 268
Chris Beem talks with political theorist Alexandre Lefebvre about why liberalism is more than just a political ideas and procedures, and how abiding by liberal principles can enhance your life far beyond politics. In his book Liberalism as a Way of Life , Lefebvre argues that liberalism isn’t just a set of neutral procedures; it’s a comprehensive way of life that shapes the way we live and think and work and love in innumerable ways. He also argues that it’s a way of life worth robustly defendin...
Sep 30, 2024•39 min•Ep. 267
Immigration is a perennial issue in American politics, but the rhetoric we hear from candidates on the campaign trail is often very different than the day-to-day experiences of migrants traveling from central America to the United States and the smugglers who help them make the often dangerous journey to get here. In an effort to better understand this essential yet extralegal billion dollar global industry, anthropologist Jason De León embedded with a group of smugglers moving migrants across M...
Sep 16, 2024•41 min•Ep. 268
We're back from summer break with a deep dive on the National Popular Vote campaign, an effort to render the Electoral College obsolete when states pledge their electors to the winner of the nationwide popular vote. As of August 2024, National Popular Vote has been enacted by 17 states and the District of Columbia, accounting for 209 of the 270 electoral votes needed to make it a reality nationwide. Guests Patrick Rosenstiel and Alyssa Cass have a plan to get to 270 by the 2028 presidential elec...
Sep 02, 2024•48 min•Ep. 266
While Democracy Works is on summer break, we bring you an episode from our friends at Making Peace Visible, a podcast that ignites powerful conversations all over the world about how the media covers peace and conflict. This episode features journalist and author Amanda Ripley. We've wanted to have Amanda on the show for a long time and are grateful to the Making Peace Visible team for sharing this conversation with us! After over two decades as a journalist, including ten years covering terrori...
Jul 08, 2024•33 min•Ep. 265
We've reached the end of another school year and another season of Democracy Works. Before we go on summer break, Michael Berkman, Chris Beem, and Candis Watts Smith reflect on recent events and what's to come this summer. We do this by taking a look back at some of our previous episodes: The real free speech problem on campus : Penn State's Brad Vivian on the problems with "campus free speech" discourse and media coverage. We discuss how this narrative has been applied to protests about the war...
Jun 03, 2024•37 min•Ep. 264
Democracies today are increasingly eroding at the hands of democratically-elected incumbents, who seize control by slowly chipping away at democratic institutions. Penn State political science professor Joseph Wright is and his coauthors explore this trend in their new book, The Origins of Elected Strongmen: How Personalist Parties Destroy Democracy from Within . Wright joins Michael Berkman , McCourtney Institute for Democracy director and professor of political science at Penn State, on the sh...
May 20, 2024•42 min•Ep. 263
Please join us in welcoming a special guest host for this episode! Cyanne Loyle is Associate Professor of Political Science and International Affairs at Penn State and a Global Fellow at the Pease Research Institute Oslo. Her research focuses on transitional justice and democratic rebuilding after conflict, which makes her the perfect person to reflect on South Africa's democratic transition. One additional programming note — Chris Beem lost power during this recording so the closing segment is ...
May 06, 2024•45 min•Ep. 262
The shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida happened around the same time Democracy Works launched in 2018. In fact, one of the first episodes featured students who organized a march event in State College, Pennsylvania. At the time, we thought it would be fantastic to get David Hogg on the show. Six years later, he's finally here to talk about what his life has been like since that fateful day in February 2018 and his work to change gun policy at the state and fede...
Apr 22, 2024•49 min•Ep. 261
Heather McGhee made her career in pushing for economic policy changes at the think tank Demos. But she couldn't help but feel that something was missing from her work. So she embarked on a cross-country road trip to understand what's at the heart of what ails America's economy and our democracy. The result is her book The Sum of Us , which she joins us to talk about in this episode. In the book, McGhee explores what we lose when we buy into the zero-sum paradigm—the idea that progress for some o...
Apr 08, 2024•46 min•Ep. 260
Cassidy Hutchinson, and aide to former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows whose testimony captured the nation's attention in the January 6 Congressional hearings, joins us this week to discuss her time in the Trump administration and her new role safeguarding American democracy. Hutchinson was faced with a choice between loyalty to the Trump administration or loyalty to the country by revealing what she saw and heard in the attempt to overthrow a democratic election. She bravely came forwar...
Mar 25, 2024•40 min•Ep. 259
If there's one thing that people across the political spectrum can agree on, it's a sense of discontent with the current state of American politics. This week, we explore the origins of that discontent and why it's damaging to democracy. Our guest is Matthew Rhodes-Purdy, an assistant professor of political science at Clemson University and one of the authors of The Age of Discontent: Populism, Extremism, and Conspiracy Theories in Contemporary Democracies . Rhodes-Purdy and his co-authors argue...
Mar 11, 2024•38 min•Ep. 258
We've talked about social media a lot on this show over the years — usually focusing on algorithms, echo chambers, polarization, and the other ways it's damaging to democracy. This week, however, we hear a different take from V Spehar , who has more than 3 million followers on the TikTok account Under the Desk News . V built a reputation providing recaps of the daily news for an audience who might not consume news anywhere else. The Under the Desk News audience is politically diverse and V talks...
Feb 26, 2024•36 min•Ep. 257
