As his first year in the White House draws to a close, Donald J. Trump remains in almost every respect a singular character. He exists well outside the boundaries of what most observers previously judged possible, let alone respectable, in American politics. To catalogue the norms he has violated, the […] Read more »
‘Fake News’: Wide Reach but Little Impact, Study Suggests
Fake news evolved from seedy internet sideshow to serious electoral threat so quickly that behavioral scientists had little time to answer basic questions about it, like who was reading what, how much real news they also consumed and whether targeted fact-checking efforts ever hit a target. … But now the […] Read more »
What we learned about American democracy in 2017
This time last year, I was trying to figure out a year-in-review piece that would make sense of all we had seen, without knowing much about what to expect from the Trump presidency. In retrospect, this seems like nothing so much as a failure of imagination: The rapid transition from […] Read more »
Here’s how Google is helping, not hurting, democracy
… We are optimistic about the utility of Google searches, which is not quite the same as being optimistic about the Internet generally. The classic complaint about direct democracy, stretching back to Plato, is that an always up-to-date, well-informed public was impossible. So, it was suggested that we need a […] Read more »
What Roy Moore tells us about the Republican Party
… For many years, most political scientists followed the lead of the eminent V.O. Key Jr. in conceptualizing each U.S. party as a three-legged stool composed of voters, politicians (and other government officials), and officers of the national, state and local party committees. More recently, however, many scholars have come […] Read more »
The populist challenge to liberal democracy
On November 29, William A. Galston delivered the fourteenth annual Seymour Martin Lipset Lecture on Democracy in the World. … In his remarks titled “The populist challenge to liberal democracy,” Galston examines sobering events of the past quarter century and the emergence of an internal threat—driven by populists—facing liberal democracy today. […] Read more »