In the United States and around the world, democracy is under threat. Antidemocratic attitudes have become more prevalent, partisan polarization is growing, misinformation is pervasive, and politicians and citizens sometimes question the integrity of elections.
Against this backdrop, MIT's Department of Political Science is launching an effort to establish a Strengthening Democracy Initiative. In this Q&A, department chair David Singer, the Raphael Dorman-Helen Starbuck Professor of Political Science, discusses the goals and scope of the initiative.
Q: What is the purpose of the Strengthening Democracy Initiative?
TO: Well-functioning democracies require accountable representatives, accurate and freely accessible information, equal citizen voice and participation, free and fair elections, and enduring respect for democratic institutions. It is disturbing for the political science community to see increasing evidence of democratic backsliding in Europe, Latin America, and even here in the United States. While we cannot single-handedly stop the erosion of democratic norms and practices, we can focus our energies on understanding and explaining the root causes of the problem, and designing interventions to keep democracies functioning healthy.
MIT political science has a history of generating important research on many facets of the democratic process, including voting behavior, election administration, information and disinformation, public opinion and political responsiveness, and lobbying. The goals of the Strengthening Democracy Initiative are to place these diverse research programs under one umbrella, foster synergies between our various research projects and between political science and other disciplines, and make MIT the leading center in the country for rigorous, evidence-based analysis. of democratic resilience.
Q: What is the research focus of the initiative?
TO: The initiative is based on three research pillars. A pillar is science and electoral administration. Democracy cannot function without well-organized elections and, equally important, without popular confidence in those elections. Even within the United States, let alone other countries, there is enormous variation in the electoral process: whether and how people register to vote, whether they vote in person or by mail, how polling places are managed, how votes are counted and validated, and how the results are communicated to citizens.
MIT's Election Science and Data Laboratory is already the nation's leading center for collecting and analyzing election-related data and disseminating election best practices, and is well positioned to increase the scale and scope of its activities.
The second pillar is public opinion, a rich area of study that includes experimental studies of public responses to misinformation and analysis of government responsiveness to mass attitudes. Our faculty employ experimental and survey methods to study a variety of important areas, including tax and health policy, state and local policies, and strategies for countering political rumors in the U.S. and abroad. Faculty research programs form the foundation of this pillar, along with long-standing collaborations such as the Policy Experiments Research Laboratory, an annual general survey in which students and faculty can participate, and frequent conferences and seminars.
The third pillar is political participation, which includes the impact of the criminal justice system and other negative interactions with the State on voting, the creation of citizen assemblies, and the lobbying behavior of companies on congressional legislation. Some of this research relies on machine learning and artificial intelligence to curate and analyze enormous amounts of data, giving researchers visibility into phenomena that were previously difficult to analyze. A related area of research on political deliberation brings together computer science, artificial intelligence, and social sciences to analyze the dynamics of political discourse in online forums and potential interventions that can mitigate political polarization and foster consensus.
The flexible design of the initiative will allow new pillars to be added over time, including national and international security, strengthening democracies in different regions of the world, and solving new challenges to democratic processes that we cannot yet see.
Q: Why is MIT the right place to host this new initiative?
TO: Many people see MIT as a highly technical, STEM-focused place. And indeed it is, but there is an enormous amount of collaboration between and within MIT schools (for example, between political science and the Schwarzman College of Computing and the Sloan School of Management, and between the fields of social sciences and science schools). and engineering. The Strengthening Democracy Initiative will benefit from these collaborations and create new bridges between political science and other fields. It is also important to note that this is a non-partisan research effort. MIT's political science department has a reputation for applying rigorous, data-driven approaches to the study of politics, and its position within the MIT ecosystem will help us maintain a reputation as an “honest broker” and disseminate groundbreaking evidence. science-based research and interventions to help democracies become more resilient.
Q: Will the new initiative have an educational mission?
TO: Of course! The department has a long history of recruiting dozens of university researchers through the MIT University Research Opportunities Program. The initiative will be structured to provide these students with opportunities to study various facets of the democratic process and so that teachers have a ready pool of talented students to help them with their projects. My hope is to provide students with the resources and opportunities to test their own theories by designing and implementing surveys in the US and abroad, and to use knowledge and tools from computer science, applied statistics, and other disciplines to study political phenomena. As the initiative grows, I look forward to more opportunities for students to collaborate with state and local officials on improvements to election administration and study new puzzles related to healthy democracies.
Postdoctoral researchers will also play a leading role in promoting research across all pillars of the initiative, supervising university researchers, and handling some of the administrative aspects of the work.
Q: This seems like a long-term effort. Do you expect this initiative to be permanent?
TO: Yes. We already have the pieces in place to create a leading center for the study of healthy democracies (and how to make them healthier). But we need to build capacity, including resources for a group of researchers to move from one project to another, which will allow synergies between projects and foster new ones. An ongoing initiative will also provide the infrastructure for faculty and students to respond quickly to current events and new research findings, for example, launching a nationwide survey experiment, collecting new data on an aspect of the electoral process, or testing The impact of a new artificial intelligence technology on political perceptions. As I like to tell our followers, there are new challenges to healthy democracies that weren't on our radar 10 years ago, and there will undoubtedly be others 10 years from now that we haven't imagined. We need to be prepared to do a rigorous analysis of any challenge that comes our way. And MIT Political Science is the best place in the world to undertake this ambitious long-term agenda.
