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An SSRC Essay Forum Collection
  • About
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  • Essays

Four Observations about Democratic Anxieties (or their Absence) in Latin America

November 30, 2014 By AOD Admin In Essays, Global Lenses, Governance 0 Comments

First Observation. Anxieties of Democracy: Generalizing from the Global North? Anxieties of democracy. This phrase is reminiscent of the kinds of conversations that Latin Americanists had in the 1980s: would the t ...

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Politics, Policy, and Participation

November 16, 2014 By AOD Admin In Access, Equality/Inequality, Essays, Governance 0 Comments

The 2012 election provided more evidence that a liberal Democratic coalition is gaining strength and may have supplanted the conservative alliance that essentially dominated American elections and policy from 1968 to 200 ...

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The Substance of Policy Areas and Representation: Some Observations about Social Policy and Tax Policy

November 13, 2014 By AOD Admin In Essays, Governance 0 Comments

In this short essay, I explore issues of democratic governance in several areas of American social policy and tax policy. How these two broad areas play out in coming decades is central to the fiscal future of the United ...

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Anxieties about Congress

November 6, 2014 By Kate Grantz In Essays, Governance 0 Comments

These days, everyone seems anxious about Congress. Rarely does a news cycle pass without new stories of political dysfunction in Washington, DC. New reports of stalemates, fiscal cliffs, and failed grand bargains have be ...

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American Challenges and Legislative Institutional Barriers Today

November 6, 2014 By Kate Grantz In Essays, Governance 0 Comments

Generally speaking, being democratic means respecting and responding to the real views of real people, regardless of what those views are. People can figure out for themselves what their anxieties are and what the challe ...

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Negotiation in the Crisis of Democracy

November 6, 2014 By Kate Grantz In Essays, Governance, History/Theory 0 Comments

The current crisis of democracy has many causes. The one I discuss here is the inability of our democratic institutions—and our understanding of those institutions—to keep up with our collective needs.[1. The followi ...

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Three Reasons Congress Is Broken

November 6, 2014 By Kate Grantz In Essays, Governance 0 Comments

Why is Congress so helpless and so hopeless? We’ve heard all the fashionable explanations: partisan gridlock; special interests and the impact of their campaign contributions; gerrymandered House districts; an excessiv ...

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Anxiety about Democracy: Why Now?

May 6, 2014 By Kate Grantz In Essays, Global Lenses, Governance, History/Theory 0 Comments

Anxiety about Democracy: Why Now? Anxiety is rising among mass publics and analysts of governance about whether democratic governments can cope with the policy problems now facing them (Schäfer and Streeck 2013; Berg ...

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Political Inequality: Challenges and Opportunities

May 1, 2014 By Kate Grantz In Equality/Inequality, Essays, Governance 0 Comments

In the following pages I briefly reflect on three related aspects of political inequality: political parties, inequality of political influence, and electoral reform. I also point to three areas of particular promise for ...

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The Democracy Papers

  • “The Nearer Your Destination, the More You’re Slip-Sliding Away”: A Comment on Charles Taylor

    Nancy Rosenblum
  • American Challenges and Legislative Institutional Barriers Today

    David Mayhew
  • Anxieties about Congress

    Nolan McCarty
  • Anxieties of Climate Change: Thoughts from the SSRC Working Group on Climate Change

    Nancy Rosenblum and Robert O. Keohane
  • Anxieties of Democracy and Distribution

    Ian Shapiro
  • Anxieties of Democracy: Who Counts? How? Why?

    Frances Rosenbluth
  • Anxiety about Democracy: Why Now?

    Peter A. Hall
  • Civic Engagement and America’s Racialized, Anti-Democratic Public Sphere

    Michael C. Dawson
  • Democratic and Institutional Anxieties

    Uday Singh Mehta
  • Four Observations about Democratic Anxieties (or their Absence) in Latin America

    Deborah Yashar
  • In Defense of Permeability

    Courtney Jung
  • Income, Inequality, and Participation

    Nolan McCarty
  • Inefficacy, Anxiety, and Leadership

    William Howell
  • Is Democracy Slipping Away?

    Charles Taylor
  • Multilateralism and Democracy

    Andrew Moravcsik
  • Negotiation in the Crisis of Democracy

    Jane Mansbridge
  • Political Inequality: Challenges and Opportunities

    Martin Gilens
  • Politics, Policy, and Participation

    Thomas B. Edsall
  • Preliminary Thoughts on Participation and Citizen Equality

    Samuel Issacharoff
  • Representative Democracy and Alternative Models

    Timothy Frye
  • Representative Democracy and Alternative Models: Notes on Latin America

    Claudio Lomnitz
  • The Politics of Policies to Promote Gender Justice

    Mala Htun
  • The Substance of Policy Areas and Representation: Some Observations about Social Policy and Tax Policy

    Andrea Louise Campbell
  • Thoughts on Access and Participation in Contemporary American Democracy

    Nathaniel Persily
  • Three Reasons Congress Is Broken

    Robert Kaiser
  • What We Are Anxious about When We Say We Are Anxious about Inequalities of Influence

    Dara Strolovitch
  • Why a Philosophy of History in which the Present Moment Is World-Altering Is Not Hubris and Is Politically Necessary

    Nancy Rosenblum

News and Announcements

  • RT @ssrc_org: #OpenAccess until March 18: “Populist Attitudes and Selective Exposure to Online News,” from an issue of The Intern… https://t.co/u55hBNrw5K, Mar 10
  • RT @ssrc_org: Who creates disinformation, and why? This literature review from @SSRC_mtp’s #MediaWell synthesizes the latest rese… https://t.co/JJxMHpV4dg, Mar 6
  • RT @jonlewallen: I wrote about my next big project on measuring and explaining policy conflict in congressional committees, funded b… https://t.co/97KX9BfbMh, Mar 3
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Funded By

The work of the SSRC’s Anxieties of Democracy program is possible due to generous funding from the William & Flora Hewlett Foundation, the Carnegie Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Knight Foundation and the Rockefeller Brothers Fund.

Related Programs

The Inaugural Democracy Papers are part of the SSRC’s Anxieties of Democracy program.

The new Democracy Papers can be found on Items, the SSRC’s digital essay forum.

The Inaugural Democracy Papers were produced as part of the planning process for the SSRC’s Anxieties of Democracy program, which asks how democracies can capably address large problems in the public interest.

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