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  • The Social Science Research Council
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    • The Cities Papers
    • The Democracy Papers
    • The Immanent Frame
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An SSRC Essay Forum Collection
  • About
  • Contributors
  • Essays

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

February 24, 2017 By Aiden Leslie In Essays 0 Comments

It is not surprising that climate change was identified as one of the initial pieces of the Social Science Research Council’s Anxieties of Democracy program. Climate change is an ever-increasing threat. International a ...

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Is Democracy Slipping Away?

February 7, 2017 By AOD Admin In Essays, History/Theory 0 Comments

Three Elements of Modern Democracy Before I get to what I mean by our democracy slipping away, I want to make three points about the nature of contemporary democracies. Firstly, modern democracy is constitutionally v ...

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

February 7, 2017 By AOD Admin In Essays, History/Theory 0 Comments

Charles Taylor gives us a long view of democracy as “constitutionally vulnerable” once political representation became its central feature, for from then on democracies faced the unrelenting problem of deciding just ...

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Multilateralism and Democracy

November 30, 2014 By AOD Admin In Essays, Global Lenses, History/Theory 0 Comments

Most contemporary commentators posit a tension between multilateralism and democracy.[1. This paper draws on a number of previous publications, which cite the extensive literature on this subject. A selection includes th ...

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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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Civic Engagement and America’s Racialized, Anti-Democratic Public Sphere

November 14, 2014 By AOD Admin In Access, Equality/Inequality, Essays 0 Comments

Racial cleavages in public opinion remain massive, particularly between black and white citizens. Gaps of 20 to 60 percent between mean black and white opinion are consistently found on issues such as support for milit ...

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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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What We Are Anxious about When We Say We Are Anxious about Inequalities of Influence

November 7, 2014 By Kate Grantz In Access, Equality/Inequality, Essays 0 Comments

From the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street to clashes over campaign finance and voter identification laws, concerns about who has too much or too little influence are at the centre of many of the most salient developments ...

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Anxieties of Democracy and Distribution

November 7, 2014 By Kate Grantz In Equality/Inequality, Essays, History/Theory 0 Comments

At least since Tocqueville wrote Democracy in America, it has been routine to see democracy and equality as joined—if somewhat problematically—at the hip. Tocqueville saw democratic politics as the outgrowth of a rel ...

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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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