Q: What’s the purpose of the Strengthening Democracy Initiative?
A: Well-functioning democracies require accountable representatives, accurate and freely available information, equitable citizen voice and participation, free and fair elections, and an abiding respect for democratic institutions. It’s unsettling for the political science community to see an increasing number of evidence of democratic backsliding in Europe, Latin America, and even here within the U.S. While we cannot single-handedly stop the erosion of democratic norms and practices, we are able to focus our energies on understanding and explaining the basis causes of the issue, and devising interventions to take care of the healthy functioning of democracies.
MIT political science has a history of generating vital research on many facets of the democratic process, including voting behavior, election administration, information and misinformation, public opinion and political responsiveness, and lobbying. The goals of the Strengthening Democracy Initiative are to put these various research programs under one umbrella, to foster synergies amongst our various research projects and between political science and other disciplines, and to mark MIT because the country’s leading center for rigorous, evidence-based evaluation of democratic resiliency.
Q: What’s the initiative’s research focus?
A: The initiative is built upon three research pillars. One pillar is election science and administration. Democracy cannot function without well-run elections and, just as vital, popular trust in those elections. Even throughout the U.S., let alone other countries, there’s tremendous variation within the electoral process: whether and the way people register to vote, whether or not they vote in person or by mail, how polling places are run, how votes are counted and validated, and the way the outcomes are communicated to residents.
The MIT Election Data and Science Lab is already the country’s leading center for the gathering and evaluation of election-related data and dissemination of electoral best practices, and it’s well positioned to extend the size and scope of its activities.
The second pillar is public opinion, a wealthy area of study that features experimental studies of public responses to misinformation and analyses of presidency responsiveness to mass attitudes. Our faculty employ survey and experimental methods to review a variety of substantive areas, including taxation and health policy, state and native politics, and techniques for countering political rumors within the U.S. and abroad. Faculty research programs form the premise for this pillar, together with longstanding collaborations comparable to the Political Experiments Research Lab, an annual omnibus survey wherein students and college can participate, and frequent conferences and seminars.
The third pillar is political participation, which incorporates 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 firms on Congressional laws. A few of this research relies on machine learning and AI to cull and parse an unlimited amount of information, giving researchers visibility into phenomena that were previously difficult to research. A related research area on political deliberation brings together computer science, AI, and the social sciences to research the dynamics of political discourse in online forums and the possible interventions that may attenuate political polarization and foster consensus.
The initiative’s flexible design will allow for brand spanking new pillars to be added over time, including international and homeland security, strengthening democracies in several regions of the world, and tackling recent challenges to democratic processes that we cannot see yet.
Q: Why is MIT well-suited to host this recent initiative?
A: Many individuals view MIT as a STEM-focused, highly technical place. And indeed it’s, but there’s an amazing amount of collaboration across and inside schools at MIT — for instance, between political science and the Schwarzman College of Computing and the Sloan School of Management, and between the social science fields and the colleges of science and engineering. The Strengthening Democracy Initiative will profit from these collaborations and create recent bridges between political science and other fields. It’s also vital to notice that this can be a nonpartisan research endeavor. The MIT political science department has a fame for rigorous, data-driven approaches to the study of politics, and its position throughout the MIT ecosystem will help us to take care of a fame as an “honest broker,” and to disseminate path-breaking, evidence-based research and interventions to assist democracies grow to be more resilient.
Q: Will the brand new initiative have an academic mission?
A: In fact! The department has a protracted history of bringing in scores of undergraduate researchers via MIT’s Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program. The initiative will likely be structured to offer these students with opportunities to review various facets of the democratic process, and for faculty to have a ready pool of talented students to help with their projects. My hope is to offer students with the resources and opportunities to check their very own theories by designing and implementing surveys within the U.S. and abroad, and use insights and tools from computer science, applied statistics, and other disciplines to review political phenomena. Because the initiative grows, I expect more opportunities for college kids to collaborate with state and native officials on improvements to election administration, and to review recent puzzles related to healthy democracies.
Postdoctoral researchers can even play a outstanding role by advancing research across the initiative’s pillars, supervising undergraduate researchers, and handling a number of the administrative elements of the work.
Q: This seems like a long-term endeavor. Do you expect this initiative to be everlasting?
A: Yes. We have already got the pieces in place to create a number one center for the study of healthy democracies (and the best way to make them healthier). But we want to construct capability, including resources for a pool of researchers to shift from one project to a different, which can permit synergies between projects and foster recent ones. A everlasting initiative can even provide the infrastructure for faculty and students to reply swiftly to current events and recent research findings — for instance, by launching a nationwide survey experiment, or collecting recent data on a facet of the electoral process, or testing the impact of a brand new AI technology on political perceptions. As I wish to tell our supporters, there are recent challenges to healthy democracies that weren’t on our radar 10 years ago, and little question there will likely be others 10 years from now that we’ve not imagined. We have to be prepared to do the rigorous evaluation on whatever challenges come our way. And MIT Political Science is the most effective place on the earth to undertake this ambitious agenda in the long run.
