Universities
join forces on Brown-led course on why democracies fail
Gillian
Kiley, Brown University
Shortly after the 2016 presidential election, Brown faculty member Robert Blair was enjoying lunch with colleagues when the conversation turned to the wealth of alarmist news reports about threats to the health of American democracy under President Trump.
Op-eds in major newspapers and analyses in scholarly publications were warning that in America, parts of Western Europe and elsewhere, democracies were backsliding or teetering on the brink of tyranny.
Blair, an assistant professor of
political science and international and public affairs, and the group — which
included political science professors Jeff
Colgan and Nicholas Miller of Brown and Dartmouth,
respectively — began debating ideas for how they could use the tools of
political science to contribute meaningfully to the discussion.
“We wanted to critically adjudicate
between those alarmist reports,” Blair said, “which ones were worth taking
seriously and which ones were really not. And there was a lot of enthusiasm for
doing something collaborative.”
What emerged from that lunchtime conversation
is “Democratic Erosion,” a cross-university collaborative course organized by
Blair that aims, according to its website, “to help students critically and
systematically evaluate the risks to democracy both here and abroad through the
lens of theory, history and social science.”
In the 2017-18 academic year, 20 universities hosted versions of the course, using all or some elements of a common syllabus.
They ranged from selective private universities (e.g., Brown, Stanford, Yale) to flagship public institutions (e.g., University of California, Berkeley; University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill; University of Virginia) even to one in Southeast Asia (the University of the Philippines, Diliman). Blair said several additional universities in the U.S., France and Israel have expressed interest in offering the course next year.
Blair said the participation of so
many institutions brings greater ideological diversity in addressing the course
material and creates a broad conversation among students, who contribute to a
common blog and are required to read each other’s work. It also fosters a sense
of camaraderie among students and among the faculty who collaborated on the
syllabus and assignments.
“One part of the motivation for
designing the course in the first place was this sense of alienation,” Blair
said. “That was a recurring theme in the election, the idea that voters felt
alienated, and that was part of the appeal of Donald Trump.
And then after Trump was elected, voters on the left felt alienated, in part because of the tenor of the campaign. This is a moment when we as Americans seem to profoundly misunderstand one another.”
And then after Trump was elected, voters on the left felt alienated, in part because of the tenor of the campaign. This is a moment when we as Americans seem to profoundly misunderstand one another.”
Blair deliberately designed the
course so that it did not focus on an American political party or elected
official, something that could devolve into partisan critique.
Rather, much of the course looks beyond the U.S., enabling students to examine the causes and consequences of a democracy’s dismantling globally. Discussion of the state of American democracy is interspersed in the coursework and couched within this comparative perspective.
Rather, much of the course looks beyond the U.S., enabling students to examine the causes and consequences of a democracy’s dismantling globally. Discussion of the state of American democracy is interspersed in the coursework and couched within this comparative perspective.
Students first develop a theoretical
framework, learning how democracies develop. Then they delve into democratic
erosion, or how democratic institutions are undermined, often through legal
means rather than a sudden seizure of power.
“Nowadays, democracies are not
usually undermined through coups,” Blair said. “Now, more often democracies are
undercut through systematic dismantling of democratic norms and institutions.
It’s done in the name of democracy.”
Students study Venezuela, Nicaragua,
Zambia and Poland as snapshots of how the phenomenon plays out in different
parts of the world, Blair said, and are later tasked with creating case studies
on democratic erosion in a country other than the U.S.
Students analyze the role of propaganda, restrictions on the press, the practice of appealing to popular desires and prejudices rather than rational argument, political polarization, scapegoating, paranoia and exclusion and other factors.
Students analyze the role of propaganda, restrictions on the press, the practice of appealing to popular desires and prejudices rather than rational argument, political polarization, scapegoating, paranoia and exclusion and other factors.
Erin Brennan-Burke, a Brown
undergraduate who took the course last fall, completed a case study on Burkina
Faso. She initially anticipated, based on quantitative data, that she would
write an analysis of democratic backsliding in the African nation. Her
qualitative research challenged that finding, however.
Ultimately, she focused on why there was a disparity between the statistical analyses and the conversations that were happening in the media and on the ground, and how that supported her assessment that democracy in Burkina Faso was consolidating.
Ultimately, she focused on why there was a disparity between the statistical analyses and the conversations that were happening in the media and on the ground, and how that supported her assessment that democracy in Burkina Faso was consolidating.
“I appreciated the openness of the
dialogue in the Democratic Erosion course,” she said. “The assignments were
flexible enough to allow that sort of initiative and argument.”
Because so many students were taking
the course, Blair said, Democratic Erosion students at participating schools
created more than 100 case studies. Master’s students at Texas A&M then
used them to create a meta-analysis assessing the precursors and symptoms of
democratic erosion around the world.
The meta-analysis will be presented
to USAID’s Democracy, Human Rights and Governance division,
Blair noted. That outcome is an example of what is possible with a
cross-university course rather than a standalone seminar — but the value
of the collaborative experience is greater than that single product, he added.
“For the students, I think a big
part of the appeal is that they are communicating not just with a single
professor in private but with one another through this blog that they write,
with the public, with a policy audience through this meta-analysis we are
producing for USAID, and with faculty at other schools,” Blair said.
“We have assigned some of the best blog posts from the fall of 2017 as required reading for the 2018 course, which creates an online community. That’s really the dimension of the course that I’m most interested in moving forward.”
“We have assigned some of the best blog posts from the fall of 2017 as required reading for the 2018 course, which creates an online community. That’s really the dimension of the course that I’m most interested in moving forward.”
For Brennan-Burke, that online
community means that students taking the course now are often in touch with her
about her blog posts from last fall. The course also provides more direct means
of connecting with students outside of Brown, she said — including, for
her class, video conversations with students at the University of Memphis.
Assignments also take students
beyond the classroom, to local political rallies or events which they write
about, drawing on insights from class to help inform their reflections.
Students in 2017-18 attended and
wrote about, among other things, a speaking engagement by conservative author
and filmmaker Dinesh D’Souza, a campaign event for Texas House of
Representatives candidate Jessica Gonzalez, a terrorism-prevention workshop and
an Indivisible Memphis rally.
The blog posts analyze the dynamics at play in the events and draw connections to larger questions about political polarization, the efficacy of types of protest, the deployment of rhetoric and other issues.
The blog posts analyze the dynamics at play in the events and draw connections to larger questions about political polarization, the efficacy of types of protest, the deployment of rhetoric and other issues.
Brennan-Burke attended a Providence
rally to preserve Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) on Sept. 8,
shortly after the White House unveiled plans to end the program. In her blog
entry, she reflected on the experiences and beliefs that inform pro- and
anti-DACA stances and discussed how rhetorical modes can impact policy
outcomes.
“The course gave me modes of thought
and modes of analysis that I wouldn’t initially have had,” Brennan-Burke said.
“But more than giving me certain answers about democracy, I feel like the
course taught me to ask better questions.”
Next August, Blair will host a
conference that brings together those who taught or took the course at various
institutions in the 2017-2018 academic year. The faculty and students will
gather to identify more ways to integrate research, teaching and civic
engagement and to think about what opportunities — like the meta-analysis for
USAID — the scale of the course might enable.
The conference will also allow
participants to talk over the effect of taking a comparative perspective when
considering threats to democracy. Blair said that some of the students in his
course, after comparing the U.S. to other countries, said they felt a greater
sense of optimism about the health of American democracy.
Brennan-Burke said, “I’m not sure
I’m any more confident about the state of democracy in America having taken the
class, but I do feel like I can more critically analyze the state of democracy
around the world.”