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September 15 is Democracy Day, which more than 120 news organizations, including The Conversation, have designated as a time when we will bring our readers, listeners and viewers stories about the dangers facing democracy in America and around the world.
For any news organization covering politics in this era, every day is Democracy Day, because those threats are all around us, all the time. Here on the politics desk, we decided about two years ago to informally call ourselves the “Democracy Desk,” highlighting the focus of much of our coverage. We even wrote a manifesto of sorts last year.
Here’s some of what we said:
What we cover at The Conversation U.S. is not politics the way many Americans think of it – partisan bickering, horse trading and he-said, she-said false equivalencies. Rather, we cover democracy: what government is and how it happens, why it was set up that way, and what the effects are for individual people, various demographic groups and the nation as a whole.
We help readers understand what values and ideals Americans claim to uphold, the processes by which they seek to do that, and the results – including whether they actually uphold or instead undermine those values and ideals. We explain the nature, workings and results – not of politics, but of democracy.
Some recent examples of our democracy-focused coverage include a story by Vanderbilt University philosopher Robert Talisse, who examines U.S. Rep. Liz Cheney’s massive Republican primary loss in Wyoming. How could “the endorsement of a one-term, twice-impeached and historically unpopular former president catapult an unknown candidate into a massive win over an effective incumbent,” asks Talisse. To answer that question, he says, “It’s important to recognize that ordinary thinking about how democracy works begins with a mistaken premise.”
And a team of political scientists at Harvard’s Kennedy School looked at the restrictive abortion laws being instituted around the country and asked why government policies sometimes fail to reflect the public’s will. “State legislatures do not always represent public preferences within their states,” they write, delving into the four major phenomena – gerrymandering, low and uneven voter turnout, the design of America’s political institutions and geographic polarization – that contribute to this mismatch.
Also this week in politics news:
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