Democracies worldwide are facing a crisis of trust due to a lack of collaboration between citizens and their representatives, as well as growing civic disengagement. This episode of PBS’s new docuseries, “A Brief History of the Future,” delves deep into this issue AND a potential solution: Deliberative Democracy.

Alice Siu, senior research scholar at CDDRL and Associate Director of the Deliberative Democracy Lab, sheds light on how Deliberative Polling has been used to bridge divides among participants and what the future of democracy could look like when empathetic conversations take center stage.

Francis Fukuyama, Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellow at Stanford University’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, is leading an effort to protect and reform the U.S. public service. He has organized a Working Group to Protect and Reform the Civil Service in response to plans elaborated in the Heritage Foundation's Project 2025 to strip civil service protections from all federal workers and replace them with political loyalists in a future administration.

The Need for Reform

A group of nonpartisan experts and scholars recently convened at the National Academy of Public Administration to discuss civil service reform. This discussion is critical in light of plans to revive "Schedule F," an executive order that would reclassify many federal positions, remove civil service protections, and allow political loyalty to dictate hiring and firing.

A Better Vision

The Working Group proposes an alternative vision for a more effective federal workforce based on five principles:

1. Agility: Modernizing outdated systems to adapt to technological, economic, and social changes.

2. Accountability: Ensuring federal employees remain loyal to the Constitution while being responsive to elected officials.

3. Collaboration: Leveraging skills and knowledge across various sectors, including private industries and universities.

4. Outcomes: Focusing on producing real-world results valued by the public and simplifying government procedures.

5. Capacity: Providing federal workers with the skills, training, and education needed to fulfill their missions effectively.
    

Risks of “Schedule F”

Reviving “Schedule F” would undermine these goals, promoting politicization over merit-based results. Government workers might avoid necessary risks and innovation if judged on political loyalty. The Working Group plans to detail further how the federal government can evolve to meet these challenges and become a 21st-century government.

Fukuyama and the Working Group call for support in protecting and reforming the civil service to ensure a competent, non-partisan, and effective federal workforce. Click here to read their statement in full.

How have pre-communist social structures persisted in Russia, and why does this persistence matter for understanding post-communist political regime trajectories? In a CDDRL seminar series talk, Tomila Lankina, Professor of International Relations at the London School of Economics and Political Science, discussed her award-winning book, The Estate Origins of Democracy in Russia: From Imperial Bourgeoisie to Post-Communist Middle Class (Cambridge University Press, 2022). The book challenges the assumption that the 1917 revolution succeeded in leveling old estate hierarchies, arguing that these social structures persist today. 

While analyses of the bourgeoisie factor heavily into the understanding of many societies, the relevance of this group is frequently left out when discussing countries like Russia and China, on the assumption that they had been completely leveled by revolutionary ruptures. Lankina’s book critically assesses this assumption. It adopts a uniquely interdisciplinary approach, utilizing archives, subnational comparisons, statistical analysis, social network analysis, and interviews with descendants. 

In characterizing the social structure of pre-communist Russia, Lankina noted that peasants comprised 77 percent of the population on the eve of the revolution. Other social groups, which she refers to as “educated estates” because of their higher literacy rates compared to those of peasants, included the urban meshchane, the merchants, nobility, and clergy. Out of the educated estates, meshchane constituted the majority, or 10 percent of the population. While their homes appeared rather modest, members of the meshchane exhibited characteristics of the urban bourgeoisie, and even their dress differed from that of the rural estate. They enjoyed much higher literacy rates than peasants.

Lankina explained that the comparatively high status of these “educated estates” — the meshchane, merchants, nobility, and clergy — persisted even after the Bolshevik revolution. To illustrate this, she highlighted partially intact social circles of the highly networked merchants, nobles, and tsarist-inspired soviet schools. Letters from the Samara province indicate that while many high-status citizens emigrated, there were matriarchs who stayed, spreading the tsarist-era values to their children and grandchildren after the revolution. Regardless of whether this middle class was endowed with democratic values, Lankina maintained that they passed human and entrepreneurial capital onto their offspring.

How did these estates endure? While the literature clearly articulates what happened to the ruling classes following the revolution, less time has been spent understanding what happened to the educated, middle-class segments of society. How did they adapt? 

Lankina proposed three different routes. First is the “pop-up brigade,” wherein young, educated individuals traveled around promoting education to peasant workers, instantly employable and absorbable into a new society. Then there is the “museum society,” where prominent nobles and merchants joined insular cultural institutions like archives, provincial libraries, and museums. Finally, “the organization man” denotes professionally skilled individuals, such as medics, who retained their positions following the revolution as the social hierarchy got absorbed into newer organizations. 

To illustrate the significance of this persistence in social structures and values, Lankina, drawing on her co-authored paper with Alexander Libman (APSR 2021), indicated that meshchane concentration (as opposed to more recent educational indices) is a better predictor of a post-communist region’s openness, at least in the 1990s.

What is authoritarian sharp power, and how has it shaped the current geopolitical landscape and the state of democracy around the globe? In a CDDRL research seminar series talk, Christopher Walker — Vice President for Studies and Analysis at the National Endowment for Democracy — and Will Dobson, the co-editor of the Journal of Democracy, discussed their new book Defending Democracy in an Age of Sharp Power (Johns Hopkins University Press 2023). The co-authors argue that dictators have moved beyond the suppression of their own citizens and are now actively attempting to erode the pillars of democratic societies. 

Conventional wisdom of the last 25 years suggests that the solution to our “authoritarian problem” is simple: the passage of time. Over time, scholars argued, authoritarian political systems would gradually and peacefully give way to democratic ones, with rising demands for political rights. Globalization would bind authoritarian elites to their Western counterparts via business, and the internet would expose citizens to new ways of thinking. 

However, the authoritarian regimes have not subsided. In fact, they have worked to undermine democratic institutions in other countries. Thus, Defending Democracy in an Age of Sharp Power serves as a rebuttal to these illusions, arguing that free societies can no longer afford this sort of complacency. 

Autocrats see democracies as an existential threat to their way of rule, both at home and abroad. Accordingly, they have begun reaching across borders to stymie democracy where it does not exist and undermine it where it does. 

How are they doing this? By attacking the facet of democratic society people believed was its principal strength, namely its openness. While autocrats are able to harden themselves and their societies from the free world, commitment to democracy fundamentally means a free exchange of ideas. This allows autocrats to target the minds of foreign publics by manipulating key institutions, such as universities, think tanks, media outlets, and entertainment companies. 

But it is not just autocrats’ outward-looking strategy that has permitted this infiltration; democracies themselves are complacent. Many powerful actors have been willing to cede their values and principles, sometimes for money or prestige, but sometimes just due to a lack of understanding and foresight. 

To prevent further influence, Walker and Dobson stress that democracies need to take both reactive and proactive measures. In response to the offense of autocracies, democracies must commit to prioritizing openness and transparency. They must, for example, prevent deals that extend China’s influence. Democracies must also work to correct knowledge asymmetries and think of innovative ways to get information about China and its role into the wider world. On the proactive front, democracies must defend their own values and the intrinsic benefit of a democratic system.

Deliberative Polling®, a process pioneered by Stanford’s Deliberative Democracy Lab (DDL), housed within the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law, has been used successfully for the second time to help change the Constitution of Mongolia.

Following a 2015 city-wide Deliberative Poll for the Capital City Ulaanbataar, conducted with support from DDL (then called the Center for Deliberative Democracy), the national Parliament in Mongolia decided to pass the “Law on Deliberative Polling.” This law, approved in 2017, requires that deliberative polling be conducted on potential amendments to the Mongolian Constitution before they can be considered by the Parliament.

The first national Deliberative Poll following the new law was convened in 2017. After extensive parliamentary debate, Mongolia amended its constitution by a two-thirds vote on November 14, 2019. Gombojavyn Zandanshatar, Chairman of the State Great Khural (the Parliament of Mongolia) and a 2014-16 visiting scholar at CDDRL, noted in a letter to Professor James Fishkin, Director of the Deliberative Democracy Lab, that Deliberative Polling “was a critical part of the process of consultation and discourse that helped shape the final amendments. You will see that most of the major changes made in these latest amendments can be traced back to the key issues the citizens discussed during the Deliberative Poll.”

In February of 2023, a new national sample of nearly 800 people — a stratified random sample of citizens from throughout the country — gathered in the Government Palace (the seat of government in Ulaanbaatar) for a long weekend to deliberate about proposed amendment topics. The new sample was selected by the National Statistical Office, the governmental body also responsible for conducting Mongolia’s National Census. The topics were gathered from nearly 1,100 suggestions from experts, the public, civil society, and professional organizations around the country. They were then screened by the Deliberative Council, an independent non-partisan body required by the “Law on Deliberative Polling.”