Democracy Works

At a time when trust in the media among Americans is at an all-time low, what can journalists and news organizations do to restore that trust? Our guests are working on innovative solutions with newsrooms and content creators across the country.
Joy Mayer is the executive director of Trusting News and Mollie Muchna is the organization's project manager. They, along with colleague Lynn Walsh, received the McCourtney Institute for Democracy's 2026 Brown Democracy Medal. They wrote the book The Transparency Imperative: Journalism, Trust, and the Future of an Informed Democracy as part of receiving the award.
We discuss the experiments in rebuilding trust that Trusting News is conducting alongside news organizations and academic researchers, including letting members of the public sit in on newsroom editorial meetings and creating a code of ethics for independent news content creators. We also talk about how nostalgia for the days of Walter Cronkite can interfere with this work — and why we're never going back to that era, as much as some of us might like to!
Watch Joy and Mollie's Brown Democracy Medal lecture.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

This episode explores how the relationship between national and state politics changed from the first Trump administration to the second one, and how the administration is using its levers of power differently this time around to target companies, law firms, universities, and more. Our guest is Jake Grumbach, who has wide-ranging expertise in democratic institutions, labor, federalism, racial and economic inequality, and much more.
Grumbach is an associate professor at the Goldman School of Public Policy at UC Berkeley. He has a new paper that examines what happened to a company's bottom line when it defied a Trump administration executive order about DEI programs. He previously joined us on the show in 2022 to discuss his book Laboratories Against Democracy: How National Parties Transformed State Politics, investigates the causes and consequences of the nationalization of state politics.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

From Brexit to the 2020 election, the United States and the United Kingdom seem more divided than ever as media, political polarization, and other factors combine to form what Mitchell Smith describes as "the Great Perceptual Divide."
Smith joined Democracy Works to explore what this divide is, how it's impacting politics on both sides of the Atlantic, and other countries might offer a model for moving beyond it.
He is Director of the School of International Affairs at Penn State and Professor of International Affairs. His book, The Great Perceptual Divide: Identity and Democracy in the U.S. and Britain, is available now from Bloomsbury Academic.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Our guest this week argues that you can't talk about the history of democracy in America without talking about the history of taxation in America. After listening to this interview, we agree and we think you will, too.
Vanessa Williamson is a senior fellow in Governance Studies at Brookings, and a senior fellow at the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center. She studies taxation and democracy in America. Her most recent book,The Price of Democracy, reveals the revolutionary power of taxation in American history. She is also the author of Read My Lips: Why Americans Are Proud to Pay Taxes, and with Harvard professor Theda Skocpol, “The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism.
We discuss the origins of the anti-tax movement in America and why the story commonly told about the Boston Tea Party is wrong. Williamson also shares some of her work interviewing current and former IRS employees and how the agency can be revitalized to ensure that Americans can pay their taxes easily and fairly.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

While we were away over the summer, it was hard to miss stories about Democratic primary elections and seeming rise of the Democratic Socialists of America — followed almost immediately about the challenges DSA candidates will face in November's election. For our first episode of the fall season, we talk with a social movement scholar about whether the DSA's policies can win over enough votes to win in a general election and why political coalitions don't always align with the structure of America's two-party system.

Rory McVeigh is the Nancy Reeves Dreux Professor of Sociology at the University of Notre Dame and and Director of the Center for the Study of Social Movements. He is the author of Politics and Privilege: How the Status Wars Sustain Inequality, along with William Carbonaro, Chang Liu, and Kenadi Silcox. The book investigates whether Americans are more likely to support a social-change organization if it explicitly opposes racism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia, and religious bigotry or if it focuses exclusively on economic equality. Drawing on the results, they argue that privileged groups’ desire to preserve their status is the primary obstacle to forming progressive alliances.

We discuss what these findings mean for the DSA, the Democratic Party, and the Republican Party as we head into the midterms and the next presidential election cycle.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.