Dissatisfaction with democratic government has been pervasive for the last decade throughout the West.  We’re launching the NYU Law Democracy Project, which seeks to engage this challenge along many dimensions and from diverse ideological perspectives. 

One of our aims is to promote understanding and analysis of the challenges facing American democracy, including putting them in the context of the similar challenges facing most Western democracies.  At another level, we will also assess the evidence behind proposed political reforms and their likelihood of that would help reducing polarization and the risks of extremism.  One major focus will be exploring executive power issues as well as the challenges the technology revolution now poses for democracy. 

We understand democracy broadly.  Thus, we will feature work on how education can be designed to promote civic understanding and citizenship.  We will also address the role of civil-society organizations.

Work on these issues unfortunately often gets swept up in the polarization of the times. Important thinking has targeted or reached particular audiences, too often ignored or received with suspicion by others. 

The NYU Law Democracy Project will pursue these efforts by actively promoting dialogue across ideological and political boundaries. Dialogue conducted only with the like-minded has limited value. We will also bring in voices from other major democracies struggling with many of the same questions. We seek to help break through the hyper-partisanship of our moment by creating a forum of diverse programming, research, and perspectives that is institutional, empirical, and comparative in approach, informed wherever possible by the best available research.

With this mission in mind, we will launch this Project with a series of “100 ideas in 100 days” offered by an exceptional range of contributions from the United States and abroad.  This series will provide a rich overview of the challenges of this complex subject.  After that, we will build on these essays through forums, conferences, writings, and other efforts that continue to bring people together from diverse perspectives and countries in the search for productive ways to meet the challenges democracies in our era confront.