‘Democracy Requires Work’: McCourtney Institute Director Michael Berkman

Most of us can probably recall the first big election in which we voted.

For me, it was the 1980 presidential election. Dissatisfied with the choices offered by the major parties—Democratic President Jimmy Carter and Republican Ronald Reagan—I voted for the third-place guy, John B. Anderson, who ran as an independent. 

Voting for the first time was a heady experience, and there’s still something about casting a ballot that evokes pride in many of us.

But until recent times, I doubt many of us gave much thought to the state of our democracy itself.

As we welcome 2023, a new Congress takes office, with Republicans controlling the House and Democrats holding the Senate. New governors, including Pennsylvania’s Josh Shapiro, and state legislators have been sworn in.

They take office in challenging times, with political and cultural polarization running hot. The integrity of our electoral process has been sharply questioned, led by former President Donald Trump’s unsubstantiated claims of fraud in the 2020 election. With estimates of some 300 so-called election deniers running for office across the country in November, President Joe Biden made an address in which he said democracy itself was on the ballot. Some leading Republicans called that speech divisive.

To offer perspective on the health of our democracy, we visited recently with Michael Berkman, director of the McCourtney Institute for Democracy at Penn State. The institute, which bills itself as “partisan for democracy,” started in 2012 as the Democracy Institute and became the McCourtney Institute for Democracy in 2014 after Tracy and Ted McCourtney gave a $3 million gift to secure the institute’s future.

The institute’s mission is to “promote scholarship and practical innovations that defend and advance democracy in the United States and abroad” through teaching, research, and public outreach (including a popular podcast, Democracy Works).

Berkman, who became director in 2016, is a professor of political science at Penn State; his research focuses on American politics. He holds a Ph.D. from Indiana University.

He says he was encouraged by the fact that, for the most part, candidates who lost in the November election conceded.

“Many people that lost this recent election made a point of conceding in very clear and dramatic terms on both sides,” he notes. “I think that’s a positive step. 

“It’s been done before. Al Gore made a very public concession after the Supreme Court decision to stop the counting in Florida in 2000 [in his presidential race against George W. Bush] because he understood that he needed to cool the temperature on his side and say, ‘I’m accepting the Supreme Court decision. I want you to accept the Supreme Court decision.’ John McCain made an impressive concession speech [in 2008] and didn’t allow Sarah Palin to come up and make a political speech when he lost to Barack Obama, because he recognized the importance of conceding to how a democracy is supposed to operate.”

Here are some other highlights from our discussion.

T&G: What’s your feeling about the health of our democracy right now, following the midterm elections?

Berkman: I feel better about it this week than I did last week [prior to the elections]. And that would be largely because so many of these election deniers, especially ones running for offices that directly control elections, did indeed lose. I’m thinking about some of the GOP gubernatorial candidates, some of the secretary of state candidates in particular. [There are] still a lot of election-denying state legislators; I think there’s still a need to be diligent about watching what’s going on. 

T&G: You’ve made the point that democracy typically dies from within. What do you see as the biggest threats to democracy going forward?

Berkman: I think one thing that concerns us quite a bit is just the erosion of support for democracy not only within the country, I think around much of the Western world right now. Also, the loss of support for some of the institutions that are responsible for maintaining our democracy. Attacks on the press … are very concerning. And the fact that there are so many members of the House Republican conference who refuse to accept the results of the 2020 election suggests to me a lack of appropriate seriousness about the role of elections and about the dangers of election denialism.

T&G: In a McCourtney Institute Mood of the Nation poll last year on what the government’s main role in the election process should be, a majority of Republicans said they were concerned about ensuring that there is no fraud in elections, whereas most Democrats were concerned about ease of access to voting for eligible citizens. How did we get there, and how do you think we bridge that gap?

Berkman: Well, certainly, what has contributed to it over the last few years has been the constant claims that there’s something fraudulent about the elections, which I think is used as a justification for this idea that we need to make voting more difficult. And so, you make claims of fraud that can’t be supported. You make them over and over and over again so that people start to believe it. And then that becomes the justification for taking restrictive action on voting rights. But this happened even prior to the election denialism of 2020. 

We have seen claims of electoral fraud used in the states as a way of justifying a variety of measures that make it more difficult to vote. And the fact is that election fraud is pretty rare. And it’s pretty serious. So, it’s often treated like people are just cheating right and left, but it’s a federal crime to cheat in an election. It carries big penalties, as we’ve seen with some people.

T&G: It used to be, it seems, that we had the same set of truths and we debated how to address those issues. Now, we don’t seem to agree on the same set of truths.

Berkman: One of our podcast guests once referred to this as epistemological polarization, the fact that people seem to be seeing entirely different realities, and certainly the way that people have siloed themselves into various media contributes to that.

I’ve always been struck by a comment [writer and commentator] David Frum made to us when he was here. We were talking about polarization and the fact that people seem so siloed. He said: Everybody join some kind of organization that’s non-political; just go do it. It’s going to put them into contact with people unlike themselves. And just learn to be comfortable being around people different from yourselves. 

And I think that is actually pretty solid advice.

T&G: Can you share a recent example of a country where democracy has died from within, and any lessons we can learn from that?

Berkman: Democracy, authoritarianism, I think it’s healthy to think of it as more of a continuum than a dichotomy. It’s not like, we’re a democracy today, we’re not one tomorrow. Things are chipped away. Things in Hungary are clearly being chipped away. Russia, which had a little bit of a democratic moment, has clearly gone full authoritarian. I think there’s reason to be concerned in Poland. Clearly, there was reason to be concerned in Brazil, although the recent election is unexpected, at least for a non-specialist like myself. … We’ve seen countries move through a variety of steps, where they become less liberal, meaning small “l” liberal, and less democratic.

T&G: What can average citizens do to safeguard democracy besides, obviously, voting?

Berkman: Voting is no small thing. Based on work that I had seen, even polling in the New York Times as recently as a week or so before the election, there was really no reason to believe anybody was going to vote on the basis of [threats to] democracy. … So, I think the fact that that will likely be proven to be wrong is reassuring, that people have had their awareness raised on this.

I think we see that in a lot of ways, including the fact that lots of universities have started different kinds of democracy initiatives and democracy institutes of different types, well after us, because of the recognition of this, the fact that it’s talked about so much more.

I also think that people need some help in understanding how democracy works, why we do some things the way we do. Some have referred to this as democratic pedagogy. Political leaders, for example, need to explain democratic processes, not just tear them down. I think the press needs to explain it. For example, that we have this procedure because it provides accountability, it provides transparency, it allows for public input, and allows for the public to have a say on the final decision through whatever kind of mechanism that we’re talking about; just a recognition of the kinds of procedures and institutions that are necessary to make democracy actually work. And that’s something we try to do on our podcast, too. … Democracy requires work.

I think people need to make the effort, given that they know how much of the information they’re getting might not be true, to access correct information, to learn how to do that. And I think we have a responsibility at Penn State to do that with our students. Certainly, we try to do this with our podcast. We talk a lot on the show about different kinds of democratic reforms. And I think different kinds of democratic reforms actually can maybe engage people in a new way of thinking that things can be done differently, thinking about Nevada this year that [took a step toward adopting] ranked-choice voting. … Cities and states have done things like this, and I think that these small, localized kinds of reforms can engage people and give them perhaps some new confidence about their democracy. T&G

TAGLINE – with this issue, we’re moving stopping the tagline box and just doing simple italic taglines. For this one, that means “Town&Gown” is NOT italicized because the rest of the tagline is.

Mark Brackenbury is a former editor of Town&Gown.

To learn more:

• Explore democracy.psu.edu, or visit the McCourtney Institute for Democracy’s Facebook page for information on upcoming speakers and other events.
• Listen to the Democracy Works podcast, hosted by Berkman; Christopher Beem, managing director of the McCourtney Institute; Jenna Spinelle, McCourtney communications specialist; and Candis Watts Smith, associate professor of political science at Duke University.
• Read The Seven Democratic Virtues: What You Can Do to Overcome Tribalism and Save Our Democracy, written by Beem.