Conference: Democratic Innovation

Version 1 This project aims to strengthen democracy by offering actionable proposals to address democratic erosion and sinking trust in democratic institutions. While much contemporary scholarship and commentary charts the decline and frailty of democracy around the world, this project asks social science researchers and practitioners from the USA, Europe and Africa to propose solutions and reforms to improve the legitimacy and efficacy of democratic institutions. These proposals will both advance our scientific knowledge of democratic institutions, for example, parties and elections, as well as serve the national interest by proposing ways to improve those institutions for everybody. Version 2 The democratic innovation project is a series of workshops devoted to advancing our knowledge about how to improve democratic institutions. The project focuses on the problem of sinking trust in democratic institutions linked to doubts about legitimacy and efficacy. The overall aim is to connect social science knowledge about political institutions to solutions to political problems. Workshop participants will examine eleven identified institutional contexts to develop both a diagnosis of the problem within that context as well as an institutional reform that can address that problem. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.