From the early days of Cornell’s founding to the present, scholars have studied the idea and the practice of democracy – what it means, how it’s evolved around the world and what happens when it falls apart.
“Nothing in the development of humanity is more pathetic than the history of the various attempts to maintain liberty in republics,” Cornell founder A.D. White said in an 1892 address to the New York state teacher’s convention. “The shores of time are covered with the wreckage of stranded democracies.”
A well-educated people, “who are not easily misled,” is the only way to ensure a thriving democracy, he told the teachers, highlighting the foundational role of U.S. universities in maintaining democracy.
More than a century earlier, Benjamin Franklin had also quipped famously about the chances the new country would be a monarchy or a republic: “A republic, if you can keep it,” he said.
Cornell scholars say the present moment is a particularly grave moment for democracy in the United States, given a unique confluence of social, political and economic pressures.
“There was a sense that backsliding only happened to countries that were not at a certain level of economic development or who hadn’t had a democracy for a set number of years,” said Rachel Riedl, professor of government in A&S and the Brooks School of Public Policy. “There was an assumption that a certain set of countries, including the U.S., were above this threshold. But the combination of threats that the U.S. faces threatens even the most long-running and institutionalized democracies in the world.”
Now, Cornell scholars of U.S. politics are collaborating closely with colleagues in comparative politics to study democratic declines, as well as strategies for strengthening the republic we still have.
“One of the missions of a great university is to study the challenges we face as a society and to develop solutions,” said Peter Loewen, the Harold Tanner Dean of A&S. “For us as a college, that requires not only thoughtful research but robust public engagement. It also requires educating our students on how to work through disagreements and resist unnecessary political polarization.”
A new Center on Democracy at Cornell
Throughout the years and across a diverse network of fields from agriculture to economics to science to government and public policy, Cornell faculty have contributed to the growth and prosperity of democracies throughout the world. Cornell’s alumni have also ascended to top leadership positions in government and public service globally.
With this strong foundation in the study of democracy, the College of Arts & Sciences, Cornell’s Brooks School of Public Policy and the Cornell Law School launched the Cornell Center on Democracy in May. The center brings 80 leading Cornell faculty together to examine core issues related to democracy - the rule of law; public interest and participation in democracy; effective democratic citizenship; and the impact of technology.
“We can use our knowledge of democratic practice, institutions and political behavior in the U.S. to contribute to democratic strengthening and bolstering,” said Riedl, the new Peggy J. Koenig ’78 Director of the Cornell Center on Democracy. “We can also use global lessons to reflect back on the questions we’re facing because these challenges aren’t unique to the U.S.”
The center will enable faculty from across campus “to have further-reaching conversations that drive our agenda and how we’re thinking about new and creative approaches to this moment,” she said.
The dialogue among those who study American politics and those who compare the politics of other countries “is richer at Cornell than in any other political science department in the country, said Kenneth Roberts, the Richard J. Schwartz Professor of government (A&S), a comparative politics expert focusing on Latin America.
And Cornell scholars embrace a wide-reaching definition when they talk about democracy, not stopping at politics or voting rights or citizen participation, but considering how well the policies of a government serve all of its citizens.
“Democracy in its best form means that people at the economic and racial margins of our society are included in, rather than pushed out of, government policies,” said Jamila Michener, professor of government (A&S) and public policy (Brooks) and director of the Center for Racial Justice and Equitable Futures. “How people act collectively to change the world around them in ways that are immediately relevant to them and their communities, that’s the heart of democracy.”
A history of support for democracy
Throughout Cornell’s history, famed faculty have conducted trailblazing studies related to government and political science and played active roles, contributing to both the study and practice of democracy. They’ve been called on by presidents, prime ministers and ambassadors to help develop policies, frameworks and agreements. And they’ve impacted the next generation of public servants, in the U.S. and abroad.
Along with A.D. White’s service as a state senator, he had a passion for history and political science and served as ambassador to Germany and Russia, as well as president of the American delegation to the First Peace Commission at The Hague in 1899. And perhaps most importantly, his ideas for Cornell as an open university served as a role model for democratic ideals in education across the country.
After World War I, Cornellians including Willard Straight and Edward House played important roles in the peace process as advisors to President Woodrow Wilson and members of conferences and committees. And after World War II, Cornell contributed to the Marshall Plan by providing scientists and technical advisors and aiding in the rebuilding of academic institutions and scientific expertise in Europe.
“Cornell’s government department has a tradition of asking big questions about politics and taking an historical approach,” said Suzanne Mettler, John L. Senior Professor of American Institutions (A&S).
Scholars wrestle with today’s issues
Today, Cornell scholars continue to study the many facets of democracy and government formation throughout the world, in the new light of democratic challenges within the U.S. government.
“In 2016, I was teaching Intro to American Politics, and it was becoming more and more perplexing to me that things that had seemed long settled about American politics – freedom of the press, the legitimacy of elections – were suddenly being questioned and up for grabs,” Mettler said. “Threats to democracy have been a part of my work for a long time, but I would not have imagined that things would go so far off the rails and so quickly.”
Mettler found herself turning increasingly to her Cornell colleagues in comparative politics. They had extensive knowledge of the conditions under which democracies worldwide have undergone deterioration and had developed concepts and theories about when and why that happened.
She also turned to colleagues who, like herself, studied the U.S. historically. They asked each other what had happened in the nation’s own past when conditions seemed to threaten whatever level or type of democracy had developed by that point. Viewing American democracy in comparative and historical perspective helped illuminate not only which features made it vulnerable but sources of resilience, as well, she said.
To formalize and spread these conversations, Mettler and colleagues created the American Democracy Collaborative in 2016, a group that’s hosted conferences and workshops and published extensively, including the book “Four Threats: The Recurring Crises of American Democracy,” which Mettler wrote with Robert C. Lieberman, a professor of political science at Johns Hopkins University.
The four threats, as they categorize them, are: political polarization; conflict over who belongs in the political community; high and growing economic inequality; and excessive executive power. Even one threat alone imperiled democracy in the some earlier periods, and combinations of the first three threats led to the Civil War, and later, in the 1890s, to the disenfranchisement of millions of Black men, Mettler and Lieberman found.
“Yet today, all four threats are on the rise together, which has not happened before in US history,” Mettler said. “It’s this combination that led to Trump’s election and re-election, and now he’s using executive power on a scope and scale unlike previous presidents, and overriding the rule of law.”
The group hosted a May 11-13 conference on campus, “Rebuilding Democracy After Backsliding,” which included scholars from 18 universities, as well as practitioners from organizations such as the Brookings Institution, Public Citizen and Democracy Forward.
These conversations and the dissemination of information are part of the role that universities play in protecting democracies, Mettler said.
“For Americans, it’s helpful to hear scholarly analysis of the situation, how we got here and where people are coming from,” she said. “Understanding is key because us vs. them politics is so dangerous. We need to understand that we’re all in this together.”
Douglas Kriner, the Clinton Rossiter Professor in American Institutions in the government department (A&S and Brooks), has focused his research on American political institutions and the separation of powers. His most recent papers compare the current Trump administration to Trump’s first term, as well as terms of other presidents.
“The sheer level of fecklessness of the Republican Congress is a little surprising,” Kriner said compared to Trump’s first term, when there was pushback to some of his policies, such as travel bans and parent/child separations for migrants. “He has enjoyed utter mastery of the GOP in this term in the face of even more assaults on Congressional powers.”
Kriner is also faculty director for Cornell’s Institute of Politics and Global Affairs, which offers an undergraduate scholar program to connect students to policymakers and politicians dealing with issues of the day and offers events in Ithaca, New York City, Washington and abroad.
Thomas Pepinsky, the Walter F. LaFeber Professor of government (A&S and Brooks), studies comparative politics and the political economy of democratic backsliding in Southeast Asia and Europe.
“What we comparativists understand is that there are situations where people destroy democracy for partisan advantage,” Pepinsky said. “One thing that helps democracies to survive is mutual interest. During the cold war, it was in everyone’s interest to protect America’s democratic form of government when we were under existential threat from the outside. That’s not the case today.”
The benefit of conversations between scholars of comparative politics and U.S. democracy scholars is that comparativists have already done intense studies of regimes that change from autocracies to democracies or vice versa, and have researched strategies for “how we preserve democracy, how we defend it, how we improve it, make it more resilient and make it more responsive to citizens,” Roberts said.
The Trump presidency is a regime similar to others he’s studied, Roberts said.
And if major change does happen, a future American democracy might look different, Pepinsky said. For example, the U.S. could get rid of single-member districts in favor of proportional representation (California would send 40 members to Congress representing the whole state, rather than splitting reps into districts) or adopt the UK (prime minister) or French (president and prime minister) forms of democracy to encourage the creation of more political parties. “All democracies are unique, with their own patterns and varieties,” he said.
Impacts of new tech and AI
The emergence of new technology has impacts across society, from economics to education, but also in the realm of politics and governmental operations.
Scholars such as Loewen are studying how people perceive AI opportunities and threats and how politicians might respond. In a 2023 survey of Americans and Canadians, Loewen and colleagues studied public concern about layoffs caused by AI and their opinions about a host of possible policy reactions.
Sarah Kreps, the John L. Wetherill Professor in the Department of Government (A&S), and director of the Cornell Brooks School Tech Policy Institute, has studied how AI could be used to manipulate elected leaders by creating a high volume of fake messages from constituents focused on an issue, but also how AI could be used as a control to detect such messages.
The research of Peter Enns, professor of government (A&S and Brooks), focuses on public opinion and political representation, data science and other issues. One recent study found that federal government policy is responsive to the voice of median-income voters, despite recent studies showing otherwise. Enns also has developed an election forecasting model that correctly anticipated Trump’s 2024 win and the outcome in all 50 states more than 100 days prior to the election.
Public engagement plays important role
Michener, who has testified in Congress about universal health insurance, said that’s just “one person making an argument to one body. It’s important, but there’s only so far that can go. As researchers, one of the things we can do is share and democratize knowledge in ways that equip people to intervene when they are able to.”
The Center for Racial Justice and Equitable Futures is working with various community groups and policy organizations across multiple states on issues including affordable housing, health care financialization, and access to public benefits. Student fellows, postdocs, faculty, and research staff at the Center provide partners on the ground with research that helps them to implement federal and local policy and to grow their capacity for getting their concerns onto the state and local legislative agendas.
“So many things are harming democracy, but the antidote I’ve seen work most powerfully is for ordinary people to come together on the basis of a shared struggle, not because of partisan politics,” Michener said. “They realize they have a shared problem they can only solve by working together, and we can use our capacities here at Cornell to support that collective work. Our role as scholars makes us active participants in not just studying democracy—but helping to change it for the better.”
Riedl agrees, adding that working with local communities and groups can strengthen support for representative systems. During the past two years, she’s chosen 70 undergrads to serve as democracy fellows, working closely with small groups around the world seeking to bolster democratic practice and rights.
“We find people where they are and help them create the living fabric of a democratic community,” ensuring that governments are providing what they need.
For Michener, studying the way that grassroots organizations accomplish political change on the local level sheds light on democracy writ large.
“Social policies and programs like Medicaid, WIC (Women’s Infants and Children’s) and SNAP affect the way people engage with government on a local level. And on a federal level, they affect how people participate in politics,” she said. “We also study what happens when people take their individual problems related to health care or housing and come together to address these problems collectively by building their collective power and pushing back against harmful practices or institutions.”
Along with his research, Pepinsky said his impact as a scholar also comes from his membership in groups such as the Brookings Institution and from the “soapbox” he has as a frequent media commentator, guest and consultant. “I have some clout because of my research, so my writing is more likely to be picked up,” he said. “And in Southeast Asia, my record studying the region means I can talk to people who are decision makers. People ask me for my advice and want my perspective.”
Kriner said Congressional policymakers and staff have told him that his research is considered in the decision-making process, particularly some of his studies on the electoral impacts of certain policy choices.
“Policymakers are constantly weighing the impacts, and our scholarship can help them have a clear assessment of what those impacts are,” he said.
Educating the next generation
Beyond their research, outreach and public-facing work, faculty say their roles as teachers might be the most consequential way they impact the public conversation and the future of democracy.
Loewen launched a new course in 2025, Disagreement, which brought together more than 150 students from across the university once a week to listen to experts have a disagreement over an important topic of the day. Students then participated in discussion sections to reflect and engage with the topic, and with a healthy process of disagreement in general. The course will be offered every spring, he said.
On campus, Riedl co-hosted the first Pathways to Purpose course in 2025, in partnership with the Office for the Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education and the Center for Dialogue and Pluralism, and co-taught by Colleen Barry, inaugural dean of the Brooks School, and Rachel Dunifon, Rebecca Q. and James C. Morgan Dean of the College of Human Ecology. More than 400 students enrolled to talk about ways they as students and future workers can contribute to democracy.
And a new online education offering spearheaded by Riedl in partnership with DemoLab, “Freedom Academy,” provides a hybrid curriculum in Spanish for young people centered on freedom, democracy and civic engagement.
Mettler said students have told her that her class helps them have more productive conversations with family members who have opposite political views. And Pepinsky knows that some of the 150 students in his introduction to comparative politics class will go on to roles in government or policy.
“It’s a civics class taught using the principles of science,” he said. “Not to tell students what’s good or what kind of system they should like or oppose, but to understand analytically how countries are governed and how citizens can use that knowledge, to reform a constitution or to lead a revolution or anything in between.”
What does the future hold?
Mettler said that among her colleagues, those who study freedom and elections are optimistic that democracy will survive current challenges, while those who study the rule of law are less so.
“I’m a hard-wired optimist and I’m so committed to the basic principles underlying the U.S. of self-government, that it all comes down to the citizens,” she said. “Ultimately, I think Americans believe and value that.”
And she’s also buoyed by the number of people who are now engaged in the news, in protests and in the political process, adding that institutions who have been targeted by the Trump administration – including law firms, environmental groups and universities – can see the number of people standing behind them.
“Many Americans can tolerate injustice, but Americans do not like to be told what to think,” Pepinsky said. “The idea that we get to laugh at our politicians, that we have the right to be left alone, that we don’t have kings – these are American ideas.”
