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Wanted: Ideas for how to strengthen American democracy

Idea
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American democracy needs an intervention, and you could help facilitate it.

Stanford University is calling for ideas on how to improve Americans' commitment to democratic principles as part of its Strengthening Democracy Challenge. The contest aims to use "collaboration, cooperation and crowdsourcing" to identify and test ways to curb extreme partisanship.


The Strengthening Democracy Challenge is open to all — academics, practitioners, industry experts and everyday citizens. Submissions are being accepted until Oct. 1.

Stanford is emphasizing short-term programming in this competition. The competition is focused on interventions that people can experience online in under eight minutes that "will reduce Americans' anti-democratic attitudes, support for partisan violence and/or partisan animosity."

The interventions could ask participants to do one or more of the following: read, write, watch, listen or respond. Submissions must also be ethical, online, scalable, short, comprehensible in English, costless and aligned.

A multidisciplinary team of political scientists, psychologists, sociologists and economists from Stanford, MIT, Northwestern University and Columbia University will evaluate the submissions and choose up to 25 of the most promising ideas. Each of those selected interventions will then be tested in separate groups of 1,000 participants (500 Republicans and 500 Democrats). There will also be a control group of 5,000 participants.

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Up to $45,000 in cash prizes will be awarded to the teams submitting interventions that most reduce anti-democratic attitudes, partisan animosity and support for partisan violence. Winners will also receive authorship in the primary publication resulting from the challenge and recognition at a virtual conference following the challenge.

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Podcast: Why conspiracy theories thrive in both democracies and autocracies

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There's something natural and organic about perceiving that the people in power are out to advance their own interests. It's in part because it’s often true. Governments actually do keep secrets from the public. Politicians engage in scandals. There often is corruption at high levels. So, we don't want citizens in a democracy to be too trusting of their politicians. It's healthy to be skeptical of the state and its real abuses and tendencies towards secrecy. The danger is when this distrust gets redirected, not toward the state, but targets innocent people who are not actually responsible for people's problems.

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Your Take:  The Price of Freedom

Your Take: The Price of Freedom

Our question about the price of freedom received a light response. We asked:

What price have you, your friends or your family paid for the freedom we enjoy? And what price would you willingly pay?

It was a question born out of the horror of images from Ukraine. We hope that the news about the Jan. 6 commission and Ketanji Brown Jackson’s Supreme Court nomination was so riveting that this question was overlooked. We considered another possibility that the images were so traumatic, that our readers didn’t want to consider the question for themselves. We saw the price Ukrainians paid.

One response came from a veteran who noted that being willing to pay the ultimate price for one’s country and surviving was a gift that was repaid over and over throughout his life. “I know exactly what it is like to accept that you are a dead man,” he said. What most closely mirrored my own experience was a respondent who noted her lack of payment in blood, sweat or tears, yet chose to volunteer in helping others exercise their freedom.

Personally, my price includes service to our nation, too. The price I paid was the loss of my former life, which included a husband, a home and a seemingly secure job to enter the political fray with a message of partisan healing and hope for the future. This work isn’t risking my life, but it’s the price I’ve paid.

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Given the earnest question we asked, and the meager responses, I am also left wondering if we think at all about the price of freedom? Or have we all become so entitled to our freedom that we fail to defend freedom for others? Or was the question poorly timed?

I read another respondent’s words as an indicator of his pacifism. And another veteran who simply stated his years of service. And that was it. Four responses to a question that lives in my heart every day. We look forward to hearing Your Take on other topics. Feel free to share questions to which you’d like to respond.

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Tom G. Palmer has been involved in the advance of democratic free-market policies and reforms around the globe for more than three decades. He is executive vice president for international programs at Atlas Network and a senior fellow at the Cato Institute.

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In the words of European autocrat Viktor Orbán, “No policy-specific debates are needed now, the alternatives in front of us are obvious…[W]e need to understand that for rebuilding the economy it is not theories that are needed but rather thirty robust lads who start working to implement what we all know needs to be done.” See! Just thirty robust lads and one far-sighted overseer and you’re on the way to a great economy!

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