Strengthening Democracy @ MIT Political Science

In the U.S. and around the world, democracy is under threat. Anti-democratic attitudes have become more prevalent, partisan polarization is growing, misinformation is omnipresent, and election integrity is called into question. 

With this backdrop, MIT Political Science—a department with an international reputation for rigorous, nonpartisan research—is launching a Strengthening Democracy Initiative. 

Our department has a long history of generating important research on many facets of the democratic process, including voting behavior, election administration, information and misinformation, public opinion and political responsiveness, and lobbying. The goals of the Strengthening Democracy Initiative are to place these various research programs under one funding umbrella;  to foster synergies among our various research projects and between political science and other disciplines; to create research and educational opportunities for undergraduate, graduate, and post-doctoral students; and to mark MIT as the country’s leading center for rigorous, evidence-based analysis of democratic resiliency.

The initiative is built upon three research pillars which reflect the department’s existing strengths: election science and administration; public opinion and misinformation; and political participation. Each pillar is described below, including links to active research projects. The initiative’s flexible structure will allow for new pillars to be added, including international security and studying new challenges to democratic processes that might emerge in the future.

Election Science and Administration

Democracies cannot function without well-run elections and popular trust in those elections. Even within the U.S., let alone other countries, there is substantial variation in how people register to vote; whether they vote in person, by mail, or online; how polling places are managed; how votes are counted and validated; and how results are communicated to citizens. 

The MIT Election Data and Science Lab is the country’s leading center for the collection and analysis of election-related data, and the dissemination of electoral best practices. You can read more about the lab, and its director Prof. Charles Stewart, here.

Public Opinion and Misinformation

In political science, public opinion is a rich area of inquiry that includes experimental studies of public responses to misinformation and analyses of government responses to mass public attitudes. Our faculty employ survey and experimental methods to study taxation and health policy, state and local politics, and strategies for countering political rumors in the U.S. and abroad. 

The department’s longstanding Political Experiments Research Lab, led by Prof. Adam Berinsky, allows students and faculty to conduct experiments on campus and over the internet using state-of-the-art software and cutting-edge methodologies. You can read more here.

Other faculty working in this pillar include Prof. Andrea Campbell, whose recent book Taxation and Resentment: Race, Party, and Class in American Tax Attitudes just received a best book award from the American Political Science Association; and Prof. Devin Caughey, one of the country’s leading scholars of pubic opinion and survey methods at the U.S. state level.

Political Participation in Democracies

Examples of the department’s research on the ways in which societies participate in democracies include studies of the impact of the criminal justice system on voting (see Prof. Ariel White’s research page), methods for creating citizen assemblies (see this story on Prof. Bailey Flanigan’s work), enhancing trust in online political and civic conversations (see this story on Prof. Lily Tsai’s GovLab), the democratic politics of governing ethnically and racially diverse societies (see Prof. Evan Lieberman’s webpage), and Prof. In Song Kim’s discipline-leading database, LobbyView – a comprehensive, continually updated database of more than 1 million lobbying reports, available to the public for research and analysis.

How to support our work

Your generous donation to the Strengthening Democracy Fund will provide critical resources to sustain our research.