As the 2024 general election approaches, the University of Wyoming School of Politics, Public Affairs and International Studies is sponsoring a series of events this fall titled Challenges to Democracy. The first one is Tuesday.
Wyoming Public Radio’s Kamila Kudelska spoke with two professors at the school who are directly involved in putting on the events in Laramie as well as across the state. Andrew Garner is a professor specializing in the quality and nature of democracy, and Jean Garrison is a professor and co-director of the Malcolm Wallop Civic Engagement Program. We start off by talking about why these types of conversations are important to have right now.
Editor’s note: This story has been lightly edited for brevity and clarity.
Andrew Garner: One of the things that inspired this Challenges to Democracy series is the fact that this has been a huge year for elections and democracies around the world. We've had elections in 60 different countries, including the three largest countries in the world, of course, the U.S., India and Indonesia.
We wanted to start talking about that – democracy more generally, because elections are the heart of democracy. So this seems like a really good time to step back, examine what's going on around the world and what challenges these countries have faced.
Kamila Kudelska: What do you see as unique about having this conversation in Wyoming?
Jean Garrison: One of the unique things is that here at the University of Wyoming, we're both from the School of Politics, Public Affairs and International Studies, and we have a wide expertise on topics of democracy and comparative government and government in general. We're committed to the land grant mission to share this with the state, but also to involve our students in this.
It also gives us an opportunity to make sure that we work with teachers around the state, not just public talks to a broader audience, but also to be in the classroom.
KK: In the description of this series, it says it will dive into the “challenges to effective functioning of democratic systems.” What does that mean, effective functioning of democratic systems?
AG: That can be anything from gridlock and governments being unable to complete the basic functions of democracy, like passing legislation, government shutdowns, which we experience in the United States. It could be things such as mass protests. Political corruption is one the topics that we'll be talking about as well, a practice known as vote buying, where candidates give money directly to citizens ostensibly in exchange for their votes.
So democracy is basically where the public, through elections, choose their leaders and the leaders enact the policies that the public elected them to enact. Anything that inhibits that process, that democratic process, is going to be a challenge. It's a wide range of things that we could look at – the challenges being faced by democracy, including anything from polarization to political corruption to just helping citizens understand what democracy means.
There's a lot of literature showing that people might broadly support the concept or the phrase democracy, but that there are challenges with supporting core democratic values.
JG: We also get to highlight some of the expertise of the people who are here on campus, not just in our faculty.
For example, Tom Dougherty is a former ambassador to Burkina Faso, and he is our Millward L. Simpson visiting professor in political science. He's going to be out and about doing these things. We also are partnering with some organizations around the state, and we want to highlight the expertise and knowledge that we have in civic engagement here at the Center for a Vital Community in Sheridan [and] Heart Mountain [in] Park County.
KK: It's no secret that politics in the U.S. currently is pretty polarized. How did we get here? And is our country unique in this progression?
AG: The country is not unique. Polarization is something that is occurring around the world along many different dimensions. The U.S., of course, is mostly partisan. In other countries, it could be demographics. It could be religion. It could be a lot of different things that are dividing people. The uniqueness with America is how intense it's been or how extreme the polarization has been. That's what makes America unique.
As far as how we got here in America, that is a very long complicated answer. It's a vicious cycle, where polarization at the elite level trickles down to the public, the public becomes more divided and that creates incentives for politicians to exploit that.And it just becomes this vicious cycle that feeds on itself.
We're launching a book that we've written where there's a whole chapter that takes a broad gaze at those causes and we'll certainly be talking about this in many of our events.
JG: Some of the work we do with the Wallop Civic Engagement Program and with partnerships around the state is to think about how we have civil dialogues on tough issues.
We're a country that's founded on problem solving. Actually, we have quite that tradition here in the state of Wyoming. That's what I anticipate as part of the discussion. We want to bring Wyomingites into this discussion because that's how you create and maintain a healthy democracy, is by the dialogues we have on shared problems.
KK: So that's the hope with these events, is that we can get Wyomingites involved.
JG: Oh yeah, absolutely. Come to Laramie to one of the programs, come out to Park County. At the end of September, we have one Oct. 1 in Sheridan and then one in October in Casper up on the campus there. Then we have one at the Laramie County Public Library in November.
KK: How can we get out of polarization?
JG: Being involved. I really think that being involved with a group of people in the same room, and it's about relationship building. I mean, we know our neighbors, we interact with people, and this is much more important than interaction on social media and other things, which actually reinforce some of these trends that we think are destructive to democratic practices.
So I'd say come out, get involved and of course get involved in just getting our youth involved in their communities and understanding how the system works.
KK: Out of the lectures in this series, which one are you guys most excited about and why?
JG: I'm really excited about the one that's coming up on Sept. 10, because that brings together a former senator from Mississippi and two legislators here from the state of Wyoming – Eric Barlow (R-Gillette) and Chris Rothfuss (D-Laramie). That's just one of those places where this can be a fantastic discussion. I'm particularly excited about it because it is actually co-sponsored by a UW student organization called Bridge UWYO.
AG: It's a student organization that is designed to bring people together and have conversations about politics and ways that can depolarize the country and depolarize politics.
Because so much of the discussion involves polarization and democracy in America, I'm actually really excited about some of the ones that focus on the crisis of democracy and challenges democracy abroad, because of some of the work that our faculty have done. We're bringing an expert from Indonesia to talk about those challenges in different regions.
Ambassador Dougherty, for example, is also going to talk about the lack of, or the challenges to, democracy in Africa, as well. I think that can really help frame the discussions about democracy and challenges to it in America by understanding what common challenges countries around the world face and what are the unique things that each country faces.
More information about UW’s Challenges to Democracy series can be found here.
