Political scientists launch the Berkeley Center for American Democracy

October 8, 2024
by Alexander Rony

Americans are feeling pessimistic about their political landscape. Polls show that US voters’ top concern involves political extremism and threats to democracy, eclipsing perennial issues like immigration and the economy. Last year, the Pew Research Center reported that 77 percent of adults expect the country will be more divided in 2050.

In response to this national priority, UC Berkeley has launched a new center to foster research into polarization, inequality, and extremism. The Berkeley Center for American Democracy (BCAD) provides a home base for political scientists seeking practical solutions to these challenges—and collecting the data needed to prove them out.

“What sets Berkeley apart is that we're not just doing research for its own sake,” said David Broockman, a political science professor and the center’s director. “It’s research that can be used—and is being used—to make American democracy better. Our faculty are producing rigorous, actionable research that is moving the needle on what practitioners are doing in the real world.”

Broockman is no stranger to impactful research. A 2024 Carnegie Fellow, he proved the benefits of deep canvassing, where door-to-door canvassers ditch the talking points and change minds through meaningful conversations. By relentlessly questioning prior scholarship, Broockman has also upended the conventional wisdom around polarized politicians and quantified complex topics like the impact of partisan media viewing habits.

Broockman is preparing to release two ambitious projects with support from BCAD’s graduate, predoctoral, and postdoctoral students — a group Broockman calls “a real force multiplier on research.” The first, a collaboration with the U.S. House of Representatives, will reveal in unprecedented detail the differences between the feedback politicians receive and what their constituents really think. The second dives deep into the under-examined impact of primary elections on polarization.

“We can’t take those kinds of big bets without a place like BCAD,” said Broockman. “It takes many thousands of dollars — sometimes hundreds of thousands of dollars — to not just ask the big questions but answer them well.”

BCAD takes interesting ideas from leading scholars and public advocates and puts them through rigorous testing, bringing data to the public conversation to understand what really works during elections. The center focuses on three programmatic areas: polarization and threats to democracy, representation and accountability, and criminal justice and policing. Innovative policies to tackle these issues receive thorough vetting by the center’s researchers.

The university has prioritized the center, committing to a challenge match of $500,000 if the center raises the same amount by July 1, 2027. The BCAD team is well on its way to the goal, in large part due to the generous support and partnership of alum Ron Epstein.

An urgent mission to strengthen society’s bonds

Epstein is the managing partner of EpicenterLaw, PC, a law firm that assists inventors in getting paid for the use of their inventions. A 1989 Berkeley Law grad, he turned to political philosophy later in life. As he considered how he could make an impact through philanthropy, Epstein observed that the growing dysfunction of our democracy was the biggest challenge to getting things done and that the increasing polarization of the American electorate caused this dysfunction.

While many people were studying how to tone down polarization, Epstein decided that the most pressing issue for research was to address the problem from the other end: to increase social cohesion, or bonds, between Americans so they could better withstand friction caused by disagreement. Without a common identity and sense of solidarity, people have a difficult time accepting the input of those with whom they disagree.

“What’s the difference between a society and a population?” asked Epstein. “A society is where people have rights and responsibilities to each other. A population is just a group of people who live near each other.”

Epstein points to countries that have frayed and dissolved in recent decades, from the Soviet Union to Sudan to Vietnam to Yugoslavia. These schisms were painful, and millions of people suffered. Epstein wants the United States to avoid the same fate.

Yet, when he began reviewing the existing research, Epstein was disappointed. Most papers sought to explain why polarization has risen in recent years, blaming individual factors and modern trends like social media algorithms. To Epstein’s eyes, polarization is not a new phenomenon; it has been a normal state for human societies driven by a natural and never-ending competition between groups within a society for resources, power, and prestige. Epstein craved new ideas on how to overcome polarization.

When Epstein met Broockman, he felt “an instant synergy” around their shared interests. Epstein was excited to discover that BCAD researchers were studying which factors promote social cohesion and can be deployed at scale. He found one idea advanced by BCAD faculty particularly compelling: civilian national service programs that unite citizens as they tackle tough challenges, such as disaster response, inequality, or poverty.

A man wearing a blue, buttoned shirt smiles toward the camera

Professor David Broockman

We’re not the kind of place where we just reaffirm conventional wisdom and fiddle around the edges.
David Broockman

A model to unify a divided society

“The thesis is that, during wartime, people think about sacrifice and come together for the good of their community,” said Professor Cecilia Hyunjung Mo. “How do we elicit greater social cohesion and civic passion in the absence of war? The philosopher Wlliam James thought civilian national service could be the ‘moral equivalent of war,’ where such programs could rally the country to greatness and a shared sense of purpose.”

Mo partners with service organizations to evaluate their programs. For example, she found that Teach For America alums are more likely to vote and have a better understanding of the structural disadvantages that lead to poverty. Thus, national service could combat political apathy by engaging young people in a positive and productive manner.

The idea for a national service requirement akin to the military draft has gained momentum in recent years. Key political, philanthropic, military, and business leaders in both the Democratic and Republican parties have endorsed the idea — many highlighting patriotism and community spirit. Mo’s findings help these advocates make their case in Congress.

“The value of having a center like BCAD is that it brings individuals together to share their findings and have conversations that can answer important questions and advance research,” said Mo. “It's exciting when the research can actually help those at the front lines who are trying to improve the lives of individuals.”

As a public university, UC Berkeley embraces this notion of research for the greater good — and the need to actively question established narratives.

“Oftentimes, academics are participating in a larger debate that is happening in the public, on television and the internet,” said Omar Wasow, another BCAD professor. “Good evidence on behalf of one claim can bolster an argument. If we can help inform the public to have a better sense of what is accurate, then hopefully everything from public opinion to policy can move closer to improving people’s wellbeing.”

Wasow studies how social movements can shape public opinion and elections. In May 2020, days before George Floyd’s death, he published a landmark study showing that protester-initiated violence often resulted in a political backlash during the 1960s, contrasted with the sympathies generated by nonviolent protesters who faced state repression. Activists, politicians, and reporters seized on the paper’s findings to debate its lessons for the racial justice uprising that soon enveloped the country.

A child of civil rights activists, Wasow wanted to determine why the salience of law-and-order messages halted the Civil Rights Movement’s victories. While Wasow has policy preferences, he doesn’t allow those to steer his research findings.

“Part of the gift of being at a place like UC Berkeley with an institution like BCAD is that there is a real openness to being guided by evidence, not by ideology,” said Wasow.

Broockman notes BCAD helps recruit faculty experts like Wasow, who joined UC Berkeley in 2022, by promising research funding and access to top graduate students. These world-renowned thinkers uphold the Charles and Louise Travers Department of Political Science’s top rankings while producing paradigm-shifting papers.

“We’re not the kind of place where we just reaffirm conventional wisdom and fiddle around the edges,” said Broockman.

A woman wearing a thin necklace smiles at the camera

Cecilia Hyunjung Mo

Part of the gift of being at a place like UC Berkeley with an institution like BCAD is that there is a real openness to being guided by evidence, not by ideology.
Omar Wasow

The impact of graduate student support

BCAD research on social cohesion is gaining traction. Recently, Stanford's Strengthening Democracy Challenge recognized a proposal by graduate student Alia Braley and Professor Gabriel Lenz as the most effective at reducing polarization and strengthening democratic attitudes in its mega-study.

In our polarized country, people who strongly support one party tend to assume their political counterparts are willing to break democratic norms to gain power. As a result, some partisans support preemptively engaging in anti-democratic actions. The team led by Braley and Lenz found that correcting partisans’ overestimates of their opponents’ anti-democratic views was a simple way to counter this self-reinforcing cycle. Braley is now exploring further interventions using chatbots.

Many of BCAD’s most innovative ideas emerge from the center’s graduate students, predoctoral fellows, and postdoctoral scholars who assist with research that turns into larger bodies of work in addition to working on their own.

With help from the center’s predoctoral students, Lenz is also writing a book on the origins of the U.S. criminal justice system’s failures to stem police violence, high incarceration rates, and interpersonal violence. It’s a heavy topic, but Lenz evokes a sense of measured optimism about our era and our ability to influence its direction. Lenz sees BCAD contributing to the marketplace of ideas, where underlying concepts help form voters’ subconscious values.

Ideas are more likely to be put into practice when they have been thoroughly tested against the evidence. For new and consequential ideas, that often entails gathering data that is not yet available. Lenz, for example, collected over a century of data on crime and violence in the United States for an upcoming book — a herculean task only possible with BCAD support. This data allowed him to understand the deep roots of the country’s criminal justice challenges.

Lenz noted how academic research shifted from reinforcing racist beliefs through eugenics to debunking them. These intellectual arguments reverberated outward from American academic institutions to the rest of the world, fundamentally altering social behaviors and public opinion.

“We almost forget how powerful ideas are,” said Lenz. “They become part of our culture; they shape how we think about everything, and we don't even realize they're there. But many ideas that have improved society have come from good academic research.”

“Our role is to get better ideas out there to make society more likely to thrive,” continued Lenz. “The hope is that when politicians and activists have an opportunity to make real reforms, the better ideas are there, ready to go. We can get these ideas out there in the real world, and interested stakeholders can pick them up and run with them.”

To support solutions that bolster American democracy and help BCAD meet its $500,000 challenge match, visit the BCAD endowment page. Please contact Berkeley Social Sciences at socialsciences@berkeley.edu with any questions.

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A person inserts their ballot into a drop box (photo by Hulda Nelson).

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