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During the First World War, my grandfather, Julius Seligsohn, served as an officer in the German army and was honored by the German government for his service. During the Second World War, he was murdered in a concentration camp by the German government. My father, still a boy when he last saw his father, fled to America with his sister, their mother, and some painfully earned lessons about the world.
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Two lessons, both of which my father taught his children, stand out. The first is that life in a free society bounded by sustainable political institutions is better than any alternative. Individual political battles might be lost along the way — some elections or policy debates, for example — but the institutions protecting freedom and political equality are essential to human happiness.
The second lesson is that nothing is guaranteed. If we cherish our freedom, we must be prepared to protect the institutions upon which that freedom depends. Everything we value — all of it — can dissolve, and it may be too late by the time we recognize what’s happening.
Millions of Americans, including many working at nonprofits and foundations, recognize that these lessons are relevant to the country today. Countless pro-democracy organizations and programs have launched during the past eight years, accompanied by a surge in philanthropic funding. Between 2012 and 2020, grants to pro-democracy efforts more than tripled.
But how do foundations know if they’re investing in promising ideas? And how do they know if these initiatives are working? The short answer is, they don’t.
Grant makers lack the necessary evidence about which pro-democracy efforts work and which don’t and haven’t invested adequately in the research needed to gather that evidence. There are plenty of good ideas, but deciding how to invest time, money, and political capital requires a deep understanding of what’s likely to work and when. The stakes are too high to gamble on gut feelings.
The Right Design
For every program or policy meant to protect democracy, dozens of questions need to be answered about how best to design and execute them. For example, many proponents of democracy reform feel each district of the House of Representatives should have more than one member, believing it could reduce polarization. But switching to such a system involves deciding which voting method — block voting, ranked choice, proportional representation — to use and how many members each district should have.
Unfortunately, politics doesn’t allow for endless revisions. If a policy doesn’t work well when it hits the ground, there may not be another opportunity to tweak it. Indeed, enacting a change could spark backlash that will not only lead to repeal in one locality or state but also make it harder to pass any version of it elsewhere. For example, a vote counting error in a ranked-choice election for school board in Oakland, Calif., has been used to make the case for repealing ranked-choice voting in Alaska.
None of this means grant makers should wait for perfect evidence, but it does mean they should prioritize evidence-gathering.
Pro-democracy efforts will also inevitably encounter opposition from those who benefit from conflict and disinformation. A seemingly promising idea may lack resilience when confronted with antagonistic forces, while any idea showing real results will face pushback. Without a sophisticated understanding of the likely political effects of proposed programs and a research-based understanding of how events could play out, grant makers have few tools for fighting back.
What to Do
Philanthropy needs to help build an evidence base, and how that’s done matters a great deal. Here’s what philanthropy’s pro-democracy evidence strategy should look like.
Research the solutions — not just the problems. Much of the current research supported by democracy grant makers consists of surveys documenting the severity of the problem. This descriptive research is helpful. When trying to eradicate a disease, for example, knowing how many people a pathogen has infected is a starting point.
But research also needs to reveal the nature of that pathogen and the agents that might prevent its spread. That requires studies to guide drug development and clinical trials to test the efficacy of promising candidates. The democracy movement needs the equivalent research to understand both the challenges it faces and the solutions most likely to help.
Philanthropy, for example, is funding a range of pro-democracy efforts to reduce partisan hostility, including messaging campaigns by trusted leaders; structural changes, such as open primaries, to reduce the role of political parties; facilitated discussions between people from different political groups; and civic initiatives meant to bring diverse groups together, such as youth sports leagues. Unfortunately, there is little high-quality research showing which of these approaches works and how they might be improved.
Mobilize academic researchers. Universities are full of talented political scientists, sociologists, economists, data scientists, and others who are profoundly concerned about the future of democracy. But their research doesn’t focus on the questions that matter most to the democracy movement — in part because they aren’t connected to the practitioners who could help them understand what those questions are.
For example, many advocacy organizations believe their success depends on engaging Americans with diverse political views in pro-democracy efforts. But they don’t know the answer to two critical questions: Can citizens with divergent views cooperate in defense of democracy? If so, how can philanthropy facilitate such cooperation? Research could help answer these questions. Academics, in turn, would gladly take up the challenge if they had sufficient funding.
Public Agenda, the nonprofit research-to-action organization that I lead, tested this hypothesis by offering grants to scholars in the first cycle of our Democracy Renewal Project. The project’s goal is to fund research on promising approaches to bolster American democracy, translate the findings, then share them with advocates, policymakers, grant makers, and journalists. The first cycle focused on research to identify programs that would improve trust in and access to elections. We received five times the number of proposals we could support.
Efforts to involve academic researchers should include open calls for proposals. If foundations simply give resources to the academics they already know, they’ll ignore a vast and diverse talent pool of emerging scholars and will likely reinforce the perspectives of well-established professionals, who tend to be older, whiter, and more male-dominated than the research community as a whole.
Ensure research is accessible. Most research is never put into practice. That’s not because policymakers and program officers don’t care about evidence. They just won’t seek out research expressed in dense technical language hidden away in academic journals.
Evidence gets used when someone goes to the trouble to connect democracy experts with researchers, and ensures that research is communicated in terms relevant to their work. Building those connections also helps researchers understand what matters — and why — to those working on the ground, which, in turn, enables better, more relevant future studies.
One promising example is the Carnegie Corporation’s Andrew Carnegie Fellows Program, which announced last week that it will provide funding to 28 scholars to research the causes of polarization and how to address it. This effort could significantly increase understanding of the problem but won’t realize its potential unless investments are made in the practical use of the research. That means funding efforts to distill and describe results in plain language, and bringing researchers and experts together to discuss the findings and how to apply them in the real world.
This may sound too long-term to grant makers who believe the nation’s democracy hangs in the balance in 2024. They can only spend so much money, and don’t want to divert any of it away from immediate needs during this election year.
Remember, however, that many people said the same thing in 2020. It’s clear in retrospect that neither outcome of that election could have solved the problems facing our democracy. The same is true today. If the strategy boils down to barely keeping democracy alive every four years, we’re destined to fail.
Moreover, the discussion shouldn’t be about dividing the existing pie. Grant makers who recognize both the risks to democracy and the possibility of democratic renewal should commit to spending a lot more than the typical single-digit percentages of their endowments. For foundation leaders who believe the country’s democracy may soon be gone, what’s the point of preserving an endowment they may no longer be able to spend it as they see fit? Authoritarian states don’t permit values-driven philanthropy.
Given the real risks to American democracy, there is no substitute for making both short- and long-term investments. Grant makers just need the research to show those investments are producing the best possible results.
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