Democracy is eroding in the United States? What are the causes and what should be done? Is the erosion of democracy because of political elites and specifically the reaction of the Republican Party to the 2020 election? Or does it run deeper? [ dur: 58mins. ]

Jacob S. Hacker is Stanley Resor Professor of Political Science at Yale University. He is the co-author of Let Them Eat Tweets: How the Right Rules in an Age of Extreme Inequality, American Amnesia: How the War on Government Led Us to Forget What Made America Prosper and the 2010 bestseller Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer and Turned Its Back on the Middle Class, all books co-authored with Paul Pierson.

Sigal Ben-Porath is a professor in the Literacy, Culture, and International Education Division of the Graduate School of Education at the University of Pennsylvania. She also holds a secondary appointment in the Department of Political Science. She is the author of Making Up Our Mind: What School Choice is Really About, Free Speech on Campus, Varieties of Sovereignty and Citizenship, and Citizenship under Fire: Democratic Education in Times of Conflict .

Martin Gilens is Chair of the Department of Public Policy and Professor of Public Policy, Political Science, and Social Welfare at UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs. He is the author of Affluence & Influence: Economic Inequality and Political Power in America and co-author, with Benjamin I. Page, of Democracy in America?: What Has Gone Wrong and What We Can Do about It.

Larry M. Bartels holds the May Werthan Shayne Chair of Public Policy and Social Science at Vanderbilt University. He is the Co-Director of the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions. He is the co-author of Democracy for Realists: Why Elections Do Not Produce Responsive Government (with Christopher Achen) and Unequal Democracy: The Political Economy of the New Gilded Age.

Recorded February 2022.

This program is produced by Maria Armoudian, Doug Becker, Ankine Aghassian, Melissa Chiprin and Sudd Dongre.