America in One Room: Pennsylvania, a Deliberative Poll coordinated by global problem-solving organization Helena and the Deliberative Democracy Lab at Stanford University, today announced results revealing what Pennsylvania voters really think about pressing local and national issues ranging from the state of democracy and elections, to immigration, housing, and foreign affairs.

The landmark Deliberative Polling® experiment gathered a representative sample of 175 registered Pennsylvania voters for a weekend of civic engagement and civil discourse in Philadelphia. The participants answered a questionnaire about 65 policy proposals across domestic and foreign issue areas before and after engaging in deep deliberation on the topics. The deliberations included small group discussions, question-and-answer sessions with bipartisan and nonpartisan issue experts, and plenary sessions featuring leading state and federal policymakers and experts from both sides of the aisle.

The Deliberative Polling® process at America in One Room goes beyond snapshot opinions to reveal an authentic will of the people,  giving policymakers access to data about what voters actually think when given balanced information and the opportunity for meaningful discussion. Policymakers who engage with the data can craft policies that truly reflect what constituents want based on an understanding of the tradeoffs and stakes involved. At America in One Room: Pennsylvania, Speaker of the House Joanna McClinton committed to leveraging data related to voting proposals as she works to advance election reform policy in the commonwealth.

“America in One Room is designed to help policymakers understand the true ‘will of the people,’ said Henry Elkus, founder and CEO of Helena, a global problem-solving organization and co-creator of America in One Room. “What happened over four days in Pennsylvania was a deeply practical demonstration of democracy in action, both for Pennsylvania and national legislators to implement policy. Helena will continue working toward a future where deliberative democracy can play a bigger and bigger role in shaping decision-making in the US and abroad.”
 

Ayça Alemdaroğlu is a Research Scholar at the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL),  Associate Director of the center’s Program on Turkey, and a Global Fellow at the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO). Her research focuses on understanding authoritarian regimes and the opposition movements against them, particularly in Turkey.

What inspired you to pursue research in your current field, and how did your journey lead you to CDDRL?

During my childhood in Turkey, I grew up discussing political issues at dinner, as my family was always very engaged in politics. My mother founded two leftist political parties, while my father ran in numerous elections and served as the mayor in Ankara for five years. I then studied political science and sociology in school, focusing on cultural and class issues while doing my PhD at Cambridge.

I eventually came to CDDRL because I appreciated its interdisciplinary emphasis and its focus on current societal issues. My early research focused on how political regimes shape people as individuals through policies and institutions. I was especially curious about eugenics efforts intended to build up a healthier nation, though it often manifested negatively through policies like sterilization.

During my PhD, I began focusing on youth and how social hierarchies, regimes, and inequalities affected their identities. At the time, there was a lot of discourse about the threat of a “dangerous” Muslim youth, but these young people were not monolithic. Often, they were reacting to concerns like finding jobs in a way that any youth group would, meaning their behavior was less correlated to their religious and cultural background than people portrayed it.

Based on your research, how do regimes affect people’s view of their own identities and political factionalism?

I disagree with the cultural primordialist approach that inherent differences are largely unchanging between peoples. Instead, I believe that the way narratives about identities are articulated in politics can strongly exacerbate differences.

For example, the Kurds in Turkey do have distinctive qualities, such as their language and ethnic group. However, what really makes them different is the unfair historical processes that Kurds have been subjected to.
 

Conventional indicators may suggest that the United States is not susceptible to democratic backsliding, given its levels of wealth and the longevity of its political institutions. Yet a different picture emerges when considering assaults on the law following President Donald Trump’s return to power. In a recent CDDRL seminar. U.C. Berkeley Distinguished Professor of Political Science Paul Pierson examined the institutional roots of this trend and how it was shaped by the current moment of polarization and rising inequality.

Deepening partisanship, Pierson explained, has eroded the checks and balances embedded in U.S. institutions. Some assert that polarization is not abnormal in our country’s history, but Pierson believes that the state of polarization today poses unprecedented challenges. Politics has been increasingly nationalized, with state elections serving as a virtual training ground for ambitious politicians. Local media have declined in influence relative to nationally oriented partisan news outlets like Fox News. State issues are blending into national politics. These trends have undermined the system of federalism that historically kept the national government in check. 

As politicians have become more concerned about teamsmanship and partisan loyalty, the path of least resistance for them has been to prop up their party leaders even at the expense of democratic processes. In the past, partisan politicians could be trusted to keep their leaders in check should they behave undemocratically, regardless of how popular they may be. A case in point is President Richard Nixon, who had been reelected in a landslide in 1972, but was later held accountable by members of his own party once his transgressions were revealed in the wake of the Watergate scandal. The same cannot be said for the contemporary Trump era, as politicians appear reluctant to hold their president accountable due to partisan considerations. This trend has undermined horizontal oversight and, arguably, vertical accountability. On the latter, political elites have failed to adequately press citizens to hold the current administration accountable. 

The U.S. remains an extreme outlier in its growing wealth inequality, as mirrored by the ascendancy of ultra-wealthy plutocrats. Campaign funding has been increasingly dominated by the ultra-wealthy, many of whom supported the Republican ticket in the 2024 election. That said, these individuals’ influence is not unlimited, considering that the president has leverage over them and has shown willingness to threaten their interests should they behave disloyally. 

Despite blatant warning signs, there are some reasons to temper the alarmism surrounding the prospects of democratic backsliding in the United States. President Trump is not overwhelmingly popular, and aspects of his agenda will unlikely garner support from most of the electorate. Furthermore, whether his legacy will endure following the end of his presidency is unclear. Indeed, the vulnerabilities of U.S. political institutions remain salient. But plenty of room remains for resisting anti-democratic transgressions, given the non-partisan orientation of the judiciary and the small size of the Republican majority in the U.S. House of Representatives.

The challenges confronting U.S. political institutions in the face of hyperpolarization and deepening wealth inequality demonstrate that democracy should not be taken for granted and that more efforts are needed to protect and strengthen democratic accountability.

A recording of Professor Pierson's talk can be viewed below:

As part of the CDDRL research seminar series, Clémence Tricaud, Assistant Professor of Economics at the UCLA Anderson School of Management, delivered a talk on the evolving nature of electoral competition in the United States. Her presentation explored a question of growing political and public interest: Are U.S. elections truly getting closer — and if so, why does that matter?

To begin answering this, Tricaud emphasized the need to clarify what we mean by “closeness.” She distinguished between vote margins, which measure how much one candidate wins over another in a specific race, and seat margins, which reflect the difference in how many seats each party wins in a legislative body like the House, Senate, or Electoral College.

These margins have real consequences. Seat margins affect which party holds power, the likelihood of legislative gridlock, and how legitimate elected officials are perceived to be. Vote margins, on the other hand, influence how informed and motivated voters are, especially if they feel their votes can truly make a difference.

Using a vast dataset covering over 150 years of U.S. federal elections, Tricaud and her coauthors documented a striking trend: while seat margins have narrowed significantly over the past 60 years, vote margins have remained relatively stable. In fact, there has been a decline in the number of extremely close races at the district level. This raises a puzzling question — how can national elections appear tighter if the races themselves are not actually becoming more competitive?

To address this, Tricaud presented a novel theoretical model of electoral competition. Building on the classic “Downsian framework,” where candidates try to appeal to the median voter, her model incorporates multiple districts, national and local shifts in voter preferences, and differences in whether candidates tailor their platforms to local constituencies or follow national party lines.

The model explains that two major changes have reshaped U.S. elections:

1. Better Information: Thanks to advances in polling and data analytics, candidates now have a much clearer sense of where voters stand.
2. Nationalization of Politics: Candidates increasingly campaign on unified national platforms rather than platforms tailored to respond to local issues.
    

Together, these changes help parties target just enough competitive districts to win control, even if many races remain lopsided. This leads to narrower seat margins without narrower vote margins.

Tricaud also examined campaign finance data to show how this shift affects political behavior. Since only a small number of districts are truly competitive, campaign resources are increasingly concentrated in these few swing districts. This geographic targeting could have troubling implications: growing political attention to a handful of places, rising regional inequalities, and a sense of disconnection between local voters and national outcomes.

In sum, Clémence Tricaud’s presentation provided a fresh lens on how modern campaigns operate and why elections may feel closer than they truly are. By disentangling seat and vote margins, her work sheds light on the evolving dynamics of U.S. democracy — and the challenges that come with it.

Democracies face the challenge of requiring competent yet representative leaders in order to effectively embody the will of the people. More than a hundred countries have electoral quotas for women and minorities to ensure representation; however, such efforts are being threatened globally under the guise of critiques alleging that quotas undermine meritocracy and candidate quality. 

To assess this assumption, Stanford Assistant Professor of Political Science Soledad Prillaman examined in a CDDRL research seminar the relationship between candidate quality and electoral affirmative action. Her co-authored study relies on data from India, where the largest of such policies is enacted, and local Gram Panchayat positions are proportionally reserved for women and lower caste individuals on a rotating basis. Using population, census, and survey data, Prillaman compared the quality of politicians by looking at their level of education and their relative education performance. 

Her findings reveal that politicians in general are positively selected, meaning that they are much better educated than the constituents they serve. While quota-elected politicians had lower average education levels than non-quota politicians, they were more positively selected — they were drawn from a higher tail of their group’s education distribution. This means that quota politicians are relatively better educated than non-quota politicians, suggesting that they are of no worse quality and maybe even higher quality.

To further bolster this claim — that quota politicians may be of higher quality than non-quota politicians — Prillaman shows that voters hold quota politicians to a higher education standard than non-quota politicians and that the lower levels of average education are largely due to inequality in access to education. 

The evidence provides little justification for the assumption that electoral quotas undermine meritocracy. Instead, inequality of opportunity underlies differences in levels of education, and overall quality can be higher because voters tend to hold minority candidates to higher standards. As affirmative action policies are under challenge across the globe, it is critical to remember that improving minority representation in our democratic systems does not require sacrificing candidate quality.