Democracies worldwide are facing a crisis of trust due to a lack of collaboration between citizens and their representatives, as well as growing civic disengagement. This episode of PBS’s new docuseries, “A Brief History of the Future,” delves deep into this issue AND a potential solution: Deliberative Democracy.

Alice Siu, senior research scholar at CDDRL and Associate Director of the Deliberative Democracy Lab, sheds light on how Deliberative Polling has been used to bridge divides among participants and what the future of democracy could look like when empathetic conversations take center stage.

How does climate change shape citizens’ views of political leaders and institutions? At a CDDRL seminar series talk, Amanda Kennard, assistant professor of political science at Stanford University, and Brandon de la Cuesta, a postdoctoral fellow at CDDRL and the Center on Food Security and the Environment (FSE), explored the effects of climate shocks on political trust, employing innovative machine learning methods.

To illustrate the link between the environment and human social systems, Kennard began with an anecdote about street vendors in Liberia. She noted that research has found that the single largest factor influencing vendors’ decision to join the formal economy is precipitation. From crop cultivation to the uptake of government programs, climate sets the stage for all other systems.

The existing literature on the political effects of climate links extreme temperatures to civil conflict and flood events to anti-incumbent voting. However, it has yet to fully explore the effect of climate on state actors or state structures.

Kennard’s and de la Cuesta’s paper focuses on Sub-Saharan Africa, characterized by a diverse set of political, economic, and demographic circumstances.

The authors studied public confidence in heads of state, local leaders, opposition parties, the police, the courts, and the bureaucracy. In the face of the changing climate, the authors are seeking to understand how people perceive state performance, corruption, and democracy.

At the start of this research project, the presenters explained, the available data lacked the spatial and temporal resolution necessary for credible subnational analysis. Accordingly, Kennard, de la Cuesta, and their team worked to create a machine learning algorithm that could harmonize survey questions across survey rounds and countries. These geolocated surveys were then paired with remote sensing data to create a complete picture of the association between climate change and public opinion in a given place and time.

Kennard and de la Cuesta used the data to study the effects of environmental shocks on relevant economic, social, and political outcomes. In terms of economic and social well-being, the team found that temperature shocks led to meaningful increases in dependence on informal networks for borrowing and remittances and to a decrease in interpersonal trust.

On the political side, they found that climate change is associated with statistically significant (albeit small) negative effects on public confidence in local bodies, the president, and the ruling party, along with some state institutions like the police and court system. While the effects of climate change on satisfaction with democracy were directionally consistent, they were, for the most part, not statistically significant.

Several countries in Africa have already seen devastating temperature changes of two degrees Celsius, with another two likely to come before 2050. This change is pushing many people out of the so-called human habitable zone, so the current effects on measures of economic, social, and political distress are only likely to increase going forward.

Kennard and de la Cuesta indicated that they hope to make the machine learning infrastructure they have developed scalable and open source, thereby allowing researchers to access specific geolocated survey responses. 

Francis Fukuyama, Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellow at Stanford University’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, is leading an effort to protect and reform the U.S. public service. He has organized a Working Group to Protect and Reform the Civil Service in response to plans elaborated in the Heritage Foundation's Project 2025 to strip civil service protections from all federal workers and replace them with political loyalists in a future administration.

The Need for Reform

A group of nonpartisan experts and scholars recently convened at the National Academy of Public Administration to discuss civil service reform. This discussion is critical in light of plans to revive "Schedule F," an executive order that would reclassify many federal positions, remove civil service protections, and allow political loyalty to dictate hiring and firing.

A Better Vision

The Working Group proposes an alternative vision for a more effective federal workforce based on five principles:

1. Agility: Modernizing outdated systems to adapt to technological, economic, and social changes.

2. Accountability: Ensuring federal employees remain loyal to the Constitution while being responsive to elected officials.

3. Collaboration: Leveraging skills and knowledge across various sectors, including private industries and universities.

4. Outcomes: Focusing on producing real-world results valued by the public and simplifying government procedures.

5. Capacity: Providing federal workers with the skills, training, and education needed to fulfill their missions effectively.
    

Risks of “Schedule F”

Reviving “Schedule F” would undermine these goals, promoting politicization over merit-based results. Government workers might avoid necessary risks and innovation if judged on political loyalty. The Working Group plans to detail further how the federal government can evolve to meet these challenges and become a 21st-century government.

Fukuyama and the Working Group call for support in protecting and reforming the civil service to ensure a competent, non-partisan, and effective federal workforce. Click here to read their statement in full.

How have pre-communist social structures persisted in Russia, and why does this persistence matter for understanding post-communist political regime trajectories? In a CDDRL seminar series talk, Tomila Lankina, Professor of International Relations at the London School of Economics and Political Science, discussed her award-winning book, The Estate Origins of Democracy in Russia: From Imperial Bourgeoisie to Post-Communist Middle Class (Cambridge University Press, 2022). The book challenges the assumption that the 1917 revolution succeeded in leveling old estate hierarchies, arguing that these social structures persist today. 

While analyses of the bourgeoisie factor heavily into the understanding of many societies, the relevance of this group is frequently left out when discussing countries like Russia and China, on the assumption that they had been completely leveled by revolutionary ruptures. Lankina’s book critically assesses this assumption. It adopts a uniquely interdisciplinary approach, utilizing archives, subnational comparisons, statistical analysis, social network analysis, and interviews with descendants. 

In characterizing the social structure of pre-communist Russia, Lankina noted that peasants comprised 77 percent of the population on the eve of the revolution. Other social groups, which she refers to as “educated estates” because of their higher literacy rates compared to those of peasants, included the urban meshchane, the merchants, nobility, and clergy. Out of the educated estates, meshchane constituted the majority, or 10 percent of the population. While their homes appeared rather modest, members of the meshchane exhibited characteristics of the urban bourgeoisie, and even their dress differed from that of the rural estate. They enjoyed much higher literacy rates than peasants.

Lankina explained that the comparatively high status of these “educated estates” — the meshchane, merchants, nobility, and clergy — persisted even after the Bolshevik revolution. To illustrate this, she highlighted partially intact social circles of the highly networked merchants, nobles, and tsarist-inspired soviet schools. Letters from the Samara province indicate that while many high-status citizens emigrated, there were matriarchs who stayed, spreading the tsarist-era values to their children and grandchildren after the revolution. Regardless of whether this middle class was endowed with democratic values, Lankina maintained that they passed human and entrepreneurial capital onto their offspring.

How did these estates endure? While the literature clearly articulates what happened to the ruling classes following the revolution, less time has been spent understanding what happened to the educated, middle-class segments of society. How did they adapt? 

Lankina proposed three different routes. First is the “pop-up brigade,” wherein young, educated individuals traveled around promoting education to peasant workers, instantly employable and absorbable into a new society. Then there is the “museum society,” where prominent nobles and merchants joined insular cultural institutions like archives, provincial libraries, and museums. Finally, “the organization man” denotes professionally skilled individuals, such as medics, who retained their positions following the revolution as the social hierarchy got absorbed into newer organizations. 

To illustrate the significance of this persistence in social structures and values, Lankina, drawing on her co-authored paper with Alexander Libman (APSR 2021), indicated that meshchane concentration (as opposed to more recent educational indices) is a better predictor of a post-communist region’s openness, at least in the 1990s.