Strengthening Democracy Challenge
Strengthening Democracy
Challenge
News
5/20/25
Megastudy on reducing antidemocratic attitudes named runner-up for International Communication Association’s Best Article of the Year
5/1/25
Megastudy on reducing antidemocratic attitudes named runner-up for Behavioral Science and Policy Association Best Paper Award
10/17/24
Strengthening American democracy through collaboration, cooperation, and crowdsourcing.
American democracy is under threat. Many Americans are willing to compromise on democratic principles for partisan goals. Some are even willing to resort to violence to help their side win. Extreme dislike for the other side has grown significantly in recent decades, and may also erode commitments to democratic principles.
Anti-democratic attitudes, support for partisan violence, and extreme levels of partisan animosity have troubling consequences for democracy. We crowdsourced interventions to reduce one, two, or all three of these outcomes. From 252 submissions, 25 interventions were selected and tested in a massive, online experiment.
What
is the Strengthening Democracy Challenge?
The challenge is a joint project between academics and practitioners to crowdsource and identify short, scalable interventions to reduce anti-democratic attitudes, support for partisan violence, and/or partisan animosity among Americans.
Why
did people submit an idea?
Submitters joined a collective effort to identify interventions that help address pressing problems in today’s political world. Contributors also had the opportunity to win prizes and be co-authors in published research.
How
did people participate?
We designed the submission process for this challenge to be accessible to all - whether people had designed interventions before, or just had an idea for one. Click here to learn more about how people submitted their ideas.
Who
organized the challenge?
Researchers at Columbia University
Human
Cooperation
Laboratory
Northwestern's Political Science Research Lab
The Strengthening Democracy Challenge is Supported by :
