Democracy Initiative.
Established in 2018 by the College and Graduate School of Arts & Sciences in partnership with UVA’s Miller Center to explore contemporary challenges confronting democracies, the initiative announced its selection of lab proposals by Sechser, the Pamela Feinour Edmonds and Franklin S. Edmonds Jr. Discovery Professor of Politics, and Vaidhyanathan, the Robertson Professor of Modern Media Studies and director of the Center for Media and Citizenship.
Secher’s “Democratic Statecraft” lab and Vaidhyanathan’s “Deliberative Media Initiative” lab join the “Religion, Race and Democracy” and “Corruption Laboratory for Ethics, Accountability and the Rule of Law” projects the Democracy Initiative launched last year. Each of the labs aims to manage a series of interconnected research, teaching and public affairs projects related to their specific themes.
More broadly, the Democracy Initiative is dedicated to the study of how democracies have fared in their efforts to achieve legitimacy, stability, civil equality, accountability, prosperity and resilience in the face of contemporary and past challenges.
Melody Barnes, co-director of the Democracy Initiative, said the lab selection committee reviewed a number of outstanding proposals from interdisciplinary teams featuring faculty from numerous UVA schools and academic departments before selecting Sechser and Vaidhyanathan’s projects.
“Ultimately, we selected two new labs well-aligned with the Democracy Initiative’s mission – rigorous scholarship and research, enhanced opportunities for students to explore the practice of democracy in and beyond the classroom, and a commitment to engage policymakers, practitioners and the public,” Barnes said.
Social Media’s Impact on Democracy
Vaidhyanathan said the Deliberative Media Initiative lab will address one of the central problems facing democracy in the 21st century, as factionalism, amplified by social media, has made democratic governance difficult and has undermined democratic norms and trust in institutions.
“While our current media ecosystem helps motivate like-minded people to find each other and act, it undermines the ability of diverse groups of people to deliberate informatively and dispassionately about issues using a shared body of accepted facts,” Vaidhyanathan said. “The lab would address the problem by assessing and analyzing the current state of media and prescribing technologies, practices and ethics that might foster and promote deliberation.”
