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The Civil Rights Act of 1964: 60 Years Later (2024 State of Black America Executive Summary)

February 28, 2024

The National Urban League's annual publication, now in its 48th edition, is the highly anticipated source for thought leaders focusing on racial equality in America. The 2024 State of Black America report examines the impact of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, marking the first significant effort by the U.S. to address the racial caste system. Sixty years later, the publication highlights that the struggle for equality persists, emphasizing the ongoing challenges and progress made in the pursuit of a more just and equitable future.

Digital Risks to the 2024 Elections: Safeguarding Democracy in the Era of Disinformation

February 16, 2024

Elections in the U.S. and around the world in 2024 face daunting digital risks.A new report from the NYU Stern Center for Business and Human Rights argues that the leading tech-related threat to this year's elections stems not from the creation of content with artificial intelligence but from a more familiar source: the distribution of false, hateful, and violent content via social media platforms.

Defending Democracy: The Charles F. Kettering Foundation 2023 Annual Report

February 12, 2024

Throughout its history, the Charles F. Kettering Foundation's focus has always been on innovation. Our founder, Charles F. Kettering, believed that "our imagination is the only limit to what we can hope to have in the future."In summer 2023, Kettering announced its new strategic plan, In Defense of Democracy, the result of the foundation's staff flexing their imagination to better meet the needs of democracy. It introduced our new vision, mission, guiding beliefs and values, and outlined five new strategic focus areas that are designed to utilize our resources effectively in the defense and advancement of democracy.Defending Democracy: The Charles F. Kettering Foundation 2023 Annual Report chronicles this journey of transformation, highlighting a year of reflection, dialogue, and action. It is our answer to the question, "What can the Charles F. Kettering Foundation uniquely offer the democracy field at this moment of crisis?" In 2023, we took the first step in our commitment to strengthening existing partnerships, forging new collaborations, broadening our reach and influence through innovative communication strategies, and exploring new lines of research.

Field in Focus: The State of Pro-Democracy Institutional Philanthropy

January 22, 2024

Philanthropic support for promoting a healthy democracy has grown in recent years, marking a period of transformation for the field. Since 2016, an influx of funding, actors, and philanthropic infrastructure has amplified the impact of pro-democracy efforts while infusing the movement with needed dynamism.At the same time, from a funder perspective these developments mean that today's ecosystem is increasingly complex, confusing, and difficult to navigate. Sustaining the benefits of this transformation while avoiding the pitfalls of rapid growth requires a full understanding of funder capacities and needs.Drawing insights from interviews and surveys conducted with 70 institutional funders, this report sheds new light on the state and direction of the democracy funding landscape. It describes:1. Field Magnitude and Growth — estimates of the size, scope, and directionality of democracy-related philanthropic funding.2. Field Focal Areas — insights on major focal areas for funding today, how that has changed over time, and where additional funding may be needed in the future.3. New Actors and Infrastructure — lessons on the experiences of newer funders and the evolving field of funding intermediaries.4. Looking Ahead — outstanding questions for future research and opportunities to strengthen the funding field. 

The Realistic Promise of Multiparty Democracy in the United States

January 8, 2024

In April 2023, New America, the Center for Ballot Freedom, Protect Democracy, Lyceum Labs, and Stanford University's Center for Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law convened a conference at Stanford University on the future of political parties in the United States. The conference, titled "More Parties, Better Parties," focused on the idea that U.S. democracy would benefit from stronger and more representative parties and that essential to that vision was opportunity for more parties beyond the current party duopoly to emerge. The essays in this collection, derived from papers prepared for the conference, trace the following argument: Parties are essential institutions in a democracy; there is an unjustified hostility to parties in much American political discourse; and fluid and overlapping coalitions of a multiparty system can improve governance and confidence. We then look at the promise of fusion voting, a practice once widespread and now prohibited in most states, which could allow new parties to gain a foothold by cross-endorsing candidates from established parties.

8 Ways To Protect American Democracy: Safeguarding Elections in 2024 and Beyond

January 4, 2024

This report provides a roadmap to help heal and strengthen American democracy. It explains some of the most pressing challenges that the 2024 U.S. elections will bring and how states, election officials, and the public must not only counter these challenges but also improve election safety, accessibility, and security. The report also looks beyond the horizon of the next election to the long-term challenges that lay at the very root of the crisis facing free and fair elections.

Dēmos 2023 Annual Report

December 28, 2023

From fighting voter suppression and expanding opportunities for voter registration at federal agencies, to uplifting the transformative work of state and grassroots organizers building power in our democracy, we have made our big ideas become reality. And, we have yet to scratch the surface of what is possible.

Labor unions and the defense of American democracy: The fight over ballot drop boxes during the 2022 midterm elections

December 20, 2023

This report analyzes the relationship between local labor union densityand access to ballot drop boxes during the 2022 midterm elections. Areas with greaterlabor union density had considerably more ballot drop boxes per capita than areaswith less density.

Dangerous by Design: How Social Media Companies Are Hurting Our Kids, National Security, and Democracy — and What We Can Do About It

December 18, 2023

Americans of all political persuasions are right to be concerned about unchecked social media. Manipulative social media products are robbing children of their social skills, human relationships, and childhood innocence, and our children's mental health is at a crisis point. Our adversaries are using the online information environment to fundamentally undermine U.S. national security and attempt to weaken our bedrock principles of freedom and self-determination. Our private data is pervasively monitored, sold, and used to suck us in, keeping our attention fixed on social media platforms for profit. Social media platforms push us deeper and deeper into information silos that are not reflective of reality and divide us — at dinner tables, in the workplace, and on Capitol Hill — making political compromise a near impossibility. No democracy can survive such an assault. As an industry, social media is largely unregulated, and social media companies are free of any liability for the harms they cause. Moreover, the rise of next generation artificial intelligence (AI) will make everything that's bad about social media worse, offering targeted opportunities for tech companies to profit from our addiction while leaving behind swaths of destruction.This isn't a future technology crisis. It's happening now. It's clear the initial promises of social media are now outweighed by the harms. But this crisis can be averted. It's time for Congress to act with legislation to tip the scale toward citizens by creating commonsense safeguards for social media companies. As a nation, we need a more responsible social media environment that supports and enhances a healthy democracy and civil society. With responsible design and operations, social media technologies can nourish, rather than erode, our society, our well-being, and our democracy.

The Money, Politics, and Transparency Campaign Finance Indicators: Assessing Regulation and Practice in 54 Countries across the World in 2014. Key Findings.

December 16, 2023

The role of money in politics is of increasing relevance all across the world. Campaigns are an integral part of the political arena. At the global level, elections occur more frequently today than ever before. More elections mean that more money is needed for campaigning. Consequently, money's role in the electoral space is increasingly prominent. Recent elections in countries as diverse as the United States, Malawi, Bangladesh, and Venezuela have been affected by inflows of money of uncertain provenance. Who is funding campaigns? Is campaign financial information available to the public? Are state resources illegally deployed for electoral benefit? What role do third party actors play? Are oversight bodies legally and practically capable of monitoring political finance and enforcing relevant legislation?The Money, Politics, and Transparency Campaign Finance Indicators (MPT) provide locally sourced, evidence-based answers to these questions. Researched between July and December 2014, MPT deployed a team of local experts to systematically investigate and review political finance issues in 54 countries across the world. MPT examines the existence and enforcement of campaign finance legislation at the country level.

The Case for Multiparty Presidentialism in the United States

December 15, 2023

For many Americans, anything besides our two-party electoral system is hard to imagine. Multiple parties and proportional representation, the main alternative, might seem more fitting for a parliamentary system than our presidential one. But the truth is, how a country elects its legislature and how it selects its executive are two separate decisions. Multiparty presidentialism—the system the United States would have if it adopted proportional representation—is common around the world.In a sweeping new review of electoral system combinations published by New America and Protect Democracy, Scott Mainwaring, a leading scholar of presidential systems, and Lee Drutman, a prominent expert on proportional representation, conclude that multiparty presidentialism is the best fit for the United States. In particular, they find that it would:Functionally eliminate gerrymandering, increasing the competitiveness of elections and decreasing electoral incentives to entertain extremism to defeat primary challengers;Allow for parties and governing institutions to more flexibly respond to ongoing challenges; andAttenuate hyperpartisan polarization by empowering compromise-oriented officials.Democracy in the United States is an outlier in many ways—most democracies around the world use some form of proportional representation, and rarely is presidential democracy paired with a two-party system. This unique combination is exacerbating factionalism and political brinkmanship, pushing our democracy beyond inefficiency and towards autocracy. 

Fusion Voting and a Revitalized Role for Minor Parties in Presidential Elections

December 14, 2023

The run-up to the 2024 presidential election is highlighting the deep dissatisfaction throughout the electorate with our two-party system, as well as the difficulty in sustaining a broad electoral coalition to defeat anti-democratic extremism. Voters are expressing an overwhelming dislike of both major parties and growing interest in more electoral choices. Yet under our existing electoral rules, the odds of an independent or minor party candidate winning the presidency are extremely low. A common concern raised is that candidacies by the progressives Cornel West and Jill Stein and centrist political organization No Labels would splinter the pro-democracy vote in 2024, giving an electoral advantage to an authoritarian candidate like Donald Trump. Another worry is the risk of a constitutional crisis if an upstart campaign pulls off an upset in one or two states and prevents any candidate from securing a majority in the Electoral College, thereby leaving the selection of the president and vice president to Congress.Our success in defending U.S. democracy will turn, in part, on our ability to make our political system more responsive to and representative of our diverse electorate and to facilitate cross-ideological majority electoral coalitions in defense of democracy and the rule of law. An electoral practice that once allowed minor parties throughout the country to exert real influence in politics — fusion voting — could help advance these goals. By empowering factions with differing views on policy but a shared commitment to liberal democracy to unify in support of a single candidate, fusion can serve as a key tool for defeating authoritarian threats at the ballot box. The following sections define fusion voting, describe its practical effects, and briefly summarize its long history in U.S. elections. We conclude by discussing the particular value of fusion voting in modern presidential elections, especially for voters in the political center concerned about extremism and hyper-partisanship.