Democracy

Know Where You Stand

How Informing the Voters Helps the Democrats

  • Anthony Fowler
  • Michele Margolis

What to Do About Inequality

We need to do more than raise taxes on the rich. We have to correct the market failures in labor and education that generate it.

  • David B. Grusky
with responses from
  • Rick Perlstein
  • Mike Konczal
  • Shikha Dalmia
  • Ruy Teixeira
  • Thomas Piketty & Emmanuel Saez & Stefanie Stantcheva
  • Barbara R. Bergmann
  • Neal McCluskey
  • Susan E. Mayer
  • Anne L. Alstott
  • Glenn C. Loury

The Salafi Question

Egypt’s Constitutional Moment

  • Amitai Etzioni

Practice Makes Citizens

An Interview with Meira Levinson

  • Meira Levinson
  • Kip M. Hustace

Capitalism and the Urban Struggle

An Interview with David Harvey

  • David Harvey
  • David V. Johnson

The Port Huron Statement at 50

Reassessing the document that sparked an era of activism.

  • Tom Hayden
with responses from
  • Kim Phillips-Fein
  • Bill Ayers
  • Angus Johnston
  • Eric Mann
  • Kirkpatrick Sale
  • Danielle Allen
  • Jennifer Hochschild
  • Trevor Stutz
  • Bernardine Dohrn

Sign up for our newsletter

No Saudi Spring

The anatomy of a failed revolution.

  • Madawi Al-Rasheed

What We Owe to Each Other

David Graeber on student loan debt, academia, and the value of education.

  • David Graeber
  • David V. Johnson

What We Owe to Each Other

David Graeber on why we don’t put babies’ lives ahead of Citibank’s shareholders and whether we should renew the tradition of debt jubilees.

  • David Graeber
  • David V. Johnson

No Parties, No Banners

The Spanish experiment with direct democracy.

  • Gianpaolo Baiocchi
  • Ernesto Ganuza

Blunt Instrument

Sanctions don’t promote democratic change.

  • Natasha Bahrami
  • Trita Parsi

Messin’ with Texas

The Legal Wrangle over Redistricting

  • Samuel Issacharoff

A Better Deal

Obama’s State of the Union Announces Populist Re-election Bid

  • David Biespiel

The Return of Inequality

How the Occupy Movement Shifted Electoral Politics

  • Ari Paul

Citizen Philosophers

Teaching philosophy in Brazil is a political project.

  • Carlos Fraenkel

Occupy the Future

A series of essays exploring key issues raised by the Occupy Wall Street movement.

  • Boston Review
with responses from
  • Rob Reich & Debra Satz
  • David D. Laitin
  • Kenneth Arrow
  • Sean F. Reardon
  • Paul R. Ehrlich & Anne H. Ehrlich
  • Prudence L. Carter
  • David Palumbo-Liu
  • Michele Elam & Jennifer DeVere Brody
  • David B. Grusky
  • Cristobal Young
  • Gary Segura
  • Frances Zlotnick
  • Doug McAdam
  • Doug McAdam
  • Donald A. Barr

The People and the Patriots

Who led whom in the American Revolution?

  • Alfred F. Young

Politics by Other Means

The Egyptian uprising has been rightly celebrated as a momentous event.

  • Mona El-Ghobashy

Libertarianism and Liberty

It’s not clear how libertarians argue from their starting point of liberty to their policy conclusion of limited government and lower taxes.

  • T. M. Scanlon
with responses from
  • J. Bradford DeLong
  • Will Wilkinson

Why I Was Maced at Occupy Wall Street

I had always thought that surely cops wouldn’t hurt people without a really good reason. But they do.

  • Jeanne Mansfield

The Constructive Responsibility of Intellectuals

Using Privilege to Advance Democracy and Justice

  • Archon Fung

Railroad Blues

The smaller Democratic clusters along the rivers and railroads are overwhelmed by their solidly Republican surroundings. 

  • Jonathan Rodden
  • Jowei Chen

China’s Other Revolution

Though there has been no “Chinese Spring,” it would be hard to describe what has transpired in China over the past twenty years as anything but a revolution.

  • Edward S. Steinfeld
with responses from
  • Andrew G. Walder
  • Helen H. Wang
  • Baogang He
  • Ying Ma
  • Guobin Yang

Fixing Congress

In politics as in life, you get what you pay for. In politics today, taxpayers are hiring mediocre talent, candidates who think their job is to duck the big policy issues in order to get elected and reelected.

  • U.S. Rep. Jim Cooper
with responses from
  • Kenneth A. Shepsle
  • Norman J. Ornstein
  • John Samples
  • Kathryn Pearson
  • John G. Geer
  • David W. Brady
  • Nick Nyhart
  • U.S. Rep. David E. Price
  • Stephen Ansolabehere
  • Andrew Gelman
  • Dana Houle
trending_flat
Get our newsletter

Vital reading on politics, ideas, and culture to your inbox

A political and literary forum, independent and nonprofit since 1975

Registered 501(c)(3) organization

Help Us Stay Paywall-Free

Donate

Become a Member

Subscribe