Six challenges for the social sciences: popular government
How can or should we address the forces eroding faith in our democratic governments?
Almost everyone agrees that democracy is in crisis, but the nature of the problem may not be as simple as it sounds. We see it framed variously in terms of apathy, populist voting, or lack of trust in institutions. But these are what elites and elite institutions perceive as the key problems (because they want to be trusted and worry about people electing parties and candidates they perceive as problematic and/or not voting at all). However, the problems as expressed by citizens themselves can take an entirely different form. What if we chose the hard path over the easy one and tried to understand how citizens themselves perceive and experience crises of democracy? What if instead of trying to “save” democracy, as though pursuing a nostalgic quest for some supposed golden age, we tried to understand why so many people are disappointed or tempted by non-democratic alternatives and tried to imagine how reinvented democracy could convince them not to lose hope that democracy could be made better than ever before?
In this panel, we’ll focus on four key priorities: How can democracy be made effective and fit for the 21st century? How can it be made resilient and everyone’s place in it protected in the context of major risks such as pandemics, environmental disasters, terrorism? Can democracy be made empowering so that people feel it is their good to protect and improve and return them to a belief that democracy can achieve better outcomes than any other system? And finally, how can democracy be integrative and focus on strengthening cohesion between people across generational, ideological, or ethno-religious divides rather than amplifying differences?
Meet our speakers and chair
Michael Bruter is LSE’s Associate Vice President for Research, Director of the Electoral Psychology Observatory, and Professor of Political Science. His research specialises in the fields of democracy, electoral psychology, political behaviour and research methods and is approach to democratic behaviours and crises is fundamentally people-centric and solution oriented.
Sandra Obradović is an Assistant Professor in Social Psychology (Department of Psychological and Behavioural Science) and a researcher at the Electoral Psychology Observatory (Department of Government, LSE). Her research focuses on the sociocultural foundations of politics. Specifically, Dr Obradović's research takes a relational approach to examine how social identities, collective memories, and intergroup relations shape political attitudes, behaviors, and perceptions of political change. Her work spans contexts including nationalism, populism, electoral psychology, and supranational integration, with particular attention to how power, recognition, and historical narratives inform political belonging.
Pavithra Suryanarayan, Associate Professor in LSE's Department of Government, studies how ethnic inequality shapes institutional development, voting and redistributive preferences, and party system ethnification in ranked ethnic systems like India and the United States. She pursues these research questions using methods in historical political economy that emphasize causal identification, spatial and survey analysis, and extensive archival research. Beyond work on ranked ethnic systems, she has developed two further substantive areas of research: the relationship between state capacity and class voting in a cross-national and party organization and party system institutionalisation in the Indian states.
Larry Kramer has been President and Vice Chancellor of LSE since April 2024. A constitutional scholar, university administrator, and philanthropic leader, he was previously the President of the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and the Dean of Stanford Law School.
More about this event
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This event is hosted by the Department of Government.
Other events in the series are on 18 January, 8 February, 22 February, 8 March and 22 March.
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