Yascha Mounk - "The Great Experiment" - Susan Stokes

Yascha Mounk will discuss The Great Experiment: Why Diverse Democracies Fall Apart and How They Can Endure. He will be joined in conversation by Susan Stokes.

Presented in partnership with the University of Chicago's Center for Effective Government and the Chicago Center on Democracy as part of The Democracy Series

Virtual Event

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About the book: In The Great Experiment: Why Diverse Democracies Fall Apart and How They Can Endure, Yascha Mounk gives a fresh answer. Most societies in the history of the world have been highly homogeneous or deeply unjust.  Never before have diverse democracies succeeded in treating all of their members fairly. Only in the past five or six decades have most democracies embraced “outsiders” as compatriots on a significant scale. At the end of World War II, fewer than one in twenty-five people living in the United Kingdom had been born abroad. Today, it is one in seven. Until a few decades ago, Sweden was one of the most homogeneous countries in the world. Now one in five Swedish residents have foreign roots.  The fiction of homogeneity is no longer a story they can tell themselves. And yet, many countries in the world, including the United States, are trying to build a more just vision of diverse democracy.  This is the historically unprecedented experiment on which we are now embarked.  And to succeed, it is necessary to develop a new vision of the future that both majority and minority groups can embrace.

About the author: Yascha Mounk is a writer and academic known for his work on the rise of populism and the crisis of liberal democracy. Born in Germany to Polish parents, Mounk received his BA in history from Trinity College, University of Cambridge, and his PhD in government from Harvard University. He is now a Professor of the Practice of International Affairs at Johns Hopkins University and the founder of Persuasion. Mounk is also a contributing editor at The Atlantic and a senior fellow at the Council. Photo by Steffen Jaenicke

About the interlocutor: Susan Stokes is the Tiffany and Margaret Blake Distinguished Service Professor and Director of the Chicago Center on Democracy. Her co-authored book, Brokers, Voters, and Clientelism (Cambridge, 2013) won best-book prizes from the Comparative Politics (Luebbert Prize) and Comparative Democratization sections of APSA. Among her earlier books, Mandates and Democracy: Neoliberalism by Surprise in Latin America (Cambridge, 2001), received prizes from the APSA Comparative Democratization section and from the Society for Comparative Research. She teaches courses on political development, political parties and democracy, comparative political behavior, and distributive politics.