Research Archives

Blog

How We Know Journalism is Good for Democracy

Josh Stearns & Christine Schmidt

September 15, 2022

At Democracy Fund, we see every day how local news strengthens democracy. People rely on local news to figure out who to vote for, how to speak up at school board meetings, how to run for local office, where to find vaccines, when to organize for change, and more. From daily reporting that equips people to act, to huge investigations that reveal corruption, the health of local news is bound up with the health of our democracy.

Unfortunately, communities across the United States are steadily losing access to this kind of civic information. According to data released in June 2022, at least one fifth of the U.S. — 70 million people — live in a community without a newspaper or a community at risk of losing theirs.

Since 2018, we’ve been tracking academic studies that show in stark terms the impact journalism has on our democracy. This research review has become a critical guide for funders, policymakers, communities, and journalists who care about creating a healthier democracy. In 2022, we overhauled this resource, including adding a section that more clearly names the harms journalism has caused in our communities, especially communities of color.

These studies and articles provide an enormous set of rigorous data that help quantify what happens when local communities have strong local news — and what happens when they lose it. Understanding the impact of quality local news on our democracy in these sorts of specific, data driven, nuanced ways is critical as we think about how to build a more equitable and sustainable future of local news that truly serves all communities at a moment of threat and uncertainty in democracy.

Do you have additional research to add, or are interested in how you can be part of the solution? Email us at info [@] democracyfund.org.

(Ed. Note: This post was originally published June 26, 2018. It was last revised on September 15, 2022. We will continue to update the date in this note for future additions. Andrea Lorenz, PhD candidate at UNC Chapel Hill Hussman School of Journalism and Media, contributed research and guidance for the update of this post in summer 2022.)

Strong local journalism = more people turning out to vote.

The amount of local political coverage correlates with increased voter turnout. Researchers in Denmark found that “local news media coverage has a positive effect on voter turnout, but only if the news media provide politically relevant information to the voters and only at local elections.”

Voters have been more likely to vote in down-ballot races in places with more local newspapers per capita. By comparing data on legislative ballot completion with news circulation data, researchers from St. Olaf College found that even the existence of local newspapers contributes to the likelihood that voters will fill out more of their ballots.

Local media coverage can increase voter engagement in state Supreme Court elections. David Hughes studied how these races can often be considered “low information elections” because of how little information voters can find about the candidates and stakes of the contest, but media attention can generate and distribute as much information about a race as a well-funded campaign.

People who consume local news are more likely to vote locally. The authors of a study from Pennsylvania State University examined the habits of people who consume local and national media, on both traditional and digital platforms, and found both types of news consumption are positive predictors of voting at both levels.

The act of reading a newspaper can mobilize as many as 13 percent of non-voters to vote, Matthew Gentzkow testified to the Federal Trade Commission in 2009. The statistic comes from a study which found that “newspapers have a robust positive effect on political participation” noting in particular that one additional newspaper in a region can boost voter turnout by approximately 0.3 percentage points.

Consuming local journalism is associated with consistent voting in local elections and a strong connection to community. Pew Research Center analysts found in 2016 that more than a quarter of U.S. adults say they always vote in local elections, and they also have “strikingly stronger” local news habits than people who don’t vote locally on a regular basis.

Reading local newspapers’ political coverage helps people understand how important local elections are and affects how much they participate in them. Researchers surveyed people in three small Midwest communities to learn more about their media use, political knowledge, and participation in local elections and found newspaper political news exposure strongly predicted political participation, people’s perceived importance of local municipal elections, and how much they voted.

Local news can boost voting by young people, and help them feel better prepared to go to the polls. Research by the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning & Engagement found that local news was a critical tool that young voters, especially people of color, turned to ahead of the 2020 election. The researchers say even more could be done by newsrooms to serve this population, and “local news media holds immense potential as a stakeholder in youth civic and political engagement.”

Weak local journalism = fewer people vote.

Voters in districts with less campaign coverage had a harder time evaluating candidates and reported they were less likely to vote. Jennifer L. Lawless and Danny Hayes used congressional districts as a lens through which to study political coverage (across 6,000 articles!) and civic engagement (through a survey of nearly 50,000 people) in the month leading up to the 2010 election. Then, the same researchers used longitudinal data to analyze how a decline in local political news coverage reduces citizen engagement. As political news about congressional elections in local newspapers declined over four years, so did citizens’ knowledge about those offices and voting.

When a major journalistic source of information declines or disappears, there are massive effects on local political engagement. This has happened in hundreds of communities where there have been large declines in local news. Danny Hayes and Jennifer L. Lawless also found that the “hollowing out” of American newspapers over 30 years — including a dramatic reduction in the amount of local news produced by newspapers of all sizes, with the most severe cuts in local government and school coverage — had massive effects on local political engagement, including decreased political knowledge, and less interest in political participation.

Places that lost a local newspaper experienced a “significant” drop in civic engagement compared to cities that didn’t lose one. Lee Shaker studied what happened to civic engagement in Denver and Seattle the year the Rocky Mountain News and Seattle Post-Intelligencer closed. “The data from the [U.S. Census Bureau] indicate that civic engagement in Seattle and Denver dropped significantly from 2008 to 2009 — a decline that is not consistently replicated over the same time period in other major American cities that did not lose a newspaper,” Shaker writes.

When a newspaper shutters, fewer candidates run and incumbents are more likely to win. When the Cincinnati Post, which served both Ohio and northern Kentucky, shut down Sam Schulhofer-Wohl and Miguel Garrido observed that “fewer candidates ran for municipal office […] incumbents became more likely to win reelection, and voter turnout and campaign spending fell.”

Less local media can mean less election turnout. Jackie Filla and Martin Johnson used data on voting and weekly and daily newspaper access in the Los Angeles area to investigate how access to local government information affects turnout in municipal elections. “We find that absent local news, voters are less likely to turnout,” they write.

Cities and towns with shrinking newsrooms had “significantly reduced political competition in mayoral races” and lower voter turnout. Meghan E. Rubado and Jay T. Jennings used a data set including 11 local newspapers in California matched up with the municipalities they cover to study the impact of declines in newsroom staffing over 20 years. As Josh Benton notes in his overview of the research, the study is notable because most similar research focuses on newspaper closings, not just shrinking staff. In a follow-up paper, Meghan E. Rubado and Jay T. Jennings interviewed working journalists to understand the impact of newspaper employment cuts on the communities they cover. Journalists they talked to described “corruption, mismanagement, lower turnout, and incumbency advantages” as outcomes of reduced government coverage. (We also recommend Nieman Lab’s excellent summary of the paper.)

Thorough local journalism helps people be less biased when considering candidates.

Giving voters even the slightest bit of additional information on a candidate (like occupation) in addition to having just the race or gender, eliminated or mitigated gender and racial/ethnic biases. Researchers experimented with ballots mimicking different real-life ballot designs that have varying levels of information about each candidate while using names that signal different genders, races, and/or ethnicities. Online respondents pretended to vote using those ballots. The researchers found that “When respondents have the least information, candidates of color—particularly Black candidates—are disadvantaged, among respondents across party, ideological, and racial attitude lines.”

Local news coverage helps voters assess down-ballot candidates. Looking at people who receive information about their local elected officials compared to people who receive information about officials in neighboring states, Daniel J. Moskowitz notes that local political news coverage provides voters with “Information that allows them to assess down-ballot candidates separately from their national, partisan assessment.”

Quality local journalism can counter divisive national narratives that aim to stoke polarization.

One local newspaper’s experiment of publishing only local editorials slowed polarization among readers compared to a neighboring town’s newspaper readers. Joshua P. Darr, Louisiana State University, Matthew P. Hitt, Colorado State University, Johanna L. Dunaway, Texas A & M University out the reasoning like this: As Americans consume increasingly nationalized news, they become more partisan. By consuming more local information, people are more likely to be concerned with issues that affect them locally and elect leaders using these criteria rather than relying on national partisan rhetoric or cues to choose leaders. This can create a better democratic system.

Local media establishes a trusted, shared public understanding of local issues, counteracting distrust of national media. Using focus groups, story diaries, and interviews with residents and local journalists in Kentucky, Andrea Wenzel examined how people navigate tricky conversations about politics and current events, locally and nationally, with neighbors. Wenzel found that recognizing place-based identities and media representations can help facilitate trust in journalism.

Local news availability keeps leaders accountable to constituents rather than the national party. Research by Marc Trussler shows that this accountability shows potential to mitigate the nationalization of politics.

Political polarization among voters increases after local newspapers close down. In research published in Journal of Communication, researchers compared data on split-ticket voting and ballot rolloffs in the context of local newspaper closures.They found that places where newspapers had closed saw more people voting for just one party up and down the ballot.. “It seems like it’s the very existence of a local option doing the work here,” Joshua Darr of Louisiana State University said in a writeup about the report. “Just staying open seems like a fairly important factor, regardless of the level of political reporting in the news.”

Every dollar spent on local news produces hundreds of dollars in public benefit by exposing corruption & keeping an eye on government spending.

Watchdog reporting has an outsized economic impact. In his book, Democracy’s Detectives: The Economics of Investigative Journalism, James Hamilton is able to quantify the economic impact of watchdog reporting. By looking at the political and social change that resulted from journalism, and the cost of those stories, Hamilton was able to show that “each dollar spent on stories can generate hundreds of dollars in benefits to society.”

Local newspapers hold companies accountable for company misconduct. After a local newspaper closure, researchers found that local facilities increase violations by 1.1% and penalties by 15.2%, indicating that the closures reduce monitoring by the press. They used a data set tracking a wide range of federal violations and the resulting penalties issued by 44 agencies between 2000 and 2017, for a total of 26,450 violations at 10,647 facilities.

When elected leaders are under investigation, more media coverage can increase the chance that they’ll resign from office. Marcel Garz and Jil Sörenson studied examples in Germany and found “resignations are more common when the media covers the case intensely.”

Citizens are more likely to vote out elected officials when media outlets highlight the incumbents’ ties to corruption. These findings, from Harvard and Columbia researchers using examples in Mexico, demonstrate support for the media’s role in holding people accountable in a democracy.

Without watchdog reporters, cities faced higher long-term borrowing costs — that translate to immediate costs for citizens. Municipal bond data in the years after a newspaper closure showed that “cities where newspapers closed up shop saw increases in government costs as a result of the lack of scrutiny over local deals.” The study used data from 1996 to 2015 and tracked English-language newspapers in more than 1,200 counties in the U.S. “Without investigative daily reporters around to call bullshit on city hall, three years after a newspaper closes, that city or county’s municipal bond offering yields increased on average by 5.5 basis points, while bond yields in the secondary market increased by 6.4 basis points—statistically significant effects,” Kriston Capps wrote in explaining the study for CityLab.

“Congressmen who are less covered by the local press work less for their constituencies,” researchers from MIT and Stockholm University documented in a study by evaluating their voting records, participation in hearings and more. They also found that federal spending was lower in areas where there was less press coverage of the local members of congress.

Where there is unreliable internet access, there is likely limited government transparency and eroding local news capacity. “In areas where declines in local newsrooms and resources inhibit political reporting and scrutiny of government actions,” researchers behind this study of Australian communities write, “there is little impetus for governments to develop interactive digital practices (or to consider and respond to civic input) given that restricting such spaces is arguably an advantage in the maintenance of political power.” Taken together, these forces create “a ruinous triumvirate – ill-informed citizenries, illegitimate local decision making and minimally accountable local governments.”

A free press helps tamp down bureaucratic corruption, in many countries. “Of the probable controls on bureaucratic corruption a free press is likely to be among the most effective ones,” authors of this study examining corruption in various nations wrote. They found “a significant relationship between more press freedom and less corruption in a large cross-section of countries.”

Watchdog coverage is more effective when it includes possible solutions to encourage civic actions. Reporting on its own doesn’t always hold power accountable. To do it most effectively, watchdog coverage should include possible solutions to encourage civic action. This finding comes from Nikki Usher’s interviews with business journalists at The New York Times, Marketplace public radio, and TheStreet to understand how journalists retrospectively considered their responsibilities following the 2007–2009 financial crisis.

People feel a stronger sense of community in places with strong local journalism.

Local news — with local owners — keeps people engaged with their physical location and local government. Meredith Metzler’s research on this involved surveying people living in two different rural communities about their information habits and assessing their media landscape in the context of where they live. Metzler found a relationship between engaging with local media, affinity to local community, and engagement with that community.

Local newspapers build a community’s sense of shared connection and place, and it’s not easy to replace them. Researchers came to this conclusion after organizing focus groups of community leaders in Baldwin City, Kansas and discussing the impact of the loss of their local paper on business, technology proficiency, and community attachment. “The overall consensus was that residents miss having a single community information platform,” they write.

Community members can experience increased loneliness, disconnection, and diminished local pride when a local paper closes. Through 19 interviews with community members of Caroline County, Virginia, following the Caroline Progress’ closure after 99 years, researcher Nick Mathews compiled examples of increasing loneliness, disconnection from community, and diminished local pride.

Communication within place is critical to producing community. Lewis Freidland focuses explicitly on the intersection of communication, community and democracy in his research, and has shown compellingly how communication within place, especially the kind made possible through local media, is critical to producing community.

Newspaper reading correlates with respondents’ sense of social cohesion. Masahiro Yamamoto has shown that community newspapers are important to community engagement. (Interestingly, Pew found an alternative correlation to also be true. Those who feel “highly attached to their communities demonstrate much stronger ties to local news” than those without a strong local sense of place.)

It’s not just news outlets — storytelling in general is key. Connection to local storytelling was key to “neighborhood belonging, collective efficacy, and civic participation,” Yong-Chan Kim and Sandra J. Ball-Rokeach found as they examined people’s relationship to community media.

Even when online news is not as tied to geography, it can build a sense of place. In two separate pieces of research Carrie Buchanan (2009) and Kristy Hess (2012) document various ways local news builds sense of place and connection in geographic communities even when online news becomes somewhat more unmoored from location

Local news keeps communities informed during times of upheaval, like disasters, protests, and pandemics — when people need critical information to engage their communities and leaders.

Epidemiologists depend on local newspapers to identify and forecast disease outbreaks. Helen Branswell wrote that “When towns lose their newspapers, disease detectives are left flying blind.” In other words, America’s journalism crisis is also a public health crisis.

Local media is often the first to reveal a crisis and draw sustained attention to it. The Pew Research Center studied how people looked for and found information about the Flint water crisis to help understand “how news spreads in our increasingly fractured information environment.” Their data shows that local media was reporting on the crisis long before national media was involved.

Media coverage can help reduce pollution. Newspaper coverage of polluters and emissions producers was correlated with a 29% reduction in the emissions compared to factories and plants that were not covered. “While coverage was generally lacking, [Stockholm University’s Pamela] Campa found that plants located in neighborhoods with more newspapers were more likely to receive negative coverage in the press. More significantly, she discovered that plants located in areas with more newspapers had lower emissions,” Sophie Yeo wrote for Pacific Standard about the study.

Hyperlocal reporting is vital to research efforts across an array of disciplines. When Gothamist and DNAInfo were shut down suddenly, Samuel Stein, a geographer at CUNY Graduate Center, spoke to a number of academics about how, for researchers, local news really is the first draft of history.

Local news isn’t inherently good for communities just because it’s local though, studies show.

Journalism clearly has positive outcomes for our democracy, but it is not in and of itself inherently good. Studies show how local journalism outlets have harmed many communities with their coverage. Shuttering local newspapers is not the only crisis in local news — we also have to work to reimagine and rebuild how newsrooms serve communities, who gets to lead those newsrooms, and how reporting reflects the diverse needs of our nation. It is not enough to simply replace what has been lost — the following studies remind us that we must build something even better as we move forward.

“Since the colonial era, media outlets have used their platforms to inflict harm on Black people through weaponized narratives that promote Black inferiority and portray Black people as threats to society,” Free Press staff wrote in their rigorous, seismic Media2070 essay. They documented instances such as the deadly overthrow of a local government in Wilmington, North Carolina where Black people held power and other situations that connects racist journalism to lynching, promoting segregation, and more.

Local reporting can fill information needs, but it can also replicate inequities. Local journalism, especially newspapers, provided critical information needed during the height of COVID regarding healthcare, emergency, and civic information. However, there were signs of information inequality, where people in wealthier, whiter counties had better quality and more local coverage than people in diverse, poorer counties.

Residents of a primarily Black community say they are not served by journalism that follows traditional practices of “objectivity.” In studying the development over 17 months of a journalism project intended to serve a majority Black community, Andrea Wenzel and Letrell Crittenden determined that “residents’ ideals for local journalism at times clash with dominant journalism norms and practices regarding objectivity.”

Paywalls limit access to information that operates as part of local media’s civic potential. While paywalls can become a helpful revenue stream for local media facing financial pressure, they also “challenge the civic function of the local news media,” researchers looking at Norwegian and Danish outlets assessed.

When purchased by corporate predators, local news becomes less frequent, relevant, and inherently local. The quantity and quality of local news decreases in correlation to these acquisitions by media conglomerates. Researchers came to this conclusion after studying more than 130,000 articles from the Denver Post, LA Weekly, the New York Daily News, and more.

Sensationalized coverage emphasizes short-term conflicts rather than social concerns. By studying the impact of a local newspaper in Australia reporting on a local climate change plan, researchers write “rather than providing an arena for public discussion and constructive debate, we find that the newspaper adopted a clear position rejecting the need for changes in planning for anticipated climate impacts.”

What’s on the horizon for journalism in our democracy?

These findings call us to take even more seriously the erosion of people’s access to news and information. The faltering of newspapers, the consolidation of TV and radio, and the rising power of social media platforms are not just commercial issues driven by the market; they are democratic issues with profound implications for our communities.

We have seen a lot of transformation and reasons for hope over the past few years since this post was originally published. News leaders are thinking about how to serve their communities, and reckoning with failures of the past. Journalism funders are coming together to fund projects to revitalize local news ecosystems. And funders who haven’t traditionally focused on journalism are joining in as well, realizing they will not achieve the change they seek in healthcare, education and more without information about their focuses. The research above makes the case for why we must continue working to expand support for quality local news that truly reflects and serves its communities. If you want to know more about how, or want to add additional research to this list, reach out to Josh Stearns at jstearns@democracyfund.org and Christine Schmidt at cschmidt@democracyfund.org.

Learn More

Explore Democracy Fund’s work funding equitable journalism and local news and information ecosystems
Subscribe to the Local Fix newsletter for regular updates on innovators in local news
Read “Advancing Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in Journalism: What Funders Can Do” and learn what it means to care about equity in journalism.
Check out this Q&A with UNC PhD candidate Andrea Lorenz to learn more about her work researching the intersection of local news and democracy.

Back to Ideas

Video

Dissatisfaction with American Democracy and Increasing Openness to Authoritarianism

Joe Goldman

July 6, 2020

While most Americans express belief in democratic values and preference for a democratic political system, a new report published by the Voter Study Group, “Democracy Maybe,” suggests that our democracy is increasingly vulnerable. Democracy Fund president, Joe Goldman, joins Hill TV to discuss shifting attitudes on American authoritarianism and democracy amid an economic recession, a global health crisis, social unrest and a polarizing election year.

Watch the video.

Back to Ideas

Elections Program Research: Winter 2019 Roundup

Sarah Cole

March 18, 2019

Democracy Fund’s Elections Program research is off to a strong start in 2019, with the release of the first brief out of the 2018 Democracy Fund-Reed College Survey of Local Election Officials (LEOs)—which will be released in full this summer. The brief focuses on voter education and accessibility and was previewed at the National Association of Secretaries of State (NASS) Conference and the Democracy Fund-Bipartisan Policy Center event on “The Voting Experience: 2018 and the Future.” Outlined below are key insights from the brief, in addition to key insights from the Southern Political Science Association (SPSA) Annual Conference and a grantee spotlight on the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement (CIRCLE). Stay tuned in the coming months as we gear up and plan for the 2020 Presidential Election!

New Research at the Southern Political Science Association (SPSA):

In January, the Southern Political Science Association (SPSA) met for its annual conference in Austin, Texas. Outlined below are the highlights shared by Democracy Fund partners, including:

University of San Diego’s Evan Crawford, Reed College’s Paul Gronke, and Portland State University’s Paul Manson: It’s difficult to interpret survey results from local election officials because of variations in jurisdiction size and work responsibilities.
University of Texas at Austin’s Nadine Suzanne Gibson: While there were no detrimental effects to voter experience or confidence when using private vendor service packages, there were also no data supporting the claim that election services vendors improve the administration of elections.
Auburn University’s Bridgett A. King: State-level election statutes and administration requirements for poll workers have variable effects on whether African American or Hispanic/Latino American voters are more or less likely to see a poll worker that matches their race or ethnicity.
Mississippi State University’s Thessalia Merivaki: There was inconsistent implementation of youth pre-registration in Miami-Dade and Hillsborough Counties in Florida despite uniform rules within the state, meaning that where a pre-registrant lived influenced the odds of whether their applications would be invalidated.
Fairfield University’s Gayle Alberda: In-person early voting had a negative effect on voter turnout in municipal elections across Ohio.

Preview of 2018 LEO Survey Results at NASS and BPC:

In early February, Democracy Fund’s Elections Program participated in two events. First, we sponsored a breakfast at the National Association of Secretaries of State (NASS) Conference that brought secretaries of state and members of the advocacy community together. Second, we partnered with the Bipartisan Policy Center on “The Voting Experience: 2018 and the Future.” At each event, we presented a sneak peek of results from the 2018 Democracy Fund-Reed College Survey of Local Election Officials (LEOs). Some of our preliminary findings include:

LEOs surveyed believe that it is easier today for voters to register and vote, and it is easier for LEOs to administer registration and voting processes;
Ninety percent of LEOs enjoy educating voters, but only 35 percent say that they have the time and resources to do so, along with their responsibilities to administer the election; and
LEOs felt prepared for the 2018 election, and were confident that their states would secure systems from outside interference and successfully count votes as intended.

Note: The full report can be viewed on www.electionline.org under Research and Reports.

Research Grantee Spotlight: The Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement (CIRCLE):

Tuft University’s Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement (CIRCLE) found that involvement in the post-Parkland gun violence prevention movement contributed to an increase in youth voter turnout in the 2018 midterm elections. Young people under 21 years old who reported being actively involved in the movement were 15 percent more likely to have been contacted by a campaign both before October and in the last six weeks before the election, and young people who reported that they were actively involved in the movement or agreed with it were 21 percentage points more likely to self-report that they voted in the election.

Back to Ideas

Learning from History to Plan for What’s Next

Joe Goldman

November 7, 2018

American democracy is in crisis. At a time of deepening polarization and social strife, many of our elected officials – most notably our chief executive – routinely disregard, and indeed actively undermine, the very norms and institutions that buttress our democratic system. At every turn, the foundational values of American democracy are under attack.

Fortunately, the threats facing our democracy are not unique and there is much to learn from other countries and from our own history – both about democratic backsliding and about strategies to reverse its course. Understanding the experiences of other democracies can help us grapple with challenges we are experiencing today, and plan for those that may lie ahead.

Democracy Fund invited Rachel Kleinfeld and David Solimini of the Carnegie Endowment for World Peace to write What Comes Next? Lessons for the Recovery of Liberal Democracy to tackle just this question. Through their research, Rachel and David dig into several case studies and offer insightful recommendations on what might be done in the United States to recover from the path of institutional decline.

Rachel and David’s analysis challenges us to revisit many of the assumptions Democracy Fund has made in assessing our democracy’s vulnerabilities and deploying strategies to protect it. Our staff has grappled these insights in ways that have enriched our thinking and the approach to our work. Among others:

We are affirmed in our work focused on ensuring the independence of a robust, healthy media that can hold those in power to account. The watchdog function of the media cannot be underestimated.
We take to the warning against placing too much hope in the political parties and legislature to defend themselves against abuses of power by a strong executive. We must explore ways to find, pressure, and incentivize, alternative champions of democracy.
While the paper corroborates our fears on the risk of the American’s system reliance on informal norms, we were encouraged to read how federalism should be considered an important tool in combatting the worst overreaches of an embattled federal government.

Democracy Fund regularly publishes research relating to our established program areas, and we occasionally commission work that is intended to push our thinking in new directions. We, like others, have much to learn. We are all well-advised to engage deeply with new, big ideas that challenge our assumptions. The research is a platform for rigorous scholarship that can help us identify new strategies to build a healthier democracy.

Read the Full Report Here

Back to Ideas

Report

What Comes Next? Lessons For The Recovery Of Liberal Democracy

Rachel Kleinfeld and David Solimini

October 31, 2018

Democracy in America suffers from a decades-long pattern of institutional decline. The candidacy and election of President Donald Trump is a symptom as well as an accelerant of this institutional degradation, catalyzing reactions from other institutions, parties, and voters. On the positive side, President Trump’s brazen disregard for the longstanding norms of American governance has drawn attention to long-running problems, creating new interest in what the United States might learn from the experience of other countries in similar situations.

What can we learn from other democracies that have faced executive degradation1 of preweakened democratic institutions, particularly countries with polarized populations? Based on the trajectories of other nations, what damage might we expect to see by the end of the Trump administration? Are there lessons for renewal that can be applied the day this administration exits the scene?

Few countries are directly comparable to the United States. As the world’s oldest continual democracy, the United States has far more established institutions than most other states. And yet the laws protecting the checks and balances of our government are older and thinner than those of most modern democracies, creating the impression of a strong state that has in practice relied more on norms than law to maintain its institutions. America’s implementation of federalism is deeper than in most other countries and is a significant buffer against executive overreach. On the other hand, its population is deeply — and often evenly — polarized by identity-driven divisions that do not lend themselves to compromise. For both sides, every political fight is an identity battle and each battle is potentially winnable. The temptation to engage in undemocratic behavior is significant.

In declining order of direct comparison, we looked at cases of democratic decline and subsequent renewal in Italy under Silvio Berlusconi, Colombia under President Álvaro Uribe, Louisiana during the Huey Long period, Argentina during the populist regimes of Carlos Menem and the Kirchners, South Korea’s President Park Geun-hye, Peru during the reign of Alberto Fujimori, and India under Indira and Rajiv Gandhi. We also looked at the similarities and differences between these states and countries that faced executive degradation and have not yet recovered, particularly Hungary, Poland, Turkey, and Venezuela.

Back to Ideas

Report

Understanding The Voter Experience: The Public’s View Of Election Administration And Reform

Natalie Adona and Paul Gronke

October 16, 2018

This report provides insights into the state of public opinion about election administration and reform. The findings are primarily drawn from the 2008–2016 Cooperative Congressional Election Study (CCES), a survey conducted each federal election year since 2006. i We hope that the findings contained in this report, and suggestions for future research, will help election officials, lawmakers, advocates, and others understand attitudes of the American people toward one of their most-cherished rights.

The takeaways in this report include:

Deciding to Vote

A significant number of nonvoters choose not to participate because they do not like the candidates, and some may be generally unenthusiastic about participating.
Lack of information may keep people from voting in certain contests, especially down-ballot races.

Navigating Voter Registration

Many people know that they are responsible for registering and updating registration. Most know where to register and that a move requires them to update their information. Most people are likely to rely on internet searches for registration information.
Many people could benefit from ongoing education about how the voter registration process works in their states, especially states that have recently implemented modernization reforms.
The majority of people support online voter registration but might not know whether it is available in their state. Some continue to prefer to use the paper registration form. The public does not currently express strong support or opposition to automatic voter registration.

The Voter Experience

There is not one most-preferred method of voting. Many like the convenience of early in-person and absentee or vote-by-mail voting. Absentee or vote-by-mail voters are more likely than early in-person voters to say that they distrust certain aspects of the voting process. Not surprisingly, voters provide compelling reasons to continue to vote in the way they have done before.
People express a higher tolerance for waiting in line when they are told that the wait is 15 minutes. Tolerance decreases as the anticipated wait time increases. i More about the CCES is offered in the Survey Methodology section of this report and on the project’s website at: https://cces.gov.harvard.edu.
Significant numbers of people are confused or unfamiliar with their state voter identification requirements. Many appear to learn about these requirements during election cycles, suggesting the need for ongoing education.
Overwhelming majorities of people provide good or excellent job performance ratings for their poll workers. Most people like that poll workers are polite and knowledgeable and demonstrate other signs of excellent customer service.

Trust and Confidence Measures

Election administrators enjoy higher levels of public trust when compared to officials in other public institutions. State and local election officials should continue to enjoy high public approval if they are viewed as nonpartisan experts.
Levels of voter confidence are influenced by the voter’s polling place experience, partisanship, and support for the winner (sometimes referred to as the “winner’s effect”). Most are confident that their own votes and votes across the country are counted as intended, though there is a noticeable gap between individual and national level confidence. There was a dramatic up-tick in voter confidence levels among Republicans and Trump supporters in 2016.
Perceptions of voter fraud, electoral integrity, and electoral fairness are deeply intertwined and powerful indicators of a healthy democracy. Most people believe that our elections are run with integrity and that outcomes are fair, but perceptions about the prevalence of voter fraud raise concerns.

We hope that readers find this informative report as interesting as we do. Thank you for reading!

Back to Ideas

New Report: A Growing Gap in Philanthropic Support for Newsroom Diversity

Lea Trusty

June 19, 2018

Journalism has long struggled to reflect the diversity of the communities it serves, and over the past decade, most efforts to support diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) in news outlets have been unsuccessful in creating meaningful change within the stories, sources, and staff of newsrooms across the United States.

New research released today by Democracy Fund traces half a decade of philanthropic investment in organizations, programming, and research aimed at increasing DEI in journalism. We commissioned this report to learn from the important work undertaken up to this point, to guide our future investments, and to spark discussions across philanthropy regarding the urgent need to address these challenges with significant new resources.

This report is based on data from the Foundation Maps for Media Funding, created by the Foundation Center for Media Impact Funders. The data set has some important limitations due to the nature of self-reporting and challenges around how grants are categorized. Even so, Katie Donnelly and Jessica Clark at Dot Connector Studio have done great work to reveal larger trends in the field.

**From 2009 to 2015, $1.2 billion was invested in journalism, news and information in the U.S.**

Recent research by the Shorenstein Center at Harvard and Northeastern University, using the same Foundation Center data as well as a study of foundation 990 tax forms, found that there is simply not enough philanthropic dollars flowing into journalism to make up for the gaps in what has been lost from legacy newsrooms. Amongst the funding that does exist there are troubling gaps and disparities. Our report provides a deeper look at one of those gaps, showing that there are even fewer dollars are going to DEI efforts within the industry.

Here are a few interesting takeaways, according to data as of February 2018:From 2009 to 2015, there were 1,105 grants totaling $105.6 million from 274 funders to 294 recipients pertaining to either racial and ethnic groups, women and girls, or LGBTQI populations.

Funding has declined in these areas overall, both in terms of dollar value by $1.3 million and total number of grants by 18.
When it comes to funding that serves racial and ethnic groups, relatively few dollars go towards financial sustainability compared to programming and project-specific funding.
There has been significantly less investment in gender-related news and staffing compared to racial and ethnic groups.
Funding serving LGBTQI populations in journalism remains extremely limited.

**Here’s a breakdown of philanthropic support strategies for funding DEI in journalism.**

The past efforts represented in these numbers faced stiff headwinds and real challenges, including a dramatic financial downturn that strained the news industry. But tight budgets alone cannot explain the persistent gap in employment opportunities between minorities and their white counterparts seeking jobs in journalism. Nor does it excuse the historic leadership failure of legacy outlets to fulfill their promise to diversify their ranks.

Reviewing this history, we are left with more questions than answers: How should we think about supporting programs and investigative projects looking at inequality when they may be housed at news outlets with a weak history of supporting diversity, equity, and inclusion internally? How do we rethink equitable funding so that program-specific funds at ethnic media outlets don’t exacerbate financial and structural uncertainty? And how do we ensure that investments in diversity, equity, and inclusion have broad and measurable impact across the industry?

Prior to this research we created a public database of organizations invested in diversity, equity, and inclusion in journalism, and we’ve got more research on the way that we hope will provide a better snapshot of the field of ethnic media and the challenges and opportunities facing those outlets.

Democracy Fund isn’t represented in the data released today because we only became an independent foundation in 2014. However, in our first few years we’ve prioritized this work. So far we are:

Working with News Integrity Initiative, Craig Newmark Philanthropies, and Gates Foundation in diverse leadership training from the Maynard Institute;
Collaborating with Google News Initiative to help revamp the ASNE Diversity Survey led by Dr. Meredith Clark;
Investing in new models like City Bureau with the MacArthur Foundation
Partnering with funders like Knight Foundation and Open Society Foundations to support data training from the Ida B. Wells Society;
Co-funding the National Association of Black Journalists with the Ford Foundation;
Working alongside the Heising-Simons Foundation to support paid internships for aspiring journalists of color through the Emma Bowen Foundation.

Together with these funders, we are learning from the research we released today to ensure that our strategies are as effective and equitable as possible. We are committed to supporting innovations in engaged journalism through grantmaking, partnerships, and collaboration. This report is part of that commitment.

Back to Ideas

Democracy Fund and Omidyar Network Support Independent Analysis of Facebook’s Role in Elections

Tom Glaisyer

April 9, 2018

Today Facebook announced a new initiative which will provide independent researchers access to Facebook data to study the impact the social network has on our elections and our democracy. Democracy Fund, along with the Omidyar Network, Hewlett Foundation and several other leading foundations have come together to support the research efforts that will be enabled through this program. We believe that independent funding of this research is critical, and hope that the program will help the public and policymakers better understand how Facebook is shaping our elections, social fabric, and democratic life.

This announcement comes amidst a firestorm of attention focused on the social media giant’s role in allowing vast amounts of personal data to be released, data which was then used to target shady and divisive political ads at Americans. Last week Facebook revealed that tens of thousands more people were affected by that breach than was first reported. As a foundation fundamentally concerned with the health of our democracy, we have been following this story closely.

In fact, Democracy Fund and the Omidyar Network have been raising the alarm about these issues for sometime. Late last year, the organizations published an in-depth paper asking, “Is Social Media a Threat to Democracy?” and identifying six ways in which digital platforms pose direct challenges to our democratic ideals. We have signed on to support this research initiative, but are realistic about the complexities and risks of supporting this effort and are approaching it as one part of a multipronged strategy to create a safer, stronger and more meaningful digital public square.

We are deeply committed to working on meaningful solutions that help rebuild trustworthy spaces for communities to connect, share information and participate in our democracy. We currently fund a range of efforts focused on combating hyper-partisanship, ensuring the integrity of our elections, and fostering a robust fourth estate locally and nationally.

Grantees like Prof. Zeynep Tufekci and ProPublica are doing powerful work on algorithmic accountability. Prof. Young Mie Kim tracked political ads on Facebook in 2016 and Politifact is helping sort truth from fiction on the platform. The German Marshall Fund is tracking Russian misinformation and Free Press is organization diverse communities around the rights to connect and communicate. The Center for Democracy and Technology is helping strengthen election cybersecurity, and spreading best practices for data privacy in voter registration databases and campaign data. Launched in 2017, the Social Science Research Center’s Media & Democracy program encourages academic research, practitioner reflection, and public debate on all aspects of the close relationship between media and democracy, including how changes in the political landscape, such as increasing polarization, have affected the media.

However, in our work with activists, organizations, and scholars in the field we have consistently heard that we can’t address what we don’t know. Through this new research effort Facebook says it will give researchers unpresented access to its data in ways it never has before. The research will be driven by a diverse coalition of scholars. Research projects will have to go through relevant university Institutional Review Board (IRB) reviews, will be rigorously peer reviewed, and may be vetted to ensure Facebook lives up to its legal and ethical commitments to users. Crucially, the research results themselves will not be subject to approval by Facebook

The emphasis of this first announcement is on Facebook’s role in elections, but the committee is also expected to address how Facebook’s systems influence viral deceptions, polarization, and civic engagement. Democracy Fund believes the American people must have effective ways to understand and be a part of the democratic process. As the internet transforms political life, it opens exciting new pathways for public engagement but has also created a fertile ground for abuse, harassment and manipulation that hurt our communities and our society. As this research is planned Democracy Fund will pay special attention to ensuring that the voices and the priorities of those disproportionately harmed by social media are included.

The flood of news about bad actors gaming the system have revealed a troubling disregard for the critical responsibility social media companies have had over our personal privacy and public debate. Facebook, and other platforms, need to acknowledge the oversized role they play in our society and truly prioritize privacy, embrace transparency, and accept accountability. We are realistic about the complexities here, but see this research partnership as a key step towards that goal. Through this program, and in separate endeavors, we are deeply committed to working on meaningful solutions that help rebuild trustworthy spaces for communities to connect, share information and participate in our democracy.

Back to Ideas

Competent Poll Workers Bolstered Voters’ Confidence in 2016

Jack Santucci

November 1, 2017

What makes Americans trust the electoral process? How can Democracy Fund work to build trust? We spend a lot of time thinking about these issues, since trust in elections and institutions more broadly are essential to healthy democracy. In order to inform our work on trust and election administration, we partnered with Reed College and the 2016 Cooperative Congressional Election Study.*

Our survey of 1,000 Americans turned up two important results in the ‘trust’ framework. First, confidence in vote-counting depends in part on who wins or loses. At the same time, competent poll workers may help bolster voters’ trust in elections.

One way to measure trust in elections is to ask respondents about “voter confidence” – a measure of whether people feel confident that their own ballots were (or will be) counted as intended. (You can read about other measures here.) In order to help us find correlates of change, we asked about voter confidence both pre- and post-election.

Winner’s and loser’s effects

The table below reveals clear evidence of what political scientists call the winner’s effect. As far as we know, this is a psychological boost from seeing a preferred candidate win. Going into the election, only 65.9 percent of Trump supporters were “very” or “somewhat confident” that their votes would be counted as intended. Post-election, that changed to 93.2 percent — an increase of 27 points.

Other studies point to a loser’s effect. We did not find much of one in 2016. 86.3 percent of Clinton voters reported being “very” or “somewhat confident” after the election, a decline of only four points.

Graph: Candidate Success May Influence Voter Confidence

The importance of competent poll workers

We also found that people who rated their poll workers highly tended to express higher confidence. For example, 62 percent of respondents rated their poll workers as “excellent,” and 63.4 percent of those people were “very confident” in the counting of their votes.

Going a step further, we used logistic regression to test the relationship between the polling-place experience and change in one’s voter confidence. This analysis also accounted for age, race, gender, education, income, and vote choice.

On average, respondents who said their poll workers did an “excellent job” were less likely to report lower confidence post-election than those who said “poor job” – 4.5 times less likely among Trump voters and 2.5 times less likely for Clinton voters.

What made people rate poll workers highly? One factor stood out in our data: a perception that poll workers “knew the proper procedures.” 60.7 percent of respondents who reported that perception also said they were “very confident” that their votes had been counted as intended. This relationship held in a logistic regression controlling for age, race, gender, education, income, vote choice, and a raft of other potential reasons for rating poll workers highly (e.g., politeness, tending to voters waiting in line, et cetera).

Given the prevalence in 2016 of rhetoric about “hacking” and “rigging” —as well as other, more specific worries across partisan and racial groups—we were pleased to find that competent poll workers likely boost trust.

Based on analysis captured in our Elections & Public Trust systems map, Democracy Fund supports several organizations working on ways to raise the quality of election administration and improve the voter experience at polling places. The Caltech/MIT Voting Technology Project, for example, offers a set of tools that election officials can use to reduce voter wait times and efficiently allocate polling-place resources. Other good examples come from the Center for Civic Design, which provides election officials with field guides that, among other things, include instructions on providing clear materials for poll worker training and making in-person voting a pleasant experience.

We hope these data and the good work being done by these and other grantees spark a larger conversation about the importance of recruiting and training poll workers. Americans rely on poll workers to understand and help voters navigate election processes. To further promote trust in elections, election officials and advocates can and should continue to support poll workers’ success.

This is the second in a series of blog posts that showcase our findings from the CCES, and we look forward to sharing more in the coming months. This post was first published in November 2017, and was updated in February 2018.

✩✩✩
* YouGov administers the Cooperative Congressional Election Study (CCES), which includes Common Content and invites participation from up to 50 academic teams. The Reed/Democracy Fund pre-election survey was administered to 1,000 respondents, and our post-election data includes answers from 845 respondents. More information about the CCES and its methodology is available at the Harvard Dataverse, found at: https://cces.gov.harvard.edu/data .

Paul Gronke is the Principal Investigator of the Reed College/Democracy Fund team module. Natalie Adona is the Research Associate for the Democracy Fund’s Elections Program and manages the roll-out of these findings, with support from Jack Santucci, the Elections Research Fellow. Please direct any questions about these survey findings to nadona@democracyfund.org.

Back to Ideas

Is Social Media a Threat to Democracy?

Tom Glaisyer

October 4, 2017

Today The Omidyar Group released a paper co-authored by me and two colleagues at Omidyar Network on the role of social media platforms on democracy and the public square. This paper – called “Is Social Media a Threat to Democracy?” – comes at a moment when there is new scrutiny on the role Facebook, Google, and Twitter played in spreading misinformation and divisive propaganda during the 2016 election. Those debates loom large, however, our analysis goes well beyond any one election to try and understand how social platforms are disrupting core elements of a democratic society.

In June 2017 Facebook raised the question “Is social media good for democracy?” Like them, we have been wrestling with these questions for some time, and while we do not take for granted how these networks provide value to civic life, we are also deeply troubled by the dangers they pose. Their algorithms and their vast storehouses of data gives them fundamentally new capacities abilities to shape discourse, media, and civic and democratic life in American.

As my co-authors – Stacy Donohue and Anamitra Deb – and I reviewed the research of leading voices on this set of issues, we identified six key ways social media is threatening democracy:

Exacerbating the polarization of civil society via echo chambers and filter bubbles
Rapidly spreading mis- and dis-information and amplifying the populist and illiberal wave across the globe
Creating competing realities driven by their algorithms’ intertwining of popularity and legitimacy
Being vulnerable to political capture and voter manipulation through enabling malevolent actors to spread dis-information and covertly influence public opinion
Capturing unprecedented amounts of data that can be used to manipulate user behavior
Facilitating hate speech, public humiliation, and the targeted marginalization of disadvantaged or minority voices

There are no easy answers to the challenges represented above, and any group of potential solutions must account for the diverse interests of multiple stakeholders if we are going to have the public square we deserve. As our founder, ebay creator Pierre Omidyar, wrote today in The Washington Post, “Just as new regulations and policies had to be established for the evolving online commerce sector, social media companies must now help navigate the serious threats posed by their platforms and help lead the development and enforcement of clear industry safeguards. Change won’t happen overnight, and these issues will require ongoing examination, collaboration and vigilance to effectively turn the tide.”

For our part, at Democracy Fund, the potential effects of social media on democracy are closely tied to many lines of our work. This includes longstanding investments on issues ranging from combating hyperpartisanship with constructive dialogue to developing digital election administration tools, and from understanding the impact of fact checking to supporting communities often targeted online. A few examples of this work include:

Politifact, one of the nation’s leading fact checking organizations, has partnered with Facebook to combat the spread of misinformation on the platform.
The Center for Media Engagement, formerly the Engaging News Project, works with newsrooms, social platforms and the public to develop and test ways to make trusted online information more engaging and impactful.
The Coral Project builds open-source tools focused on helping newsrooms build safe, secure and vibrant online communities.

In addition, we supported the Knight Prototype Fund on misinformation earlier this year, which focused on many of these issues. The full list of 20 projects can be found here, but the four projects we funded are:

Viz Lab — Developing a dashboard to track how misinformation spreads through images and memes to aid journalists and researchers in understanding the origins of the image, its promoters, and where it might have been altered and then redistributed across social media.
Hoaxy Bot-o-Meter is a tool created by computer scientists at the Center for Complex Networks to uncover attempts to use Internet bots to boost the spread of misinformation and shape public opinion. The tool aims to reveal how this information is generated and broadcasted, how it becomes viral, its overall reach, and how it competes with accurate information for placement on user feeds.
The Documenters Project by City Bureau creates a network of citizen “documenters” who receive training in the use of journalistic ethics and tools, attend public civic events, and produce trustworthy reports on social media platforms.
The American Library Association is collaborating with the Center for News Literacy to develop an adult media literacy program in five public libraries, focused on how to be a savvy digital citizen in a platform world.

We are going to continue to ask hard questions and support people and organizations who are working to create a robust public square that serves our democracy. We look forward to continuing this work alongside these and other partners. Please email the authors at inquiries@omidyargroup.com if you’d like to discuss how we might work together.