University-based Centers and Institutes focused on research, teaching, and civic engagement on issues related to democracy.
Research Priorities
NUDC-affiliated professors and researchers work across a wide range of democracy issues. This section synthesizes their main research priorities.
01
Research on democracy in the United States is key to understanding the strengths and weaknesses of democratic systems, showing that even wealthy, industrialized democracies are not immune to backsliding. This makes the study of democratic resilience and renewal a strategic imperative, an urgency underscored by V-Dem's 2026 Democracy Report, which focuses on the United States as its key case of decline, citing its largest-ever annual drop in the Liberal Democracy Index, driven mainly by weakened congressional oversight and falling press and academic freedom.
02
Network members conduct research classic and contemporary forms of democratic backsliding, defined as the state-led weakening of democratic institutions (Bermeo, 2016). Bermeo identifies six varieties of backsliding, ranging from open-ended, promissory, and executive coups to subtler forms like executive aggrandizement, blatant election-day vote fraud, and longer-term strategic harassment and manipulation, while Riedl et al. (2025) identify four backsliding pathways: executive aggrandizement, elite collusion, autogolpe, and erosion through horizontal institutions. This research priority is vital because if democratic backsliding is left unchecked, the intentional and systematic weakening of democratic institutions can lead to full democratic breakdown.
03
Network members study democratic resilience, which is the capacity of democratic actors and institutions to absorb and recover from attacks. Resilience also depends on institutional guardrails that limit incumbents' abuses of power and provide opposition forces with genuine leverage to resist backsliding and shocks.
04
Network members study how the rule of law, accountability, and legal guarantees for the effective protection of rights sustain democratic governance, with a focus on the gradual weakening and politicization of courts, regulators, and other checks on power.
