To find ways to fix U.S. democracy, Northeastern professor David Lazer “did Democracy like a drug,” he said.
At the 55th annual Robert D. Klein Lecture on Thursday, Lazer described the current state of U.S. democracy with an image of a dumpster ablaze.
Using an experimental setup similar to that used by pharmaceutical companies, Lazer and his colleagues were looking for ways to solve some of the biggest issues threatening democracy in the U.S. They found an answer.
Lazer his colleagues employed a combination of big data analysis and experimental methods to study U.S. democracy and determine what was working and what wasn’t. They found that polarization is on the rise, trust in the news media is down, and inequality in income and wealth are more drastic than they’ve been in at least the last 40 years.
