Meet the Director
After a decade of leadership by BC Law Professor Vlad Perju, the Clough Center for the Study of Constitutional Democracy has a new director.
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Renewing Journalism, Restoring Democracy
By keeping the public informed and holding the powerful to account, journalism plays a vital role in the life of democratic societies. Maintaining an objective public record–whether by fact-checking political advertisements, or scoring political speeches with Pinocchios–is only the most obvious of journalists’ contributions. When institutional norms fail, the media serve as an additional set of guardrails, offering critique while safeguarding democratic institutions.
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“The Return of the Native”
As the second Clough Distinguished Lecturer in our relaunched series, Prof. Tarrow will draw on his extensive comparative research into European democratic regimes to speak to the challenges polarization poses to American democracy today. He will also make the case that the postwar experience of European countries can afford valuable insights into the nature of these challenges, and how they might be addressed. Prof. Tarrow’s respondent will be Marshall Ganz, the Rita E. Hauser Senior Lecturer in Leadership, Organizing and Civil Society at the Kennedy School of Government, and one of the foremost scholars and practitioners of community organizing.
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"Degenerations of Democracy”
As the first speaker in the Clough Center’s relaunched “Distinguished Lecture” series, Prof. Calhoun will address the issues explored in his most recent book, Degenerations of Democracy, co-authored with Charles Taylor and Dilip Gaonkar. Challenging commonplace narratives, this work interrogates the underlying causes of democratic decline, and examines the most promising strategies for revitalizing democracy across the globe. Calhoun’s respondent is Elizabeth McKenna, Assistant Professor of Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School and an expert in social movements, political parties, and grassroots democratic politics.
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Coping With Defeat? A Roundtable Discussion
How do religions that have grown accustomed to political rule cope with the loss of their political authority in modernity? And how might they learn to coexist, peacefully, with the modern state? In his latest book, Coping with Defeat, Clough Center Director Jonathan Laurence sheds new light on these questions by offering a comparative analysis of two religions not often treated together: Roman Catholicism and Sunni Islam.
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Renewing Journalism, Restoring Democracy
By keeping the public informed and holding the powerful to account, journalism plays a vital role in the life of democratic societies. Maintaining an objective public record–whether by fact-checking political advertisements, or scoring political speeches with Pinocchios–is only the most obvious of journalists’ contributions. When institutional norms fail, the media serve as an additional set of guardrails, offering critique while safeguarding democratic institutions.
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What the Constitution Means to Us
Since the founding era of the United States, the American Constitution has been central to our public life. It has inspired hope, and it has provoked despair. It has remained in place, as few other national constitutions have. Yet it has also repeatedly been changed, and some today think it needs to change again. At a moment when its basic meaning seems more contested than ever, how should we look at the Constitution today?
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Clough Reception
On September 8, 2022, The Clough Center for the Study of Constitutional Democracy hosted a reception for the research, public service, and doctoral fellows, along with the Clough correspondents.