Since 2019, I have designed and directed the Democratic Erosion Consortium (DEC)‘s Summer Democracy Fellowship in collaboration with the Chicago Center on Democracy and Dartmouth College in my role as the co-founder of the DEC. This summer program brings together students and institutional partners to contribute to the DEC’s cross-national Democratic Erosion Event Dataset (DEED), as well as the U.S. subnational dataset (US-DEED, under the direction of Dr. Jaime Settle), which tracks agentic threats to horizontal and vertical accountability at the state level.
Summer Democracy Fellow cohort 2023, American University, Washington D.C.
The fellowship is structured as a ten-week program that includes a one-week, in-person training at the University of Chicago, followed by a structured, remote summer research experience. This intensive in-person training is designed to build an intellectual community among fellows and establish a shared foundation in the study of democratic erosion. In addition to research, fellows participate in a structured weekly seminar series covering core themes in democratic erosion and authoritarianism with DEC faculty affiliates.
The Summer Democracy Fellowship is a multi-institutional collaboration. To date, fellows and collaborators have come from:
- Brown University
- Dartmouth College
- Harvard College
- Morehouse College
- Spelman College
- Texas A&M University
- Texas Southern University
- Tulane University
- University of Chicago
- University of Georgia
- University of Houston
- University of Richmond
- William & Mary
- Xavier University of Louisiana
Each year, the program brings together a cohort of approximately 10–12 students working collaboratively across institutions. The fellowship provides students with hands-on research experience, training in political event-based data collection and analysis, and the opportunity to collaborate across universities while contributing to a large-scale, policy-relevant research initiative on democratic erosion.