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A voter signs a petition for a criminal justice reform initiative during a signature gathering event at the downtown Phoenix farmer's market, June 20, 2020.

Gov. Doug Ducey's stay-at-home order at the end of March was a knife to the heart of many initiatives in Arizona. Though the governor protected campaigning as an essential activity, gone were the days of gathering signatures at public libraries or farmer's markets.

But the realities of the pandemic had already manifested on the campaign trail well before that.

"When you go back and look at our signature totals and our daily reporting, you can see that it actually started around the second or third of March, where the apprehension of signing petition signatures and, you know, campaigning in and around people had changed dramatically," said Andrew Chavez, the owner of the signature gathering firm Petition Partners. "People started to understand that distancing was important."

Chavez said his staff went from collecting 67 signatures an hour to less than one.

On March 25, Chavez pulled all his staff from the field. He spent the next nine days trying to determine if his business could survive amid the pandemic.

"We honestly did not know," he said. "Take yourself back to that time and the amount of confusion that was going on about COVID and understanding transferability rates, where the virus was on paper or cardboard or plastic. That was all really big questions that we had, we just didn't know we're going to be able to do it safely.

Chavez has found ways to manage, as have a handful of initiatives still in the field.

There's the Stop Surprise Billing and Protect Patients, which seeks to reform the way patients are billed for pre-existing conditions. The Smart and Safe Arizona Act hopes to legalize recreational marijuana, four years after voters rejected a similar measure.

Smart and Safe has more than enough signatures to qualify, according to campaign spokeswoman Stacy Pearson. Theyve been in the field gathering signatures since late 2019.

Scott Bourque/KJZZ

Dawn Penich-Thacker collects signatures for a ballot initiative ahead of the 2020 election at the downtown Phoenix farmer's market, June 20, 2020.

Pearson represents two other initiatives that got a late start: The Invest In Education Act would raise taxes to better fund schools; the Second Chances, Rehabilitation and Public Safety Act aims to reduce recidivism, among other criminal justice reforms.

"Both of those campaigns got in the field around Presidents Day, and only had a couple of weeks before the pandemic hit," Pearson said.

Petition Partners works for both campaigns, and had to adjust their strategy.

Chavez said they focus on door-to-door campaigning, a tactic that typically makes up less than 25 percent of their signature gathering efforts. Those efforts have been more successful as of late. Chavez said they give advance notice to neighborhoods before stopping by for signatures, and there seems to be a real desire for dialogue.

But its not as efficient as gathering signatures at crowded public places, so Chavez hired hundreds of new employees.

It'd usually take 150 to 200 signature gatherers to staff a successful campaign. Chavez said he has 600 people in the field right now. Due to staggering levels of unemployment, there were ample applicants.

"We had pilots, flight attendants, bartenders, servers, teachers, who were in need for a job. And luckily, we hired all the way through," he said.

Pearson said the resilience of volunteers has also been remarkable. People who gathered only a handful of signatures in February held on to their petition sheets.

In recent weeks, they started collecting again.

"It's unlike anything I've ever seen for, for any campaign that I've worked on. Yeah, it has ramped up; it is a straight ascension into the sky," she said.

Volunteers from other ballot initiatives that pulled the plug on their campaigns have helped boost the signature gathering efforts for Invest in Education and Second Chances.

Dawn Penich-Thacker of Save Our Schools Arizona was working on her own organizations effort to restrict Arizona from expanding school voucher programs. At Saturdays farmers market in downtown Phoenix, she was trying to get signatures on petitions for education funding and criminal justice reform.

"A lot of people like zoom right over when they hear those words," she said. "And then other people are kind of like Im just shopping, you know?"

Aside from door-to-door canvassing, large events are how organizers gather signatures for candidates and ballot initiatives.

But in mid-March, when the gravity of the coronavirus pandemic became apparent, events stopped.

The deadline to get signatures remained unchanged, and the state law doesn't allow online signature gathering for ballot initiatives. Canvassers were forced to get creative if they wanted to stay on track.

"We have a lot of volunteers who put petitions on their driveway, and they watched through a window. And they just tell their neighbors, 'If you feel comfortable, Ill be 12 feet away, come through and sign,'" Penich-Thacker said.

They really only got about a dozen signatures a day doing that. It wasnt until mid-May, when the governors stay at home order expired and some events resumed, that they were able to continue.

"A lot of people were like Yes! Were going out again! Ill put on my mask and Ill be there," she said.

Now, canvassers and signature collectors host signature-gathering events at local businesses and public gatherings, like the farmers market.

Howard Fischer/Capitol Media Services

Dawn Penich-Thacker in 2018.

But its different. Instead of going out and mingling with the crowd, they stay at a table or booth. Theyre wearing masks. They sterilize pens in between each signature and offer hand sanitizer to everybody who signs.

If anything, though, current events seem to have bolstered enthusiasm among voters.

"This is the moment," Penich-Thacker said. "Our public schools are already underfunded, and now what were going to have to do to keep students and teachers safe is going to require a lot of money. And with Black Lives Matter and the police violence issues weve been facing have put criminal justice reform more in the spotlight. No one could have planned that. But it makes these two issues in particular really front of mind for a lot of voters. When they see us out, a lot of them say Ive been looking for you, thank you for being here.

Signatures are due on July 2.

Both the education and criminal justice reform initiatives have cleared the roughly 237,000 signature threshold to qualify for the ballot.

But there's still one more weekend to collect, and Penich-Thacker said more signatures are always better.

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Direct Democracy Struggles, But Survives In Arizona During The Pandemic - KJZZ

Written by Ram Madhav | Updated: June 25, 2020 9:01:00 am Liberal democracies are facing multiple challenges. This pandemic has become an excuse for some leaders to usurp more powers and become more authoritarian. (File Photo)

American novelist David Foster Wallace began his commencement speech at the Kenyon College of liberal arts in Gambier, Ohio, with an instructive story. Two young fish were swimming along and bumped into an older fish swimming the other way. Morning, boys! Hows the water?, asks the older fish. The two young fish continue to swim on, and eventually, one of them asks, What the hell is water?

Reality, for many, becomes so obvious sometimes that they fail to appreciate its value. People in many democracies behave like those young fish today. They dont realise that with all its defects, democracy is the best available form of government.

Democracy, a Herodotus-era institution of the rule of the people, took wing only in the last seven decades. There were 137 autocracies and just 12 democracies in 1945. Bolstered by the victory of the democratic Allied forces, more and more countries turned democratic. By 2001, this number grew to 88 and equalled autocracies. Today, the world has more than a hundred democratic countries while 80 are autocracies.

Opinion | Ruler alone is not accountable, everyone who succumbs to authority is no less guilty

But democracies are in decline. In the last two decades, more and more countries have become less and less democratic. The Economist recently reported that only 22 countries can be called true democracies, while another 53 countries can, at best, be described as flawed democracies. More than half of the countries in the world are either semi-autocracies or downright dictatorships.

Liberal democracies are facing multiple challenges. This pandemic has become an excuse for some leaders to usurp more powers and become more authoritarian. The rise of the far left and left-liberal anarchist forces, wanting to destroy mankinds valuable possession of democracy, is also discernible in many countries. Post-modernist scholars are trying to dub democracies pejoratively as populist. They argue that democracies are posing a danger to our freedom. They seek to pit people against democracy.

It is nobodys case that democracies are perfect. There is no single definition of democracy that is universally acceptable. There are illiberal democracies as Fareed Zakaria pointed out and liberal un-democracies as Yascha Mounk wrote. But the alternative to democracy, historically, has only been authoritarian dictatorships. When societies fail to appreciate the value of democratic principles, either dictators are created or anarchy reigns. It also happened, albeit just for less than two years, in India.

Forty-five years ago, on this day, June 25, 1975, Indias democracy was shackled by Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. Citing internal disturbance and imminent danger to the security of India as the reasons, she invoked Article 352 of the Constitution and declared a state of internal emergency. The country was pushed into a dictatorship that lasted for 21 months. Fundamental rights were suspended. Over 1.4 lakh people were detained, including opposition party leaders. The media was gagged, and even the higher judiciary became a pliant handmaiden of Indira Gandhi. The entire country was converted into a prison of fear. Indira Gandhis loyalist attorney general, Niren De, had ominously told the Supreme Court that the Emergency gave powers to the government even to take away the life of a citizen and yet not be answerable to anybody. Citizens lives and limbs were under threat.

As months passed by, the Stockholm Syndrome set it. Many eminent journalists and writers were singing paeans to the government. When asked to bend, they crawled, L K Advani, who spent the entire duration of the Emergency in jail along with colleagues such as Atal Bihari Vajpayee, commented wryly: Hitlerian fascism was reincarnated in Indiras Emergency.

Hitler, after getting elected to the Reichstag the Lower House of the Weimar Republic in 1933, had made his National Socialist Party redundant. Senior party leaders were made inconsequential in Hitlers Third Reich. Sycophants and courtiers replaced them. Joseph Goebbels, the propaganda chief, became the most powerful leader due to his proximity to the Fuhrer. A systematic campaign against Jews was unleashed, culminating in their genocide towards the end of the Reich.

Something similar had happened in India during those years. Vidya Charan Shukla, minister for information and broadcasting, became the new Goebbels. Sanjay Gandhi emerged as the super prime minister with a coterie of officials running the show. A systematic Islamophobic campaign was unleashed by this coterie. Sanjay and his coterie became infamous for their forced sterilisation programmes. Corruption and sycophancy had reached unforeseen heights. Dev Kant Barooah, president of the Congress during those years, had acquired sycophantic notoriety by coining the slogan Indira is India and India is Indira, something on the lines of the mandatory Heil Hitler salute.

If Indias millennials take to the streets today with anarchist slogans, that is because they are like those young fish in the water, who have never seen the dark side of a dictatorship. Thanks to the valiant fight against the draconian Emergency by the forces that are in power today, the country has enjoyed liberal democracy for four-and-a-half decades. We did not have autocrats partly because of the Gulliverisation of our politics for many years, where smaller parties would pull the strings of power. When a stable majority returned after three decades, the country was in the hands of those who were victims of the Emergency regimes excesses and fought for democracy.

The freedom that the anarchists and their left-liberal cohorts enjoy in the countrys media and public life today is because we have leaders in the government who fought for that very freedom and are committed to liberal democratic values, not just as a matter of compulsion but as an article of faith.

This article first appeared in the print edition on June 25 under the title When democracy was shackled. The writer is national general secretary, BJP, and director, India Foundation.

Opinion | India is steadily creeping from democracy to some form of thugocracy

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Those who have not seen the dark side of dictatorship, dont truly appreciate the value of freedoms today - The Indian Express

Written by Stefanos Loukopoulosfor theHeinrich-Bll-StiftungFoundation

Throughout the world, most media outlets and pundits are so consumed by the public health and economic consequences of COVID-19 that they consistently fail to highlight the looming political and institutional risks ahead.

Unfortunately, the pandemic is not just here to test the robustness of our healthcare systems and economies but also the very foundations of our democracies and our perceptions of them. A recent report by the United Nations (COVID-19 and Human Rights: We are all in this together) in fact warns that The pandemic could provide a pretext to undermine democratic institutions, quash legitimate dissent or disfavored people or groups, with far-reaching consequences that we will live with, far beyond the immediate crisis.

When analyzing the broader impact of the pandemic one therefore needs to take a holistic approach, looking at the interplay between public health, the economy and its impact upon the livelihoods of people, as it is the combination of all these variables that will define the course of our democratic systems both in the short and the long term.

As we should all be very well aware of by now, economic collapse and protracted recession combined with a pervasive sense of fear and insecurity felt within society in this case instigated by COVID-19 can be the breeding ground for acute intrasocietal polarization, extreme alt-right ideas, disinformation, demagogy and political instability often leading to authoritarian approaches.

The above constitute a real threat to the stability of our democracies and as such all necessary steps need to be taken to safeguard our democracies and rights whilst also protecting public health.

In this sense it is imperative to galvanize a feeling of trust in our democratic institutions and elected parliaments. There is no better way to achieve this than to promote further transparency and accountability both at government and parliamentary level through access to information, transparency in public procurements, transparency in political parties and MPs finances.

Democratic governments are currently attempting to balance between extraordinary measures which will ensure the protection of their citizens whilst not curtailing their basic freedoms and democratic rights. The Greek government has seemingly fared relatively well in terms of keeping this fine balance. The protective measures and the lockdown that ensued have undoubtedly proven to be effective, as the country has to this day, to a significant extent managed to successfully contain the pandemic. There are, however, a number of justified concerns as to the Greek governments track record on transparency, openness and access to information during this period.

In analysing the proportionality of the measures taken by the Greek government in its effort to tackle the pandemic one needs to firstly draw a distinct line between the first stage of implementation i.e. the lockdown and the current stage which involves the gradual easing of the restrictions and the return to a contained normality. It is essential to make such a distinction as the circumstances upon which the two stages of measures were implemented differed significantly in terms of urgency, preparedness of the state mechanism and acceptance by the wider population.

The Greek government without any doubt reacted swiftly (with the exception of the delayed closure of churches) in implementing the first stage measures which broadly speaking had a positive impact upon the containment of the pandemic. Most importantly it is worth noting that despite their authoritarian nature they enjoyed considerable legitimacy in the eyes of both the vast majority of Greek citizens and the political parties of the opposition. Undoubtedly the overarching sense of fear and insecurity that the pandemic instilled in in most of us was reason enough for the acceptance and justification of such draconian measures despite the entailed sacrifice in basic democratic rights. This collective reaction should not surprise us, history after all teaches us that people are often led to accept if not embrace in a quasi-instinctual fashion the curtailment of fundamental rights in times of crisis and deep concern for their wellbeing.

From astrictly constitutional/legal perspectivethe measures taken by the Greek government were, taking into account the facts and data now available to us, both constitutionally legitimate and in line with the proportionality principle. According to the Greek constitution in fact, the protection of human life constitutes an overarching duty of the polity. This of course is upon the condition that the measures are temporary and continually revised vis a vis their necessity in protecting public health.

With regards to the second stage, we see that despite the fact that the majority of the restrictive measures have been lifted, a considerable number of citizens are finding it hard to follow the current measures. This is due to a combination of factors such as the protracted period of lockdown and its effect upon the psychology of people, the successful management of the pandemic during its first outbreak- which mitigated the fear factor and the failure of the government to communicate effectively the nature and scope of this second stage, which in turn has caused confusion. A case in point is what we have been witnessing lately in public squares across Athens, where congregating citizens especially youngsters have fallenvictims to unjustifiable policeviolence for failing to conform to a rather peculiar strict recommendation not a law advising citizens to stay indoors between midnight and six a.m.

By strictly focusing our discussion on the proportionality of the protective measures imposed by the government one runs the risk of missing the full picture. We can all agree in fact,at least most of us, that the imposed measures in question constituted a grim necessity for the protection of public health. Our analysis therefore should not be focusing so much on the measures per se but rather on the extraordinary conditions that these have created for government to act with limited oversight, transparency and accountability, and the extent to which the government has taken advantage of these conditions in advancing its own agenda largely freed from the restrictions that checks and balances are meant to offer in democracies. After all it is widely accepted that such crises and the shock factor that accompanies them, often present opportunities for governments to act illicitly, especially in cases such as Greece where media freedom and independencerank among the lowest in Europeandcorruption constitutes a chronic disease.

Arguably on the transparency and accountability front, the Greek government unfortunately did not fare as well as it did with the containment of the pandemic.

The easing of the public procurement procedures in an effort to meet the urgent needs of the state caused by the pandemic seems to have been perceived as an opportunity to channel public funds to favor businesses of party friends and supporters. A stark example of such practices is the notorious case of the e-learning platforms intended for free-lance professionals, who instead of receiving financial state aid, received vouchers that would allow them to take online training courses. The government allocated for this purpose a total of 36 million euros to 7 service providers whose selection procedure and the assessment of their learning material (a total of 100,000 pages) was completed in less than a day! Additionally the company details of the beneficiaries were undisclosed in the documents published on the governments transparency portal Diavgia, probably due to the fact that their owners, according touncontested findings, maintain friendly relations with members of the government and the New Democracy party. Another instance of dodgy public contracting practices involves the award of a contract to disinfect the prisons across the country to a company which a few days prior to the call was active only in the field of public relations.

Public procurements are unfortunately not the only area where one can detect a severe lack of transparency on behalf of the government. In fact another noteworthy case is the one where 20 million euros were disbursed to media outlets for the purpose of broadcasting COVID-19-related public messages without disclosing the final beneficiaries and how the sum was distributed.

There are of course more examples that could be added to the list but the point to be made here is that, especially in extraordinary times, ensuring transparency and accountability in decision making processes and public contracting is of the outmost importance. No crisis or state of emergency should constitute an excuse to undermine transparency and accountability, as they both constitute fundamental guarantors of a healthy and stable democracy.

It is widely agreed among the international community of parliamentary monitoring organisations that during this extraordinary period parliaments should remain as functional as possible as their oversight role over government becomes of crucial importance. At the same time, however, it is recommended that the legislative process to the extent that this is feasible should be limited to the bare necessary as the conditions imposed by the pandemic are likely to affect the quality and soundness of the legislative process.

The Greek government recently announced that it plans to pass through parliament 26 bills by the end of July. This has raised a series of concerns which have been voiced by Vouliwatch in arecent communicationaddressed to the Prime Minister and the President of the Hellenic Parliament.

Vouliwatch believes that due to the content of the bills in question consent will be hard to reach among political parties. Without fail, contentious bills are challenged by the opposition parties by making use of all tools available to them in the parliaments regulatory framework. These can include for example a request for a roll call vote or even an exception of unconstitutionality. The extent to which the aforementioned processes will be feasible considering the tight legislative schedule and the extraordinary conditions imposed by the pandemic is unclear, thus raising a question on whether or not opposition parties will be able to exert their right to effectively challenge a bill.

Additionally, 26 bills in the space of 3 months practically translates into two plenary votes per week at a time where COVID-19 related restrictions are in place and the number of MPs allowed both in the committees and plenary has been significantly decreased. The issue of time is of huge importance in this case as from it a number of serious concerns arise. Will the MPs have time to adequately prepare themselves and go over every single article of a given bill while at the same time tabling amendments? Will there be adequate time for them to catch up with all the last minute ministerial amendments which are often irrelevant to the content of the bill and therefore require further scrutiny? Wont the time available for public consultations be severely reduced thus limiting the input of citizens and civil society organisations? In the end, wont the quality of the legislative process as whole which remains problematic as it is suffer significantly?

Finally there is a question of a constitutional nature to be addressed. According to the Greek constitution (article 67) Parliament cannot resolve without an absolute majority of the members present, which in no case may be less than one-fourth of the total number of the Members of Parliament. Given that due to the pandemics restrictions only up to 25 MPs are allowed to be present at once in the plenary can the voting process be considered as being constitutionally sound?

Parliamentary democracy in Greece has already been significantly undermined during the protracted austerity period imposed by the adjustment programs sponsored by the countrys lenders. The vast majority of the legislative process over the past decade in fact concerned the ratification of structural reform policies dictated by the bail out agreements. Further undermining the parliamentary process by using the pandemic as a pretext to bend the rules so that the government can expedite for whatever reason its agenda will most likely result in the further delegitimisation and weakening of the role of the Hellenic Parliament. Parliaments are at the center of democracies and as such safeguarding their function as the supreme oversight and legislative bodies should be of paramount importance for any democratically elected government.

One can only speculate on the long term impact of COVID-19 on democracy. Factors such as the duration of the pandemic and the recovery pace of the economy will undoubtedly play a significant part. Presently democracy is under voluntary quarantine, the challenge ahead is to ensure that this does not turn into the new normal. In this respect it is of paramount importance for civil society, the press and citizens to stay extra vigilant and perform their oversight role over governments expanding their executive power at the cost of transparency and accountability. This is by no means an unattainable task. In fact to an extent we have already been witnessing it in Greece where some of the scandals and irregularities mentioned above have been spotted by concerned citizens and brought to light through the use of social media forcing the government to retract. Surely this constitutes a positive sign for the future of our democracies; after all democracy works best when appropriated by the people.

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Assessing the Immunity of Democracy in Greece - The Pappas Post

In May 2020, with the world still in the grip of the coronavirus pandemic, Margaret MacMillan, an historian at the University of Toronto, wrote an essay in The Economist about the possibilities for life after the pandemic had passed.

On a scale of one to ten, where one was utter despair and ten was cautious hopefulness, it would have rated about six. Her thesis was that the future will be decided by a fundamental choice between reform and calamity.

She saw the world as being at a turning point in history. It had arrived there as a result of the conjunction of two forces: growing unrest at economic inequality, and the crisis induced by the pandemic.

It was at such times, she argued, that societies took stock and were open to change. Such a time, for example, was in the immediate aftermath of the second world war, which resulted in radical reforms to international political and economic frameworks.

She was writing against a backdrop of a larger crisis the crisis in democracy. The most spectacular symptoms of this were the election of Donald Trump as president of the United States and the Brexit referendum. Both occurred in 2016, and both appealed to populism largely based on issues of race and immigration.

In the four years since, many books have been written on this crisis, among them Cass Sunsteins #republic, Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatts How Democracies Die, and A. C. Graylings Democracy and its Crisis.

Then, somewhat surprisingly, in May 2020 a new spirit of what might be called economic morality announced itself.

This came from within the Republican Party of the United States. It happened while Trump, that most amoral of Republican presidents, was in office, and reasserted some of the fundamental values of conservatism.

It took the form of a new organisation, American Compass, https://americancompass.org/, founded by Oren Cass, who was domestic policy adviser to Mitt Romneys 2008 and 2012 US presidential election campaigns. He is also the author of an acclaimed book on labour markets, The Once and Future Worker: A Vision for the Renewal of Work in America.

American Compasss mission, as stated on its website, was to:

restore an economic consensus that emphasises the importance of family, community, and industry to the nations liberty and prosperity.

As the coronavirus pandemic wreaked havoc across the United States, Cass described the nations response as an indictment of what he called an economic piety a form of ideological purity that ignored many values that markets do not take into their calculations.

These included the well-being of workers, the security of supply chains, and the running down of Americas self-sufficiency, exemplified by a shortage of medical supplies.

His line of argument was supported by a senior Republican, Senator Marco Rubio, in an article for The New York Times. Rubios critique of the failure of American economic policy over two decades was crystallised in one sentence:

Why didnt we have enough N95 masks or ventilators on hand for a pandemic? Because buffer stocks dont maximize financial return, and there was no shareholder reward for protecting against risk.

The fact that this significant shift in economic thinking and socio-political priorities was coming out of elements in the Republican Party in the lead-up to the presidential election is perhaps an indication that MacMillans thesis has some substance. Perhaps democracies are on the cusp of a change in direction.

Alongside these developments, the existential crisis facing news media was made worse by the coronavirus pandemic. As business activity was brought to a stop by the lockdown, the need for advertising was drastically reduced.

Coming on top of the haemorrhaging of advertising revenue to social media over the previous 15 years, this proved fatal to some newspapers.

In Australia, the impact of this was worst in regional and rural areas. News Corp announced in May that more than 100 of its regional newspapers would become digital-only or close entirely.

Read more: Digital-only local newspapers will struggle to serve the communities that need them most

In April, Australias largest regional newspaper publisher, Australian Community Media (ACM), announced it was suspending the printing of newspapers at four of its printing sites, halting the production of most of its non-daily local newspapers. ACM has about 160 titles.

These developments represented a serious loss to local communities and added to the democratic deficit already apparent over more than a decade as advertising revenue flowed away from traditional media to the global social media platforms.

At a national level, the Australian government took up a recommendation by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission to force the global platforms, particularly Facebook and Google, to pay for the news it took from Australian media.

The platforms mounted a fierce rearguard action against this proposal, which remains unresolved for now.

If a democratic revival is to occur, however, a strong media will be a necessary part of it. The necessity of a free press has been clear since the germination of modern democracy in the late 17th century, and in the late 18th century it was given powerful recognition in both legal and political terms.

In 1791 it was articulated in the First Amendment to the US Bill of Rights. In 1795, Edmund Burke stood up in the British House of Commons and asserted that the press had become what he called the fourth estate of the Realm.

If the media are to play their part in any democratic revival, however, financial and material security will be only a part of what is required.

One factor that has contributed to the present crisis in democracy is polarisation, the opening up of deep divisions between the main political parties of mature democracies. This has been magnified by media partisanship.

There is a lot of research evidence for this. One of the most significant is a 2017 study that showed the link in the United States between peoples television viewing habits and their political affiliations.

A further factor in the crisis has been the emergence of the fake news phenomenon. In the resultant swirling mass of information, misinformation and disinformation that constitutes the digital communications universe, people have returned to traditional mass media in the hope that they can trust what they see and hear there.

Read more: Trust in quality news outlets strong during coronavirus pandemic

The Edelman Trust Barometer, an annual global study of public attitudes of trust towards a variety of institutions, including the media, showed that since 2015, public trust in the traditional media as a source of news had increased, and their trust in social media as a source of news had decreased.

A third factor in the crisis, exacerbated by the first two, is the rise of populism. Its defining characteristics are distrust of elites, negative stereotyping, the creation of a hated other, and scapegoating. The hated other has usually been defined in terms of race, colour, ethnicity, nationality, religion or some combination of them.

Powerful elements of the news media, most notably Fox News in the United States, Sky News in Australia and the Murdoch tabloids in Britain, have exploited and promoted populist sentiment.

This sentiment is reckoned to have played a significant part in the election of Trump.

It is also considered to have played a part in the outcome of the Brexit referendum.

It follows that if these are contributing factors to the crisis in democracy, then the media has a part in any democratic revival.

To do so, it needs to take four major steps. One is to focus resources on what is called public interest journalism: the reporting of parliament, the executive government, courts, and powerful institutions in which the public places its trust, such as major corporations and political parties. This work needs to include a substantial investigative component.

A second is to recommit to the professional ethical requirements of accuracy, fairness, truth-telling, impartiality, and respect for persons.

The third is to take political partisanship out of news coverage. Media outlets are absolutely entitled to be partisan in their opinions, but when it taints the news coverage, the public trust is betrayed.

The fourth is to recalibrate the relationship between professional mass media and social media.

That recalibration involves taking a far more critical approach to social media content than has commonly been the case until now.

While it is true the early practices of simply regurgitating stuff from social media have largely been abandoned, social media still exerts a disproportionate influence on news values. Just because something goes viral on social media doesnt make it news unless it concerns a matter of substance.

Social media is where fake news flourishes, so the filter applied by professional mass media to what appears there needs to be strong and close-meshed.

That is the negative side of the recalibration.

The positive side is to further develop the extraordinary symbiosis that has been shown to exist between social and professional mass media.

It was most spectacularly demonstrated by the Black Lives Matter protests that followed the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis.

Social media allowed millions of people all over the world to be eyewitnesses to this gross act of police brutality.

Professional mass media, by applying its standards of verification and corroboration then disseminating the footage on its mass platforms, ensured the killing became known to the community at large, well beyond the confines of echo chambers and filter bubbles.

It also added that element of long-established public trust that respected news brands have to offer.

The world saw how powerful that combination was. A single act of police violence with racist overtones in a relatively obscure American city set off protests not just in the United States but in many countries with a history of police brutality against people of colour: Canada, Britain, Belgium, France, Australia, the Dominican Republic.

And then the same combination exerted a high level of accountability on the police for their further acts of violence against the protesters, which spilled over into police violence against the media covering those protests.

These events show the importance of the community having a common bedrock of reliable information on which to base a common conversation and a common response to an issue of common concern. It is the opposite of the fragmentation that is created by online echo chambers.

If Margaret MacMillan is right, and the world really is at a point where significant economic, political and social change is possible, lets hope the media might be brave and honest enough to reflect on the contribution they have made to the creation of democracys crisis, and be prepared to change in order to help rebuild public trust in democratic institutions.

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Media have helped create a crisis of democracy - now they must play a vital role in its revival - The Conversation AU

Sheri Berman urges the American left not to squander the sea-change in public opinion of recent weeks by only preaching to the converted.

From the outside, what is going on in the United States may seem bewildering. Not only has the most powerful country in the world (as well as one of the richest and most technologically advanced) proved unable to deal effectively with the pandemic; it now seems to be tearing itself apart in paroxysms of protest and civil discord. Reflecting a common view, the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, proclaimed that the US was in a deep internal crisisone which echoed, others asserted, the type of crisis that plagued the Soviet empire as it careened towards its collapse.

The US is at a critical juncture, its most obvious manifestation being protests which may be the largest in our history. But rather than reflecting or furthering a deep internal crisis, as Putin and other believe (and perhaps hope), these protests are as likely to strengthen American democracy as weaken it.

Moreover, they may produce victories for the left which would have been unimaginable only a few weeks ago. Whether we will look back at this time as one in which the US shifted from a path of democratic decay and discord to one of positive and progressive change will depend on many factorsnot least choices made by the left itself.

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Protest is a legitimate political exercise in democracies, a way for citizens to make their voices collectively heard outside the electoral process. Indeed, protesting is often motivated by dissatisfaction with that processwith the decisions and behaviour of elected officials. Large-scale mobilisation and even dissatisfaction are not, therefore, necessarily problematic for democratic regimes. By providing citizens with myriad, legitimate ways to express their demands, democracies have peaceful means of self-correction dictatorships lack.

The protests agitating the US are indeed motivated by dissatisfaction with the behaviour of elected officials and other decision-makers. They were triggered by outrage at the killing of George Floyd in Minnesota in late May by a police officer, subsequently charged with his murder. But they quickly grew to encompass demands that longstanding injustices and inequalities which made Floyds murder possible be addressed. In their scale and scopethey have occurred in every state, in urban and rural areas, and included participants from every imaginable ethnic, religious and socio-economic groupthe protests have been an astonishing manifestation not merely of anger and discontent but also of the potential power of democratic participation.

Within a few weeks they have had dramatic impactsperhaps most obviously on public opinion. In contrast to past episodes when African-American citizens were killed by the police, excuses for, or rationalisations of, Floyds murder have been absent. Eighty-eight per cent of white Americans believe the protests it has triggered are justified. As CNNs incredulous political director noted, that percentage dont agree on anything.

Also shifting rapidly are views of the movement most associated with the protests. Black Lives Matter was previously criticised or looked upon with wariness by many white citizens but in the last few weeks support for BLM has increased by almost as much as in the preceding two years.

Yet it is not merely views of Floyds murder, police brutality and BLM that have shifted; more citizens have acknowledged and begun to confront deeper issues of racism and inequality. For example, six in ten white Americans now say that racism is a big problem in society and over two-thirds that Floyds killing reflects broader problems within law enforcement in the US.

Reflecting this wider shift, even deeply conservative publications, such as the National Review and The American Conservative, have recently run articles with titles like Seven Reasons Police Brutality is Systemic not Anecdotal and America Begins to See More Clearly Now What its Black Citizens Always Knew. As one observer of race in the US noted, When it comes to such a dramatic, almost on-the-spot change, I dont think weve ever seen anything of this level.

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And its not just public opinion thats in flux. Businesses, sports franchises, entertainment outlets and other institutions, which had previously avoided confronting issues concerning racial justice, have shifted course too.

The National Football League has belatedly accepted the legitimacy of the taking the knee protests by Colin Kaepernick and other athletes against police brutality. Several brands which explicitly or implicitly employed racist imagery have been withdrawn. Companies and other organisations rushed to celebrate Juneteentha holiday, previously unknown to many white Americans, which commemorates the proclamation of freedom for slaves in Texas on June 19th 1865. All this has been associated with a record-setting flood of donations to racial justice groups, bail funds and black-led advocacy organizations across America, remaking the financial landscape of black political activism in a matter of weeks.

The political pressure coming from the protests, the attitudinal shifts and the behaviour of private-sector and civil-society actors has already begun influencing policy. Politicians at the local, state and national levels have begun debating and implementing reforms. Congressional Democrats, for example, have put forward a reform bill (the Justice in Policing Act) which represents the most expansive intervention into policing proposed in recent memory.

The bill would, among other things, ban chokeholds, establish a national database to track police misconduct and make it easier to hold officers accountable for misconduct in civil and criminal courts. In response, Congressional Republicans released their own reform bill (the Justice Act) which, while much less far-reaching than the Democrats, nonetheless reflects a recognition of the way the winds are blowing.

In short, the protests reflect precisely the way democracy should work: citizens acted collectively to express their demands and the political system has begun to adjust accordingly. For change to be long-term, structural and institutionalised, however, more will be needed. Fundamental, progressive reform of society and the economy in the US will require winning elections and holding on to political power.

Which brings us to the crucial backdrop to the proteststhe most important election in modern American history.

During his time in the White House, Donald Trump has supercharged the ugliest tendencies in American society, deepened the problems which made Floyds murder possible and undermined American democracy more than at any point in recent history. Despite over three years of corrupt, divisive and reactionary behaviour, Republican politicians and voters had however hitherto stuck with him.

And yet, in the last few weeks, the political shift Democrats and progressives long expected and hoped for may have begun to emerge. Alongside his incompetent handling of the pandemic, Trumps authoritarian and polarising response to Floyds death has led figures such as James Mattis, James Miller, George W Bush, Colin Powell and others to say they could no longer support him and might even vote in November for his Democratic opponent, Joe Biden.

The prominence and in many cases impeccably conservative credentials of these critics may finally lead to a tipping point, enabling other Republican politicians and voters to turn their backs on the nativist populism peddled by Trump. Reflecting this, the polls have begun to shift, with some now showing Biden amassing a dramatic lead.

What should the left do in this incredible situation?

The response thus far has reflected longstanding divisions within the Democratic party and among left-wing activists. Winning elections requires building coalitions and making compromisesas well as avoiding anything which enables Republicans to shift attention away from injustices that need addressing or erodes broad but fragile support for significant change.

Just as the Trump presidency has made crystal-clear the role played by the politically polarising, racially-inflammatory tendencies built into the Republican party since the era of Richard Nixon, the left needs to recognise that denigrating compromises and coalitions and shouting down opponents, rather than engaging with and trying to convince them, are incompatible with democracy.

We have seen these tendencies over the last days, as defences and rationalisations of rioting have abounded in sections of the left. And in a widely-reported scene in Minneapolis the mayor, Jacob Frey, a civil-rights lawyer, progressive and second-youngest mayor in the citys history, gave an impassioned speech in favour of deep seated, structural reformonly to be surrounded by protesters telling him, inter alia, to get the f*** out of here, having refused to commit to fully defunding and abolishing the citys police department.

The demand to defund the police, which has been central to the protests, is designed to mobilise the already committed and express anger, rather than attract a broad array of citizens to the cause. The goal, of course, is to create a new model of policingless violent and aggressive, more deeply and organically embedded in communities, more integrally paired with expanded social-service organisations to deal with mental health and poverty-related issues with which cops are not trained to deal.

There is broad support for such reforms, yet if couched as defunding or abolishing the police majorities are consistently opposed. If the goal is to win elections and institutionalise major structural reforms, emphasising confusing and confrontational slogans such as defund the police is counter-productive. Unless, of course, the real goal is not to win elections and power but rather to make a point or mobilise the already discontentedtendencies towards which parts of the left are all too prone and have left it consistently vulnerable to being overwhelmed by a more strategic and focused right.

Now is the time the American left has been waiting for. The protests over recent weeks have been a remarkable manifestation of the power of democracycitizens from every state and every background have made their voices heard and forced American society to confront problems which it ignored for too long. The protests have also helped turn the tide against a president who represents the greatest threat to progress and democracy our country has experienced in modern times.

But to seize this opportunity the left needs to recognise that in a democracy there are only two ways of achieving your goals: you can compromise with those who disagree with your views or you can convince them that your views are correct. Illiberal behaviour, purity tests and name-calling are antithetical to both. The US is indeed at a critical juncturethe democratic left must recognise this and act accordingly.

This article is a joint publication bySocial EuropeandIPS-Journal

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Protests, the left and the power of democracy - Social Europe