Democracy and the Informed Public

Contact Info

Jessica Creighton
jessica_creighton@hks.harvard.edu

Vision Statement

Social policies should enable individuals to easily obtain reliable and actionable information to protect themselves from a wide range of risks, vindicate their rights, advance their interests, and fulfill their responsibilities as citizens, workers, and consumers.

Because an informed public remains the cornerstone of democracy, we believe that promoting such access will help make governments and private organizations more accountable and advance the public interest in many other ways.

Mission Statement

The Program on Democracy and the Informed Public conducts research to understand the dynamics through which information is generated, disseminated, obtained, and utilized by the public as citizens, workers and consumers.

We seek to understand “successful” information dynamics that produce reliable information as well as dynamics in which information is hidden, unreliable, deceptive, or used in ways that are individually or socially harmful.
The Program will seek to contribute to the development of policies and practices that improve these dynamics and so empower individuals with reliable information.
The Program will share knowledge arising from the project broadly with students, scholars, policy makers, and the general public.

The Program on Democracy and the Informed Public will aim to:

Understand the dynamics of Americans’ access to information about risks in everyday life, rights guaranteed by law, essential services, and civic responsibilities.
Explore both persistent barriers in information pathways as well as new paths and opportunities to create a better-informed public.
Examine the information needs, preferences, problems, and perspectives of workers, consumers, citizens and others in the community whose welfare is at stake.
Analyze the capacity of individuals and collective groups to act on information in ways that affect private and public institutions in ways consistent with the public interest.
Examine the causes and dynamics of information inequality to understand why some people receive information they can understand as well as inequalities in their capacity to act on or receive responses to their actions.
Seek common learning across a wide variety of policy areas and to develop a common lens of information and the actions cycles that arise from them across many domains of public policy in order to create a platform for both broad research and the dissemination of knowledge arising from the project.

Meet the Team

David Weil

Visiting Professor of Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School;
Co-Director of the Program on Democracy and the Informed Public;
Samuel F. and Rose B. Gingold Chair in Human Development and Professor of Economics,
School of Social Sciences and Social Policy, Brandeis University

Archon Fung

Director, Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation;
Co-Director of the Program on Democracy and the Informed Public;
Winthrop Laflin McCormack Professor of Citizenship and Self-Government

Jessica Creighton