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Friends, Right after the 2024 presidential election, I shared my first draft reflections in the spirit of transparency and collaboration: that being able to understand the current state of our democratic systems and imagine a more generative future requires powerful new narratives; that the election results can embolden us to get curious and compassionate about the socio-political trends animating people’s feelings and actions towards American democracy; and that there is an appetite and urgent mandate for viable solutions and change to our current constitutional reality. As we brace ourselves for the challenges and opportunities of 2025––some anticipated, others less so––I wanted to share how these reflections and questions have evolved and how Democracy 2076 is building upon these insights in the new year to bring about a more responsive, representative, and effective American democracy for the next generation. What are the types of stories that help different audiences connect to the process of creating a democracy that works for everyone? Over the past several months, Democracy 2076 has worked with Harmony Labs to develop a body of research to understand how depictions of democracy and the future in entertainment media might be shaping people’s understanding of government. Today, we are excited to share with you the conclusion of the first phase of this research, which examines the media consumption of 130,000 streaming platform users watching nearly 29,000 individual programs to understand the prevalence of government-themed media and how different themes around democracy and authoritarianism impacted different values-based audiences. You can view the first report on this work here.
Ultimately, our investigation generated several key findings:
Nearly 3 in 5 (58%) of people who watch any scripted streaming daily are engaging with programs that contain governmental themes. In other words, the pursuit of liberal democracy makes for engaging stories. Of the various government-relevant stories we identified, only 8% were set in the future, while 53% were set in the past 25 years. Through our strategic foresight work for A Constitution for 2076, we have observed that when asked to imagine the future, often the first narratives that come to mind are ones that come from film and television. Our research shows that there are very few examples of healthy governments in the future to help foster people’s imagination: of the future visions of government we identified, only half actually depicted them as healthy. This work echoes other recent findings (see here and here) on the increasing normalization of political violence. 55% of the 200 government-relevant story arcs we investigated showed main characters using violence to navigate conflict, revealing just how commonly accepted it has become as a tool for political change. This builds on early analysis we had done on how the political violence depicted in the trailer for Alex Garland’s film Civil War actually made all audiences––even those who tend to value order, authority, and community––more comfortable with the use of political violence.
Additionally, our research illuminated important insights into audience values and consumption preferences around themes of democracy and governance: Unsurprisingly, we found that audiences with different sets of values consume different types of stories about democracy. Audiences that value community and collective action are demotivated by stories about maverick actors breaking rules to create change, while those same stories emphasize individual agency in a way that is inspiring and persuasive to audiences that value authority and individual freedoms. Importantly, these types of stories are upstream of our existing political narratives and can help us understand why certain political messages do or do not resonate with their intended audiences. The narratives audiences are exposed to in their leisure time impact their reception of more explicit narratives around government and democracy. While we at Democracy 2076 enjoy watching positive portrayals of functioning democracy in the media, we found that audiences were more likely to move positively towards democratic reform when consuming stories where democracy is dysfunctional, threatened, or deteriorated. In other words, content like The West Wing that portray effective and functioning democratic systems do not significantly convince audiences to care about improving those systems and, in some instances, decrease their belief that systems need to change. However, while negative examples of democracy were more likely to convince audiences to view democratic reform as necessary, these portrayals often did not actually give those audiences the tools needed to understand how to move those governments to change nor help them envision what positive democratic change could actually entail. We identified some stories that helped create feelings of agency and helped audiences envision what the future of American democracy could entail, but we did not find stories that move all audiences on these questions. This tells us that there is an opportunity for both more research and more stories.
In the coming months, we will build on this research to identify how the types of stories being told have changed over time, enrich our existing data by incorporating voter files to explore how party affiliation relates to audience values and government-relevant media consumption, and dig deeper into audiences that were not being moved positively towards democracy with current media offerings.. Ultimately, we hope to build both the demand and the supply of more robust pro-democracy, pro-topian narratives informed by meticulous research and development. How can we understand people’s political choices with compassion and curiosity? How can we shape the next political realignment to ensure pro-democracy political coalitions in 2076? On January 16th at 12 PM EST / 9 AM PST we will be officially launching the final piece of our three-pronged strategy, Pro-Democracy Coalitions for 2076. Alongside our partners at Horizon 2045, we will be using strategic foresight and horizon scanning tools to understand what we can be doing now to shape and prepare for our next political realignment to ensure that all political parties over the next generation are committed to democracy. We will be hosting regular stakeholder briefings throughout this process to seek feedback and input from partners. We would love to have as many voices as possible present on Thursday’s launch so folks know the range of opportunities to get involved and can recommend who we should be learning from. RSVP here to see how you and others can be involved! And finally, how can we acknowledge the brokenness of our political systems and present viable solutions that ensure the continuity of American democracy while addressing its shortcomings? At Democracy 2076, we have found that long-term visions of constitutional change provide solutions to some of the biggest questions facing our democracy. We have also found that they serve as a moderating force for individuals and organizations who are deeply frustrated with the status quo. This summer, we will reconvene our cross-ideological and cross-experiential cohort of scholars, organizers, and futurists to: Connect current defensive work across the democracy ecosystem with longer-term efforts to reform the Constitution; Deepen understandings and strategies to engage with a broad coalition of actors in those efforts; and Revise and refine the reform plans we began during our time together in 2024.
We are also building on the success of our strategic foresight processes for constitutional change at the state level. In December 2024, we worked with state legislators through the national conference of the State Innovation Exchange (SIX), a resource and strategy center for collaborative initiatives in state governments, which was our first foray into working with elected officials. In 2025, we are working with state organizers in nine different states across the country––including many of those most vulnerable to authoritarian-minded attempts at calling state-wide constitutional conventions. We made this assessment based on those states who currently support federal efforts at a constitutional convention; for example, North Carolina quietly passed their call for a federal convention in December 2024. Just last week, we were in Louisiana working to align their pro-democracy coalition in advance of a potential state-wide constitutional convention after last year’s efforts and to begin to plan a large event for later this year to engage members of the public on their desires for amendments for the Louisiana state constitution.We are working to support our partners’ efforts to take what began as a threat to liberal democracy and turn it into an opportunity to improve liberal democracy in Louisiana. If you are interested in using our resources or team guidance to facilitate a strategic foresight process for democratic reform at your organization, please contact us! If you’re thinking that this is a lot of work, well, that’s because it is. We struggled to get it concise enough so that you would open this email and read it all the way to the end (congratulations, by the way, you made it!). In order to ensure we have enough organizational capacity to support all of our programmatic efforts, we are in the process of onboarding new team members onto the Democracy 2076 team and are hoping to hire more later this year. We’re so excited to introduce you to them soon; they will bring incredible expertise and wisdom to the work of Democracy 2076. The scale of our work––and the problems we’re determined to face––also serve as an important reminder for the resilience that all of us will need in the coming year. That resilience goes beyond just Democracy 2076, or even the US democracy movement (see this UN report on global future-oriented democracy efforts). I would encourage all of us to continue sharing resources and practices for restoration, adaptability, and endurance in the months to come, even if we think they are unfinished or imperfect. My inbox is always open! Onwards, Aditi
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