Every September, the United Nations General Assembly brings the world's leaders to New York. This year, a few miles from U.N. headquarters, Vanderbilt's Center for Global Democracy convened leading experts to ask what makes democracy resilient.
The Sept. 24 conversation at Vanderbilt's new Chelsea campus examined how citizens view democracy, how well democratic institutions are serving them, and how global pressures shape democracy's prospects everywhere.
Jason Merchant, Searcy Family Dean of the College of Arts and Science, opened the evening with a personal story: He was living in Germany when the Berlin Wall fell and the East's authoritarian government collapsed.
East Germany's official name, he noted, was the German Democratic Republic. "Democracy was in their name, and they had this wonderful constitution," Merchant said. "You could read it, you could enjoy it, but you could not live it."
Those who witnessed what followed-the reunification of Germany and the fall of the Soviet empire-"have come more and more to appreciate the great achievement that democracy is," Merchant said.
How to protect that achievement was the question Merchant handed to the evening's panel.
Moderated by Elizabeth Zechmeister, Cornelius Vanderbilt Professor of Political Science, vice provost for graduate education and growth initiatives, and dean of the Graduate School, the panel included Noam Lupu, the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor of Political Science and director of the Center for Global Democracy; Larry Diamond, senior fellow at Stanford University's Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies; Ruth Ben-Ghiat, professor of history at New York University; and Kevin Casas-Zamora, secretary-general of International IDEA, an intergovernmental organization that supports democracy worldwide.
As the panel explored how the public and the institutions that serve it uphold democracy, one theme kept recurring: Disillusionment with democracy is not a rejection of it.
Lupu said the CGD's 2026 AmericasBarometer, a public opinion survey of people in 21 countries across the Americas, supports that idea. The survey found support for democracy rising for the first time in more than a decade, even as trust in courts, political parties and the media has eroded. When the survey asked whether people would give up freedom of political expression in exchange for a guaranteed income and standard of living, respondents generally rejected the idea.
"People still want those freedoms," Lupu said. "They've just lost faith in the institutions that are supposed to protect them. They're clearly hungry for a rebirth of democratic institutions-ones that feel legitimate and that actually protect the liberties people value."
The quality and legitimacy of courts, political parties and the media are paramount, Casas-Zamora said, but citizens often judge those institutions by the results they produce.
"Regardless of where I go, what I encounter is that people are craving a democracy that gives them outcomes," he said.
But that focus on results carries a danger. If citizens give up checks and balances to get those results (inadvertently or not), that bargain can eventually put elections themselves at risk.
"Sooner or later, when the government starts playing fast and loose with fundamental rights, with checks and balances, in the name of lofty objectives, there's a very high risk that you will end up with a government that you cannot get rid of," Casas-Zamora said.
That's where democratic practice comes in. Just resting on good performance is not enough, Diamond said. Resilient democracies also depend on habits that must be learned and practiced, such as civility, tolerance, reasoning, compromise, bargaining and acceptance of electoral defeat.
Ben-Ghiat placed much of that work with citizens themselves: accessing accurate information, staying informed, engaging in civic life and voting. "Your vote is your voice," she said. "And if you are choosing not to vote, you're self-silencing."
She also cautioned against assuming that democracy can't fail in a country with no history of dictatorship. Diamond likewise warned that while years of good government can build up public goodwill that can be drawn on in a crisis, much like a bank account, "no account can be drawn on indefinitely."
As the discussion drew to a close, Zechmeister steered the panel toward the future.
Ben-Ghiat said the evidence made her hopeful, pointing to a worldwide surge of mostly nonviolent protest and to surveys suggesting that many disillusioned citizens "want democracies to be more democratic, not less."
The evening also showcased the Center for Global Democracy. Diamond, who helped found Stanford's Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law, pointed out a subtle but telling difference between the institutions' names.
"Congratulations to the Center for Global Democracy for using the word 'for' and not 'on,'" he said.
The CGD studies how democracies emerge, function and decline. Its LAPOP Lab has conducted the AmericasBarometer since 2004, collecting more than 433,000 interviews across 35 countries across that time. The 2026 data and accompanying report, Pulse of Democracy, are available free online. The goal is to give policymakers, researchers and the public the evidence they need to understand the challenges democracies face and how to strengthen them.
As the U.N. General Assembly met a few miles away, Casas-Zamora explained why democracy's resilience matters beyond any one country's borders: "If we care about peace and international security, we would do well to try to support democracy, not just in our own country but globally."
