Democracy

In new research, Claire Liu and Jared Stanfield examine how relationships between corporate leaders and the United States president enable firms to capture regulation and avoid antitrust scrutiny.

As private corporations gain unprecedented control over public data, Americans are losing access to the information that underpins democracy and critical aspects of their lives. D. Victoria Baranetsky argues that this rise of secrecy—driven by the rising value of data and government privatization—demands not just transparency, but a bold commitment to anti-secrecy as essential to democratic governance.

Fifteen years after Citizens United opened elections to corporate campaign financing, Jacob Eisler asks if the ruling remains relevant after Donald Trump won in 2016 and 2024 through small donations and social media savvy rather than traditional reliance on kingmaking donors.

Caio Mario S. Pereira Neto reflects on the discussions at the Stigler Center’s 2025 Antitrust and Competition Conference and addresses the problems that confront Brazil’s courts as they navigate the tradeoffs between removing disinformation that threatens electoral integrity and observing constitutional protections for freedom of expression.

Eleanor Fox argues that the leading law firms should have immediately and collectively resisted President Donald Trump’s attacks. Strong, timely collective resistance may have helped staunch democratic backsliding and prevented normalization of repeated, speech-chilling demands. Doing so, however, the firms would have faced the risk of violating the antitrust laws. This article assesses antitrust’s treatment of political action and argues that the space for protected political action needs to be enlarged.

Assistant Director Matt Lucky, Ph.D., reviews Joan Williams’ new book, Outclassed, which reflects on the Democratic Party’s loss of what she calls “middle-status” voters. Williams discusses her book with Bethany McLean and Luigi Zingales on this week’s Capitalisn’t episode, which you can listen to here.

The following is an excerpt from Joan Williams' new book, “Outclassed: How the Left Lost the Working Class and How to Win Them Back,” now out at St. Martin's Press.

The following is an excerpt from Natasha Piano's new book, Democratic Elitism: The Founding Myth of American Political Science, now out at Harvard University...

Populist leaders like United States President Donald Trump are zealously challenging the authority of independent technocrats and judges. This backlash follows decades of steadily increasing delegation of policymaking authority to unelected experts, bureaucratic agencies, and the judiciary. In new research, Gabriele Gratton and Jacob Edenhofer argue that such backlash is a predictable development in political environments where majorities are unstable and new political coalitions frequently favor policies at odds with those crafted by social welfare-maximizing technocrats.

Wendy Li writes that business leaders must rediscover past unity and put pressure on politicians to defend against President Donald Trump’s attacks on businesses and civil society and prevent democratic backsliding.