Democracy

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.

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.

Marios Constantine Iacovides discusses his and Konstantinos Stylianou’s empirical investigations into how the goals of competition policy have evolved over time. They find that a multitude of goals have always been present in judicial and regulatory decisions, but the emphasis on certain goals has vacillated in response to the concerns of the time. Contemporary concerns about the health of democracy suggest a revival of ordoliberalism and protection of the competitive process.

The following is a transcript of Tom Ginsburg's keynote address at the 2025 Stigler Center Antitrust and Competition Conference—Economic Concentration and the Marketplace of Ideas.

Media pluralism is a core democratic value in Europe. Upholding it requires that media concentration is scrutinized beyond its impact on competition in the traditional economic formulation. By addressing the challenges posed by dominant media players and fostering a diverse information ecosystem, Europe aims to uphold media plurality as a democratic value and ensure that citizens can engage in informed decision-making. From this angle, the European approach to protecting media pluralism might offer an interesting comparative  perspective for the United States debate, write Maciej Bernatt and Marta Sznajder.