As we open another academic year in College Park, we wanted to share a bit more with our community about the "inclusive consensus" strategy we use to develop new ideas to strengthen democracy.
Academic consensus is one of the best ideas humanity has ever had.
Academic consensus has given humanity penicillin, the theory of plate tectonics to understand the deep past, and even the god-like ability to predict tomorrow’s weather with decent accuracy. It has shown us that some strategies for teaching kids to read are more effective and that having babies sleep on their backs saves lives.
Academic consensus works because science is a social process. Lone geniuses having moments of inspiration may look glamorous in movies. But good science comes from the social process of many experts critically vetting and improving each other’s work through peer review and other similar processes.
This master key to discovering new ideas that can transform our society is startlingly simple. Scholars organize themselves into “disciplines” - biology! physics! sociology! etc. - which are just communities of people exploring particular questions. These communities set up regular conferences, peer reviewed journals, and other processes of scientific production. And over time these communities establish and update a disciplinary consensus around what questions are important, the methods that are valid ways to explore those questions, and the claims scholars can make about what is true based on the data they collect.
Academic consensus is not always right at any particular moment. We can all think of notable examples of times when scientific consensus was proven to be incorrect. But the processes these communities use to submit claims about what is true to scrutiny from peers enables them to self correct over time and eventually produce the knowledge that creates the modern world.
We study politics at CDCE. This requires a more inclusive approach to consensus than studying rocks or atoms.
In political science, we have extraordinary opportunities that our colleagues outside the social sciences don’t have. Imagine how much the geologists would be learning if rocks could join their research teams and if geologists were part rock? That’s the opportunity we have in political science! The political institutions and processes we study are composed of and run by people who we can talk to and collaborate with. And as political scientists, we too are humans and political beings. Our own experiences participating in the institutions we study can inform our work.
In order to seize the incredible opportunities inherent to studying people rather than things, we need to design the whole process of academic consensus building to account for those opportunities. That requires including experts who know things about social processes and institutions through participating in them or running them. It requires including these experts as co-creators of research who help determine research questions, methods and the meaning of data. And it also includes fully accounting for the extent to which scholars are also humans who are inherently participants in political institutions even as we seek to observe them objectively.
Academic consensus exerts power over research questions, methods, and the meaning of results. We benefit from including more expertise in decisions about how to exert this power over what is understood to be true about politics.
There’s a common story that’s told about someone looking for their keys under a streetlight. They’re asked “why are you looking for your keys under the streetlight? Do you think you dropped them there?” And they say “No! But that’s where I can see!”
At CDCE, we think of the methods and community we engage with through political science as being like a really big and awesome streetlight. It’s extremely helpful in looking for our keys (i.e. important facts about politics)! Political science methods and scholars often help us discover important new facts and ideas.
But not all of the ideas and facts worth discovering about politics can be found using the high powered streetlight of political science. Including people from outside political science - especially people with direct experience and expertise operating in the systems we study - in every step of the research process can help us make crucial discoveries.
How CDCE uses inclusive consensus to discover new ideas about democracy
We seek to operationalize the ideal of inclusive consensus every day at CDCE. We do that in three key ways.
1) Co-leading research teams with practitioners
In 2025-2026 we will continue to expand CDCE’s Senior Fellows program which extends formal appointments in the UMD political science department to practitioners with whom we are cultivating research collaborations. We have an amazing cohort joining us for the 2025-2026 academic year and we’ll be sharing more about them in the coming weeks!
You can read more about last year’s cohort here.
2) Doing service that deepens understanding
In 2025-2026 we will continue to do service work that supports and strengthens the efforts of our community partners. This includes actively supporting partners like TerpsVote and the Maryland Democracy Initiative who are inspiring civic engagement on our campus as well as our work to strengthen Maryland’s elections workforce and understand the future of Maryland elections.
We also continue to use service to operationalize inclusive consensus through the kind of “research aligned internships” we developed with our colleagues at the Maryland Democracy Initiative. “https://cdce.substack.com/p/new-laufer-democracy-internship-programhttps://cdce.substack.com/p/new-laufer-democracy-internship-program” enable UMD students to pursue top notch service and professional development opportunities with organizations and agencies that are crucial to our research. This benefits UMD students, provides valuable service, and brings important “ground truth” knowledge into our research.
3) Publishing and convening for both scholarly and public audiences
This year we will continue to work with partners to make meaning of our research in ways that both advance scholarship and practice. For our peers in political science, CDCE affiliates will be publishing several academic papers and presenting at upcoming disciplinary meetings to share new findings about poll worker recruitment, modern American suffrage movements, and the effects of the Electronic Registration Information Center on voter turnout. At the same time, we’ll be continuing to convene practitioners through the Vote 16 Research Network, New Voters Research Network, and National Student Vote Summit (which the Students Learn Students Vote Coalition will be hosting on our campus in College Park from November 12 - 14). We’ll also be continuing our work with the Washington Post to understand public opinion and our work with VoteRiders to understand who lacks the proof of residency, identity, and citizenship they need to vote. Throughout it all we will be moving forward papers that have an academic audience as well as practitioner facing research products that meet community needs.
Join us as CDCE grows and thrives in 2025-2026!
In the coming weeks, we will be sharing some exciting news about how CDCE will be dramatically expanding our work to apply inclusive consensus to some of the most urgent questions facing our democracy. Stay tuned! And please do reach out and get in touch if you’d like to work with us to explore a question you’re interested in. Your insights and perspective just might be the key to discovering important new ideas about how to strengthen democracy.
Mike Hanmer is the Director of the University of Maryland Center for Democracy and Civic Engagement, the Michael Miller Endowed Faculty Fellow in Government and Politics, and co-Principal Investigator of the Maryland Democracy Initiative. Sam Novey is Chief Strategist at the Center for Democracy and Civic Engagement.
