September 4, 2025. 12 PM EST
Tracking Democratic Erosion in the United States
This week's discussion will feature John Carey, Gretchen Helmke, and Brendan Nyhan, professors of political science and directors of the Bright Line Watch initiative, which assesses the state of American democracy over time. Their remarks will focus on the state of democratic erosion and key findings from the Bright Line Watch dataset.
John Carey
John Wentworth Professor in the Social Sciences, Dartmouth College
Gretchen Helmke
Thomas H. Jackson Distinguished University Professor in the Department of Political Science, University of Rochester
Brendan Nyhan
James O. Freedman Presidential Professor, Dartmouth College
Meet the Speakers
John Carey is John Wentworth Professor in the Social Sciences and interim Dean of Faculty for the Arts and Sciences at Dartmouth. He is also a co-founder and co-director of Bright Line Watch, which monitors threats to American democracy. In 2012, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. In 2014, he received the George H. Hallet Award from the American Political Science Association for his 1992 book, Presidents & Assemblies, judged to have made a lasting contribution to the study of representation and elections.
Gretchen Helmke is the Thomas H. Jackson Distinguished University Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Rochester, where she also serves as the Faculty Director for the University of Rochester's Democracy Center. Helmke is a 2025 Guggenheim Fellow. Helmke’s research spans political institutions, judicial politics and the rule of law, informal institutions and norms, and democratic erosion in Latin America and the United States. Her current book project entitled, Upending Impunity: Corruption, Competition, and Selective Accountability under Democracy, leverages experiences from presidential systems around the world to assess the political factors underlying the prosecution of democratically-elected leaders for corruption, and analyzes the tradeoffs that such prosecutions carry for democracy and the rule of law in the United States and beyond. She is a founding member of Bright Line Watch, a non-partisan group of scholars that monitors threats to democracy in the United States.
Brendan Nyhan is the James O. Freedman Presidential Professor in the Department of Government at Dartmouth College. His research, which focuses on misperceptions about politics and health care, has been published in journals including Nature, Science, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, American Journal of Political Science, Journal of Politics, Nature Human Behaviour, Pediatrics, and Vaccine. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2023 and previously was named a Guggenheim Fellow by the Guggenheim Foundation, an Andrew Carnegie Fellow by the Carnegie Corporation of New York, and a Belfer Fellow by the Anti-Defamation League. He also received the Emerging Scholar Award for the top scholar in the field within 10 years of their Ph.D. by the American Political Science Association's section on Elections, Public Opinion, and Voting Behavior. He is a co-director of Bright Line Watch, a watchdog group that monitors the status of American democracy. He was previously a contributor to The Upshot at The New York Times and GEN/Medium and a media critic for Columbia Journalism Review. Previously, he was a founder and editor of Spinsanity, a non-partisan watchdog of political spin that was syndicated in Salon and the Philadelphia Inquirer, along with Ben Fritz and Bryan Keefer. Together they co-authored All the President's Spin, a New York Times bestseller that Amazon named one of the best political books of 2004.
Suggested Readings
TBD