The Center for Democracy & Civic Empowerment
The Center for Democracy & Civic Empowerment (DCE) is an initiative housed at the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy that seeks to advance a clearer, evidence-based understanding of what it takes to establish and sustain democracy and to translate that understanding into the civic capacity of our students and the public.
While ‘strengthening democracy’ is a widely shared goal, democracy institutes across higher education acknowledge that what this means in practice is often underspecified. Working in partnership with units across campus, DCE builds three mutually reinforcing pillars:
- an intellectual hub for transdisciplinary democracy research, anchored by a scholarly network that helps democracy researchers learn about one another's work and catalyzes new collaborative projects
- student learning opportunities, including a campus-wide Democracy Certificate Program and Student Democracy Hub
- public service through engagement opportunities such as a pilot internship program embedding students with state election administrators, Democracy Week, and public teach-ins.
DCE aims to catalyze at least 15 interdisciplinary democracy research projects with evidence of cross-unit collaboration, external grant funding, and scholarly and policy-relevant outputs, and to engage more than 2,500 non-university participants through public programming and partnerships beyond Ann Arbor. The center will also generate widely accessible civic-education products and track outcomes through pre- and post-participation civic capacity surveys, culminating in a comprehensive evaluation and sustainability plan.
