News

“Thinking Our Way Out of This”: Cognitive Approaches to the Crisis of Democracy

20 Sep 2025

This interdisciplinary symposium brought together scholars of politics, psychology and social sciences to discuss some of the new difficulties that democracies face, and to consider some possible ways forward.

Papers & Speakers

• Deliberative Versus Participatory Democracy. Diana Mutz (Department of Politics, University of Pennsylvania) 

• Longitudinal Trends in Moralization of Politics. Curtis Puryear (Department of Computational Social Science, University of Northern Carolina) 

• Authoritarianism, religiosity and democratic norms. Gizem Arikan (Department of Political Science, Trinity College Dublin)  

• Honest Liars and the Threat to Democracy. Stephan Lewandowsky (Cognitive Psychology, University of Bristol UK) 

• Are We Doomed to Idiocracy? Scott Lucas (Department of Political Science, University College Dublin) 

Chaired by Dr Michael Booth, Department of English, UCC.

Symposium supported by UCC Futures – Collective Social Futures

For more on this story contact:

Dr Michael Booth, michael.booth@ucc.ie