This perspective is from Democracy Digest:

The robustness of democratic institutions in large part rests on citizen activism, according to a leading civil-resistance expert.

“Regular people should know that there are steps they can take to uphold democracy.” This is a core tenet of civil-resistance theory, also known as people power—that citizens, working in concert, have more agency than they are led to believe, says Erica Chenoweth, the Berthold Beitz Professor in Human Rights and International Affairs at the Harvard Kennedy School.

In the past fifteen years, there has been a marked global increase in what international-relations scholars call “democratic backsliding,” with more authoritarians and authoritarian-style leaders consolidating power, she tells The New Yorker’s Andrew Marantz.

Read the full perspective here.