The Great Experiment

Can a diverse democracy actually hold together? Mounk takes up the question directly, surveying the record of multiethnic societies and arguing that success is possible but never automatic, that it has to be built through shared institutions and a common civic identity rather than assumed. The companion to The People vs. Democracy, turned toward the hardest version of the modern democratic task: governing together across difference, on purpose, without pretending the difference away.

A political scientist who studies the strains on liberal democracy and the project of building diverse societies that hold together. The People vs. Democracy examines how liberalism and democracy, long assumed to be partners, have begun to pull apart. The Great Experiment asks how multiethnic democracies can succeed. He writes about the conditions under which self-government survives its own internal tensions.