New Report: Important Work to Protect Democracies is Happening Locally
Jefferson Educational Society + The Eisenhower Institute
“Across North America and Europe, democracy is being tested in serious ways … and some of the most important work to protect democracy is happening locally,” write Tamara Ehs and Arnaz Mahbub in “Important Work to Protect Democracies is Happening Locally,” a report co-published by the Jefferson Educational Society (JES) and the Eisenhower Institute.
Ehs, a researcher and consultant for democratic innovations safeguarding democracy in Austria, Germany, and at the European Union level, and Mahbub, a research assistant and student with the Eisenhower Institute at Gettysburg College, co-authored this Heartlands Transformation Network (HTN) report that draws from a 2026 virtual discussion the JES hosted, “Local Leaders Build Engaged Citizenry and Resilient Democracies.” That conversation revealed that, as Ehs and Mahbub note, “cities, schools, community colleges, civic organizations, local leaders, and ordinary citizens are helping people connect to public life again” at a time when “anti-democratic leaders and movements are trying to weaken democratic rules, limits rights, and divide people against each other.”
The conversation, led by John Austin, senior fellow at the Eisenhower Institute, Eisenhower Institute, nonresident senior fellow Brookings Institution, associate fellow with the Academy of International Affairs-NRW, and facilitator of the HTN, featured Ehs along with:
Volker Rein, Coordinator of the Bonn, Germany Network for Common Good and Democracy, and Member, Education for Democracy senior expert network, German Trade Union for Education and Science
Ryan Kostanecki, Professor Macomb Community College, outside Detroit, Michigan, leader of local citizen and democratic engagement efforts in this U.S. key battleground county.
Ben Speggen, Vice President of the Jefferson Educational Society, an Erie, Pennsylvania-based nonpartisan think tank cultivating civic education and global citizen engagement in this key Pennsylvania battleground county.
This report draws upon high points made during the event, including democratic “frontsliding”; the importance of building and maintaining networks; critical links between democracy and economic conditions; the power and potential of education; and the role of organizing and the need to create safe spaces for civic engagement.
With a great number of threats to democracy in both North America and across Europe, the response to protecting one come from a single person, election, institution, or idea. In other words, there is no “single-bullet” solution, Ehs and Mahbub argue. Rather, the response to protecting democracy comes from “many small but important efforts.”
The “no single-bullet solution” framing is the right one, and as a human rights attorney I’d add why the local emphasis matters so much right now. A lot of what I document is the removal of national-level checks: inspectors fired, oversight offices hollowed, enforcement quietly severed from the laws that still exist on paper. When the top layer of accountability gets thinned out, what’s left is the redundancy underneath, the city councils, school boards, community colleges, and local civic networks this report points to. They aren’t a consolation prize for losing the bigger fights. They’re the part of the system that’s hardest to capture from a single center of power, because there are too many of them, too dispersed, each one rooted in a real community. Authoritarian movements can disable a federal watchdog with one personnel decision. They cannot fire ten thousand local institutions at once. That’s the quiet strength of the “many small efforts” model: it’s resilient precisely because it isn’t centralized enough to be switched off. Glad to see this work being documented