As preparations for the 2024 General Election approach, the Sandra Day O’Connor Institute for American Democracy sat down with the National Association of Secretaries of State (NASS) President Secretary Steve Simon (D-MN), President-elect Michael Watson (R-MS), and NASS Executive Director Leslie Reynolds to discuss important bipartisan aspects of e…

We are pleased to take a new look at this conversation with Dr. Spencer Crew, in which he discusses the importance of making African American history accessible to the public. Art and documents in a museum can be an important way to experience and understand cultures in new ways. Dr. Spencer Crew has worked in public history institutions for more t…

Empty office buildings. Workforce changes allow for more remote work. American downtowns are struggling. The pandemic-led changes in where and how we work and live have weakened and withered many urban cores. The office vacancy rate in Houston is some 26 percent; in Phoenix it is above 20 percent. This shift means fewer workers, fewer businesses to…

We are excited to revisit this fascinating discussion with Judge Douglas Ginsburg as he delves into past, present, and future struggles for liberty through the lens of the US Constitution - just in time for the 4th of July and the celebration of our Country’s independence. Judge Ginsburg is the author of Voices of Our Republic, the companion to the…

The Sandra Day O’Connor Institute for American Democracy presents a conversation with author and historian Claire Rydell Arcenas and Liam Julian, director of Public Policy at the Sandra Day O'Connor Institute. In her book America's Philosopher: John Locke in American Intellectual Life, Rydell Arcenas seeks to better understand and illuminate the cr…

There is broad scholarly agreement that our current political world owes much to what Thomas Paine was the first to call the "age of revolutions"—that is, the several late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century decades during which revolutions rocked the globe. But what gave rise to the age of revolutions? Why, suddenly, were era-spanning monarch…

Perhaps no extant product of the U.S. Constitution has received more bipartisan animus than the Electoral College. Since 1800 there have been more than 700 proposals introduced in Congress to amend or eliminate the way in which America chooses its presidents. Yet the Electoral College lives on. Why do we have this system? Why does it inspire such c…

Some 40 million people in the American West rely on water from the Colorado River. But the river’s flow has diminished, and those decreases will likely continue. What does this mean for the American West in general and California and Arizona in particular? Will booming metro areas—Maricopa County, for example—have to halt their growth? Will vast ex…

Episode three of the three-part series "The Economy: Inflation, the Fed, and You." Inflation in America is happening for the first time in forty years, but different parts of the country are experiencing inflation differently. How do the ways in which we measure price increases, such as the Consumer Price Index (CPI), contribute to regional varianc…

Episode two of the three-part series "The Economy: Inflation, the Fed, and You." Inflation in America is happening for the first time in forty years, and the Federal Reserve has committed to fighting it. What tools can and does the Fed use to battle inflation, and what are its other economic duties beyond keeping prices stable? Who at the Federal R…

Episode one of the three-part series "The Economy: Inflation, the Fed, and You." Inflation in America is happening for the first time in forty years. Why have prices gone up and when might they come down? What role do monetary policy, the Federal Reserve, and legislators play? And what is the fiscal theory of inflation? Hoover Institution economist…

In September 1981, Senator Dennis DeConcini, a Democrat from Arizona, supported President Ronald Reagan’s nomination of Sandra Day O’Connor as the first woman to take a seat seat on the United States Supreme Court. Hear an eyewitness to history from that unprecedented time, Senator Dennis DeConcini himself, in a moderated conversation with his long…