Russia's Attacks on Our Democratic Systems Call for Diverse Countermeasures

What do attacks on the integrity of our voting systems, the census and the judiciary all have in common? They're all intended to reduce our faith in systems necessary for our democracy to function, and they're also targets of Russian propaganda efforts.

To understand how these efforts can effectively undermine a democracy, it helps to think of a government as an information system. In this conceptualization, there are two types of knowledge that governments use to function. The first is what we call common political knowledge, which consists of the political information we all agree on. This includes things such as how the government works, how leaders are elected, and the laws that the courts uphold. This is contrasted with contested political knowledge, which are the things we disagree on: what the correct level of taxation should be, in what ways government should get involved in social issues, and so on....