One nice thing about democracy, in theory, is that it's a form of government that responds to its own citizens. That means a democratic government has many questions about itself. Who are all these people? Where do they live? What do they do? What do they care about? (And, of course: who voted for whom?) Meanwhile, the people of a democracy have questions too. What is my government doing in my name? How does it make decisions? What does it know and what is it hiding? What do my fellow citizens and noncitizens think about all this? And ultimately, what’s working and what’s broken in our system itself? In this course, we’ll ask how American democracy has tried to organize, share, and process different kinds of information. We’ll see how the state tries to learn about the world, through elections, censuses, bureaucrats, and spies. We’ll explore how people try to learn things about their own democratic government, and ask what happens when they
tell their government things it may not want to hear.