Published September 14, 2026 at 4:24 PM CDT

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Political polarization has become deeply entrenched over the last decade, damaging trust in institutions and undermining the "rules of the road" of our country. But University of Kansas professor Chris Koliba says it doesn’t have to be like this forever.

That’s the argument Koliba will make on Thursday afternoon during his talk at Park University’s David Theater called “Our Shared Social Contract: Rediscovering the Ideals of American Democracy.”

A social contract, he explained, is comprised of the rules that people abide by in a society.

“There's a contract of an agreement between you and I right now as we talk, for example. We abide by rules of the road when we are driving on the highway,” he explained. “Democracies are no different.”

Koliba told KCUR’s Up To Date that he believes the country’s lack of agreement on core values and lack of trust in institutions has caused the social contract to fragment. Koliba pointed to arguments over election integrity as just one of many indicators.

“(People are wondering if they’ll) have access to the vote. Will the vote get get counted? Will the wrong people be allowed to vote?" Koliba said. "And instead of making this a more generalized discussion and effort to increase the integrity of our elections, the politicization of that very question is really undermining our trust in the government and in each other.”

Koliba does believe that there is a path for the country to fix this problem.

“If you go back to the framing and the discussions of the framers of the Constitution, there was a robust and serious and deliberate and civil civic debate among people from different points of view about what holds us together,” he explained. “I think we need to promulgate a serious civic debate about what binds us together as a people, and that's sort of what I'm using the soapbox for. So, we need to create the forums for that to happen and we need to invest in civic education.”

• Chris Koliba, Edwin O. Stene Distinguished Professor at the University of Kansas School of Public Affairs and Administration

Our Shared Social Contract: Rediscovering the Ideals of American Democracy, 5 p.m. Thursday, Sep. 17, David Theater at Alumni Hall, 8700 NW River Park Drive, Parkville, MO 64152. Livestream at parkumedia.com.