# Yascha Mounk's The Great Experiment explained: how diverse democracies can hold together

> In The Great Experiment (2022), Yascha Mounk argues that no democracy has yet managed to be both ethnically or religiously diverse and fair to every group, and that whether citizens see each other as strangers or compatriots depends on the institutions they build. He rejects both the melting pot and the mosaic, proposes a 'public park' where groups keep their identity and still meet under common rules, and defends a cultural patriotism that decent people should not cede to the far right. For radical centrism the book points at one institution in particular: the school, where Spain's 12.9% of foreign pupils either become compatriots or fall behind.

- URL: https://www.radicalcentre.eu/en/articles/yascha-mounk-the-great-experiment-explained
- Language: en
- Publisher: radical centre / centro radical
- Published: 2026-11-01
- Topic: Ideas & history
- Author: radical centre
- Licence: CC BY 4.0

## Key points

- Yascha Mounk's The Great Experiment: Why Diverse Democracies Fall Apart and How They Can Endure was published by Penguin Press in April 2022.
- Mounk argues that humans sort into groups with ease and that democracies tend either to let a majority dominate or to splinter into hostile factions.
- He proposes the image of a public park, where people can stay with their own group, meet strangers and follow common rules, in place of the melting pot or the mosaic.
- He defends a cultural patriotism: pride in a country's customs, places and people alongside its civic values.
- In Spain, 12.9% of pupils were foreign nationals in 2024-25, and foreign nationals aged 18 to 24 leave education early at three times the rate of Spaniards.

Yascha Mounk opens his 2022 book with a claim that sounds bold and turns out to be hard to refute: no democracy in history has yet managed to be both diverse and equal, with different ethnic and religious groups treated fairly. *The Great Experiment: Why Diverse Democracies Fall Apart and How They Can Endure*, published by Penguin Press, calls the attempt the greatest experiment of our time. This week, in a category about [social mobility](/en/articles/what-is-social-mobility-spain-social-elevator-data) and young people, it is the right book for a country where one pupil in eight is a foreign national.

Mounk is a German-born writer of Polish parents, a historian by training at Cambridge with a doctorate in government from Harvard, now Professor of the Practice of International Affairs at Johns Hopkins, founder of the magazine *Persuasion* and host of *The Good Fight* podcast. He made his name with *The People vs Democracy*, on populism. This book is the constructive sequel.

## Why diverse democracies go wrong

The first part of the book, as reviewers describe its structure, deals with what goes wrong. Mounk draws on social psychology to show how easily humans form groups and turn against outsiders. Publishers Weekly picks out the classic experiment in which schoolboys sorted by a preference for one painter or another started discriminating against the other group. If a taste in paintings is enough, ethnicity and religion are more than enough.

Democracy can make this worse, Mounk told an audience at Johns Hopkins in April 2022, because democratic institutions respond to majorities. Diverse democracies have tended to fail in one of two directions: a majority dominates the minorities, or the society breaks into hostile factions living side by side. The New Rambler's review notes his worry about the darker version of the second, with residential segregation and separate schooling.

## The park

The second part describes what diverse democracies should become. Mounk sets aside the two images people usually reach for. The melting pot asks newcomers to dissolve and, in his view, undervalues the groups people care about. The mosaic, or salad bowl, emphasises the boundaries between groups and leaves them apart.

His alternative is a public park. In a park, people can sit alone, gather with their own family or community, or join a game with strangers. Groups overlap or keep to themselves as they choose. And the park has rules, consistently enforced, so that nobody can take it over or shut it down. Commonality grows out of repeated encounters in a shared space. The publisher's description puts the stakes in one line: whether we come to see each other as "strangers or compatriots" depends on the institutions we build.

Two further positions make the book harder to file under left or right. Mounk argues for a cautious, inclusive patriotism and says tolerant citizens should not hand national symbols to far-right populists, because that makes the symbols easier to capture. He calls it cultural patriotism: civic values plus pride in a country's customs, places and people, since most citizens do not organise their lives around politics. And he accepts that democracies may decide how many people to admit and on what terms; Publishers Weekly notes his view that secure borders can make large-scale migration more acceptable to citizens.

The critics have a point. Diana Muir Appelbaum, writing in the New Rambler Review, argues that the park leaves open which language citizens share and how a society enforces norms when groups disagree about practices such as child marriage. Those are the right questions. The third part of the book, on how diverse societies can succeed, ends on hope, and hope gets concrete fast once you apply the park to a real country.

## The park in Spain is the school

Mounk's park needs a place where children of every origin meet every day under the same rules. In Spain that place exists and is enormous. According to Ministry of Education data reported in July 2025, foreign nationals made up 12.9% of pupils in non-university education in 2024-25, after ten years of growth, with shares of 19% in the Balearic Islands and 18.5% in the Valencian Community. The share was 14.2% in public schools and 10.2% in private and state-funded private ones.

And the school is where the experiment is currently failing for many. Ismael Sanz's February 2026 report for Funcas, built on the Labour Force Survey, finds that 30.7% of foreign nationals aged 18 to 24 left education early in 2025, against 9.8% of Spaniards. On Mounk's terms, that gap is the line between becoming a compatriot and staying a stranger.

The left is right that equal treatment has to be real: no second-class pupils, and public resources aimed at the children who arrive furthest behind, with language support from the first week and tutoring that follows the pupil. The right is right that a shared culture is worth defending, that rules apply to everyone, and that public consent for migration depends on a state that controls who comes in. What fits neither camp is Mounk's park turned into school policy: a mixed intake across public and state-funded private schools, so that no neighbourhood's children sit only with each other; one set of rules and Spanish, or the co-official language, as the shared tongue, with room for every family's heritage language and festivals; and one test of success that everyone can see, which is whether newcomers' children finish upper secondary at the same rate as everyone else.

Halstead and Lind, [the founders](/en/articles/halstead-lind-the-radical-center-explained) of radical centrism, saw the school as the engine of opportunity. Mounk adds that it is also the engine of citizenship, the place where a diverse democracy makes its compatriots one class at a time. Spain already runs that park for more than a million foreign pupils and all their classmates. The task is to make it work for every one of them, and at the end of this week the programme returns to Mounk to work out what a common school without uniformity would ask of Spanish law.

## FAQ

### What is The Great Experiment by Yascha Mounk about?

It asks how democracies that are diverse in ethnicity and religion can treat every group fairly and stay united. Mounk argues that no democracy has yet fully achieved this, that the outcome depends on institutions, and that a 'public park' model and a cultural patriotism offer the best path.

### What is Mounk's public park metaphor?

It is his alternative to the melting pot, which asks minorities to dissolve, and the mosaic or salad bowl, which keeps groups apart. In a park people can keep to their own circle, join others or meet strangers, and everyone follows common rules that are consistently enforced.

### What does Mounk mean by cultural patriotism?

A patriotism that combines civic values with attachment to a country's customs, places and people. Mounk argues that tolerant citizens should embrace national symbols themselves, because leaving them to far-right populists makes them easier to capture.

### Is Mounk for or against immigration?

He defends diverse democracy and also accepts that democracies may set admission numbers and rules. Publishers Weekly notes his view that secure borders can make large-scale migration more acceptable to citizens, a position likely to please neither extreme.

## Sources

- [The Great Experiment by Yascha Mounk](https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/665275/the-great-experiment-by-yascha-mounk/9780593296820), Penguin Random House (2022)
- [The Great Experiment: Why Diverse Democracies Fall Apart and How They Can Endure](https://publishersweekly.com/9780593296813), Publishers Weekly (2022)
- [Yascha Mounk explores diverse democracies at SNF Agora event](https://www.jhunewsletter.com/article/2022/04/yascha-mounk-explores-diverse-democracies-at-snf-agora-event), The Johns Hopkins News-Letter (2022)
- [Let's Undo the Melting Pot](https://newramblerreview.com/book-reviews/political-science/let-s-undo-the-melting-pot), New Rambler Review (2022)
- [Los alumnos extranjeros alcanzan un récord en España](https://theobjective.com/sociedad/educacion/2025-07-19/alumnos-extranjeros-record/), The Objective (Ministry of Education data) (2025)
- [Informe sobre el abandono educativo temprano en España. Datos de 2025 y análisis comparado](https://www.funcas.es/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/Informe-sobre-el-abandono-educativo-temprano-en-Espana.pdf), Funcas (2026)