The Democracy Seminar, a network of seminars that ran from 1984 to 1994, and again from 2018 to the present (2021), were semi-clandestine meetings of scholars held simultaneously in Warsaw, Budapest and New York, before spreading to cities across Eastern and Central Europe. The seminar discussed topics in democratic politics and culture, and was the genesis of the Transregional Center for Democratic Studies at The New School for Social Research. The Democracy Seminar oral history project consists of interviews conducted by Ph.D. sociology candidate Jack Wells with three sociology faculty members who were deeply involved with the Democracy Seminar: Jeffrey Goldfarb, Elzbieta Matynia and Andrew Arato.

The New School Graduate Faculty established the East and Central Europe Program in 1990, expanding to become the Transregional Center for Democratic Studies (TCDS) in 1997, to foster dialogue on democratic theory and practice in East and Central Europe, Central America and southern Africa, among other regions. The collection documents the center's events, seminars, workshops, and conferences. Also includes research and course files of TCDS founder, Elzbieta Matynia.