The ’love and hate’ of American democracy is a global and historical phenomenon and feeling. In Experiencing American Democracy (ExAm), our research group explores how this unfolded and was evoked for Nordic men and women, their communities and organizations, commemorations and narratives, from the early 1800s until the present. Few countries have had more emigrants traveling to the United States than the Scandinavians. This provides a unique possibility to study the role of migration for the conceptions, circulations and commemorations of American democracy as lived and everyday experiences through a transatlantic public sphere. By examining interchanges between Scandinavia and America on the level of individuals, communities and organizations (and not just governments and states), the ExAm group aims to produce new understandings of how and why American democracy has been and continues to be a forceful ‘emotive’ in the political discourse of Nordic societies. ExAm brings together scholars from the faculty of humanities, theology and law and utilizes digitization methodologies in the study of literary, historical and contemporary material.