Mark Chou
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 642898 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | Mark Chou |
| NOMBRES | Mark |
| APELLIDO | Chou |
| FIRMA | CHOU M |
| AFILIACIONES | Australian Catholic University |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-5142-2172 |
| VERIFICADO | Sí |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 39 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 93 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 39 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2009 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2025 |
| ÍNDICE H | 5 |
Mapping the ‘fringe’ in Australian local politics
From the Three Rs to the “Culture Wars”? How Australians Perceive Local Government Action on Climate Change, Indigenous Reconciliation, and LGBTQIA + Advocacy
Australian local government has rarely been the domain where entrenched and polarising cultural disputes play out, and is instead most often associated with the “3Rs”: roads, rates, and rubbish. However, in recent years, a growing number of local councils from across Australia have taken exceptional and unprecedented steps, sometimes in defiance of state and federal governments, to address some of the country's most ideologically contentious issu…
The Three Rs and Beyond
Despite the growing consensus among local government scholars and practitioners that the sector has now moved beyond the 'Three Rs', there remains a trenchant perception in public debate that when local councils do more than provide the narrow range of local services to property they are overreaching.But to what extent are these views actually reflective of Australian public opinion?This article reports on the findings of a new national survey an…
Enhancing perceptions of employability amongst first-year arts students and implications for student belonging
Despite being a degree that leads to diverse employment in a wide range of industries, the Bachelor of Arts (BA) has long had a bad reputation when it comes to employment outcomes for graduates.The challenge of overcoming this disjuncture has significant implications for current and prospective BA students, especially with respect to attrition and student satisfaction.In this article, we examine whether interventions that highlight the profession…
Going Local
Localism has recently been placed back on the political agenda in many countries. Given this, the case for prioritizing the local should be subject to renewed scrutiny. In this review essay, I do this in two ways while being guided by two new books: Trevor Latimer's Small Isn’t Beautiful: The Case Against Localism and Jennifer Vey and Nate Storring's edited collection, Hyperlocal: Place Governance in a Fragmented World. Firstly, I use Latimer to …
Far-right translocalism
Culture Wars and City Politics, Revisited
Conflicts rooted in questions of morality and values—so-called “culture wars”—pose difficult questions for local governance. Yet, when it comes to culture wars, local governments can be as politically active as other levels of government. This article explores the role of local government in the culture war surrounding Australia’s national holiday, Australia Day. We draw on the pioneering work of Elaine Sharp on urban politics, culture wars, and …
The Localist Turn in Populism Studies
While the study of populism has typically focused on the national level, recent years have seen a growing body of research on populism’s local dimensions. Despite making important scholarly advances, this ‘localist turn’ has yet to develop a systematic account of how populism intersects with localism. In this research note, we broach this gap. By exploring how right‐ and left‐wing populisms conceptualize the ‘local’, as well as how localist senti…
Too young to run? Young political candidates and the 2020 Victorian local government elections
This article analyses the demographics, party affiliation, political motivations, and personal experiences of young people in Australia who run for elected office. By analysing a survey conducted with 51 young political candidates who ran in the 2020 Victorian local government elections, we show that that the most under-represented groups include young women, young people with Indigenous heritage or from minority ethnic backgrounds, and young peo…
How Local Governments Govern Culture War Conflicts
While local governments have traditionally been thought relatively powerless and unpolitical, this has been rapidly changing. Recent years have seen local governments jump headfirst into a range of so-called culture war conflicts like those concerning LGBTI rights, refugee protection, and climate change. Using the Australia Day and Columbus Day controversies as case studies, this Element rejuvenates research on how local governments respond to cu…
Australian local governments and climate emergency declarations
In recent years, a growing number of Australian local governments have reaffirmed their longstanding climate leadership by declaring a climate emergency. Indeed, since 2016, when Melbourne's Darebin council became the world's first local government to declare a climate emergency, close to 100 local governments – or a little under one fifth of all Australian local governments – have taken the extraordinary step and made a similar declaration. But …
Different Levels of Government, Different Levels of Political Competence
In federal political systems such as the United States, there has long existed a view that citizens should be more politically competent at the local level than at the federal level of government. Recent studies have challenged this view. This article argues that these findings may reflect only one part of the broader picture. Through a review of two recent studies, I contend that research in this realm must consider more than only the level of g…
Young People, Citizenship and Political Participation
Combatting voter ignorance
In light of recent political events, prominent scholars have argued that voters ignorant of the issues should be disqualified from taking part in decisions that have the potential to alter political landscapes. As convincing as this literature is in highlighting voter ignorance, it fails to differentiate between local, state, and federal elections and how levels of political knowledge are often scale-dependent. If the level of median voter ignora…
Have the black knights arisen? China's and Russia's support of autocratic regimes
The threat of autocracy diffusion in consolidated democracies? The case of China, Singapore and Australia
The majority of today’s authoritarian regimes have little hope of promoting autocracy beyond their own borders, let alone to consolidated democratic countries. However, China and Singapore are two prominent examples of non-democratic countries whose soft power arsenals have given them some global appeal beyond that enjoyed by most authoritarian regimes. But to what extent has China’s and Singapore’s power of example influenced consolidated democr…
China’s New Silk Road
Does China’s vision for a New Silk Road constitute autocracy promotion? This critical commentary argues that while China may currently be showing no signs of promoting autocracy strictly defined, its broad-ranging economic, political, and cultural initiatives along its New Silk Road will likely influence how foreign governments and everyday people think and act. Though still in its infancy, the New Silk Road represents an ambitious new geopolitic…
Elections as Theater
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Democracy's story … 250 years on
This commentary explores the question of whether the rise of China in the Asia-Pacific is having any impact on the attitudes Australians hold about their own democracy. The rationale for this focus is because China, as reported in another important Lowy Institute study, is said to be transforming not only ‘Australia’s strategic environment’, but also ‘Australian domestic politics’ (Shearer 2010). Even as Australia continues to forge stronger ties…
Non-Western Theories of Democracy
A conventional story is often told about democracy. It is a story that begins somewhere in the West, some millennia ago. From there, or so this telling goes, democracy spread across the continents; traversing from the familiar epicenters of Western civilization—Athens, London, Washington, Versailles—to the exotic and sometimes alien cultural landscapes in the East. The idea that such a model of democracy, based on an essentially Western set of id…
The rise of China and the decline of democracy in Australia
Over the years, the Lowy Institute’s annual poll has uncovered a number of unexpected and concerning trends about Australian attitudes. However, one of the most alarming findings during the last decade of polling has been the revelation that a significant proportion of Australians are largely apathetic towards democracy. In the 2012 poll, for example, when the Lowy Institute first published findings on its democracy question, only 60 percent of r…
Putting participation on stage
Participation, it has been said, is a central lynchpin of citizenship and democracy. Unfortunately, studies have shown for some time that political participation is on the decline in most Western democracies. Particularly for scholars and policy analysts who define political participation in democracy purely as voting, party membership or in terms of a narrow ‘arena’ definition of politics, the conclusion is clear: levels of political illiteracy …
From Crisis to Crisis
For a movement that emerged to spotlight the crisis of liberal democracy, it did not take long for the Occupy Movement to find itself embroiled in its own democratic crisis. Occupy's story has exposed just how central or constitutive crises are to democracy. But is crisis such a deleterious thing? Though scholars of democracy have customarily given it a bad name, should we consider democracies to be in trouble when they are met with crisis, when …
Democracy Against Itself
By their very nature, all democracies have the potential to destroy themselves. But this fact is too rarely documented by acolytles of the system. In the decades since Joseph Goebbels, then Reich Minister of Propaganda, reminded the world that it "will always remain one of the best jokes of democracy, that it gave its deadly enemies the means by which it was destroyed", democrats have quickly forgotten just how precarious a political framework it…
Why Democratic Theory
The post-1945 world is well documented for its surge in the study of and struggles over "democracy". The Eurocentric and then Pacifi c wars were-and continue to be-in part understood as a fi ght over ideology. Ideas of fascism, nazism, and empire as well as the totality of the state came face to face with ideas like democracy. Considered the panacea to all the world's political ills, democracy was employed by the West as both stick and carrot. Fo…
The Localist Turn in Populism Studies
While the study of populism has typically focused on the national level, recent years have seen a growing body of research on populism’s local dimensions. Despite making important scholarly advances, this ‘localist turn’ has yet to develop a systematic account of how populism intersects with localism. In this research note, we broach this gap. By exploring how right‐ and left‐wing populisms conceptualize the ‘local’, as well as how localist senti…
Have the black knights arisen? China's and Russia's support of autocratic regimes
Democracy's not for me
For two consecutive years, the Lowy Institute Poll has revealed just how little Australians seem to value democracy. This has particularly been the case for Australia's so-called Generation Y. Understandably, these findings have aroused dismay among media, policy and academic commentators, with many automatically assuming the troubling nature of these findings. Despite this, little consideration has been given to what the results actually denote,…
Culture Wars and City Politics, Revisited
Conflicts rooted in questions of morality and values—so-called “culture wars”—pose difficult questions for local governance. Yet, when it comes to culture wars, local governments can be as politically active as other levels of government. This article explores the role of local government in the culture war surrounding Australia’s national holiday, Australia Day. We draw on the pioneering work of Elaine Sharp on urban politics, culture wars, and …
From Crisis to Crisis
For a movement that emerged to spotlight the crisis of liberal democracy, it did not take long for the Occupy Movement to find itself embroiled in its own democratic crisis. Occupy's story has exposed just how central or constitutive crises are to democracy. But is crisis such a deleterious thing? Though scholars of democracy have customarily given it a bad name, should we consider democracies to be in trouble when they are met with crisis, when …
Australian local governments and climate emergency declarations
In recent years, a growing number of Australian local governments have reaffirmed their longstanding climate leadership by declaring a climate emergency. Indeed, since 2016, when Melbourne's Darebin council became the world's first local government to declare a climate emergency, close to 100 local governments – or a little under one fifth of all Australian local governments – have taken the extraordinary step and made a similar declaration. But …
The threat of autocracy diffusion in consolidated democracies? The case of China, Singapore and Australia
The majority of today’s authoritarian regimes have little hope of promoting autocracy beyond their own borders, let alone to consolidated democratic countries. However, China and Singapore are two prominent examples of non-democratic countries whose soft power arsenals have given them some global appeal beyond that enjoyed by most authoritarian regimes. But to what extent has China’s and Singapore’s power of example influenced consolidated democr…
Elections as Theater
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Non-Western Theories of Democracy
A conventional story is often told about democracy. It is a story that begins somewhere in the West, some millennia ago. From there, or so this telling goes, democracy spread across the continents; traversing from the familiar epicenters of Western civilization—Athens, London, Washington, Versailles—to the exotic and sometimes alien cultural landscapes in the East. The idea that such a model of democracy, based on an essentially Western set of id…
Putting participation on stage
Participation, it has been said, is a central lynchpin of citizenship and democracy. Unfortunately, studies have shown for some time that political participation is on the decline in most Western democracies. Particularly for scholars and policy analysts who define political participation in democracy purely as voting, party membership or in terms of a narrow ‘arena’ definition of politics, the conclusion is clear: levels of political illiteracy …
Projections of China's normative soft power
Fuelled by unparalleled recent development, China has by necessity been reaching outward in search of foreign resources and international recognition. The three books reviewed in this essay all speak to China's spectacular global ascendency of the past two decades—and to the political consequences and international reactions that have followed. What unites these three volumes—Tongdong Bai's China: The Political Philosophy of the Middle Kingdom (2…
Democrats against Democracy
In late 2011, the Wall Street Journal published a curiously titled editorial, “Democrats against Democracy.” Written by James Taranto, one of the Journal ’s conservative columnists, the piece documented a disturbing trend besetting democracy in America. Taranto claimed that American Democrats, or those who identified themselves as liberal and progressive, were increasingly turning their backs on democracy. Taranto was apprehensive that still more…
When Democracies Fail
Despite democracy's universal appeal, democracies have frequently suffered from debilitating crises, often of their own making. Sometimes, they have even self-destructed. Why is this the case and how might we respond to democracies that fail? In this article, I review five recent works which provide new answers as well as new provocations to these questions. In particular, I argue that there are three interrelated categories of reasons and respon…
From the Three Rs to the “Culture Wars”? How Australians Perceive Local Government Action on Climate Change, Indigenous Reconciliation, and LGBTQIA + Advocacy
Australian local government has rarely been the domain where entrenched and polarising cultural disputes play out, and is instead most often associated with the “3Rs”: roads, rates, and rubbish. However, in recent years, a growing number of local councils from across Australia have taken exceptional and unprecedented steps, sometimes in defiance of state and federal governments, to address some of the country's most ideologically contentious issu…
Why Democratic Theory
The post-1945 world is well documented for its surge in the study of and struggles over "democracy". The Eurocentric and then Pacifi c wars were-and continue to be-in part understood as a fi ght over ideology. Ideas of fascism, nazism, and empire as well as the totality of the state came face to face with ideas like democracy. Considered the panacea to all the world's political ills, democracy was employed by the West as both stick and carrot. Fo…
Going Local
Localism has recently been placed back on the political agenda in many countries. Given this, the case for prioritizing the local should be subject to renewed scrutiny. In this review essay, I do this in two ways while being guided by two new books: Trevor Latimer's Small Isn’t Beautiful: The Case Against Localism and Jennifer Vey and Nate Storring's edited collection, Hyperlocal: Place Governance in a Fragmented World. Firstly, I use Latimer to …
Far-right translocalism
Different Levels of Government, Different Levels of Political Competence
In federal political systems such as the United States, there has long existed a view that citizens should be more politically competent at the local level than at the federal level of government. Recent studies have challenged this view. This article argues that these findings may reflect only one part of the broader picture. Through a review of two recent studies, I contend that research in this realm must consider more than only the level of g…
China’s New Silk Road
Does China’s vision for a New Silk Road constitute autocracy promotion? This critical commentary argues that while China may currently be showing no signs of promoting autocracy strictly defined, its broad-ranging economic, political, and cultural initiatives along its New Silk Road will likely influence how foreign governments and everyday people think and act. Though still in its infancy, the New Silk Road represents an ambitious new geopolitic…
The rise of China and the decline of democracy in Australia
Over the years, the Lowy Institute’s annual poll has uncovered a number of unexpected and concerning trends about Australian attitudes. However, one of the most alarming findings during the last decade of polling has been the revelation that a significant proportion of Australians are largely apathetic towards democracy. In the 2012 poll, for example, when the Lowy Institute first published findings on its democracy question, only 60 percent of r…
Global days of action, global public transcripts and democracy
This is a reply to:Gregoratti, Catia. 2014. “Global days of action, global public transcripts and democracy.” Global Discourse. 4 (2–3): 353–366. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/23269995.2014.914367
Sowing the Seeds of Its Own Destruction
Democracy in an Age of Tragedy
Democracy and tragedy captured a delicate poise in ancient Athens. While many today perceive democracy as a finite, unquestionable and almost procedural form of governance that glorifies equality and liberty for their own sake, the Athenians saw it as so much more. Beyond the burgeoning equality and liberty, which were but fronts for a deeper goal, finitude, unimpeachability and procedural norms were constantly contradicted by boundlessness, subv…
Dramatizing War
Times of war are often times when democratic debates are under siege. The apparent necessity to ward off an enemy and secure the nation’s survival can trigger a state of exception: a partial suspension of crucial democratic rights and practices for the sake of national security. The purpose of this essay is to examine the potential and limits of theater to offer an alternative forum for public debate in contexts where freedom of speech is limited…
The Symbiosis of Democracy and Tragedy
Democracy and tragedy were intrinsically linked during the time of the Athenian city-state. But though vital at the time, this symbiosis is largely forgotten today. We address this puzzling silence. What was it about democracy that encouraged, even needed, the ascendancy of tragedy? Why did the mass performances of tragedy play so central a role in the democratic polis of Athens? We address these questions not as historians or philologists, but a…
The Symbiosis of Democracy and Tragedy
Democracy and tragedy were intrinsically linked during the time of the Athenian city-state. But though vital at the time, this symbiosis is largely forgotten today. We address this puzzling silence. What was it about democracy that encouraged, even needed, the ascendancy of tragedy? Why did the mass performances of tragedy play so central a role in the democratic polis of Athens? We address these questions not as historians or philologists, but a…
Democracy in an Age of Tragedy
Democracy and tragedy captured a delicate poise in ancient Athens. While many today perceive democracy as a finite, unquestionable and almost procedural form of governance that glorifies equality and liberty for their own sake, the Athenians saw it as so much more. Beyond the burgeoning equality and liberty, which were but fronts for a deeper goal, finitude, unimpeachability and procedural norms were constantly contradicted by boundlessness, subv…
Dramatizing War
Times of war are often times when democratic debates are under siege. The apparent necessity to ward off an enemy and secure the nation’s survival can trigger a state of exception: a partial suspension of crucial democratic rights and practices for the sake of national security. The purpose of this essay is to examine the potential and limits of theater to offer an alternative forum for public debate in contexts where freedom of speech is limited…
Postmodern Dramaturgy, Premodern Drama
Numerous commentators have recently noted that the ancient art form of Greek tragedy has been undergoing something of a worldwide resurgence in popularity. This, they argue, can be attributed to the fact that contemporary societies are no less fertile a stage for tragedy than their ancient Greek antecedent. The objective of this article is to examine whether the resurgence of Greek tragedy possesses the potential to speak, metaphorically or other…
Autobiographical International Relations
Autobiographical International Relations: I, IR, edited by Naeem Inayatullah, London and New York, Routledge, 2011, 232 pp., $46.95 (paperback), ISBN 978-0-415-78143-5
When Democracies Fail
Despite democracy's universal appeal, democracies have frequently suffered from debilitating crises, often of their own making. Sometimes, they have even self-destructed. Why is this the case and how might we respond to democracies that fail? In this article, I review five recent works which provide new answers as well as new provocations to these questions. In particular, I argue that there are three interrelated categories of reasons and respon…
Greek Tragedy and Contemporary Democracy
This engaging work tells the story of democracy through the perspective of tragic drama. It shows how the ancient tales of greatness and its loss point to the potential dangers of democracy then and now. Greek Tragedy dramatized a variety of stories, characters, and voices drawn from reality, especially from those marginalized by Athens’s democracy. It brought up dissident figures through its multivocal form, disrupting the perception of an order…
The subject of analysis
Cities, politics and power, by Simon Parker, Abingdon, Routledge, 2011, 211 pp., $114.00 (hardback), ISBN 978-0-415-36579-6 Cities and global governance: new sites for international relations, edited by Mark Amen, Noah Toly, Patricia McCarney, and Klaus Segbers, Farnham, Ashgate, 2011, 240 pp., $89.96 (hardback), ISBN 978-1-4094-0893-2 The spirit of cities: why the identity of a city matters in a global age, by Daniel A. Bell and Avner de-Shalit,…
Sowing the Seeds of Its Own Destruction
Theorising Democide
Beginning with the premise that democracies are often deeply implicated in their own downfall, The Theory of Democide challenges the conventional view of how and why democracies collapse by demonstrat
Democracy's not for me
For two consecutive years, the Lowy Institute Poll has revealed just how little Australians seem to value democracy. This has particularly been the case for Australia's so-called Generation Y. Understandably, these findings have aroused dismay among media, policy and academic commentators, with many automatically assuming the troubling nature of these findings. Despite this, little consideration has been given to what the results actually denote,…
Democracy Against Itself
By their very nature, all democracies have the potential to destroy themselves. But this fact is too rarely documented by acolytles of the system. In the decades since Joseph Goebbels, then Reich Minister of Propaganda, reminded the world that it "will always remain one of the best jokes of democracy, that it gave its deadly enemies the means by which it was destroyed", democrats have quickly forgotten just how precarious a political framework it…
Why Democratic Theory
The post-1945 world is well documented for its surge in the study of and struggles over "democracy". The Eurocentric and then Pacifi c wars were-and continue to be-in part understood as a fi ght over ideology. Ideas of fascism, nazism, and empire as well as the totality of the state came face to face with ideas like democracy. Considered the panacea to all the world's political ills, democracy was employed by the West as both stick and carrot. Fo…
Global days of action, global public transcripts and democracy
This is a reply to:Gregoratti, Catia. 2014. “Global days of action, global public transcripts and democracy.” Global Discourse. 4 (2–3): 353–366. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/23269995.2014.914367
Projections of China's normative soft power
Fuelled by unparalleled recent development, China has by necessity been reaching outward in search of foreign resources and international recognition. The three books reviewed in this essay all speak to China's spectacular global ascendency of the past two decades—and to the political consequences and international reactions that have followed. What unites these three volumes—Tongdong Bai's China: The Political Philosophy of the Middle Kingdom (2…
Democrats against Democracy
In late 2011, the Wall Street Journal published a curiously titled editorial, “Democrats against Democracy.” Written by James Taranto, one of the Journal ’s conservative columnists, the piece documented a disturbing trend besetting democracy in America. Taranto claimed that American Democrats, or those who identified themselves as liberal and progressive, were increasingly turning their backs on democracy. Taranto was apprehensive that still more…
Democracy's story … 250 years on
This commentary explores the question of whether the rise of China in the Asia-Pacific is having any impact on the attitudes Australians hold about their own democracy. The rationale for this focus is because China, as reported in another important Lowy Institute study, is said to be transforming not only ‘Australia’s strategic environment’, but also ‘Australian domestic politics’ (Shearer 2010). Even as Australia continues to forge stronger ties…
Non-Western Theories of Democracy
A conventional story is often told about democracy. It is a story that begins somewhere in the West, some millennia ago. From there, or so this telling goes, democracy spread across the continents; traversing from the familiar epicenters of Western civilization—Athens, London, Washington, Versailles—to the exotic and sometimes alien cultural landscapes in the East. The idea that such a model of democracy, based on an essentially Western set of id…
The rise of China and the decline of democracy in Australia
Over the years, the Lowy Institute’s annual poll has uncovered a number of unexpected and concerning trends about Australian attitudes. However, one of the most alarming findings during the last decade of polling has been the revelation that a significant proportion of Australians are largely apathetic towards democracy. In the 2012 poll, for example, when the Lowy Institute first published findings on its democracy question, only 60 percent of r…
Putting participation on stage
Participation, it has been said, is a central lynchpin of citizenship and democracy. Unfortunately, studies have shown for some time that political participation is on the decline in most Western democracies. Particularly for scholars and policy analysts who define political participation in democracy purely as voting, party membership or in terms of a narrow ‘arena’ definition of politics, the conclusion is clear: levels of political illiteracy …
From Crisis to Crisis
For a movement that emerged to spotlight the crisis of liberal democracy, it did not take long for the Occupy Movement to find itself embroiled in its own democratic crisis. Occupy's story has exposed just how central or constitutive crises are to democracy. But is crisis such a deleterious thing? Though scholars of democracy have customarily given it a bad name, should we consider democracies to be in trouble when they are met with crisis, when …
China’s New Silk Road
Does China’s vision for a New Silk Road constitute autocracy promotion? This critical commentary argues that while China may currently be showing no signs of promoting autocracy strictly defined, its broad-ranging economic, political, and cultural initiatives along its New Silk Road will likely influence how foreign governments and everyday people think and act. Though still in its infancy, the New Silk Road represents an ambitious new geopolitic…
Elections as Theater
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Young People, Citizenship and Political Participation
Combatting voter ignorance
In light of recent political events, prominent scholars have argued that voters ignorant of the issues should be disqualified from taking part in decisions that have the potential to alter political landscapes. As convincing as this literature is in highlighting voter ignorance, it fails to differentiate between local, state, and federal elections and how levels of political knowledge are often scale-dependent. If the level of median voter ignora…
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