Zim Nwokora
Biographic Data
| ID | 4179949 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Zim Nwokora |
| GIVEN NAMES | Zim |
| FAMILY NAME | Nwokora |
| SIGNATURE | NWOKORA Z |
| AFFILIATIONS | Deakin University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-2171-9319 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 32 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 110 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 31 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2011 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
Principles of Institutional Design for a ‘Good’ Exit from Parliament: Representation, Welfare and Equality
How elected representatives depart the legislature, either voluntarily or involuntarily, shapes perceptions of the legitimacy of representative institutions. Yet parliamentary exit has been neglected in research on political careers. Seeking to address this gap, this article analyses parliamentary exit in terms of its fit with democratic values. It begins by recasting the process of exit as an ‘institution,’ which opens the door to institutionali…
Valedictory speeches in the Australian parliament: Democratic rituals, legislative rotation and autobiographical self-disclosure
The conditional effects of party system change on economic growth in Africa
African party systems vary considerably in their patterns of stability and change over time. This article examines how economic growth has been shaped by such party system fluidity—in particular, the frequency, scope and variety of change—while taking account of the constitutional regime (i.e., level of democracy) within which these party system dynamics occur. To do so, we use Arellano-Bond generalized method of moments models to test the impact…
Has Politics Become More Professional? Career and Legislative Professionalisation in the Australian Parliament Since 1950
“Professional politicians” have been lamented for their perceived negative impact on representative democracy. However, the concept of “political professionalisation” is deployed inconsistently, making these claims difficult to assess. This article develops a framework to measure professionalisation across two dimensions: career professionalisation (capturing MPs' changing career trajectories) and legislative professionalisation (describing the c…
Free speech and social change: A Public Reason Approach
Free speech is a fundamental right in liberal democracies. Yet, liberal democracies often face difficult decisions about whether, when and how to curtail various types of speech—including hate speech, pornography, fake news, and offensive speech. In this climate, there is a pressing need to reappraise the case for free speech protection and re-establish shared grounds for its legitimacy. This paper asks whether and to what extent social change ha…
Introduction to the Symposium Conspiracism and Democracy: New Perspectives and Challenges
This Introduction outlines the rationale for the symposium by providing an overview of the main information pathologies that are increasingly affecting liberal democratic polities, including misinformation, disinformation, fake news, rumours, and conspiracism. It then zooms in on Russell Muirhead and Nancy L. Rosenblum’s (2019) book A Lot of People Are Saying: The New Conspiracism and the Assault on Democracy, from which this symposium takes insp…
Transitional Support for Former Members of Parliament: Benchmarks for ‘Professional Parliaments
Leaving parliament is often a time of significant financial, employment and emotional difficulty for MPs. However, few studies have examined the support provided by parliaments to departing and former members. Consequently, parliaments lack access to best-practice case studies to improve the transitional experience for MPs. This article develops five benchmarks for supporting former MPs, covering transitional financial assistance; retirement inco…
Political Finance and Party Systems in the Normative Theory of Partisanship: Toward a Civic Model
Political finance in liberal democracies is often regarded as a source of pathology accompanied by demands for reform. But on what principles and values should political finance reform be grounded? The existing scholarship provides no more than sketchy advice on such matters. To address this gap, this paper presents a normative framework to evaluate political finance rules, which proposes (a) that the design of such rules should take account of t…
Ignore, Rebut or Embrace: Political Elite Responses to Conspiracy Theories
The attention to and concerns about conspiracy theories have increased in recent years, fuelled by a surge in conspiratorial discourse during the Donald Trump presidency in the United States. Responding to this development, the scholarship on how democracies should deal with conspiracy theories has focused on what new regulations and institutions ought to be introduced to tackle its threats to democracy. In this article, I consider this practical…
The prime minister's constitution: Cabinet rulebooks in Westminster democracies
The transformation of governance in Westminster democracies is well documented. However, one aspect of their change that has not received much attention is the creation and publication of cabinet rulebooks. The few studies of cabinet rulebooks have focused on their potential constitutional implications, leaving unclear how their emergence fits within the broader development of Westminster governance. We address this gap in the literature by exami…
The Invisible Primary in an Agent-Based Model: Ideology, Strategy, and Competitive Dynamics
Historical accounts of American presidential nominating contests suggest that candidates jockey over ideology and policy in ways that shape the outcomes of these races. Yet this aspect of competition has been difficult to analyze with the formal and statistical methods that dominate this research agenda. To address this gap, this article presents a computational agent-based model (ABM) of candidates’ ideological maneuvering during the invisible p…
The real fourth estate? Portrayals of Trump’s rise in the foreign media of friendly countries
That the news media should operate as an impartial and responsible “fourth estate” in a democracy is a pervasive ideal, but there are serious obstacles – economic, organizational and political – to its achievement in practice. These obstacles, we argue, may be lower when an outlet reports on politics in another country, which is strategically allied to its own. And, for this reason, the quality of news coverage of that country’s politics may be h…
Politics as a transitory vocation: A case study of the post-parliamentary challenges experienced by former Victorian MPs
A career in parliament is inherently a transitory vocation, and parliamentary turnover is critical for a healthy democracy. Yet many MPs fail to prepare for the time when they must leave parliament. This lack of preparedness exacerbates the challenges of post-parliamentary life. Drawing on research conducted with former members of the Parliament of Victoria, Australia, this article reports on the experiences of MPs leaving parliament. Former MPs,…
How the notion of constitutional resilience might help make sense of challenges to democracy
Constitutional democracies around the world are facing dramatic challenges to governance, driven by longstanding problems becoming more urgent in the present day, such as economic inequality, the climate crisis and national identity
Othering as soft-power discursive practice: China Daily’s construction of Trump’s America in the 2016 presidential election
The relationship between Chinese soft power and Chinese media has been a focus of a growing body of literature. Challenging a resource-based conception of soft power and a transmission view of communication that inform much of the debate, this article adopts a discursive approach to soft power and media communication. It argues that their relationship is not just a matter of resource transmission, but one of discursive construction, which begs th…
The Impact of Political Finance Regulation on Party Organisation
Political finance regulations require political parties to engage with a complex and multi-faceted regulatory environment. This article develops a framework to understand how political finance regulation impacts on party organisation and applies it to a diverse grouping of six parties from the Australian State of New South Wales. We find that all parties seek to capture the benefits of compliance, and minimise their exposure to the risks of non-c…
Political Finance Regulation and Reform in New South Wales: Towards a Fairer System
In recent years the regulation of political finance in Australia has moved from systems of laissez‐faire to systems of enhanced regulation, which aim to curb the scale and influence of donations. This article examines political finance regulation in New South Wales — the jurisdiction that has seen the most significant transformation of its regulatory setup — to assess whether and how the new regulations have affected donations to political partie…
Perceptions of democracy and the rise of Donald Trump: A framing analysis of Saudi Arabian media
The 2016 US presidential election, which brought Donald J. Trump to power, raised concerns that his ascendency could undermine US democracy promotion and enable illiberal regimes to resist calls for reform. This article seeks to hold this argument up to empirical scrutiny via a framing analysis of coverage of the US election in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA). To some extent, the analysis supports the claim: throughout the election, the KSA med…
The Dynamics of Constitutional Conventions in Westminster Democracies
Constitutional conventions are fundamental to the operation of Westminster democracies. However, despite their political significance, there have been few attempts to analyse and theorise their internal dynamics. This article aims to address this gap by identifying the triggers of constitutional ‘softening’, when the opportunity for convention change emerges; and examining how such moments interact with the particular properties of a convention t…
The foundations of democratic dualism: Why constitutional politics and ordinary politics are different
Formal constitution-making is now an increasingly common phenomenon. But how should we understand the politics of constitutional lawmaking—what we call constitutional politics? Should it be structured differently from ordinary politics? As a descriptive matter, there seem to be important differences between constitutional and ordinary lawmaking. Constitutional lawmaking makes entrenched rules about rules and determines the institutional landscape…
Party System Change and the Quality of Democracy in East Africa
This article explores in greater detail the nexus between party system change and democratic qualities. In doing so, we do not simply assess whether, how, and to what extent qualities of democracy in East Africa are affected by the instability of the patterns of interparty competition (fluidity of the party system); we also plan to show how the subcomponents of party system fluidity (frequency of change, scope of change, variety of change) influe…
Less Money, Fewer Donations: The Impact of New South Wales Political Finance Laws on Private Funding of Political Parties
The role of money in politics has been a concern internationally with strong calls for stricter regulation of such funds. In Australia, this has resulted in a shift from laissez‐faire to increased regulation. Yet, there has been little research into the impact of this shift. To address this gap, this article examines the impact of four New South Wales political finance laws enacted from 2008 to 2012, which reflect the emergent regulatory approach…
Measuring Party System Change: A Systems Perspective
The term ‘party system’, explained Giovanni Sartori, refers to the pattern of interactions among relevant parties. That pattern can be represented as a type and treated as a proper unit of analysis. When ‘party system’ is defined in this way, it becomes clear that the scholarship lacks a direct measure of ‘party system change’. The Sartori approach to party system change is not the only legitimate way to understand this concept, but it does targe…
Bridging the Divide: Measuring Party System Change and Classifying Party Systems
Party systems research has proceeded along two parallel lines of inquiry, one predominantly “qualitative” and the other “quantitative.” This article attempts to bridge this divide in two ways. First, by showing that qualitative information can be valuable in the construction of quantitative measures. Second, by showing that the results from applying theoretically sensitive measurement tools can be useful for qualitative classification. These anal…
The Political Consequences of Party System Change
This article engages one of the important gaps in the literature on party system effects: the consequences of party system change. We discuss how existing empirical approaches to party system change do not actually capture the changeability of patterns of party competition, which is the most direct understanding of the term “party system.” We propose a measure that does exactly this: the index of fluidity. Applying this measure to countries in So…
Othering as soft-power discursive practice: China Daily’s construction of Trump’s America in the 2016 presidential election
The relationship between Chinese soft power and Chinese media has been a focus of a growing body of literature. Challenging a resource-based conception of soft power and a transmission view of communication that inform much of the debate, this article adopts a discursive approach to soft power and media communication. It argues that their relationship is not just a matter of resource transmission, but one of discursive construction, which begs th…
The distinctive politics of campaign finance reform
This article presents a unified theory explaining several conflicting empirical observations in the politics of campaign finance. It identifies those circumstances that foster or frustrate the enactment of financing laws that increase the competitiveness of elections. I argue that the competitiveness of financing laws is a result of three strong incentives when they operate in differently structured party systems. First, lawmakers have an incenti…
Sartori Reconsidered: Toward a New Predominant Party System
Despite the success of his party systems theory, Giovanni Sartori's predominant party system is a type that is consistently avoided by party systems scholars, yet the reasons for this have been unclear. This article exposes the flaws in Sartori's predominant party system, but we also argue that it remains a useful concept and, consequently, that the literature's rejection of predominance and retreat to the cruder dominance notion is unnecessary. …
Measuring Party System Change: A Systems Perspective
The term ‘party system’, explained Giovanni Sartori, refers to the pattern of interactions among relevant parties. That pattern can be represented as a type and treated as a proper unit of analysis. When ‘party system’ is defined in this way, it becomes clear that the scholarship lacks a direct measure of ‘party system change’. The Sartori approach to party system change is not the only legitimate way to understand this concept, but it does targe…
Political Finance and Party Systems in the Normative Theory of Partisanship: Toward a Civic Model
Political finance in liberal democracies is often regarded as a source of pathology accompanied by demands for reform. But on what principles and values should political finance reform be grounded? The existing scholarship provides no more than sketchy advice on such matters. To address this gap, this paper presents a normative framework to evaluate political finance rules, which proposes (a) that the design of such rules should take account of t…
Politics as a transitory vocation: A case study of the post-parliamentary challenges experienced by former Victorian MPs
A career in parliament is inherently a transitory vocation, and parliamentary turnover is critical for a healthy democracy. Yet many MPs fail to prepare for the time when they must leave parliament. This lack of preparedness exacerbates the challenges of post-parliamentary life. Drawing on research conducted with former members of the Parliament of Victoria, Australia, this article reports on the experiences of MPs leaving parliament. Former MPs,…
The Impact of Political Finance Regulation on Party Organisation
Political finance regulations require political parties to engage with a complex and multi-faceted regulatory environment. This article develops a framework to understand how political finance regulation impacts on party organisation and applies it to a diverse grouping of six parties from the Australian State of New South Wales. We find that all parties seek to capture the benefits of compliance, and minimise their exposure to the risks of non-c…
The Dynamics of Constitutional Conventions in Westminster Democracies
Constitutional conventions are fundamental to the operation of Westminster democracies. However, despite their political significance, there have been few attempts to analyse and theorise their internal dynamics. This article aims to address this gap by identifying the triggers of constitutional ‘softening’, when the opportunity for convention change emerges; and examining how such moments interact with the particular properties of a convention t…
Bridging the Divide: Measuring Party System Change and Classifying Party Systems
Party systems research has proceeded along two parallel lines of inquiry, one predominantly “qualitative” and the other “quantitative.” This article attempts to bridge this divide in two ways. First, by showing that qualitative information can be valuable in the construction of quantitative measures. Second, by showing that the results from applying theoretically sensitive measurement tools can be useful for qualitative classification. These anal…
The prime minister's constitution: Cabinet rulebooks in Westminster democracies
The transformation of governance in Westminster democracies is well documented. However, one aspect of their change that has not received much attention is the creation and publication of cabinet rulebooks. The few studies of cabinet rulebooks have focused on their potential constitutional implications, leaving unclear how their emergence fits within the broader development of Westminster governance. We address this gap in the literature by exami…
Party System Change and the Quality of Democracy in East Africa
This article explores in greater detail the nexus between party system change and democratic qualities. In doing so, we do not simply assess whether, how, and to what extent qualities of democracy in East Africa are affected by the instability of the patterns of interparty competition (fluidity of the party system); we also plan to show how the subcomponents of party system fluidity (frequency of change, scope of change, variety of change) influe…
The Political Consequences of Party System Change
This article engages one of the important gaps in the literature on party system effects: the consequences of party system change. We discuss how existing empirical approaches to party system change do not actually capture the changeability of patterns of party competition, which is the most direct understanding of the term “party system.” We propose a measure that does exactly this: the index of fluidity. Applying this measure to countries in So…
Sceptical partisans: How citizens think about political finance
This article investigates how citizens form their opinions on political-finance issues. Two distinct mechanisms are elaborated. First, citizens may be 'faithful followers', adopting positions that reflect their partisan loyalties. Second, citizens may be 'sceptical' and lean against cues from their party leaders. Drawing on a survey of Australian attitudes to political finance, I assess the extent to which predictions from these theories are obse…
Transitional Support for Former Members of Parliament: Benchmarks for ‘Professional Parliaments
Leaving parliament is often a time of significant financial, employment and emotional difficulty for MPs. However, few studies have examined the support provided by parliaments to departing and former members. Consequently, parliaments lack access to best-practice case studies to improve the transitional experience for MPs. This article develops five benchmarks for supporting former MPs, covering transitional financial assistance; retirement inco…
Less Money, Fewer Donations: The Impact of New South Wales Political Finance Laws on Private Funding of Political Parties
The role of money in politics has been a concern internationally with strong calls for stricter regulation of such funds. In Australia, this has resulted in a shift from laissez‐faire to increased regulation. Yet, there has been little research into the impact of this shift. To address this gap, this article examines the impact of four New South Wales political finance laws enacted from 2008 to 2012, which reflect the emergent regulatory approach…
Ignore, Rebut or Embrace: Political Elite Responses to Conspiracy Theories
The attention to and concerns about conspiracy theories have increased in recent years, fuelled by a surge in conspiratorial discourse during the Donald Trump presidency in the United States. Responding to this development, the scholarship on how democracies should deal with conspiracy theories has focused on what new regulations and institutions ought to be introduced to tackle its threats to democracy. In this article, I consider this practical…
Perceptions of democracy and the rise of Donald Trump: A framing analysis of Saudi Arabian media
The 2016 US presidential election, which brought Donald J. Trump to power, raised concerns that his ascendency could undermine US democracy promotion and enable illiberal regimes to resist calls for reform. This article seeks to hold this argument up to empirical scrutiny via a framing analysis of coverage of the US election in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA). To some extent, the analysis supports the claim: throughout the election, the KSA med…
The foundations of democratic dualism: Why constitutional politics and ordinary politics are different
Formal constitution-making is now an increasingly common phenomenon. But how should we understand the politics of constitutional lawmaking—what we call constitutional politics? Should it be structured differently from ordinary politics? As a descriptive matter, there seem to be important differences between constitutional and ordinary lawmaking. Constitutional lawmaking makes entrenched rules about rules and determines the institutional landscape…
Narratives of a Race: How the Media Judged a Presidential Debate
The first debate in 2008 was a turning point in the presidential election campaign: a race that was close before the debate turned decisively in Obama’s favor following it. This article explores how the media reached their verdict that “Obama won.” We examine two aspects of this problem: how, in practice, the media reached this verdict and whether they made the right decision from a normative standpoint. Based on content analysis of debate transc…
Making Policy Choices in Uncertain Conditions
Review essay of Michael Heazle, Uncertainty in Policy Making: Values and Evidence in Complex Decisions (London: Earthscan, 2010), ISBN 978 1849710831; Roger A. Pielke, Jr, The Honest Broker: Making Sense of Science in Policy and Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), ISBN 978 05216 94810; Cass R. Sunstein, Worst-Case Scenarios (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), ISBN 978 06740 25103
Presidential Leadership Dilemma, The: Between the Constitution and a Political Party
Bridging the gap: Early warning, gender and the responsibility to protect
Women, Peace and Security (WPS) scholars and practitioners have expressed reservations about the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) principle because of its popular use as a synonym for armed humanitarian intervention. On the other hand, R2P’s early failure to engage with and advance WPS efforts such as United Nations Security Council (UNSC) resolution 1325 (2000) has seen the perpetuation of limited roles ascribed to women in implementing the R2P p…
Sartori Reconsidered: Toward a New Predominant Party System
Despite the success of his party systems theory, Giovanni Sartori's predominant party system is a type that is consistently avoided by party systems scholars, yet the reasons for this have been unclear. This article exposes the flaws in Sartori's predominant party system, but we also argue that it remains a useful concept and, consequently, that the literature's rejection of predominance and retreat to the cruder dominance notion is unnecessary. …
The distinctive politics of campaign finance reform
This article presents a unified theory explaining several conflicting empirical observations in the politics of campaign finance. It identifies those circumstances that foster or frustrate the enactment of financing laws that increase the competitiveness of elections. I argue that the competitiveness of financing laws is a result of three strong incentives when they operate in differently structured party systems. First, lawmakers have an incenti…
The Political Consequences of Party System Change
This article engages one of the important gaps in the literature on party system effects: the consequences of party system change. We discuss how existing empirical approaches to party system change do not actually capture the changeability of patterns of party competition, which is the most direct understanding of the term “party system.” We propose a measure that does exactly this: the index of fluidity. Applying this measure to countries in So…
Narratives of a Race: How the Media Judged a Presidential Debate
The first debate in 2008 was a turning point in the presidential election campaign: a race that was close before the debate turned decisively in Obama’s favor following it. This article explores how the media reached their verdict that “Obama won.” We examine two aspects of this problem: how, in practice, the media reached this verdict and whether they made the right decision from a normative standpoint. Based on content analysis of debate transc…
Sceptical partisans: How citizens think about political finance
This article investigates how citizens form their opinions on political-finance issues. Two distinct mechanisms are elaborated. First, citizens may be 'faithful followers', adopting positions that reflect their partisan loyalties. Second, citizens may be 'sceptical' and lean against cues from their party leaders. Drawing on a survey of Australian attitudes to political finance, I assess the extent to which predictions from these theories are obse…
Bridging the Divide: Measuring Party System Change and Classifying Party Systems
Party systems research has proceeded along two parallel lines of inquiry, one predominantly “qualitative” and the other “quantitative.” This article attempts to bridge this divide in two ways. First, by showing that qualitative information can be valuable in the construction of quantitative measures. Second, by showing that the results from applying theoretically sensitive measurement tools can be useful for qualitative classification. These anal…
Party System Change and the Quality of Democracy in East Africa
This article explores in greater detail the nexus between party system change and democratic qualities. In doing so, we do not simply assess whether, how, and to what extent qualities of democracy in East Africa are affected by the instability of the patterns of interparty competition (fluidity of the party system); we also plan to show how the subcomponents of party system fluidity (frequency of change, scope of change, variety of change) influe…
Less Money, Fewer Donations: The Impact of New South Wales Political Finance Laws on Private Funding of Political Parties
The role of money in politics has been a concern internationally with strong calls for stricter regulation of such funds. In Australia, this has resulted in a shift from laissez‐faire to increased regulation. Yet, there has been little research into the impact of this shift. To address this gap, this article examines the impact of four New South Wales political finance laws enacted from 2008 to 2012, which reflect the emergent regulatory approach…
Measuring Party System Change: A Systems Perspective
The term ‘party system’, explained Giovanni Sartori, refers to the pattern of interactions among relevant parties. That pattern can be represented as a type and treated as a proper unit of analysis. When ‘party system’ is defined in this way, it becomes clear that the scholarship lacks a direct measure of ‘party system change’. The Sartori approach to party system change is not the only legitimate way to understand this concept, but it does targe…
Political Finance Regulation and Reform in New South Wales: Towards a Fairer System
In recent years the regulation of political finance in Australia has moved from systems of laissez‐faire to systems of enhanced regulation, which aim to curb the scale and influence of donations. This article examines political finance regulation in New South Wales — the jurisdiction that has seen the most significant transformation of its regulatory setup — to assess whether and how the new regulations have affected donations to political partie…
Perceptions of democracy and the rise of Donald Trump: A framing analysis of Saudi Arabian media
The 2016 US presidential election, which brought Donald J. Trump to power, raised concerns that his ascendency could undermine US democracy promotion and enable illiberal regimes to resist calls for reform. This article seeks to hold this argument up to empirical scrutiny via a framing analysis of coverage of the US election in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA). To some extent, the analysis supports the claim: throughout the election, the KSA med…
The Dynamics of Constitutional Conventions in Westminster Democracies
Constitutional conventions are fundamental to the operation of Westminster democracies. However, despite their political significance, there have been few attempts to analyse and theorise their internal dynamics. This article aims to address this gap by identifying the triggers of constitutional ‘softening’, when the opportunity for convention change emerges; and examining how such moments interact with the particular properties of a convention t…
The foundations of democratic dualism: Why constitutional politics and ordinary politics are different
Formal constitution-making is now an increasingly common phenomenon. But how should we understand the politics of constitutional lawmaking—what we call constitutional politics? Should it be structured differently from ordinary politics? As a descriptive matter, there seem to be important differences between constitutional and ordinary lawmaking. Constitutional lawmaking makes entrenched rules about rules and determines the institutional landscape…
How the notion of constitutional resilience might help make sense of challenges to democracy
Constitutional democracies around the world are facing dramatic challenges to governance, driven by longstanding problems becoming more urgent in the present day, such as economic inequality, the climate crisis and national identity
Othering as soft-power discursive practice: China Daily’s construction of Trump’s America in the 2016 presidential election
The relationship between Chinese soft power and Chinese media has been a focus of a growing body of literature. Challenging a resource-based conception of soft power and a transmission view of communication that inform much of the debate, this article adopts a discursive approach to soft power and media communication. It argues that their relationship is not just a matter of resource transmission, but one of discursive construction, which begs th…
The Impact of Political Finance Regulation on Party Organisation
Political finance regulations require political parties to engage with a complex and multi-faceted regulatory environment. This article develops a framework to understand how political finance regulation impacts on party organisation and applies it to a diverse grouping of six parties from the Australian State of New South Wales. We find that all parties seek to capture the benefits of compliance, and minimise their exposure to the risks of non-c…
The Invisible Primary in an Agent-Based Model: Ideology, Strategy, and Competitive Dynamics
Historical accounts of American presidential nominating contests suggest that candidates jockey over ideology and policy in ways that shape the outcomes of these races. Yet this aspect of competition has been difficult to analyze with the formal and statistical methods that dominate this research agenda. To address this gap, this article presents a computational agent-based model (ABM) of candidates’ ideological maneuvering during the invisible p…
The real fourth estate? Portrayals of Trump’s rise in the foreign media of friendly countries
That the news media should operate as an impartial and responsible “fourth estate” in a democracy is a pervasive ideal, but there are serious obstacles – economic, organizational and political – to its achievement in practice. These obstacles, we argue, may be lower when an outlet reports on politics in another country, which is strategically allied to its own. And, for this reason, the quality of news coverage of that country’s politics may be h…
Politics as a transitory vocation: A case study of the post-parliamentary challenges experienced by former Victorian MPs
A career in parliament is inherently a transitory vocation, and parliamentary turnover is critical for a healthy democracy. Yet many MPs fail to prepare for the time when they must leave parliament. This lack of preparedness exacerbates the challenges of post-parliamentary life. Drawing on research conducted with former members of the Parliament of Victoria, Australia, this article reports on the experiences of MPs leaving parliament. Former MPs,…
Ignore, Rebut or Embrace: Political Elite Responses to Conspiracy Theories
The attention to and concerns about conspiracy theories have increased in recent years, fuelled by a surge in conspiratorial discourse during the Donald Trump presidency in the United States. Responding to this development, the scholarship on how democracies should deal with conspiracy theories has focused on what new regulations and institutions ought to be introduced to tackle its threats to democracy. In this article, I consider this practical…
The prime minister's constitution: Cabinet rulebooks in Westminster democracies
The transformation of governance in Westminster democracies is well documented. However, one aspect of their change that has not received much attention is the creation and publication of cabinet rulebooks. The few studies of cabinet rulebooks have focused on their potential constitutional implications, leaving unclear how their emergence fits within the broader development of Westminster governance. We address this gap in the literature by exami…
Introduction to the Symposium Conspiracism and Democracy: New Perspectives and Challenges
This Introduction outlines the rationale for the symposium by providing an overview of the main information pathologies that are increasingly affecting liberal democratic polities, including misinformation, disinformation, fake news, rumours, and conspiracism. It then zooms in on Russell Muirhead and Nancy L. Rosenblum’s (2019) book A Lot of People Are Saying: The New Conspiracism and the Assault on Democracy, from which this symposium takes insp…
Law (30 works) · Political science (30 works) · Politics (30 works) · Law (26 works) · Sociology (19 works) · Democracy (15 works) · Public Administration (13 works) · Electoral Systems and Political Participation (12 works) · Economics (10 works) · Public Administration (10 works)