Most contemporary discussions of how to improve politics focus on problems of representation and power. When I come along and want to thrust getting better decisions into the forefront and claiming that a certain sort of untried forum could get improved results even without ch...

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Anglo-Saxon countries are often heaped together as having a single culture. When it comes to migration, attitudes to sex, teenage-pregnancy, inequality, language, and bellicosity, that seems about right. At least, the UK, the US, and Australia are pretty close on those scores....

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[caption id="attachment_31685" align="aligncenter" width="1000"] "Arrival" by Brett Whiteley, painted for the Bicentennial celebrations of the arrival of the First Fleet on 26 January 1788[/caption] We’re a weird mob, we Australians, even weirder than we were in 1957 when John...

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In many areas of policy, particularly where relatively homogeneous communities deliberate about matters within their everyday experience, the informal processes of discussion in the community can, and often do, lead to changes in public opinion that in turn lead to effective p...

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A post by John Burnheim. About ten months ago, John Burnheim wrote to me in terms I've reproduced on this blog previously. John was one of the early movers in academia exploring the limitations of electoral democracy with his book Is Democracy Possible published in 1985 and th...

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* cross-posted from Screen Hub . The #MeToo sexual harassment tsunami generated by the unmasking of American screen industry heavyweights Harvey Weinstein and Kevin Spacey has hit Australian shores with a vengeance. As an old Monty Python sketch observed: ‘Nobody expects the S...

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From today's column in the Guardian UK. There’s a chasm between the will of the British people as expressed in their 52 percent vote for Brexit and their considered will. Turns out ordinary Britons deliberating amongst their peers think things through, ‘unspinning’ much of the...

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Australia has a backlog of issues that will need to be resolved by constitutional referendum sooner or later: Indigenous recognition (especially the Voice to Parliament); resolving the problems caused by archaic and unworkable parliamentary disqualification rules in section 44...

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I was rung yesterday by Ida Argy, wife of Fred Argy and she told me that Fred had recently had a stroke from which he did not recover. Fred was rather like my Dad Fred. A Jewish immigrant – Dad was from Austria (via England) and Fred was Egyptian, though I think both were non...

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Reposted from the Mandarin I In our contemporary lexicon 'independence' – for instance of a government body – is usually a Good Thing. [1. other Good Things include 'appropriate', 'modernised', 'reform', 'enhance', 'principled' It's sobering to realise how rhetorical we are. T...

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Do black politicians matter Abstract: This paper exploits the history of Reconstruction after the American Civil War to estimate the causal effect of politician race on public finance. I overcome the endogeneity between electoral preferences and black representation using the...

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