Online abuse is driving women out of public life. It’s time to act
Public scrutiny is one thing, but the degree of online abuse now suffered by female political candidates is another. The Independent Committee for Standards in Public Life has recommended that platforms be held liable for hate speech and incitement to violence – but, writes María Rún Bjarnadóttir (University of Sussex), domestic UK law currently does not […]
Book review | Know Your Place: Essays on the Working Class, by the Working Class
Inspired by the collection The Good Immigrant, Know Your Place: Essays on the Working Class by the Working Class brings together 22 stories reflecting on working-class lives and experiences in the UK today. Edited by Nathan Connolly, this volume offers tales of sadness, struggle, resilience and resistance, all told with warmth and love, that show how class inequality is both personal and […]
Politicising national identity: how parties try to define ‘Welshness’ for themselves
The politicisation of national identity in Wales has increased dramatically since devolution. But political parties do not present a common version of ‘Welshness’, writes Sophie Williams. Each party expresses its own version instead, conflating national identity with their own political ideology in the process.
The Chinese Communist Party has growing sway in Western universities
In recent years, China has fostered academic links with Western universities by funding Confucius Institutes and sending its students to study abroad. As the recent uproar over the decision of Cambridge University Press to censor a list of journal articles for the Chinese market has highlighted, it also exerts growing influence in academic publishing. Alexander […]
How are PMs held to account? A survey of procedures in 32 parliamentary democracies
How are prime ministers held to account by their parliaments, and how do UK mechanisms on the matter fare in comparison to those in other countries? Ruxandra Serban (University College London) explores the different procedures in place across 32 parliamentary democracies to answer these questions.
Brian Klaas: ‘The incentives for a Trump 2.0 will be exactly the same as the incentives for Trump’
In his first year in power, argues Brian Klaas (LSE), Donald Trump has deployed the tactics of despots and begun to corrode the institutions of US democracy. What happens next? Democratic Audit editor Ros Taylor talks to him about his new book, The Despot’s Apprentice. Mike Pence, Paul Ryan, Donald Trump and Mitch McConnell celebrate […]
Book review | We: Reviving Social Hope, by Ronald Aronson
In We: Reviving Social Hope, Ronald Aronson takes stock of the current state of US society, attributing the rise of Donald Trump to a steep decline in participatory democracy throughout the twentieth century and offering a blueprint for restoring hope to the body politic. This is an intellectually rigorous analysis, writes Jeff Roquen, that will contribute to a broader […]
How the planning system lets homeowners overwhelm the broader public interest
Britain needs more housing, especially in the South East, yet the green belt still enjoys a great deal of protection from development. John Sturzaker (University of Liverpool) looks at the difficulty of establishing whether NIMBYism is motivated by self-interest or legitimate concerns – and the imbalance of power between people who need housing, and those […]
Seventeen reads to change the way you think about democracy in 2018
A lot happened in 2017 – so much that you may have missed some of it. Ros Taylor, the outgoing editor of Democratic Audit, picks some of the best posts we’ve published.
How our social circles shape the way we think about supporters of another party
It is a truism that American politics has become more polarised in recent years. But how big a gap between Democrats and Republicans do people actually perceive? And how is that gap influenced by their social circles – for example, for a Democrat who only talks about politics with other Democrats? Jeffrey Lyons (Boise State […]
Democratic Audit's core funding is provided by the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust. Additional funding is provided by the London School of Economics.