The Labour Peer Lord Sewel was caught on video in highly compromising circumstances by the Sun. But will the inevitable scandal lead to reform of the UK’s bloated and inefficient House of Lords? Alun Wyburn-Powell uses history as a guide, and argues that it would be naive to expect this to trigger much-needed change when […]
Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair were both accused of taking British politics into a ‘presidential’ direction, with highly visible and ‘strong’ leaders seen as the defining political force. But this trend is not unique to the UK, with Italy also moving in this direction under first Silvio Berlusconi, and secondly the incumbent Prime Minister Matteo […]
Yesterday Prime Minister David Cameron, seemingly undeterred by the already negative media coverage about the Lord Sewel affair, gave strong indications that he intends to make yet more appointments to the Lords. In doing so, he appeared to invoke a convention that does not exist: that of bringing Lords membership into line with Commons seats. […]
The UK has seen a spate of referendums since 1997, with the public being consulted on the creation of new mayoralties, parliaments, assemblies, voting systems, and soon our membership of the European Union. But does direct democracy have the potential to engage those who are currently disinterested in politics? Arndt Leninger argues that while it […]
In 2017, the UK is scheduled to hold a referendum on our membership of the European Union, with David Cameron set to campaign for retention of our status as a EU member state. The vote has been described as a referendum and a plebiscite, but Richard Rose cautions against using the terms interchangeably as they […]
What lies behind voter disengagement? While some blame a crumbling political and electoral infrastructure, others lay the fault at the feet of voters themselves, and posit compulsory voting as the answer. The idea has an enduring appeal for many people, who look enviously at high turnouts in Australia, but is it suitable in the British […]
Democratic Audit recently carried a piece (via Policy Network) by Peter MacLeod, in which he showed the benefits of deliberative democracy based on developments in the Canadian polity. Here, Involve’s Reema Patel argues the UK also does well in this regard, and that there are various projects, developments, and policies which must be taken into […]
The Government has announced that the south-west county of Cornwall will be the first rural area in the country to receive powers over elements of public policy, following on from the City-region deals. Joanie Willett argues that Cornwall is a logical place to start owing to its rich cultural history and distinctive identity. However, an […]
Does the Greek crisis prove the limitations of European integration? Cristina Ares Castro-Conde writes that the real question facing Europe is not whether integration should be rolled back, but how European democracy can be improved. She suggests that a first step could be to create a parallel European Parliament composed of MEPs from Eurozone states […]
Party membership is often cited as uniformly in decline across European democracies. However, this might be an untenable statement as a look at annual party-level data of 47 parties in six European countries between 1960-2010 reveals. Ann-Kristin Kölln argues that almost a quarter of the parties have not been losing members and that membership decline […]
Democratic Audit's core funding is provided by the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust. Additional funding is provided by the London School of Economics.
This work by Democratic Audit is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0 UK: England & Wales.