Last night, the First Minister of Scotland, the Scottish National Party’s Alex Salmond went head-to-head with the Better Together campaign’s Chairman, and the former Labour Chancellor of the Exchequer, Alastair Darling. Here, Democratic Audit’s Sean Kippin rounds up the response from the blogosphere, academia, and our esteemed newspaper columnists. Similar Posts20 things we learned about […]
Special Advisers are a now a fixture of British government, with “SpAds” patrolling the political space in between Ministers and the Civil Service, offering the kind of policy and political advice which “Sir Humphreys” don’t feel inclined or able to offer. Drawing on research from New Zealand, Richard Shaw and Chris Eichbaum show that little research has been carried […]
Representative democracy has come under attack from different directions during the global financial crisis of 2008 and beyond. In assessing these critiques, Matteo Mameli and Lorenzo del Savio argue that he existence and strength of the two strongest kinds of attack show that the current dominant kind of electoral-representative structures have become irremediably obsolete. Similar PostsYou Like this and […]
At the heart of the debate about nudge policy is a debate about the freedom to choose. Some would argue that the freedom to act according to one’s own wishes without any external coercion is essential. The state, on the other hand, would do best to point out that by accepting to live in our current liberal state […]
Should our political representatives be representative? And if so, does that mean that politicians are incapable of people who do not look and sound like them? Reflecting on the recently released national councillor census, the Centre for Public Scrutiny’s Jessica Crowe argues that representatives should be representative, with the whole democratic process benefiting from a […]
British Home Secretaries and Prime Ministers have occasionally proscribed organisations which are violent or completely intolerant in outlook, banning various apparent terrorist organisations under a 2000 act of Parliament. But is it effective? Lee Jarvis and Tim Legrand argue that it is not, and raise problems with the identification and designation of these groups, the politicisation of the […]
In this study of democratization, Joshua Kurlantzick proposes that the spate of retreating democracies, one after another over the past two decades, is not just a series of exceptions and instead reflects democracy in worldwide decline. Muireann O’Dwyer finds that this book will be useful reading for anyone seeking to gain an understanding of the global democracy recession, as […]
The financial crisis has generated a number of policies and discussions across Europe aimed at reforming financial regulation. Nicholas Dorn writes that while there is widespread recognition that a rethink is required to prevent a similar crisis from occurring again, the core problem underlying the crisis has yet to be addressed: the fact that financial regulation is […]
In a digital age, the closed world of institutions is no longer viable. To rebuild trust and re-engage citizens, technology can be used to change the way decisions are made, how citizens are involved and how institutions are held to account, argue Dave Richards and Martin J. Smith Similar PostsCriticisms of the Westminster model of politics […]
Over recent weeks, Democratic Audit has been looking at ways to re-engage young people with politics for our ‘Beyond the Youth Citizenship Commission’ in collaboration with Huddersfield University’s Dr Andy Mycock. In the latest instalment of this series, Chloe Smith MP argues that though the internet cannot replace politics, it can be a useful supplement, with online-based youth […]
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.