It’s the fairest way to settle this debate – though in the absence of a clear majority supporting either “remain” or a “no deal” it would probably mean accepting Theresa May’s deal.
The financial oligarchies differ from other kidnappers by being silent about their power over institutions and policies – they don’t want to alert anyone to what they have done.
The protesters who took to the streets of Paris didn’t know what they wanted: they just knew what they were against. But they did make us think that maybe there is another, better world.
Camille Bedock, Université de Bordeaux; James K. Wong, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology; Patricia Roberts-Miller, The University of Texas at Austin; Sabeel Rahman, Brooklyn Law School; Sor-hoon Tan, National University of Singapore, and Xavier Marquez, Te Herenga Waka — Victoria University of Wellington
Uncertainty is built into democracy, but we are seeing more talk of crisis and more attempts at redefinition. So where does this leave citizens who want to have a meaningful say in how they live?
Democracy takes many forms, some of them democracy in name only. Confusion and misappropriation complicate the public struggle for the democracy to come, but this challenge is always unending.
Current events show that the old problem of populism is making a comeback, and that populism is indeed an autoimmune disease of our age of monitory democracy.
We’re not sure if the cure, the populist outsider, will work and make life better. but we are willing to experiment as the old certainties of representative politics wither.
While both parties may have set out to modernise and renew their ideologies, the ALP’s and Labour’s attempts to marry the old and new instead precipitated two separate identity crises.
Ambivalence among voters is reason to think about how democracy is working for us as a community. To keep democracy alive we need to be sceptical about the exercise of power and keep it in check.
Each individual act of posting, linking, commenting and liking may look insignificant up close, but they add up. There is enormous power here for mass persuasion, one viral share at a time.
Professor of Comparative Political Science and Democracy Research at the Humboldt University Berlin; Associate of the Sydney Democracy Network, University of Sydney; Director of Research Unit Democracy: Structures, Performance, Challenges, WZB Berlin Social Science Center.