To celebrate the new English-language MA in Comparative Democracy at Goethe University Frankfurt, Hanna Pfeifer, Julian Garritzmann and I took over the Talk Social Science To Me Podcast and produced three episodes on key themes in the field. All episodes are now available on your favourite podcast provider or click on the links below.
A large number of national climate assemblies have been set up across Europe to enable citizens to make climate policy recommendations. But do these bodies have any impact? Drawing on new research, John Boswell, Rikki Dean and Graham Smith argue that greater attention should be paid to how these assemblies can be integrated into the world of politics.
Next week at the ECPR Annual Conference in Innsbruck I will present my new working paper, which develops a multidimensional framework for understanding the nature of a political process preference. You can download the full paper from this blog post.
I was the guest for the June episode of the new podcast from Goethe University, Talk Social Science To Me. The main theme was to discuss new ways of involving citizens in democracy, but the conversation led us to many topics, ranging from the effects of the pandemic on democratic governance to the role of democracies in the climate crisis. The podcast is now available on Spotify, Youtube and other podcast providers.
Embeddedness is often invoked as a goal for participatory governance, but it tends to remain vaguely defined. So what does embedding participation mean? And how is it achieved? Sonia Bussu, Adrian Bua, Graham Smith and I convened this symposium in Critical Policy Studies in order to explore these questions through case studies from around the world.
Jean-Paul Gagnon has amassed over 4,000 ‘linguistic artefacts’ into a data mountain of descriptions of democracy. Yet, I note, a sustained consideration of these linguistic artefacts as language is missing from his Science of Democracy and the responses to it.
What are the hidden politics of seeking to co-produce research with stakeholders? What kinds of leadership are common in co-produced research? What trade-offs does each kind of leadership make in addressing issues such as being directive, inclusive, innovative, accountable, open to what emerges and sharing power?
Across advanced democracies citizens’ assemblies on climate change – randomly selected, deliberative initiatives of usually between 100-200 people – are increasingly being adopted in the hope that they can address democratic politics current failures on climate policy. My fear is that, as institutional design solutions to what is more a problem of political economy, these climate assemblies are destined to fail. But I share these rough thoughts in the hope that more optimistic readers might convince me that I am wrong.
Wie können wir erkennen, wenn den Begriff ‘Demokratie’ missbraucht wird? In einem Kapitel des neues Buchs Sprachgewalt von David Ranan, versuchen Jonathan Rinne und ich diese Frage zu beantworten.
How can we broaden the range of actors involved in the solving complex problem of generating sustainable urban communities? A new, open access book on Transdisciplinary Knowledge Co-production gives a detailed account of the methods, with a contribution from Catherine Durose, Beth Perry, Liz Richardson and I on leadership in co-production.