School of Politics & International Relations

Political leaders signal their commitment to democratic or authoritarian values through public speeches. Such signals can constitute a breach of democratic norms and indicate intent to undermine democratic institutions.

Australia’s electoral system has a level of complexity and results reporting unknown overseas. Election night is like leaping into the void with little safety equipment apart from a thin stream of data from the Electoral Commission. Tonight, we hear reflections from ABC Chief Election Analyst Antony Green on his 36-year career covering Australian election night counts for ABC Television. Antony promises a catalogue of the highs and lows, the laughs and the embarrassments, the thrills and spills of live election night broadcasting.

Why do nations actively publicise previously overlooked disputes, and why does domestic mobilisation sometimes fail to lead to aggressive policy?

In November 2021 the Human Rights Commission presented its report called the Independent Review into Commonwealth Parliamentary Workplaces (known as the Jenkins Review). The Review was a response to reports of misconduct towards staff, which brought a new focus on the role of parliamentarians as employers and the status of staff as employees, present within a public sector workplace rather than in private spaces, personal to a parliamentarians.

Disproportionate recruitment of distinctive ethnic and religious groups has been a staple strategy of rulers throughout history. Why, however, do rulers limit their talent pool in this manner? Existing explanations have looked to irrational ideologies such as that of the 'martial races' or to a desire to maintain domestic power via a strategy of divide and rule amongst subject populations.

It is proposed that political parties should select their parliamentary candidates by way of sortition. Alternatives such as party primaries, caucus votes, and elite selection create entry points for elite manipulation of the electoral process.
While sortition for electing parliaments directly – being random – controls for elite capture, it is also likely to dissolve political parties and established voting blocs within parliament. This would undermine the democratic ideal of political parties, including their role in producing comprehensible and feasible legislative agendas.

In a political environment increasingly defined by rapid information dissemination, digital communication, and data proliferation, Quantitative Text Analysis (QTA) has emerged as an essential tool for political scientists. By enabling robust and systematic analysis of political texts such as parliamentary speeches, party manifestos, and social media interactions, QTA provides researchers with powerful methods to uncover patterns, sentiments, and underlying themes shaping political discourse and behaviour.

Democracy is conventionally understood as “delegation with accountability”. As such, it presupposes the existence of a demos from which the matching chains of delegation and accountability must, respectively, depart from and arrive to.

THIS TALK HAS BEEN CANCELLED