While writing and thinking about the democratic legitimacy of the Referendum, I discovered the work of Juan J Linz. This article initially hosted my thoughts on Linz’s views on the US Presidential system and its clones. I returned to it in the Autumn of 2021 when questions of why the founding fathers did it this…
Read more
I was looking at the way democracy dies in Unions, with a whimper and came across these two articles, Trotskyism and Trade-Union Struggle from marxists.org and the Iron Law of Oligarchy, on Wikipedia. which points at further reading.
Read more
Lewisham Council, are looking at their constitution to see if they make it more democratic. They are running a consultation which started in 2018 and is planned to finish and I propose to submit some evidence. I thought I understood how it worked, but I don’t; here are my notes.
Read more
Often one finds that people argue their solution is more democratic; how does one know? Some political scientists have looked at measuring democracyness, here’s what I have found.
Read more
An unfinished white Paper by Emmanuelle Avril of the Université Sorbonne Nouvelle. The paper is called, The (Unintended) Consequences of New Labour: Party Leadership vs Party Management in the British Labour Party. and was presented to the Political Studies Association 2015 conference, in March so before the election. The abstract states,
Read more
For people casual acquainted with political theory, we know that dictators quite like plebiscites in a way that they dislike parliaments. We can see in the UK, the way in which some of the Brexiteers, but not their leadership, are frightened of both parliament’s consideration of interpreting the referendum result and/or running a second one.
Read more