Australian Federal Election 2025 Roundtable
Panel discussion
Join us on Thursday 8 May, for a panel discussion examining the results of the 2025 Australian Federal Election. Bringing together some of the country’s leading scholars in political science, this event offers a considered and data-driven exploration of the forces that shaped this year’s outcome.…
Market for Warriors: A Rational Theory of Military Clubs
Seminar
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…
How Cases Speak to One Another: Using Translation to Rethink Generalization in Political Science Research (Nicholas Rush Smith, CUNY)
Seminar
Regardless of method, political scientists often seek to develop arguments that can be generalized to a population of cases. But is this the only way to think about how cases speak to one another? We advocate for a new way to think about how qualitative research produces broadly applicable…
Sortition within Political Parties
Seminar
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 –…
What’s to know about politics? Positivism and tradition in Australian undergraduate program and course descriptions (William Howe, ANU)
Seminar
How do Australian universities today communicate to potential and new students what constitutes fundamental knowledge in the study of politics? In this talk I discuss results of research on required or core undergraduate course descriptions in political science; international relations; and,…
Democratic Principles for a Multilevel, Multidemoi Democracy
Seminar
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.Moreover, these chains must ideally be unbroken, but the…
The Will of the People Revisited
Seminar
The notion of the “will of the people” has long been at the centre of populist conceptions of democracy, but it has taken on renewed salience in recent years, with the rise of populist movements. Following the UK’s 2016 referendum on leaving the European Union, for instance, references to “the will…