The School would like to congratulate Professor Ian McAllister, Dr Juliet Pietsch and Dr Svitlana Chernykh who obtained Australian Research Council grant funding in the latest round announced on October 30.

Professor McAllister and Dr Juliet Pietsch won a Discovery Award of $406,890 over three years for a project entitled “Political Engagement Among the Young: The 2016-19 Australian Election Study”.  The project seeks to understand the declining level of political engagement among the young, with a view to developing measures that will help to re-invigorate their political participation. One of the greatest challenges to democracy in Australia and internationally is to understand the lack of political engagement among the young. Young people today are less likely to vote, to join a political party, or to engage in interest groups than at any time since democratisation. The 2016–19 Australian Election Study is designed to address this question by surveying a representative sample of voters in the 2016 and 2019 elections. The project is also designed to add to an unbroken series of post-election national opinion surveys which have monitored trends in Australian political behaviour since 1987.

Dr Svitlana Chernykh won a Discovery Early Career Researcher Award of $368,000 over three years for a project entitled “The Dilemma of Compliance: Political Parties and Post-election Disputes”.  This project plans to analyse post-election disputes in Eastern Europe, Africa, and Asia to determine why political parties refuse to comply with electoral outcomes and what determines the strategies they use to contest them. To date, scholars have primarily focused on why post-election protests succeed, paying scant attention to the reasons political parties decide to reject election results in the first place. This project also seeks to evaluate the impact that post-election disputes and their resolutions have on the future of political parties and democratic governance. The findings of the project may inform and improve donor and civil society efforts to strengthen electoral management and the quality of democracy.

This is a fantastic result for the researchers and for the school which will enable to us to continue to produce high quality research.