Citizen’s Assemblies

What’s the theory? Why are they useful and good? What role should they play in municipal or state governance? Here are my notes …

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Gramsci in context

Martin Thomas (of the AWL) together with Peter Thomas has produced a pamphlet/book on the Life and thoughts of Gramsci.  I might read it some time, but not today. Their landing page which hosts the .pdf is called Gramsci in Context.  I also found this, from Socialist Appeal which argues that many Communists and Social…

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Multiple Choice Voting systems

So as the rerun of the referendum becomes more likely, some people are considering a multiple choice; the problem is how to weight and count the votes. It interests me that instant run off is people’s first port of call, and I have some links that refer to it. On first site, the problem is…

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On Presidentialism

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…

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Trade Union Democracy

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.

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Measuring Democracy

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.

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Dictatorship and Plebiscites

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.

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