David Coen’s Post

It was an exciting start today with our interview at the Australian Sociological Association with Professor Andrew Gunstone on the release of his new book Reflections On The Voice. Professor Gunstone situates a truth telling perspective fostering meaningful dialogue for all Australians to reflect and consider. Here are some key points 1. **Historical Significance**: Ptofessor Andrew Gunstones work sheds light on the historical significance of the Voice to Parliament proposal in Indigenous advocacy and self-determination. By delving into the origins, evolution, and impact of the Voice, they provide valuable context that deepens our understanding of its importance in the broader landscape of Indigenous rights and sovereignty. 2. **Educational Value**: Professor Andrew Gunstone Through their research and analysis, the academic contributes to the educational value of the discourse surrounding the Voice to Parliament. They offer insights, perspectives, and critical reflections that enrich the knowledge base and stimulate dialogue among students, scholars, policymakers, and the public on issues of Indigenous governance and representation. 3. Promoting Dialogue and Reconciliation** Professor Andrrw Gunstone exploration of the reflections on the Voice to Parliament contributes to promoting dialogue, understanding, and reconciliation between Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities. They facilitate conversations that bridge divides, challenge misconceptions, and foster mutual respect for Indigenous perspectives and experiences in shaping Australia's democratic institutions. 4. Critical Analysis and Insight**: Through critical analysis and scholarly rigor, Professor Andrew Gunstone offers valuable insights into the outcomes, challenges, and implications of the Voice to Parliament discussions. They unpack complexities, interrogate assumptions, and offer nuanced perspectives that inform public discourse and policymaking on Indigenous affairs and constitutional reform. 5. Empowering Indigenous Voices**: Professor Andrew Gunstones work empowers Indigenous voices by centering Indigenous knowledge, perspectives, and experiences in the narrative of the Voice to Parliament debate. They elevate Indigenous voices as key stakeholders in shaping the future of democracy, governance, and nation-building, challenging the status quo and advocating for meaningful inclusion and recognition. 6. Policy Implications and Recommendations**: Professor Andrew Gunstone offers valuable policy implications and recommendations for advancing the implementation of the Voice to Parliament model. They advocate for concrete actions, legislative reforms, and institutional changes that support Indigenous self-determination, governance structures, and decision-making processes within the Australian political landscape. #Indigenoustruthtelling #Voice #FirstNationsjustice

My latest academic article – Evolving Prefigurative Politics in an Intentional Community: The Auroville Citizens’ Assembly Pilot – coauthored with Lesley Branagan, was published today! In this paper we explore how a Citizens’ Assembly pilot in Auroville – the largest intentional community in the world – sought to prefigure new practices in collective decision-making, uniquely drawing together the scholarship concerning Citizens’ Assemblies and the literature concerning prefigurative politics. The Auroville’s Citizens’ Assembly pilot is a unique case study given that Auroville is an intentional community shaped by specific spiritual and self-governance values, and the pilot sought to prefigure the community’s foundational societal ideals in its collective decision-making practice. Lesley Branagan and I were involved in the pilot from the onset as members of the organising team, and later decided to draw from the experience to contribute to academic research. I hope the article will also serve as a testament to the unique societal experiment that is Auroville! The full article is accessible at the link below (for a limited number of downloads!) https://lnkd.in/gqXyhP7A

🚀Out now & open access in American Political Science Review: We discuss the potential of empowered minipublics (“Bürgerforen mit Entscheidungsbefugnis”) for democratic renewal in the eyes of citizens. 🤓 We find that citizens in general view minipublics as attractive institutional innovations but still want them to be advisory only and tightly coupled with the representative system. But: trust in other citizens, distrust in politics and experience with such democratic innovations seem to make some intriguing difference! 👇find out more

Notwithstanding its considerable degree of constitutional and institutional stability, Dutch politics has seen considerable step changes and occasional upheavals across the last half century. Influenced by long-term demographic, socio-economic, and cultural shifts the old social cleavages have waned. New social identities and dividing lines - such as ethnicity, education, place, and gender - have influenced Dutch citizens' political attitudes and behaviours, including their voting patterns. The media landscape and the information environment have been altered by new technologies that politicians and citizens alike have to navigate. This has produced changes in such pivotal components as the party system, coalition formation and management process, and executive-legislative relations, and many others. Moreover, public policy paradigms and the political coalitions that sustained them have ascended and lost traction. The product of a massive collaborative effort across the Dutch political science community, The Oxford Handbook of Dutch Politics provides a comprehensive overview of 'what we know' about the Dutch political system. It tackles: its origins and historical development, its key institutions, main fault lines, pivotal processes, and key public policy dynamics. In each of the chapters, researchers take stock of what - if anything - has changed over time, how we can explain those changes, and what questions and challenges this raises moving forward. The book will be out on October 31 with Oxford University Press, and can be pre-ordered here:  https://lnkd.in/eH4M-ujk  

Power and its Logic: MASTERING POLITICS - OA PDF: https://lnkd.in/gqK369D8 Power is the essence of politics. Whoever seeks to understand and master it must understand its logic. Drawing on two decades of international experience in political consulting, Dominik Meier and Christian Blum give profound and honest insights into the inner workings of power. Introducing their Power Leadership Approach, the authors provide a conceptual analysis of power and present the tools to successfully exercise it in the political domain. "Power and its Logic" is a guidebook for politicians, business leaders, civil society pioneers, public affairs consultants and for every citizen who wants to understand the unwritten rules of politics. Politics is about power and decision-making. This principle applies to all epochs, all systems and all cultures. There were and there are no power vacuums whatsoever. Moreover, regardless of whether we consciously enter the political arena or are involuntarily thrown into it, we all inevitably become participants in a zerosum game for power. Accordingly, it is all the more important to understand and to master the rules of this game. This is true for all of us. We are all stakeholders of one kind or another – whether as official decision-makers, citizens, journalists, lobbyists or political consultants. In recognition thereof, this book is aimed at providing readers with an honest, objective and comprehensive look at power and its logic. It is for the theorist and the practitioner alike. We welcome all interested readers, those lacking power and those wielding it. If the title has already attracted your attention, you are on the right trail. Our findings are based upon two decades of broad, in-depth experience in national and international political consultancy. Thereby, the focus of this book ranges from conceptual theories to concrete tools, all of which comprise the very foundation of our own proven Power Leadership Approach. Such a perspective is urgently required. Particularly now, as democracies struggle and strive amidst the challenges posed by the digital age, a fresh but historically rooted approach is necessary. Given the prevalence of untrustworthy information, the importance of the ability – and the willingness – to distinguish political facts from political fictions, for example, cannot be overstated. Democracies are based upon trust. They are, more specifically, dependent on the faith which members of society place in the processes, institutions and actors of the political realm on a daily basis. This faith must not and should not be blind. Just as transparency is to be expected of democratic institutions, it is also incumbent upon members of society to avail themselves of information and to comprehend the laws of power and politics.

Strengthen your capacity as a policymaker by cultivating a practical grasp of the tools, methodologies, and strategies essential for proficient program and policy evaluation within the public sector.     During the ‘Application of Program Evaluation’ program, Dr Rodrigo Praino, Associate Professor of Politics and Public Policy at Flinders University, will delve into the intricacies of collecting and articulating results in a compelling and informative manner.     Register your place now. https://lnkd.in/d-KSrZd8    #PublicPolicy #EvaluationMethods #DecisionMaking #FlindersUniversity" 

Very excited to share my new publication with JCMS: Journal of Common Market Studies titled 'Everything Everywhere All at Once? Introducing a Field- Theoretic Model for Party Politics in the European Union'! The article starts from the observation that few have challenged the conceptual models of party politics underpinning dominant ideas of EU democracy. I argue that simply applying models from the national context to the EU does not do justice to the complexity of European politics. A new model is needed that departs from state-based models and theorises parties as genuine multilevel actors whose behaviour at the European level can only be understood by also appreciating national-level dynamics, and vice versa. In response to this conceptual need, the article introduces the European Multilevel Party Field (EMPF) as a novel perspective to study party democracy in the EU, characterised as a polity in which politics occur simultaneously in every direction all the time without a clear hierarchy of power – it is a situation of ‘everything everywhere all at once’. Building on organisational field theory, the EMPF presents an alternative model that acknowledges both the agency of actors and the structuring framework in which they operate, making it more suitable to capture the cross-level (multilevel) and cross-border (transnational) interactive nature of EU politics. Concretely, it conceptualises the European party system as an organisational field and, accordingly, Europarties as inter-organisational alliances. Importantly, the EMPF is not just some conceptual novelty, but brings with it a set of notions that can help understand and explain how European party politics operate. Concretely, it captures how actors need to navigate the complex field of power relations amongst and within unstable political alliances that comprise highly autonomous actors across levels and borders. This is an important insight that is inherent to a field approach and explicitly lacking from state-based approaches to party politics in the EU. As such, the EMPF equips scholars with a conceptual foundation to address questions relating to the formation, development and operation of a European party system without taking recourse to pre-existing notions of networks or federalism, thereby contributing to the broader study of the development of a European democratic sphere. Read the full paper via the link below. 👇 https://lnkd.in/ewfq75sP I want to thank so many people for helping me make sense of both the European party system and field theory, contributing to making this article happen. Special thanks go out to Bram Wauters, Nathalie Brack, Ben Crum and John Erik Fossum for their valuable and thorough comments on the (many) previous versions of this article!

The 28th IPSA World Congress will take place in Seoul, South Korea, from 12 – 16 July 2025, and I am organizing a panel, “Clientelism in Power-Sharing Systems,” sponsored by the RC14 Politics and Ethnicity. This panel will discuss the interplay between clientelism and power-sharing and the distributive politics in divided societies. If interested, please submit your paper proposal to the panel!   Call for papers opens on 10 September and closes on 5 November [for the details, see: https://lnkd.in/e9VQXqMd]. If you have any questions about the panel, please contact me (Satoshi Tanaka: [email protected]).     Clientelism in Power-Sharing Systems There is a growing body of literature demonstrating that there is a link between clientelism and ethnic politics: Considerable empirical evidence is there on preferential public provisions by political leaders to their co-ethnics (i.e., ethnic favoritism), ethnic parties engaging in the distribution of patronage, and socioeconomic mobilization along ethnicity-focused networks. These studies reveal that ethnic politics are often underpinned not only by identity-based political mobilization but are sustained by material resources distributed along the clientelist networks. However, there remain questions about causal relations: does ethnic politics encourage clientelist relations, or does clientelism sponsor preferential treatment of co-ethnics? Does ethnicity inherently play a role in fostering clientelism, or does clientelist distribution entrench people’s preference for identifying along ethnic lines?   Since in many postconflict places, power-sharing institutions are erected to encourage intergroup cooperation, our panel invites papers that elucidate the linkage between the distribution of patronage and political stability in divided societies. Institutions of power-sharing are expected to settle interethnic conflicts by ensuring autonomy alongside access to (political, economic, societal, territorial, military, etc) resources for the main conflicting (usually) ethnic groups. However, recent scholarship points out that ethnic politics under power-sharing regimes often turn clientelist in a bid to stability, as clear from Bosnia-Herzegovina, Northern Macedonia, South Tyrol, Northern Ireland, Burundi, and Lebanon. This poses the question of whether power-sharing has the institutional preference for and reinforces clientelist-based exchange. If so, whose clientelism does it reinforce, and by what mechanism? Do different institutional settings, such as corporate/liberal and centripetal designs, affect clientelist distribution differently?     *For information about the congress, see: https://lnkd.in/eXY335sk **For information about the registration fees, see: https://lnkd.in/ea9hhKaB   --- Satoshi Tanaka, PhD Lecturer, College of International Relations, Ritsumeikan University, Japan Email: [email protected]

"We must get serious again about teaching and diffusing the values, experiences, requirements, and institutional designs of democracy." Read Larry Diamond's Lipset Lecture (in essay form) here: https://lnkd.in/ezVCnfVC

I sat down with Kenneth Lowande (University of Michigan Political Science) to discuss his fascinating book on the symbolism of executive action for an in-person version of the BookMarked series (USC Sol Price School of Public Policy's CLEAR Initiative). Dr. Lowande sheds light on the dichotomy between the symbolic and substantive aspects of executive power in contemporary politics. He argues that while executive actions like orders and memos are pervasive, their practical impact on policy change is often superficial. Instead of driving real governance, these actions serve as tools for political optics and credit-taking. Lowande's work underscores the tendency for executive action to be reduced to symbolic gestures on the one-hand due to institutional constraints and, on the other, presidents' lack of attention to implementation and substantive follow-through. Without the necessary institutional competence and drive for implementation, presidential actions like executive orders often fall short in effecting meaningful change. For those unfamiliar with the BookMarked series, it offers a critical lens on governance and civic leadership through interviews with authors of new work contributing to that space. Lowande's research challenges us to reevaluate the true efficacy of executive actions and the imperative of substantive follow-through for tangible policy outcomes. For more on his book & CLEAR: https://lnkd.in/ggvMHZhP h/t: USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism