“If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.” -Haruki Murakami Nearly every government, from tiny Tuvalu, all the way up to India, has a public sphere. That is, a community of some kind, “made up of private people gathered together as a public…
Yesterday Queen Elizabeth the Second died. She wasn’t Australia’s second Queen named Elizabeth, since the other Elizabeth reigned before Australia was ‘discovered’. Despite the fact that we have had no other Elizabeth’s we call her the second because the monarchy is an embarrassing relic of British rule. In this article I’ll be laying out why…
The French system of allocation of power is pretty strange: despite the very first article of its constitution stipulating that “Its organisation is decentralised.”, France is one of the least decentralised countries in the democratic world, even for a unitary state. The current political establishment was set up in the middle of the Algerian War…
Everybody’s talking about the current French elections, but as far as I can see, no one is talking about the effect these elections could have on the Andorran monarchy. The President of France, whomever it is, automatically becomes a coprince of Andorra; a landlocked microstate in the Pyrenees, situated between Spain and France. The coprince…
I’ve already talked about why democracy works, and its flaws, but I’ve hardly addressed the potential to improve democracy further. In this article I’ll be doing just that! Citizen Journalism: As I talked about in the previous article, the press is extremely important in upholding democracy. While the internet’s contributions to this are often overlooked…
As objectively great as democracy is, it does have serious flaws. In this article I’ll be looking at some of the biggest flaws in democracy and how to address, or at least reduce, them. Short-termism: One of the biggest criticisms of democracy is that it encourages short-term thinking. With politicians serving short terms and having…
Barbados has just become a republic, stripping the Queen of her few remaining powers. So, what does that mean? Well, the position of Governor-General has been removed, and replaced with a Presidency. The President of Barbados is the head of state and of the armed forces, and is the source of executive power. In practice…
Sometimes it seems that faith in democracy is waning in the West. As countries like China appear to speed ahead, there appears to be an increasing tendency in the West to attribute its own perceived failures to the most obvious difference between it and its rivals: democracy. In this series of articles I’ll talk about…
Mr. Hakainde Hichilema recently won the Zambian elections in a landslide victory (he won nearly 60% of the vote, with a 70% voter turnout). He assumed power on the 24th to become the 7th president of Zambia. He has unsuccessfully run for president 5 times (though sometimes on a knife’s edge), starting with the 2006…