Mar 7
I gave a lunchtime talk at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy at the National University of Singapore on March 9. More details here | Flyer here. The paper that was the basis of the lecture is available on SSRN. NUS Professor Rahul Sagar moderated the discussion.
I’ve written a short piece for Medium drawing on my S.T. Lecture at the University of Oxford this month.
I’ll be delivering the Lee Lecture at All Souls College, Oxford, on February 26, 2015. Download the details from All Souls College. The title of my lecture will be Four Crises of Democracy. The paper is now available on SSRN (Revised on January 6). The Lecture is supported by Dr. Seng Tee Lee FBA through an endowment for an annual lecture in Political Science and Government. Read more
Bookforum mentions my “Four Crises of Democracy” paper in a round-up of recent works on the state of democracy.
I’ve just posted a short paper on SSRN, “The Nation-State: Not Dead Yet.” It marks twenty years since the publication of several influential books (by Kenichi Ohmae, Jean-Marie Guéhenno, and Susan Strange) that predicted the end of the nation-state.
Six reviews that I’ve written recently, on books that assess the state of democracy:
Review of Democracy in Retreat by Joshua Kurlantzick. Forthcoming in International Public Management Review. “Kurlantzick provides a detailed account of how our end-of-the-millennium exuberance about the spread of democracy dissipated so quickly. Around the world, Kurlantzick says, an unhappy middle class has slipped away from the pro-democracy camp. What can be done to draw the middle class back? This is a critical question which Kurlantick only begins to answer — and perhaps cannot be answered neatly in a work of this breadth.” Read the draft on SSRN. Read more
A mash-up of two charts that relate to the reading I’ve been doing lately on the state of democracy. The orange line shows the number of countries that are established democracies according to Polity IV data. The blue line shows how frequently the phrase “crisis of democracy” appears in the English language corpus in Google’s Ngram.
It’s Even Worse Than It Looks: How The American Constitutional System Collided With The New Politics of Extremism. Mann, Thomas E. and Norman J. Ornstein. New York, Basic Books, 2013, pp. 248, $16.99 (pb), ISBN 978-0-465-07473-0.
Review published in Public Administration Review in November 2014. Also available on SSRN.
In this book, Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein provide a sobering description of how politics in Washington has coarsened over the span of a generation. Today, the authors warn, “America’s capacity to govern” is under threat (Mann and Ornstein 2013, xvii). They have some practical suggestions on how to make Washington work better. But the remedies may be unequal to the underlying problem: a profound shift in the structure of American politics, and attitudes about the role of the federal government in American life. Read more
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I’ll be giving talks at the Center for Economic Research and Teaching (CIDE) on October 22-23, as part of their fortieth anniversary celebrations. My October 22 talk at CIDE is titled “Democracy in Crisis?” I’ll draw on recent writing including book reviews and my comment on Francis Fukuyama’s article in Foreign Affairs. See also my recent oped in the Winnipeg Free Press.
I”ve published an oped in the Winnipeg Free Press on the pushback against governmental openness. “Six years have passed since the financial collapse of 2008. We liberated global financial markets to rule themselves, and they let us down. Now we are witnessing one of the perverse results of this collapse: a boom in complaints about the weaknesses of democracy, and the dangers of too much governmental openness.” Read the oped in the Winnipeg Free Press. The oped has also been republished by freedominfo.org.
I’ll be giving a lecture on government openess next week in Mexico City, at the Accountability Network’s international seminar on accountability and corruption control. The working text for my address can be downloaded from SSRN.
Alasdair S. Roberts 
