Alasdair S. Roberts

Nov 27

Book reviews: Does democracy work?

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

Nov 25

Brookings paper discusses openness lecture

A brief just published by the Brookings Institution’s Center for Effective Public Management discusses my lecture to the Accountability Network’s conference in Mexico City in October. “Roberts rightly sounds an alarm about recent claims that transparency is a cause of declining democracies and government dysfunction,” write Gary Bass, Danielle Brian and Norman Eisen. Read the brief.

Nov 24

Democracy: Doing better, feeling worse

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.

Nov 4

NASPAA/APPAM panel on relationship between political science and public administration

I’ll be participating in a NASPAA/APPAM panel on “the evolving relationship between political science and public administration” in Albuquerque, NM on November 6. The panel will be chaired by Steven Rathgeb Smith, APSA Executive Director. More details here. I’ll draw on the argument from my monograph Large Forces: What’s Missing in Public Administration. The core ideas from the monograph are summarized in this oped published in PA Times last spring.

Nov 3

Governance roundtable at Boston University

I’ll be participating in a lunch discussion at Boston University’s Pardee School of Global Studies on November 20. The discussion highlights a forthcoming special issue of Governance that examines how the global financial crisis has changed policy and practice within the International Monetary Fund. The special issue was organized by Cornel Ban and Kevin Gallagher of the Pardee School. More details here.

Nov 1

Book review: The limits of ‘sensible centrism’

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

Oct 30

2014 Grace-Pépin Access to Information Award

I’m honored to receive the 2014 Grace-Pépin Access to Information Award. Read the news release from the Office of Canada’s Information Commissioner. The Grace-Pépin Access to Information Award is presented annually to an individual or organization in recognition of outstanding dedication towards advancing the principles of access to information across Canada. It was named in recognition of the contributions of John Grace, former Information Commissioner of Canada, and Marcel Pépin, President and founder of the Commission d’accès à l’information du Québec. Suzanne Legault, Information Commissioner of Canada, presented the award on October 30 during the Annual Access to Information and Privacy Law Symposium organized by the Canadian Bar Association. Read announcement in French.

Oct 27

ABS article references “The End of Protest”

In the American Behavioral Scientist, Takis S. Pappas and Eoin O’Malley reference The End of Protest in their comparison of social unrest in Ireland and Greece following the financial crisis of 2008. Read the article. Pappas and O’Malley conclude that “the most compelling explanation relates to the varying ability of the Greek and Irish states to continue providing basic public goods and other state-related services to their respective societies.”

Oct 22

Keynote address at Accountability Network seminar, October 21

I delivered a keynote address at the Accountability Network’s international seminar on the design of public policies for accountability and corruption control in Mexico City on October 21, 2014. The working text for my address can be downloaded from SSRN. The full text has also been published by Freedominfo.org. Feedback is appreciated. Here is an October 17 article in Processo magazine about the conference.

Oct 20

Talks at CIDE October 22-23: Democracy in crisis?

Click to enlarge

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.