Tax morale and direct democracy

This paper analyses the impact of direct democracy on tax morale in Switzerland, a country where participation rights strongly vary across different cantons, using survey data from the International Social Survey Programme (ISSP) 1998. The findings suggest that direct democratic rights have a significantly positive effect on tax morale.

Participation and e-democracy how to utilize web 2.0 for policy decision-making

This paper investigates in how to utilize ICT and Web 2.0 technologies and e-democracy software for policy decision-making. It introduces a cutting edge decision-making system that integrates the practice of e-petitions, e-consultation, e-rulemaking, e-voting, and proxy voting. The paper demonstrates how under precondition of direct democracy through the use this system the collective intelligence (CI) of a population would be gathered and used throughout the policy process.

Crime, Justice and Social Democracy : International Perspectives

Crime, Justice and Social Democracy is a provocative and thoughtful collection of timely reflections on the state of social democracy and its inextricable links to crime and justice. Authored by some of the world's leading thinkers from the UK, US, Canada and Australia, with a preface from Professor David Garland of New York University, this volume provides a powerful social democratic critique of neoliberal regimes of governance and crime control on an international scale. Social democratic values raise broad questions about government, ethics, and the exercise of power in criminal justice institutions; each chapter here engages with how this might occur and with what consequences. The contributions to this volume, while critical and hard hitting, also boldly envision a more socially just criminal justice politic. This collection is essential reading for activists, scholars, legislators, politicians and policy makers who are concerned with promoting, imagining and understanding socially sustaining societies.

Crime, justice and social democracy : proceedings of the second international conference, 2013, volume 1

The refereed papers contained in this set of conference proceedings were presented at the 2nd International Conference on Crime, Justice and Social Democracy, hosted by the Crime and Justice Research Centre, Faculty of Law, QUT. The conference attracted an impressive list of internationally distinguished keynote and panel speakers from the United Kingdom, United States, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and this time Latin America, as well as high quality paper submissions.

Social media and e-democracy in Fiji, Solomon Islands and Vanuatu

This paper examines the extent social media is enabling e-democracy in Fiji, Solomon Islands and Vanuatu. The study conducts an interpretative case study approach interviewing active social media users, political actors, civil servants, civilians, civil society actors and tertiary students. The study also conducts a content analysis of popular “political social media” Facebook pages in these three countries. The findings of the study suggest that social media is playing a role in facilitating citizen engagement with governments, making governments accountable and providing a means for citizens to be informed, to discuss and share views on political matters. However, social media usage is evolving quite differently in these three countries and factors such as high levels of militarism (Fiji), high levels of corruption (Solomon Islands) and also rapid ICT development (Vanuatu) have contributed towards shaping the potential of social media as a democratic enabler and political tool in these countries.

Crime, Justice and Social Democracy: Proceedings of the Second International Conference, 2013, volume 2

The refereed papers contained in this volume of conference proceedings were among those presented at the 2nd International Conference on Crime, Justice and Social Democracy, hosted by the Crime and Justice Research Centre, Faculty of Law, QUT, from 8 – 11 July 2013. The conference attracted an impressive list of speakers from Australasia, Europe, North America and Latin America. These seven papers can be viewed at the Crime and Justice Research Centre’s website at http://crimejusticeconference.com/publications/ as can Volume 1 representing another 26 selected papers from the conference. As with the papers contained in the first volume, this set of papers raises important questions about the links between crime, justice and social democracy, and continues the contribution that the Crime and Justice Research Centre makes towards engaging with these topics. We thank all those who submitted papers for review for this second volume of proceedings, as well as the peer reviewers for taking the time to review the papers, often within very tight timelines.

Modes of criminal justice, indigenous youth and social democracy

The political question of how the will of a community is to be democratically formed and adhered to, the question of social democracy, is normatively tied to the mode of criminal justice employed within that democratic public sphere. Liberal, republican, procedural and communitarian forms of democratic will-formation respectively reflect retributive,restorative, procedural and co-operative modes of criminal justice. After first elaborating these links through the critical response of republican and procedural theories of democracy to the liberal practice of democratic will-formation and its retributive mode of justice, our discussion considers the recent practice of restorative and procedural justice with respect to Indigenous youth; and this in the context of a severely diminished role for Indigenous justice agencies in the public sphere. In light of certain shortcomings in both the restorative and procedural modes of justice, and so too with republican and procedural understandings of the democratic public sphere, we turn to a discussion of procedural communitarianism, anchored as it is in Dewey’s notion of social co-operation. From here we attempt a brief formulation of what a socially co-operative mode of justice might consist of; a mode of justice where historically racial and economically coercive injustices are sufficiently recognised.

Crime Justice and Social Democracy: Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference, 9-10 July 2015

We are pleased to present these selected papers from the proceedings of the 3rd Crime, Justice and Social Democracy International Conference, held in July 2015 in Brisbane, Australia. Over 350 delegates attended the conference from 19 countries. The papers collected here reflect the diversity of topics and themes that were explored over three days. The Crime, Justice and Social Democracy International Conference aims to strengthen the intellectual and policy debates concerning links between justice, social democracy, and the reduction of harm and crime, through building more just and inclusive societies and proposing innovative justice responses. In 2015, attendees discussed these issues as they related to ideas of green criminology; indigenous justice; gender, sex and justice; punishment and society; and the emerging notion of ‘Southern criminology’. The need to build global connections to address these challenges is more evident than ever and the conference and these proceedings reflect a growing attention to interdisciplinary, novel, and interconnected responses to contemporary global challenges. Authors in these conference proceedings engaged with issues of online fraud, queer criminology and law, Indigenous incarceration, youth justice, incarceration in Brazil, and policing in Victoria, Australia, among others. The topics explored speak to the themes of the conference and demonstrate the range of challenges facing researchers of crime, harm, social democracy and social justice and the spaces of possibility that such research opens. Our thanks to the conference convenor, Dr Kelly Richards, for organising such a successful conference, and to all those presenters who subsequently submitted such excellent papers for review here. We would also particularly like to thank Jess Rodgers for their tireless editorial assistance, as well as the panel of international scholars who participated in the review process, often within tight timelines.

Awakening the spirit : telling the stories

Stephen Page talking with Cheryl Stock Stephen Page is one of the most significant dance artists working in Australia today, unique in his ability to forge and sustain a company of Indigenous artists through his seminal leadership of Bangarra Dance Theatre, which celebrated its 20 year anniversary in 2009. Together with the many artists who have contributed to the Bangarra vision, Stephen has created a distinctive contemporary Indigenous dance style and approach, celebrated for the stories it tells of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander experience. Fusing the traditional with the contemporary through a connection to the spirit of the land and its people, Stephen has inspired and influenced a generation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander dance and theatre artists as a choreographer, director and mentor. His down to earth humour, his passion and his sensitivity draw us as audience, Indigenous and non-Indigenous alike, to his theatrical stories of place and spirit – both ancient and modern – in ways that simultaneously transcend and reaffirm the particular cultural experience which informs them. This conversation covers the early years of growing up with his 'urban clan', discovering dance and politics and his spiritual awakening at Yirrkala. Stephen then describes moving in and out of different realities as a member of Sydney Dance Company whilst simultaneously exploring his Indigenous dance voice, the transition from dancer to choreographer, creating the Bangarra identity and the intercultural experiment of 'Rites' with the Australian Ballet. The last section looks at his various roles as an artistic director and nurturing the next generation of Indigenous artists.

Panem et circenses : law, law and power in The Hunger Games

Like many cautionary tales, The Hunger Games takes as its major premise an observation about contemporary society, measuring its ballistic arc in order to present graphically its logical conclusions. The Hunger Games gazes back to the panem et circenses of Ancient Rome, staring equally cynically forward, following the trajectory of reality television to its unbearably barbaric end point – a sadistic voyeurism for an effete elite of consumers. At each end of the historical spectrum (and in the present), the prevailing social form is Arendt’s animal laborans. Consumer or consumed, Panem’s population is (with the exception of the inner circle) either deprived of the possibility of, or distracted from, political action. Within the confines of the Games themselves, Law is abandoned or de‐realised: Law – an elided Other in the pseudo‐Hobbesian nightmare that is the Arena. The Games are played out, as were gladiatorial combats and other diversions of the Roman Empire, against a background resonant of Juvenal’s concern for his contemporaries’ attachment to short term gratification at the expense the civic virtues of justice and caring which are (or would be) constitutive of a contemporary form of Arendt’s homo politicus. While the Games are, on their face, ‘reality’ they are (like the realities presented in contemporary reality television) a simulated reality, de‐realised in a Foucauldian set design constructed as a distraction for Capitol, and for the residents of the Districts, a constant reminder of their subservience to Capitol. Yet contemporary Western culture, for which manipulative reality TV is but a symptom of an underlying malaise, is inscribed at least as an incipient Panem, Its public/political space is diminished by the effective slavery of the poor, the pre‐occupation with and distractions of materiality and modern media, and the increasing concentration of power/wealth into a smaller proportion of the population.