Democracy in Transition

In December, Melbourne School of Government undertook it’s largest endeavor to date: a practioner conference with international high-ranking officials and academics on the topic of “democracy in transition” with a related website, DemocracyRenewal.edu.au.

Over the course of the year, the DemocracyRenewal website served as a resource and forum for discussion about Western-style democracy. The site featured original and curated opinion articles and summaries of research, reports and statistics from across the world about the functioning of democracy.

Many articles were re-published in other media outlets and led to several interview opportunities for the Melbourne School of Government.

The Democracy in Transition conference was the culmination of our quest to advance the discussion on the challenges facing democracies around the world and what might be done to “fix democracy”. Participants from all over the world discussed, sometimes heatedly, what could be done and these discussions continued between the formal sessions. It was not uncommon to see Simon Hughes, former UK Minister of State for Justice and Civil Liberties, and Maxine McKew, Former Federal Parliamentary Secretary bantering between sessions or Mukulika Banerje  from the London School of Economics and Craig Jeffrey, Director of the Australia India Institute chatting during the coffee break.

You can catch up on what you missed at the conference on the Democracy in Transition blog. This live-blog was a new and very popular innovation for the conference, and we are grateful for all the hard work of MSoG PhD students who reported on all of the sessions for the blog.