The invitation-only conference – A Permanent Global Citizens’ Assembly: Adding humankind’s voice to world politics – on Thursday 18th July, aims to investigate the arguments for a Global Citizens’ Assembly in the run-up to the UN Summit of the Future in September. It is a collaboration between the DPIR and ISWE Foundation – a social impact foundation dedicated to finding ways to put people at the heart of social and political decision making to solve some of society’s greatest challenges.
A Citizens’ Assembly (CA) is a body whose members are chosen on a near-random basis so as to be representative of the population, along chosen dimensions such as gender and race. CAs examine issues through a process of structured and supported deliberation. They have been widely, and successfully used at local and national levels in a number of countries in recent years to develop public policy, and assist constitutional change. The world’s first Global CA, with assembly members drawn from around the globe, was organised in 2021/22 on the topic of climate change. The conference on July 18 will explore the proposal to establish a permanent Global CA.
The agenda includes a keynote address on ‘The immediate political relevance of a permanent Global CA’ by Sandrine Dixson-Declève, Co-President of the Club of Rome. There will be panel discussions on the development and potential of the proposal, and breakout sessions to explore how a Global CA might accelerate action on urgent 21st century challenges such as climate change, AI governance. and health.
Stuart says, “This conference will bring together academics and practitioners working across the fields of global governance and global public policy, and activists in social movements, to explore the potential for a permanent Global CA, and the critical areas where it might speed up action by democratic governments.’
The study of Citizens’ Assemblies forms part of Stuart’s own academic research. He has published several papers on the topic, including Citizens’ Assemblies and Republican Democracy (Bruno Leipold, Karma Nabulsi and Stuart White, eds., Radical Republicanism: Recovering the Tradition’s Popular Heritage, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 81-99. 2020) and Citizens’ Assemblies and Democratic Renewal (Working Paper for ENA (Institute for Alternative Policies), Centre for Political Theory, Athens. 2022.)
The first Global CA was convened to raise community voices at a global level on the climate crisis, and led to the ‘People’s Declaration for the Sustainable Future of Planet Earth’, which was presented at COP26 in 2021. The declaration, produced by members of the assembly, and targeted at world leaders, set out seven steps towards addressing the world’s climate crisis in a fair and effective way.
The outcomes of next week’s conference will support further discussions on multilateral democratic reform at the UN Summit of the Future on 23-24 September in New York.
James Goldston was tasked with producing the ten hearings conducted by the Select Committee, which made headlines around the world, and played a key role in the legal processes that are now underway against former President Donald Trump. The implications of the events of January 6 and the hearings that followed are now one of the central themes of this American election cycle. He will be joining us on Wednesday 28th May for Democracy on Trial: January 6 and the 2024 Presidential Election, in which he’ll discuss how the hearings came to happen, and why they remain so central to the future of US politics.
Goldston has established a global reputation as a journalist and innovator in the non-fiction space. He spent 18 years at ABC News, including seven years as President, overseeing all aspects of America’s number one news division, including #1 rated Good Morning America and World News Tonight with David Muir. He also led ABC News in to the streaming era with a series of successful podcast and documentary projects for Hulu and Disney Plus, including The Dropout, produced by Rebecca Jarvis and her team, which became a successful podcast, documentary and Emmy-award winning scripted series, and John’s Ridley’s Let it Fall documentary on the LA riots, which won a DuPont award. His teams have won five Edward R. Murrow Awards for Overall Excellence, and numerous other prestigious honors in journalism including duPont, Peabody and Emmy awards.
After leaving ABC News in 2021, Goldston founded Aquitania Films, creating documentary series for the US, UK and global market. Last year he also brought his story-telling acumen to producing the January 6 hearings in Washington DC. His work led The Wrap to name Goldston as one of their Innovators of the Year for 2022. He is now the President of Candle True Stories, making documentaries and factual dramas for audiences around the world.
Tickets for Democracy on Trial: January 6 and the 2024 Presidential Election are free. The event takes place in the Cheng Kar Shun Digital Hub and starts with drinks at 6pm. The talk begins at 6.30pm.
Across five episodes in The Kids are Alt Right?, James explores how ageing affects our political views, how people become attached to specific political parties when they are young, and how the choices made by political parties play out among the young and the old.
Professor James Tilley recording his new BBC Radio 4 series ‘The Kids are Alt Right?’
Each episode casts the spotlight on a different aspect of the relationship between age and politics. The starting point is how age affects people’s preference for the radical right. The first episode, What’s Going On?, explored the recent success of radical right parties and how their support base is often younger, rather than older, people.
Future broadcasts in the series cover:
Over the series, James argues that both ageing and generational effects are the key to understanding why mainstream parties do better with the old. Interestingly, this means, in some countries, that younger people are more likely to support the radical right as well as the radical left.
He said: “In some European countries, young voters are more likely to prefer radical right parties than are older voters. This can be surprising as there is a popular notion that as we age, we become increasingly right-wing. The relationship between age and how we vote is not that straightforward, however.”
James’ research is focused primarily in the fields of public opinion and electoral behaviours, specifically in Britain and the EU. His work concentrates on three main themes; explaining the changing role of social cleavages (class and religion) in predicting party choice; explaining the circumstances in which voters blame some governments for policy failures, but are willing to absolve others; and exploring the predictors of affective political polarisation, particularly the creation of identity groups around ‘Remain’ and ‘Leave’ after the Brexit referendum.
The Kids are Alt Right? Is broadcast at 1.45pm on Mondays, and episodes are also available afterwards via BBC Sounds.
With thanks to the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of Oxford who first published this news story.
In Judges and the Language of Law – Why Governments Across the World Have Increasingly Lost in Court (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022). Matthew analyses the evolution of the language of politics across the 20th and early 21st centuries, and the effects of that evolution on litigation strategies and public administration. By focussing on power across seven decades, and on five jurisdictions in particular – Canada, France, Germany, the UK and the US – his research finds that judges behaved with political consequence not necessarily when they wanted to, but when they had the means, opportunity, and institutional incentives to.
As Petra Schleiter, Professor of Comparative Politics at the University of Oxford, says in her review of the book, “This elegantly written monograph argues persuasively that a central cause for the decades-long expansion of judicial power lies not so much in the ambition of judges as in changes of the law itself: As the specificity of laws has declined, so the power of the courts has expanded.”
Matthew says, “I’ve been interested in the power of judges for some time now. It struck me that politicians the world over were increasingly whingeing about losing court battles, and I wanted to understand if that was true, and if so why it was happening. The more I looked into it, the more it became clear that it is not that judges are snatching power for themselves, but they are having power thrust into their hands.”
Dr Matthew Williams. Tutor in Politics and Access Fellow at Jesus College
“Put plainly, the language of legislation has changed. Laws have been, to an increasing extent, linguistically underdetermined. This indeterminate language of law represents the social ambivalence and loose policy bargains that preceded it. And, in turn, the indeterminacy of language enables post-promulgation discretion for policy implementation. This is a meso-level theory, where language connects macro-level social changes to individual court rulings at a micro-level. It is not simply that governments increasingly break laws, it is that the precise substance and correct procedural implementation of laws is less easily identifiable.”
Professor Sir Nigel Shadbolt FRS, FREng, Principal of Jesus College, says “We live in an age of data and data analytics. Analysing huge swathes of legislative text across time and jurisdictions, Matthew Williams has revealed a series of fascinating changes in language use. He clearly demonstrates that indeterminacy in the language of legislation affords considerable scope for judges and those exercising judicial determinations to exercise wide powers of interpretation. This clearly written book with its compelling narrative is an important contribution to our understanding of law and policy in the 21st century.”
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