Course overview
To help students understand how Australian democracy works, its strengths and weaknesses. It provides a brief history of Australian electoral experiments and then explores in depth its most important features as well as controversies around them. Topics to be covered include: voting and its democratic purposes; whether voting is a right or a duty (or both); compulsory voting; the problem of electoral disinformation and its regulation; securing electoral representation for indigenous Australians, incarcerated citizens and the unhoused; competence tests for voting eligibility; and the ethics of lowering the voting age in Australia.
Course learning outcomes
- Understand the history of Australian suffrage rights and electoral innovation
- Think critically about the role of voting in authentic democracies
- See how voting affects government responsiveness and performance
- Appreciate the implication of electoral exclusion
- Understand how liberal democracies are supposed to operate
- Understand the theoretical and legal justifications for Australia’s electoral arrangements
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