Learning the lessons: what other referendums can teach us about the EU vote

While we’re nowhere near Switzerland or California in constantly using referendums, the UK is becoming accustomed to big constitutional votes. Katie Ghose discusses what the AV and Scottish referendums tell us about the likely shape of the EU debate

We need a root and branch review of referendums in the UK

Assessing the role of referendums is a challenge because they are on the fault-line of representative and other forms of democracy. Katie Ghose argues that more clarity is needed on who triggers them, and proposes three essential reforms for future referendum campaigns

‘Citizens’ assemblies’ show that we can do politics differently in the UK

Over the past twelve months the Democracy Matters research team, consisting of academics and campaigners, has been conducting a project on the use of citizens’ assemblies to explore complex elements of constitutional policymaking in the United Kingdom. Here, one of those campaigners, Katie Ghose, discusses the findings of the project and to act upon them

We need a root and branch review of referendums in the UK

Assessing the role of referendums is a challenge because they are on the fault-line of representative and other forms of democracy. Katie Ghose argues that more clarity is needed on who triggers them, and proposes three essential reforms for future referendum campaigns

Electoral Reform Society: other referendums can teach us a lot about the EU vote

While we’re nowhere near Switzerland or California in constantly using referendums, the UK is becoming accustomed to big constitutional votes, writes Katie Ghose from the Electoral Reform Society. The Society will be releasing new polling on the EU referendum next week – the first of a monthly polling series on the public’s engagement with and perception of the referendum

‘Super Thursday’ showed us that British politics has changed for good

Last Thursday’s elections highlighted the persistence of multi-party politics, the growing distinctiveness of the devolved nations and the diversity of electoral systems. Katie Ghose argues these longer term trends deserve greater attention given the implications they have for the future shape of the UK

We’re taking back control – but who’s going to wield it?

Britain voted to ‘take back control’ from the EU, and Theresa May’s Lancaster House speech made the repatriation of power to Westminster a priority. But it is far from clear what kind of Brexit Britons want, nor how many of these powers will go to Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland rather than the UK Parliament. Katie Ghose argues that with direct democracy on the rise, citizens’ assemblies would help people grasp the trade-offs at stake and have a voice in these monumental decisions

Changing Politics: Towards a New Democracy

In October 2014 the PSA joint-funded a Consultation event ‘Changing Politics – Towards a New Democracy’ with St. George’s House. The Chair of the PSA, Professor Matthew Flinders, chaired the event which brought together participants from a range of fields (including academics, think tankers and practitioners in several policy areas). Today, St. George’s House has published a report which highlights the main themes emerging from the discussion as well as some conclusions and recommendations. It identifies several areas where changes are urgently needed to reinvigorate democracy. The report concludes that to fully succeed in addressing the growth of political apathy and disengagement, parties and leaders must forget their differences and join citizens, academics, charities and others to address this problem with all available energy and resources

Pedagogy and deliberative democracy: Insights from recent experiments in the United Kingdom

A growing body of research suggests the existence of a disconnection between citizens, politicians and representative politics in advanced industrial democracies. This has led to a literature on the emergence of post-democratic or post-representative politics that connects to a parallel seam of scholarship on the capacity of deliberative democratic innovations to ‘close the gap’. This latter body of work has delivered major insights in terms of democratic design in ways that traverse ‘politics as theory’ and ‘politics as practice’. And yet the main argument of this article is that this seam of scholarship has generally failed to explore the existence of numerous pedagogical relationships that exist within the very fibre of deliberative processes. As such, the core contribution of this article focuses around the explication of a ‘pedagogical pyramid’ that applies a micro-political lens to deliberative processes. This theoretical contribution is empirically assessed with reference to a recent project that sought to test different citizen assembly pilots around plans for English regional devolution. The proposition being tested is that a better understanding of relational pedagogy within innovations is vital, not just to increase levels of knowledge, but also to build the capacity, confidence and contribution of democratically active citizens

Finishing the euchromatic sequence of the human genome

The sequence of the human genome encodes the genetic instructions for human physiology, as well as rich information about human evolution. In 2001, the International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium reported a draft sequence of the euchromatic portion of the human genome. Since then, the international collaboration has worked to convert this draft into a genome sequence with high accuracy and nearly complete coverage. Here, we report the result of this finishing process. The current genome sequence (Build 35) contains 2.85 billion nucleotides interrupted by only 341 gaps. It covers ∼99% of the euchromatic genome and is accurate to an error rate of ∼1 event per 100,000 bases. Many of the remaining euchromatic gaps are associated with segmental duplications and will require focused work with new methods. The near-complete sequence, the first for a vertebrate, greatly improves the precision of biological analyses of the human genome including studies of gene number, birth and death. Notably, the human enome seems to encode only 20,000-25,000 protein-coding genes. The genome sequence reported here should serve as a firm foundation for biomedical research in the decades ahead