In the Summer 2020/2021 issue of the Journal of Australian Political Economy, I published an article on anti-politics with Simon Copland and Luke Mansillo. We examine potential evidence for anti-politics in electoral fragmentation in Australia.
We use the approach employed by Peter Mair when examining the longterm democratic countries of the European Union, in his posthumously published Ruling the Void (2013), and consider data related to electoral participation, party loyalty, electoral volatility and party membership. In doing this, we offer a more comprehensive overview than presently exists in the scholarly literature, and assess the timing of neoliberalism in relation to shifts in citizen disengagement.
We argue political decomposition and potential deepening of anti-politics represents a significant political economic challenge in Australia, as it directly impacts the capacity of the political class to execute new projects. This dwindling faculty of political society poses particular challenges when seeking to address global existential threats to humanity such as climate change. The article is available open access.
