This article examines the divergent trajectories of democratic innovations in Australia and contextualises the institutional constraints on efforts to revise and improve traditional mechanisms of political participation and decision-making. Adopting a broad definition of democratic innovations as interfaces between citizens and government designed to enhance citizen participation, it distinguishes between two main types: electoral (vote-centric) and deliberative (voice-centric) innovations. While Australia is often recognised as a global pioneer in electoral innovations, experimentation with deliberative democratic reform at the federal level remains rare and sporadic. This article identifies two contextual features that help explain the limited pathways for embedding deliberative innovations into national governance: first, the adversarial and non-deliberative nature of the Westminster-inspired majoritarian system of government and, second, the enduring influence of Australia’s settler-colonial status. Together, these factors sustain a political culture that tends towards non-listening. The article suggests ways to counter these factors by drawing insights and inspiration from creative community innovations emerging in Australia.

Peaceful transfers of power are a fundamental principle of democracy. Yet, in times of heightened affective polarisation, election losses may trigger strong negative emotional reactions in partisans, which in turn undermine support for fundamental democratic principles among partisans. We test this idea through two pre-registered survey experiments conducted after the 2022 and 2024 elections in the United States. We randomly assign partisans to receive either a placebo or an emotive reminder about the election that their party lost, containing others’ angry or worried reactions at the election outcome. Contrary to our pre-registered expectations, we do not find evidence that priming negative feelings about electoral loss affects support for political violence or democratic norms. Emotive reminders about salient political events can momentarily turn up the heat on politics, but are not enough to propel partisans to adopt extreme anti-democratic attitudes. By linking the study of emotions to democratic norms, this article contributes to our understanding of when negative emotions (fail to) radicalise partisans.

Neidle, Kegl, Bahan, Aarons, & MacLaughlin 1997 argues that rightward WH-movement in ASL constitutes a counterexample to claims by Kayne (1994) that all phrasal projections exhibit specifier-head-complement order and that syntactic movement is leftward. Petronio & Lillo-Martin 1997, although not adopting Kayne's antisymmetry framework, offers a critique of our analysis and a proposal involving leftward WH-movement. Here, we argue that Petronio and Lillo-Martin's interpretations of the data are incorrect and that their analysis cannot account for the facts of the language. We therefore maintain our position that ASL WH-phrases move rightward in ASL, and that universal grammar must allow the option of rightward movement.