Narelle Miragliotta

This open access book analyses the relationship between language proficiency and political participation from abroad among Italians living in Australia, focusing specifically on second- and third-generation Italians. It evaluates how confident second- and third-generation Italians in Australia are in understanding and participating in Italian political debates from abroad. The book also assesses how effective Italy’s language policies are in providing Italians in Australia with the language skills necessary to understand and participate in those debates and be informed voters. Furthermore, it advances more general policy proposals to improve language proficiency and political participation among transnational communities abroad. By providing a solid empirical analysis based on mixed methods combining survey data and semi-structured in-depth interviews, informed by a rigorous theoretical framework, this book is a great resource for students and academics working on migration studies,transnational politics, and linguistic justice as well as for policymakers and other key stakeholders concerned with the promotion of homeland languages among citizens living abroad.

This book analyses constitutional conventions as a powerful but largely neglected framework for studying the law and politics of constitutions.

Constitutional conventions are the unwritten rules that inform and circumscribe the political behaviour of individuals, organisations, and a political system. They are as important as the formal legal rules that define written constitutions and shape modern states; yet, unlike formal written rules, conventions have received only limited scholarly attention. This book considers conventions as a lens to theorise and to analyse the institutional dynamics of contemporary constitutions. Interrogating constitutional conventions in a wide variety of contexts – including in Westminster parliamentary systems, in presidential systems, and in non-democratic regimes – the book offers new perspectives for understanding diverse aspects of constitutional politics such as the capacity of conventions to constrain populists, how conventions influence constitutional transformation, how they reflect and reshape core democratic values such as citizenship and constitutional identity, and what they reveal about the character of authoritarian regimes. The book thus demonstrates how the dynamics of conventions shape the very character of constitutions.

The book will be of interest to legal theorists, constitutional lawyers, and political scientists.