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.

Introduction

A robust constitutional framework is one of the preconditions of a healthy democracy, setting out the essential rules, principles and expectations that regulate and animate the political system. However, not all the rules that matter are set out in a codified, written constitution. Some of these rules are unwritten and take the form of constitutional conventions (or political norms). These conventions give form, meaning and substance to the written constitution. They play a crucial role in regulating democratic processes and elite behaviour, managing disagreements and in remedying constitutional and political stalemates (Azari and Smith 2012; Helmke and Levitsky 2004; Levitsky and Ziblatt 2018; Lieberman et al. 2019). Conceiving of a constitution without the conventions that complement it provides an incomplete picture of the framework of rules undergirding democracy in Australia or, for that matter, any democratic country.

Constitutional conventions are created, interpreted and enforced by public officials. While this arrangement is efficient and practical, and has desirable normative properties, it is not without limitations. This chapter seeks to identify the factors that may be weakening elite adherence to constitutional norms in Australia. It then examines how to address this problem, arguing that citizens have a key role to play as guardians of these norms. We argue that the important work that conventions perform in regulating public officials can be better reflected in, and supported by, the Australian citizenry. However, this requires a reinterpretation of the role of citizens and efforts to boost their capacity to play a greater role in providing critical oversight of those who violate conventions without cause.

More specifically, this chapter makes the case for the ‘democratisation of constitutional conventions’, defined for our purposes as the diffusion of awareness and knowledge about conventions beyond the political class whose actions these conventions regulate. We argue that contemporary changes in the media landscape, governmental practices and emergent political polarisation make it necessary to extend the custodianship of norms beyond government officials to be more inclusive of citizens. Doing so will increase the political and electoral costs of norm transgression without weakening the inherent flexibility of these essential constitutional devices.

Constitutional conventions are properties of constitutional systems that regulate often important areas of activity. Constitutional conventions typically lack legal force, but they are rarely openly abrogated in established democracies, especially Westminster systems. Yet while constitutional actors are generally loath to reject long-held convention rules entirely, they are inclined to resist them. This chapter examines how actors justify resisting and even departing from a convention rule and how this affects the consequent development of that convention. It does so through an analysis of claims presented by opposition peers challenging the UK's Salisbury-Addison convention in the period between 1945 and 2021. We find that actors rarely challenge the legitimacy of the convention but might make claims to an exemption that enables them to resist some aspect of the convention. Exemption claims are, however, generally consistent with the convention's value parameters and make possible the gradual evolution of the convention without threatening its legitimacy.

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.

This chapter proposes constitutional conventions as a valuable conceptual lens for understanding modern constitutions and political systems. It provides a new theoretical engagement with the question of the nature of conventions; examines their provenance, development and application; investigates their efficacy in shaping, guiding and restraining the contours of politics; and, finally, shows their potential to reveal new insights into contemporary comparative constitutionalism.

Western Australia (WA) is huge, rich, sparsely populated – and different. Occupying one-third of Australia’s landmass, but with just 10 per cent of its population, and geographically distant from the eastern seaboard, the state has always had a distinctive identity, partly due to the prominence of primary industries. Although much of WA’s area is desert, there are massive mineral resources, notably iron ore, petroleum and natural gas, but also including gold, diamonds, nickel and rare metals like lithium. Agriculture is important too, especially wheat and premium wines. With around 10 per cent of the national population, WA is responsible for over half of Australia’s goods exports…