Party Politics vs. Grievance Politics: Competing Modes of Representative Democracy.

As a vast literature on political disaffection, populism, "pitchfork politics," and the emergence of an "age of anger" testifies, the nature of democratic politics and the socio-political context in which it operates appear to have shifted sharply during the last decade. This is reflected in the rise of challenger parties, the election of unorthodox politicians, and widespread concern regarding the "crisis," "death," or "end" of democracy. Existing analyses have, however, understandably adopted a conventional model of party-based representative politics as their main interpretive lens or reference point to make sense of these changes.

Rising to Ostrom's challenge: an invitation to walk on the bright side of public governance and public service.

In this programmatic essay, we argue that public governance scholarship would benefit from developing a self-conscious and cohesive strand of "positive" scholarship, akin to social science subfields like positive psychology, positive organizational studies, and positive evaluation. We call for a program of research devoted to uncovering the factors and mechanisms that enable high performing public policies and public service delivery mechanisms; procedurally and distributively fair processes of tackling societal conflicts; and robust and resilient ways of coping with threats and risks. The core question driving positive public administration scholarship should be: Why is it that particular public policies, programs, organizations, networks, or partnerships manage do much better than others to produce widely valued societal outcomes, and how might knowledge of this be used to advance institutional learning from positives?

The privilege of public service and the dangers of populist technocracy: a response to Michael Gove and Dominic Cumming's 2020 Ditchley annual lecture.

On 27 June 2020, the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster and Minister for the Cabinet Office, Michael Gove, gave the Ditchley Annual Lecture on the theme of 'the privilege of public service'. Although the fact that it took place in the context of the broader Coronavirus crisis meant that it received relatively little publicity or attention, the central argument of this article is that the lecture provides great insight into the ideas shaping government policy, in general, and into the inner mind of Dominic Cummings, in particular. As such, we argue that although the lecture was given by Michael Gove, it was clearly floating ideas and themes that were taken, almost directly, from Dominic Cummings' website.