11 October 2023
Poland’s Sham ‘Migration’ Referendum
On June 15, 2023, Jarosław Kaczyński, leader of Poland's PiS party, announced a rare referendum, ostensibly to allow the public to weigh in on crucial elements of Polish immigration policy, alongside the general elections. Yet, in reality, the referendum had little to do with migration and the opposition parties largely ignored the referendum's questions to avoid its deployment as an electoral campaign tool. As such, whatever voters will decide on Election day, it will tell us little about the state of Polish migration politics. Continue reading >>
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30 June 2023
Politicians don’t dance? AI doesn’t either!
“Why don’t politicians ever dance? – Because they have too many steps to backtrack on!” Chat-GPT answered this when we asked the program to tell a political joke. While this example is somewhat worrying since the underlying assumption might perpetuate existing stereotypes about politics and politicians, the joke also highlights that AI has become witty and incredibly good at behaving in a way we perceive as human. Thus, we take the recent advancements of generative AI as a motivation to analyze its potential effects on political campaigns and democratic elections. Continue reading >>
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07 March 2023
Freeing Political Expression
The South Korean parliament is in the midst of an intensive debate on electoral reform. Yet, a crucial element of necessary electoral law reform is missing in these debate: Last year, the Constitutional Court declared a controversial paragraph from the Electoral Act as unconstitutional and unjustly restricting freedom of expression. Failing to revise the targeted paragraph corresponding to the Constitutional Court’s decision in the upcoming legislature periods - by the latest of July 31, 2023 - would inevitably lead to a legal vacuum. In this blog post, I shed some light on the Constitutional Court’s 2022 decision and explain why the ruling could have a major impact on how election campaigns are conducted in South Korea. Continue reading >>
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12 April 2018