Hilary Pearse

Lecturer

BA Hons VUW, MA Melbourne

Profile

Hilary Pearse returned from Canada in July to join the Programme as a Lecturer in Comparative Politics. She is currently teaching the Programme’s new first year course, ‘Introduction to Comparative Politics’, and POLS 382 Special Topic ‘Political Representation’.

Research Interests

Hilary’s two primary fields of expertise are political parties and deliberative democracy. Her doctoral dissertation at the University of British Columbia examines party adaptation to coalition and/or minority government in parliamentary systems where single party majority government has been the norm. Hilary has a particular interest in the Westminster-derived parliamentary systems of Canada, Ireland, New Zealand and Australia.

Hilary recently co-edited the volume Designing Deliberative Democracy with Mark E. Warren, which studies the Citizens’ Assembly on Electoral Reform in the Canadian province of British Columbia: a body of 160 near-randomly selected citizens charged with assessing and redesigning the province’s electoral system. The Assembly represents the first time a citizen body has been empowered to reform fundamental political institutions, and has since been replicated elsewhere in Canada and in the Netherlands.

Recent Publications

Warren, Mark E. and Hilary Pearse (eds). 2008. Designing Deliberative Democracy: The British Columbia Citizens’ Assembly. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Pearse, Hilary. 2008. “Institutional design and citizen deliberation.” In Designing Deliberative Democracy: The British Columbia Citizens’ Assembly. Edited by Mark E. Warren and Hilary Pearse. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 70-84.

Warren, Mark E. and Hilary Pearse. 2008. “Introduction.” In Designing Deliberative Democracy: The British Columbia Citizens’ Assembly. Edited by Mark E. Warren and Hilary Pearse. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1-19.

Pearse, Hilary. 2005. “Geographic Representation and Electoral Reform.” Canadian Parliamentary Review 28/3: 26-32.

Boston, Jonathan, Stephen Church and Hilary Pearse. 2004. “Explaining the Demise of the National-New Zealand First Coalition.” Australian Journal of Political Science 39/3: 585-603.

Current Teaching

POLS 114: Introduction to Comparative Politics

INTP/POLS 212 Special Topic: Comparing Democracies