Lisa Hill

The idea of political corruption is millennia old, and in this chapter, we explore discourses around its conceptual origins in ancient Athens and Rome, the best-documented settings. Corruption has always been a contested concept, an issue complicated by the fact that scholars have typically distinguished between two conceptions: the broad ‘classical’ definition that emphasised the dangers to the polity of any behaviour that weakened political virtue (‘degenerative corruption’), and the more restricted ‘modern’ definition, which focuses on abuse of public office for private gain, for example, bribery and patronage (‘public office corruption’). We seek to show two things: first, that, contrary to the common perception, the ‘public office’ conception of corruption did exist in antiquity and, second, to throw light on the latter, now obsolete conception, which is less well-understood today.

In 2025, the World Economic Forum identified mis- and disinformation as a major global risk to society (WEF, 2025) and election denialism is one type of disinformation that poses a significant risk...

During the 2023 Voice Referendum, prominent ‘No’ campaigners, including leading politicians, falsely accused the Australian Electoral Commission (AEC) of manipulating the rules (Huitson 2023). The ...

In this chapter I examine the challenges posed to liberal democracy by the growing volume and sophistication of political disinformation. The advent of digital publishing and easy access to a digital commons has created a disinformation environment with which both liberal and democratic systems are struggling to cope. Disinformation in the digital age challenges two core commitments shared by liberals and democrats: first, the necessity of extensive speech freedoms for the proper functioning of both liberal and democratic systems; and second, the liberal-democratic preference for spontaneous, informal and self-equilibrating mechanisms to manage and regulate its ‘conversation culture’. Both are obstacles to resolving the escalating problem of ‘bad faith speech’, the deliberate propagation of false political information. Disinformation is largely tolerated as an unavoidable aspect of the informally regulated ‘conversation culture’ upon which liberal democracies depend and yet it is also a major threat to their health and existence.