Michael de Percy

Michael de Percy (born 1970) is an Australian academic and political scientist who is a senior lecturer in political science in the Canberra School of Politics, Economics and Society at the University of Canberra in Australia. According to Toby James, de Percy co-developed theoretical tools which show how technological and institutional legacies limited the policy options available to deploy new communications technologies in Australia and Canada. He was among the people who supported change in the Australian Broadcasting Legislation amendment in 2017. In 2022 de Percy was appointed to the Australian Research Council's College of Experts. He is a graduate of the Royal Military College, Duntroon and served as an army officer before becoming an academic.

Research
De Percy's PhD thesis, supervised by John Wanna, developed a model of path-dependent, punctuated equilibrium to facilitate process tracing in a comparison of communications technology policy outcomes in Canada and Australia. He further expanded the research with his article in Policy Studies to also identify policy regimes.

Publications
De Percy has co-edited scholarly works on transportation policy, public administration, and the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on foreign aid and international relations. His other works include telecommunications policy in Australia and Canada, transport policy,  models of government-business relations, populism, institutional exhaustion and political leadership.

Industry Engagement
De Percy serves with industry bodies in the transport, telecommunications, and energy sectors. He is the Chairman of the ACT and Southern NSW Chapter of CILTA, and the Vice President of the Telecommunications Association (TelSoc). He is a member of the Australian Nuclear Association. De Percy collaborated with the Australian Civil-Military Centre on a project on Syrian refugee women in Jordan and Lebanon, where he co-authored three commissioned occasional papers.

Teaching
De Percy teaches political science subjects, and has edited and written several books and scholarly articles on the topic. He also teaches leadership in the University of Canberra's MBA program. He maintains a blog on his research and political commentary, Le Flaneur Politique.

Political Commentary
De Percy is a conservative political commentator and his articles appear weekly in The Spectator Australia and he provoides political commentary each fortnight on Spectator Australia TV.

Fellowships and appointments
De Percy is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, a Chartered Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Logistics and Transport, and a Member of the Royal Society of New South Wales. He is the Public Policy Editor of the Journal of Telecommunications and the Digital Economy. In 2022, he was appointed to the Australian Research Council's College of Experts.