Clark Center Research

New Zealand Supreme Court Database

The New Zealand Supreme Court Database is building the first comprehensive dataset of the Supreme Court of New Zealand’s (NZSC) decisions since the Court opened in 2004, alongside a companion dataset of how the press has covered those decisions. The data let us answer questions that scholars of other apex courts have long been able to ask: what kinds of cases the NZSC hears, who wins and who loses, how often and along what lines the justices divide, how the Court’s agenda has shifted over two decades, and which decisions make the news and why. The project is part of a larger effort to bring New Zealand into the comparative study of courts, joining resources like the Supreme Court Database in the United States and the High Court of Australia Database. NZSC decisions are also coded to be compatible with the Comparative Agendas Project.

Findings have been presented at the International Political Science Association World Congress (Seoul, 2025) and the Comparative Agendas Project conference (Paris, 2026), with a further paper coming at the IPSA Research Committee on Comparative Judicial Studies workshop in Mexico City in October 2026.

Rhonda L. Evans, Director of the Edward A. Clark Center, leads the project along with Christine Bird (UT Austin Ph.D., now Assistant Professor of Political Science at Oklahoma State University) and Sierra Rowe (UT Austin B.A. and LBJ School M.P.Aff., now a Research Associate at the Prenatal-to-3 Policy Impact Center at Vanderbilt University), both of whom began work on the project as graduate students at UT and remain collaborators.

The full dataset and codebooks will be released free to the public at nzscdatabase.org in spring 2027. After that, you can follow the project’s progress on Bluesky at nzscdatabase.bsky.social.

Aussie Cafés Abroad

Australian café culture has gone global. Cafés built on the Australian model, with flat whites, all-day brunch, and a distinctive style of hospitality, now operate in cities from New York to Budapest to Seoul. Aussie Cafés Abroad, a research project led by Clark Center Director Rhonda Evans, is mapping their global diffusion and asking three related questions. What makes a café Australian when it is located a world away from Australia? How did these cafés get there? And how do the people who create them choose to present Australia to the world?

The project is building a database of Australian cafés operating outside Australia. Hundreds of cafés have been found across dozens of countries. The project also relies on interviews with the founders of these cafés to discover what led them to open their café, what they incorporated from Australian café culture, what they changed to suit the locale, and what they think their café says about Australia. The database and interviews make it possible to trace how Australian café culture travels. The project considers these cafés as a source of soft power for Australia.

The project was the subject of a SXSW 2026 panel, “Flat Whites & Big Ideas: Australian Cafe Culture in the US,” held at Australia House @ SXSW on 16 March 2026. Dr. Evans moderated the conversation with Andy Stone of Bluestone Lane, Alicia Ritson of Two Hands, and Lindsay Goodrich of Proud Mary.

The project website is aussiecafesabroad.com, where you can subscribe to a fortnightly newsletter. You can also follow the project on Instagram, YouTube, and Facebook. Know an Australian café outside Australia, or the person behind one? Nominate it at aussiecafesabroad@gmail.com. Every lead gets checked.