Measuring or Creating Attitudes? Seventy Years of Australian Public Opinion Polling about Indonesia

This article critically evaluates the relationship between public opinion polling and foreign affairs. It plots key trends in public opinion polls of Australian attitudes towards Indonesia from the 1940s to the present day. Despite variations in polling companies and questions, Australian attitudes to Indonesia appear surprisingly stable, especially since the 1970s. Reading across multiple polls over this period reveals that, both as a mass and among individuals, Australians held complex views in which positive appraisals of Indonesian people and culture co-existed with an underlying fear of Indonesia as a potential military threat. Yet rather than accepting these findings at face value, this article calls for nuanced scrutiny of the role played by polling companies and the media in the construction and representation of so-called “public” opinion. Sensitive to recent developments in the historiography of public opinion polling, it suggests that public opinion polls not only attempted to measure Australian attitudes towards Indonesia, but also helped construct Indonesia as an object of popular and political concern.     

Whose Mandate? Policy Promises,Strong Bicameralism and Polled Opinion

The political theory of Australian politics has been dominated, since the election of a Liberal-National Party government in 1996, by claims and counterclaims about electoral mandates. The government has privileged its position in the House of Representatives; opposition parties have pointed to their support in the Senate. This paper provides a historical re-examination of the meanings and merits of mandate theories; it outlines the difficulties posed by strong bicameralism for any mandate theory; and it shows how the rise of survey research has strengthened some claims to a mandate, especially in bicameral systems, while weakening others.     

The 2017 election: Scotland re-enters British politics?

Scotland has long seemed politically apart from England and Wales. That trend reached its apogee with the SNP landslide in 2015. Yet now it is a country that is full of marginal seats whose outcome can potentially be decisive in the Britain-wide battle between Labour and the Conservatives. The roots of this development are traced as a product of an increasingly evenly spread SNP vote, the increased fragmentation of the unionist vote, and the impact of Brexit on the parties’ fortunes. The result is a highly unstable political map.     

British Diplomatic Attitudes towards Europe, 1801–4Ignorant and Indifferent?

Recent decades have seen a rehabilitation of the reputation of Henry Addington's and Lord Hawkesbury's foreign policy during the course of the former's government, 1801–4. Nevertheless, the existing historiography has done little to place their actions in the wider context of British foreign policy in the early nineteenth century, nor to assess them in light of the debate around the arguments of Paul W. Schroeder's systemic theories and his attacks on eighteenth-century balance-of-power politics. This article argues that Schroeder's theories need qualifying in relation to this period and shall demonstrate that Addington and Hawkesbury conducted a logical, consistent, and Euro-centric balance-of-power policy, and one rooted in rules and assumptions governing their conduct, rather than a pell-mell free-for-all diplomatic system. It furthermore raises questions as to the continuity in British foreign policy and the need for additional research in this area.     

Theological Education in Australia 1964–2020: Intellectual Authority in a Changing Socio-Political Landscape*

This paper examines the intellectual authority of theological education in modern Australia by tracing its provision from one set of arrangements (the first settlement) inherited from the nineteenth century to another (the second settlement) in the half century from the mid-1960s to ca. 2020. The paper investigates what happened when the exclusion of Theology from the public higher education system was reversed by the Martin Report of 1964, with particular reference to the legitimacy and authority of Theology as public knowledge. A survey of the landmark developments in this transformation, the paper is divided into two parts. Relations of the theological education sector with the structures of the regulatory environment of higher education are examined in the first. Developments within the sector itself are considered in the second. It is argued that the confluence of these two streams has transformed the nature and public standing of Australian theological education. Paradoxically this dramatic improvement coincided with decline in the social salience of Christianity itself, a development which posed afresh the question of the legitimacy of theological knowledge in a way that raises the perennial issue of the relation between Christianity and culture.     

Changing addresses: social conflict,civic culture,and the politics of house numbering reform in Milwaukee, 1913–1931

House numbering systems are way-finding systems with cultural significance not only by virtue of their quantification of space but because large centralized systems define a center and axes which have symbolic potential. The article briefly traces house numbering systems in American cities, then analyzes the evolution of Milwaukee's system, beginning with rudimentary numbering of a few business and upper-middle class streets, moving to a number of systems, one for each side of town, after prodding by the Post Office, and then to their unification, 1913–1931. It shows how the interests of large citywide businesses and government promoted reform efforts, while the public was largely uninterested and localistic. Reformers concerned about class and ethnic cleavages favored a unified, centralized numbering scheme symbolically centered on downtown business and a new civic center, conferring enhanced legitimacy on business and law; but this was politically unpopular because it required renaming streets on which a majority of voters lived. But the public acquiesced to the idea of reform, and an alternative unified scheme was adopted in the end. This article provides a detailed analysis of the practical interests underlying house numbering and explores the surprising symbolic potential of house numbers.     

Whose aid? Whose influence? China,emerging donors and the silent revolution in development assistance

Rising economies including China, the United Arab Emirates, Brazil, Korea, India, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia are subtly changing the rules of foreign aid with profound consequences for the role of multilateral institutions and conditionality. Fears abound that this new aid is bolstering rogue states, fuelling corruption, and increasing the debt burdens of poor countries. This article critically assesses these arguments before dissecting the attractions of emerging donors' aid against a background of established donors' failure to deliver on promises to increase aid, reduce conditionality, better coordinate and align aid efforts, and reform the aid architecture. It argues that a silent revolution is taking place whereby the emerging donors are not overtly attempting to overturn the rules of multilateral development assistance, nor to replace them. Rather, by quietly offering alternatives to aid‐receiving countries, they are weakening the bargaining position of western donors. The resulting tensions underscore the urgency of reforming the multilateral aid system.     

Cull or vaccinate?: Badger politics in Wales

In this sequel to an article on the badger‐cull published in the April issue of 2010, the author provides an update on what is happening to the culls announced for North Pembrokeshire and for England.     

Towards a chequebook democracy? Business,parties and the funding of politics in Italy and the United States

This article seeks to establish to what extent Silvio Berlusconi's entry into electoral politics as leader of Forza Italia signals an ‘Americanization’ of Italian politics. It argues that Italian party democracy is moving in an ‘American’ direction in two ways. First, Italian party organizations are declining, leading to a more candidate-centred type of electoral politics. Second, the decline of parties is enhancing the ability of business to use its financial clout to tailor public policy to its own requirements. However, these trends do not have identical effects in Italy and the United States. This article will also show that this process of ‘Americanization’ interacts with the existing political praxis and institutional framework of Italian politics to produce an outcome which differs from both the traditional Western European model and the American model of party democracy. It will be concluded that this outcome seriously undermines representative democracy in Italy.     

Hospital contributory schemes and the NHS debates 1937-46: the rejection of social insurance in the British welfare state?

This article considers the discussion and rejection of social insurance model of funding for the British National Health Service. Specifically it asks why the hospital contributory scheme movement had so little impact on policy debates in the 1940s. We argue that at the start of the policy-making process serious consideration was given to the incorporation of this mode of funding, not least because the contributory schemes, with some ten million members, played a major role in financing existing voluntary hospital provision. Early sections describe the growth and nature of the schemes, noting that, despite their large working-class constituency and the presence of labour movement representatives amongst their leadership, they remained peripheral to discussion of reform in the interwar period. We then trace the emergence of the proposal for an insurance-based 'hotel-charge' in civil servants' discussions about hospital funding the Beveridge Report. Officials, however, remained sceptical about the contributory schemes' capacity to deliver a comprehensive and efficient funding mechanism, given their lack of uniformity, the gaps in their coverage, and the limited progress of reciprocal arrangements between them. Finally, we note the ineffectiveness of the British Hospital Contributory Schemes Association as a player in the policy community. Its leadership had no clear strategy for influencing events and was reluctant to deploy pressure group tactics such as lobbying through the press or parliament. Crucially, the movement was divided internally between those members who supported the voluntary system and others who welcomed a publicly funded health service.     

Whose Minerals,Whose Development? Rhetoric and Reality in Post‐Conflict Sierra Leone

Despite boosts in mineral exports, popular post‐conflict minerals‐for‐development reforms in Sierra Leone have failed to significantly reduce poverty. This article uses power as an analytical lens to explore the reasons for this failure, with empirical material from the diamond sector's mining cooperatives scheme (2005), the Diamond Areas Community Development Fund (DACDF), and Kono District. The study shows that there was no significant improvement along four dimensions: material deprivation, education and health, vulnerability, and powerlessness. The authors argue that understanding the impact of these reforms requires a nuanced multi‐scalar examination of power relations, actors, and the social, political, economic and historical context within which mining is embedded. Their findings point to: 1) limits to mineral‐led poverty reduction and the need for realistic expectations and diversification of livelihood opportunities; and 2) the need for interventions that balance power asymmetries and the way that power is exercised among diverse actors, wherein decentralization offers early hope.     

The politics of the Shanghai courts: the state,local elites,and social networks in Nationalist China, 1927–1937

This article explores the ways in which the Nationalist Party established dominance over the Shanghai courts in the foreign concession area to use them as weapons against political dissidents, and it analyzes the intricate relations among the Nationalist Party, local elites, and the Shanghai courts during the Nanjing decade (1927–1937). Building on recent studies that pay attention to the limited success of the Nationalist Party’s policy of putting the judiciary under Party control, this study demonstrates that the process of establishing the Nationalist Party’s dominance over the Shanghai courts was highly contested. The interplay between the Nationalist Party’s effort to gain control over the Shanghai courts by building formal and informal institutions and the local elites’ appropriation of their own social networks rendered the Shanghai courts vulnerable not only to the Party’s intervention, but also to the influence of social forces. I argue that due to the weak authority of the Shanghai courts, the Nationalist Party’s use of law against political foes could be a double-edged sword.     

Modernization, welfare and 'third way' politics: limits to theorizing in 'thirds'?

The current period of welfare reform in British politics is taking place within a discourse of modernization described in terms of a 'third way'. The ideas which constitute this discourse resonate with recent developments within human geography, namely a movement to theorizing 'in-between' spaces, a turn to culture and to issues of globalization. This paper suggests that welfare reform is a restructuring project which allows the nature of thinking and acting 'in thirds' to be questioned. It problematizes the 'third way' approach to cultural modernization and economic globalization as a de-politicized discourse, and argues for the cultural politics and political economics which underpin welfare reform to be foregrounded. As a form of political discourse analysis, it points to the developing need for a welfare geography that is attuned to the languages and practices through which dominant systems of social and economic distribution are constituted.