The Electoral Politics of Economic Reform in Australia: The 1998 Election

Like many other advanced industrial democracies, Australia has experienced major and ongoing economic reform over the last two decades, the pace of which has, if anything, increased since the election of the Liberal‐National government in 1996. These developments have led to a growing sense of economic insecurity among many voters. Many of these concerns were focused on the 1998 election, when the Liberal‐National Coalition advocated the introduction of a goods and services tax. This paper uses the 1998 Australian Election Study (AES) survey to examine the impact of economic evaluations, economic insecurity and economic issues on voting in the election. The results demonstrate the existence of widespread economic concerns across the electorate, but that the Coalition gained a marginal electoral advantage on the tax reform issue. Economic issues were also a cause of defection to the new One Nation Party, although further analysis reveals that its support was motivated more by race and ethnic concerns than by economic discontent.     

The Queensland Election of 21 March, 2009: Labor's Swim Against the Tide

This article explores the events before and during the 2009 Queensland election which saw the Bligh Labor Government returned far more easily than commentators and opinion polls had indicated. This election remains especially noteworthy for its groundbreaking firsts, including the first election of a woman state premier, and the first election for Queensland's single, merged Liberal-National Party. The article concludes that Anna Bligh's then-popular leadership, Opposition leader Lawrence Springborg's alleged poor grasp of economic realities, and fears of job losses during the global financial crisis were the prime motivators of swinging electors' vote choice.     

Change and Continuity in Irish Politics: The General Election of 2007

Bertie Ahern, the incumbent Taoiseach or Prime Minister of Ireland, was elected to a third term in the general election of 24 May 2007. While Ahern's party, Fianna Fáil, was able to retain its governing coalition, the level of support of some of the other parties changed dramatically. Fine Gael, the principal opposition party, saw its number of seats in the parliament, Dáil Éireann, increase by nineteen. Some of the minor parties did less well than expected or compared to previous elections. Only the Greens maintained their six representatives. As a result, they were rewarded with a share in the new government. This election suggests that, while Irish society is changing rapidly, the political system is changing more slowly and subtly. This article examines the election results in terms of the fate of the political parties and focuses on one constituency, Tipperary South, to illustrate trends in Irish electoral politics.     

Race,Class and Politics in Peninsular Malaysia: The General Election of 2008

Racial politics have bedevilled peninsular Malaysia since independence in 1957, largely sustained by a ruling coalition of partners sharing power unequally, in a consociational government. The effect of a racialised practice over fifty years is the institutionalisation of the politics of ethnic pluralism, each component driven by its own internal dynamic and cultural logic: for the Chinese it is the politics of economic security, for the Tamils the politics of religion and caste, and for the Malays incipient class antagonisms that are historically rooted in a feudal society. In the general election of 2008, there was an unprecedented swing of votes across the ethnic divide against the ruling government, resulting in the loss of five state governments to an opposition coalition espousing multiculturalism and the loss of the government's two-thirds majority in Parliament for the first time. However, we argue that these developments do not signal the beginning of the end of racial politics in peninsular Malaysia. Instead, the opposition has skilfully recoded multiculturalism as social justice and accountability in racial terms, and effectively communicated this to an essentially racialised electorate at a time when Malays, Chinese and Tamils had lost faith in the ruling government's ability to address deep-seated grievances specific to each of these communities.     

Intensities of Feeling: Towards a Spatial Politics of Affect

Abstract This paper attempts to take the politics of affect as not just incidental but central to the life of cities, given that cities are thought of as inhuman or transhuman entities and that politics is understood as a process of community without unity. It is in three main parts. The first part sets out the main approaches to affect that conform with this approach. The second part considers the ways in which the systematic engineering of affect has become central to the political life of Euro‐American cities, and why. The third part then sets out the different kinds of progressive politics that might become possible once affect is taken into account. There are some brief conclusions.     

Election Campaigns and Television News Coverage: The Case of the 2001 Australian Election

This paper examines the patterns of television news coverage of the political parties, their leaders and the issues they raised during the 2001 Australian federal election campaign. By focusing on some issues, parties and leaders, television has long been argued to constrain voters' evaluations. We find that television news coverage in the 2001 Australian election campaign focused primarily on international issues, especially terrorism and asylum seekers, and on the two major parties—virtually to the exclusion of coverage of the minor parties and their leaders. Within the major party ‘two-horse race’, television gave substantially more coverage to the leaders than to the parties themselves, thereby sustaining what some have called a ‘presidential’-style political contest. John Howard emerged as the winner in the leaders' stakes, garnering more coverage than Labor's Kim Beazley.     

The Queensland Difference

Allan Patience (ed.), The Bjelke‐Petersen Premiership 1968–1983: Issues in Public Policy, Melbourne, Longman Cheshire, 1985, pp. 286, $18.95 (paper)     

On the Spatial Dynamics of Democratic Politics: Analysing the Bolivian Case

After an initial discussion of the ‘diverse spaces of democracy’, which sets out the main points of the author's approach to democratic politics, this article considers three perspectives on the relations between governmental decentralization and territorial democracy in Latin America. These two interrelated sections provide a thematic and conceptual background to a more specific treatment of the development and dynamics of decentralization in the Bolivian case. In examining the decentralization process in Bolivia, the article highlights the two spatial modes of this process — the regional and the local — and includes an appraisal of the relation between both modes and the nature of democratic politics.     

Pinochet: The Politics

Against the background of the Pinochet affair, the author considers that a new era of international politics is in the process of being created. The House of Lords' ruling which has allowed extradition procedures against the former Chilean dictator, is understood as a formidable and groundbreaking decision in international law based on the defence of human rights against crimes committed by authoritarian and unlawful rulers. The decision taken under the European Convention on extradition and the setting up of a Permanent International Criminal Court in the summer of 1998 are, according to the author, signs that international law and international politics are moving in the direction of a universal acceptance that violators of human rights must bepunished.
However, the author is also cautious about the tension between the new path opened to international politics and the old power politics based on the absolute and indivisible sovereignty of the state. Double standards will certainly prevail and powerful states, in particular the United States, are reluctant to accept that international law and international politics are in the process of change.     

Tibetan Range Wars: Spatial Politics and Authority on the Grasslands of Amdo

This article focuses on one of the most disturbing features of life on the Tibetan grasslands today: intractable, violent conflicts over pasture. The author argues that understanding spatial and historical dimensions of the process through which Amdo was incorporated into the People's Republic of China (PRC) helps us make sense of these conflicts. State territoriality attempts to replace older socio–territorial identities with new administrative units. However, histories remain inscribed in the landscape and lead to unintended consequences in the implementation of new grassland policies. The author draws on Raymond Williams’ insight into residual formations to theorize the relationship between range conflicts and secular state officials’ lack of authority. At the same time, dispute resolution by religious figures challenges both triumphalist readings of state domination and romantic notions of Tibetan resistance.     

The Symbolic Politics of Belonging and Community in Peri‐urban Environmental Disputes: the Traveston Crossing Dam in Queensland,Australia

This paper examines a recent dispute generated by the Queensland State Government proposal to build the Traveston Crossing Dam on the Mary River in southeast Queensland, Australia. It is particularly concerned with the ways in which interrelated issues of belonging, community identity, and social diversity were negotiated during the anti‐dam campaign. As an unusual alliance of farmers, environmentalists, urban retirees, some Aboriginal people and others, it takes a view of the anti‐Traveston Crossing Dam campaign as a fluid network of people and approaches the notion of community identity as the symbolic construction of similarity. Locally specific, the paper describes pertinent aspects of community politics in the context of rural socioeconomic change, and the mobilisation of heritage. With regard to local senses of belonging, it also discusses the involvement of Aboriginal people during the campaign. More broadly then, this paper attempts to make an ethnographic contribution to the study of environmental disputes and the politics of alliance in peri‐urban areas of settler‐descendant societies such as Australia.