The Logic of Spatial Politics: The 1998 Queensland Election

This paper combines one of the few facts we know about the 1998 Queensland state election, ie the break-up of seats before and after the poll, with some straightforward assumptions about political behaviour to develop a spatial model of the election. In doing so, we reach interesting conclusions about the nature of the political contest in Queensland and highlight the existence of somewhat surprising similarities and differences between the policies of the main parties. Just as in mathematics when we can imagine a line and then imagine it projected out further, even to infinity, through the exercise of rational thought, so in politics we can consider actions and calculate consequences. Remark ascribed to John Wallis, Professor of Geometry at Oxford University in the seventeenth century. (Pears 1997, 435)     

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 Poverty Trap: Or,Why Poverty is Not About the Individual

Poverty is often thought of as an inevitable social condition, and the blame for any shortcomings in governmental welfare policies is frequently placed upon the failings of individuals, markets, and demography. By exploring the influence of neoliberal politics on archaeologies of slum-life this article makes the case that less emphasis should be placed upon the perceived failings of individuals and more effort should be placed on recovering the complex social networks which sustained community-life within Hungate and other so-called urban slums.     

The Representative of the State: Why the English Parliament Was Distinctive in the Early 17th Century

This article identifies the forms of state development in 16th- and 17th-century England, and shows that they were embraced by parliament rather than the crown, reflecting the change whereby MPs ceased to be mere local representatives and came to be seen as the central representative of the kingdom, traditionally the function of the monarch. Thus parliament assumed a defining role in the new national dimension of foreign policy, working in concert with the Elizabethan government, but generally in opposition to the early Stuarts, who perpetuated a dynastic approach. The most challenging domestic manifestation of parliament as central representative was the long-term campaign for freedom of trade, pursued by a broad coalition of the merchant community and the gentry in parliament, asserting a principled right of English subjects to be free of arbitrary exactions and restraints, such as the royal prerogative of impositions. The emergent state was structured by a distinctive internal dynamic, based on the sole sovereignty of representative law, established by the expulsion of the universal church. Omni-competent statute had a unique dual force, responding directly to constituency requirements, and meeting them with definitive national provisions. This was adopted by parliament as the new instrument of good government, but distrusted and sidelined by the Stuart crown. Consequently, in 1641, John Pym bemoaned the absence of parliaments as bereaving the country of the legislative function, which he now saw as ‘that which makes and constitutes a kingdom’. The appropriation of state perspectives reinforced parliamentarian strength and ambitions.     

Why the History of Parliament Has Not Been Written*

There have been legions of individual studies of the history of the English/British/United Kingdom parliament, which is not surprising, since its history is widely acknowledged to be so closely bound up with the history of the nation state itself. But there have been remarkably few attempts to put the story together, to try to consider the long‐term development of parliament as an institution. What would such a story look like? This essay discusses some of the critiques of the whiggish narrative of constitutional and parliamentary development to recognise a common theme in whiggism's tendency to anthropomorphise parliament, to describe it as a single organism with agency and purpose. To forgo that temptation, however, makes it difficult to provide a satisfying narrative of parliament over time. The essay tries to imagine how one might construct a history of parliament as an institution which no longer sees it as an actor in its own story, but, instead, a complex collection of ideas, processes, customs, and conventions, which competing forces struggle to organise in order to achieve their goals, and which is also an arena and forum for that competition.     

Turning the Tide? Why Development Will Not Stop Migration

Restrictive immigration policies and the militarization of external border controls by the US and the EU have failed to significantly curb immigration from Latin America and Africa. Rather, they have led to greater reliance on increasingly risky and costly irregular migration and have paradoxically encouraged permanent settlement. A commonly presented ‘smart solution’ to curb immigration is to address the perceived root causes of migration through increasing aid or liberalizing trade with origin countries. Recently, policies to stimulate remittances and to promote temporary and circular migration have also been advocated as enhancing home country development, so that these forms of migration become a medicine against illegal and permanent migration. However, besides the limited scope and credibility of such policies, empirical and theoretical evidence strongly suggests that economic and human development increases people's capabilities and aspirations and therefore tends to coincide with an increase rather than a decrease in emigration, at least in the short to medium term. Under unfavourable conditions, trade, aid and remittances can be complements to, rather than substitutes for, migration also in the longer term. At the same time, demand for both skilled and unskilled migrant labour is likely to persist. Trade, aid, return migration and remittances are no short‐cut ‘solutions’ to migration, and sustained immigration therefore seems likely.     

颐和园养云轩未罹火患

咸丰十年(1860年)十月,英法联军兵临京都,“三山五园”同罹火难,清漪园内一片瓦砾。光绪十四年(1888年)二月,光绪帝正式下谕在清漪园废墟上营建颐和园。但颐和园内究竟是否还留存有清漪园时期的古建筑,这一问题变得愈来愈模糊难识,笔者通过考察和分析认为,颐和园内养云轩当属清漪园幸存的古建筑之一。     

柬埔寨吴哥石窟建筑结构形式及其破坏特征分析

柬埔寨吴哥石窟的文物建筑规模宏大．保存完整,蕴含极高的历史、艺术和科学价值,足著名的世界史化遗产,在世界建筑史上占有重要的地位。本研究从结构工程的角度,介绍了吴哥石窟建筑结构形式．并在现场勘察的基础上简述了吴哥石窟建筑破坏的类型,即结构破坏与材料破坏两种类型,在保护修复中,应针对不同的破坏肜式采取相应的技术措施。     

张治中重用于蒋介石原因析

张治中是国民党统治集团的上层人物,毕生主张亲苏联共,而蒋介石极端反苏反共.从政治观点上看,两人应该是冰炭不容,但蒋介石为什么还要重用他、容忍他呢?事情既复杂,也简单.因为张治中是蒋介石"和"的一手的重要工具,始终有用.与此同时,张对蒋忠心耿耿,从不搞小派系,不留恋兵权,毫无个人野心.     

也谈“中华人民共和国”作为国名的原因——兼与潘焕昭老师商榷

《党的文献》2007年第3期发表了潘焕昭的文章《"中华人民共和国"国名考》(以下简称潘文),第5期又发表了宋月红的文章《"中华人民共和国"国名补考》(以下简称宋文),对"中华人民共和国"提出的时间、命名的由来和作为国名的原因等问题进行了探讨,宋文既是对潘文观点的补充,同时在一些观点上也进行了商榷。笔者认为,潘文提出选择"中华     

Voter Behaviour in Rural Areas: A Study of the Farrer Electoral Division in Southern New South Wales at the 1998 Federal Election

The National (Country) Party, traditional beneficiary of a countrymindedness ethos in rural and regional Australia, suffered a significant electoral setback at the 1998 federal election from a new conservative force in Australian politics, the One Nation Party. One Nation has been characterised as the party of the ‘old’ Australia, those least able to cope with the pace of recent social and economic changes, rationalisation and centralisation of services and the exodus of people from rural and regional areas. Such a characterisation is supported by findings from this study of the geography of voting and the social correlates of One Nation's support base in the Farrer electoral division in south‐western New South Wales.     

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.     

Was All Irish Politics Local? The Portarlington Election of 1832 and the Structure of Politics in 19th‐Century Ireland

Historians have often characterised 19th‐century Irish elections as insular, inward‐looking affairs. This article, however, offers a reconsideration of the role played by national and imperial events in Irish elections through a close analysis of the Portarlington contest of 1832. While acknowledging the importance of local concerns in the campaign, it argues that the Portarlington election cannot be understood in exclusively parochial terms. Candidates, voters, and opinion‐makers all situated the contest in national and imperial, as well as provincial, contexts, and they behaved as if larger political issues might affect the ultimate outcome of the campaign. An examination of the election suggests that the dichotomy between the local and the national, while analytically useful, can also be misleading: the Portarlington contest exhibited a complex interplay between local, national, and imperial affairs. This article concludes, consequently, that national and imperial issues were integrated into the structure of Irish politics after the Reform Act of 1832.     

Why conventional wisdom on radicalization fails: the persistence of a failed discourse

Politicians, the media, and some academics are getting it wrong about radicalization. Relying on simple narratives to explain how an individual departs from point a (‘a good Muslim boy’) to point b (‘a suicide bomber’), too many recent contributions to academia rely on assumptions and ‘conventional wisdom’ rather than testable and falsifiable empirical research and methods. Through specific cases, this article seeks to demonstrate how the over‐simplification of ‘conventional wisdom’ privileges convenient political narratives over the complex realities of such situations. In light of this failure to account for reality, this article seeks to challenge current thinking on radicalization by exposing its limitations, as currently being used, as a meaningful basis and departure point for rigorous social science research. The article concludes by showing how the current persistence of this ‘conventional wisdom’ approach to radicalization ultimately betrays the normative political assumptions of those who insist on using this term, and how this adherence to ‘conventional wisdom’ now deprives radicalization from being a relevant and useful academic or policy discourse. This is because radicalization as an area for study has been corrupted by its instrumental political application.