‘A Tiny Little Footnote in History’: Conservative Centre Forward

In May 1985, two years after he had returned to the back benches, Francis Pym launched the first organised display of dissent within the parliamentary Conservative Party against Margaret Thatcher's leadership: Conservative Centre Forward. Those Conservative MPs who joined the group were very much believers in One Nation Conservatism. Conservative Centre Forward survived for barely a week after going public; it rapidly collapsed amid accusations of disloyalty and inept leadership. The group proved to be a short-lived experiment which achieved little of note and exposed those who were involved to widespread ridicule. Yet, it was precisely because Conservative Centre Forward collapsed so quickly and achieved so little that it was significant. In its own way, the short life of the group provided a revealing commentary upon the character of the mid-1980s Conservative Party. It was a party which, on the one hand, was moving inexorably to the right and therefore ever further away from the values of One Nation Conservatism which Conservative Centre Forward espoused. On the other hand, it was a party which was still traditional enough to view open displays of dissent, of whatever magnitude, as a threat to the unity upon which its continued electoral success depended.     

The Decline of the Scottish Conservatives in North‐East Scotland, 1965–79: A Regional Perspective

This article takes a fresh look at the decline of the Conservative Party in post‐war Scotland, a phenomenon that has provoked much debate. The analysis presented here is innovative in that it takes a regional approach, whereas other contributions to this field have tended to ignore the considerable regional diversity of Scottish political behaviour. By examining one particular region of Scotland – the rural north‐east – this article demonstrates that the Conservatives’ decline occurred at the hands of parties – the Liberals and the Scottish Nationalists – that did not brand themselves as left wing or right wing; the latter in particular eschewed conventional political labels. This marks another departure from the established literature, which has tended to discuss the decline in terms of the Conservative Party or the Scottish electorate moving ‘left’ or ‘right’. Furthermore, the article makes it clear that a serious decline befell the party between 1965 and 1979: before the advent of Thatcherism that has widely been held responsible for the Scottish Conservatives’ electoral woes. This analysis is conducted by examining the local press coverage of the region, as well as the national and regional records of the parties concerned. It therefore seeks to make a contribution to the wider study of post‐war British politics, by demonstrating the benefits of local and regional approaches in this period where they have been largely overlooked. This article demonstrates that even in the 1960s and 1970s, when politics seemed so nationally uniform, there is considerable diversity to be appreciated in different parts of the country.     

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.     

Re-examining a modern classic: does Putnam's Making Democracy Work suffer from spuriousness?

What makes democratic institutions work efficiently? Robert Putnam argued in Making Democracy Work that a mixture of political participation and immersion in associative and social networks in the community, conceptualised as ‘civic community’ or ‘social capital’, is the explanation. Ever since its publication, many questions have arisen about the validity of Putnam's theory. Among the most relevant concerns stands the influence of the Italian Communist Party on Putnam's empirical tests. This paper aims to fill the gap left in the literature by testing Putnam's hypothesis against the political party in the regional government and the PCI's electoral support. Supporting Putnam, this paper finds that variations in the quality of democratic governments in Italy's regions are a function of civic community even after adjusting for the presence of the Italian Communist Party.     

Spatially Disaggregated Modelling of Voting Outcomes and Socio‐Economic Characteristics at the 2001 Australian Federal Election

This study uses GIS and spatial modelling to relate voting outcomes at the 2001 federal election for polling booths across Australia with the socio‐economic characteristics of polling booth catchment areas. The data and analysis used are more detailed and comprehensive than previous studies. It is conducted at a fine level of spatial disaggregation across the whole nation to examine voting outcomes for both major and minor political parties. Because the aim of the paper is to distinguish voting outcomes between political parties rather than to predict voting outcomes for particular political parties, a discriminant analysis is used rather than regression analysis. The statistical discriminant analysis identifies two main socio‐economic dimensions that are able to predict polling booth outcomes with a relatively high degree of accuracy. That analysis shows how, at the 2001 federal election, the middle ground, in terms of socio‐economic characteristics, was being claimed by the Liberal Party, Country Liberal Party, The Greens, and, to a lesser extent, by the Australian Labor Party. However, the Australian Democrats, National Party and One Nation had more distinctive constituencies, with the National Party and One Nation Party competing for areas with similar socio‐economic characteristics. Using GIS mapping tools, examples of actual and predicted polling booth voting outcomes are given, along with selected socio‐economic characteristics of booth catchments.     

党组织、党员与群众——华北土改期间的整党运动

在土地改革期间,中国共产党针对基层党员干部发动了广泛而深入的整党运动。整党运作的基本特征在于让党外群众介入其间,并对基层党员干部行使审查评议之权,即所谓"开门整党"。整党运动中党组织、党员与群众之间的关系,表征了乡村权力结构和共产党乡村治理模式的深刻变化。借助群众力量进行整党,不仅可以实现对基层政治精英的有效监控,也有助于将乡村民众整合到党和国家的权力体系中来,因而对乡村治理目标的实现具有重要意义。     

A battle in the Bush: Some lessons from liberal‐national rivalry in Warrnambool

An intriguing aspect of rural Australian politics has been the occasional capacity of one of the conservative parties to make sudden, substantial electoral gains at the other's expense. C.A. Hughes (1985:53) has suggested that, in order to understand Liberal‐National rivalry, we ought not dwell upon demographic variables but need undertake detailed electoral studies and draw out the importance of ‘the personalities and local popularity of candidates’. Such a micro‐level of political examination, he laments, is rarely attempted in Australia. Ours is a micro‐level study of the one‐time safe Liberal Victorian state seat of Warrnambool in which, in recent elections (1985 and 1988), the National Party has decisively wrested control. Certainly the local popularity of the National Party candidates contributed in no small way to the switch in conservative allegiance which has occurred in Warrnambool. However, contra Hughes, we also identify an important demographic explanatory variable in Catholicism.     

Managers and Agents: Conservative Party Organisation in the 1850s*

During the 1850s in the wake of the calamitous Peelite split, Britain's Conservative Party struggled to rebuild its numbers in the house of commons. The structure of the party's electoral organisation is well known‐parliamentary leaders, election managers such as Sir William Jolliffe and Philip Rose, plus local constituency based agents. Jolliffe's and Rose's 1859 election notebooks help understand this, but they also reveal serious gaps in the Conservatives' information networks. This article delineates the electoral activities of Sir John Yarde Buller (first Baron Churston) and his ally Samuel Triscott, who supplemented the spasmodic flow of information from small boroughs in at least two counties. Mid‐level or second‐tier managers, to whom no attention has previously been given, assisted the Conservatives in their gradual electoral recovery. Their roles also suggest that the party's organization may have been more complex than previously believed.     

Sport,Localism and Social Capital in Rural Western Australia

Whilst there has been some research conducted on the role of sport in Australian rural communities, to date there has been little detailed discussion by social scientists and geographers on the association between sport and social capital. This paper identifies elements of social capital, at a community and regional social scale, which have been expressed through the activities and adaptive strategies of twenty‐five sporting clubs from the wheatbelt region of Western Australia. Most of the adaptive strategies are a direct result of the clubs being exposed to the processes of rural restructuring and include amalgamation and the spatial reorganisation of sporting competition locations. The importance of localism in rural communities is also examined through the issues of trust and distrust within a regional hierarchy context. The paper illustrates how sport is not only an important part of rural life but also an activity which plays an integral role in the formation of bonding and bridging social capital.     

The Liberal Party,Free Trade and the 1841 Election

It is a paradox that the Liberal Party's electoral defeat in 1841 attested to its underlying strength and vitality. This article focuses on the impact on party unity of the free trade measures advocated by the ministry in the months preceding its fall. The Liberal Party's bold electoral platform antagonised its protectionist MPs, a group previously overlooked in the historiography, but fell short of the demands of its radical wing for political reform. While all the ingredients for fragmentation existed, unity prevailed. Protestations of loyalty to the leadership could be heard from the mouths of Liberal MPs of all shades, from stalwart protectionists who coalesced around the ministry on traditional foreign policy grounds through to the most fervent radicals who celebrated its ‘new’ direction. Such findings of cohesion contradict accounts which have hitherto viewed the 1841 electoral defeat as evidence of the party's inchoateness. Indeed, this article shifts the historiographical narrative away from addressing why the Liberals lost to the more pertinent issue of why the losses suffered were not greater. In answering that question, both the sensitivity with which the financial agenda was presented by ministers and the flexibility of different sections of the Liberal Party in interpreting and presenting the free trade measures to the electorate are underlined. Above all, Lord John Russell is rehabilitated as a ‘popular’ leader and his importance in the development of the nascent Liberal Party is unearthed.     

Demographic Change,Differential Ageing,and Public Policy in Rural and Regional Australia: A Three‐State Case Study

This paper takes a differential demographic change in six rural settlement categories within rural and regional Australia as the starting point for the measurement of differential ageing using a Relative Ageing Index which compares ageing in sub‐populations with the national norm. The spatial units employed are 412 rural communities, approximated by social catchments each consisting of a country town and its surrounding dispersed population. The study covers the period from 1981 to 2006 and includes the rural areas of New South Wales, Victoria, and South Australia, excluding major cities, peri‐urban areas, and the remote rangelands. It examines demographic change and differential ageing in a selection of the rural settlement categories recommended for further analysis in the report of the ‘Demographic Change and Liveability Panel’, one of three advisory panels established in 2010 by the then Commonwealth Government seeking to develop a sustainable population strategy for Australia. Ageing profiles are produced for the whole study area, for the individual rural settlement categories, and for the urban and rural components within each category separately. Results show that differential ageing is least advanced in the ‘regional cities’, most advanced in the ‘sea change’, but of most concern in the agriculture‐based rural settlement categories where it exacerbates the effects of overall population decline. In all categories, ageing in the dispersed rural population element exceeded that of the urban component. Results emphasise the vital role of the ‘regional cities’ category in future public policy development supported by ameliorative and collaborative measures for their surrounding agriculture‐based communities.     

Voter migration as a source of electoral change in the Rocky Mountain West

Examining county-level voting patterns since 1992, this paper describes the rising strength of the Democratic Party in the Rocky Mountain West and explores domestic migration (voter mobility) as a cause of the electoral change. Other theories of electoral change (voter conversion, voter mobilization and generational replacement) are analyzed and found less significant than a voter migration theory. A spatial autoregressive model also presents evidence of significant contextual “neighborhood effects” contributing to electoral change in the region. Relying on IRS tax-filer migration data, Census data and voting results for all Western counties since 1992, this work finds a significant correlation between growing Democratic strength and in-migration of new voters who generally hail from more Democratic environments than the Western counties into which they are emigrating. The strongest correlations emerge in counties where the share of creative class occupations is also growing quickly. Migrating voters are building a new Western community – a community of creative classes, childless households and urban professionals who are more likely to vote Democrat than the rural conservatives they are increasingly outnumbering.     

Dividing Societies: The Socio‐Political Spatial Implications of Restructuring in Australia

This paper reviews trends over the last two to three decades in the socio‐economic divisions in Australia, focusing on their spatial dimensions. It provides empirical evidence that our society is dividing on multiple dimensions – including shifts in industry and occupational structure, income distribution, the incidence of poverty. And it demonstrates that the differentiations across space in socio‐economic phenomena also have complex multiple dimensions, which are explained inadequately by a ‘city/bush’ dichotomy popularly espoused by politicians and reported in the media. Processes of globalisation, economic restructuring and employment shifts, and changing patterns of population movement are combining to create stark differentials between places both within the major cities as well as in regional Australia. As demonstrated by the recent One Nation phenomenon, voter backlash is strong, and it too has specific spatial characteristics.     

Blair's project in retrospect

New Labour came into being as an attempt to frame a successor project to Thatcherism, but in practice it has proved to be a continuation of it. Blair's project was to achieve hegemony for Labour by blending free market policies with a concern for social cohesion. He accepted the new economic settlement that Thatcher had established, but believed it could be made more sustainable if it was tempered with a concern for social justice. Within the Labour Party his project was set in terms of modernizing social democracy, but in the country as a whole it was perceived as a variation on One Nation Toryism—a strand in the British political tradition which the Conservatives had seemingly forgotten. In fact, Blair's domestic agenda has had more in common with Thatcher's than with either social democracy or One Nation Toryism. There were significant constitutional reforms in the first term, but privatization and the injection of market mechanisms into hitherto autonomous institutions has remained the central thrust of policy. Blair has been committed to modernizing Britain, but his conception of modernization was a variation on Thatcher's. In one centrally important area, Blair diverges from Thatcher: he believes an essential component of Britain's modernization was an improved relationship with the EU, culminating in British entry into the euro. Yet his uncompromising support for the US over Iraq has left Britain as deeply alienated from France and Germany as it had ever been in Thatcher's time. Britain may still some day join the euro, but it will not be Tony Blair who takes us in. Blair's strategy was to attain hegemony for New Labour by appropriating the Thatcherite inheritance. In domestic terms, this strategy has been a success, but it relies on continuing Conservative weakness and an economic and international environment congenial to neo‐liberal policies. At present both of these conditions appear to be changing to Blair's disadvantage. The Conservative Party seems to be shaping a post‐Thatcherite agenda. At the same time, the US is leading a movement away from neo‐liberal orthodoxies towards protectionism and deficit financing and faces an intractable guerrilla war in Iraq. In these circumstances, the neo‐Thatcherite strategy that sustained Blair in power could prove to be his undoing.     

Electoral bias in Australia 1980–1993: The impact of the 1983 electoral amendments

This paper examines the amount and sources of electoral bias at federal elections in Australia from 1980 to 1993. The main conclusion reached is that the changes to electoral legislation introduced between the 1983 and 1984 elections did not, as has previously been widely accepted, merely act to neutralise the then‐existing bias towards the Liberal and National coalition parties but actually resulted in a bias towards the Australian Labor Party. Most of the bias arose from the differential geographic concentration of voters, to which a contributing influence was a ‘size effect’ caused by increasing the number of members of parliament However, the introduction of a boundary redistribution criterion which requires equality in electorate enrolments over time (rather than immediately) has also introduced an inbuilt bias arising from differential enrolment levels into the post‐1983 electoral system. This bias has favoured the ALP at every one of the four elections held under the new system.     

Swings and Roundabouts? Patterns of Voting for the Australian Labor Party at State and Commonwealth Lower House Elections, 1901-96

Federation for Australia in 1901 was closely followed by the rise of the mass party, an organisation with the potential to reduce the regional differentiation that federalism is designed to protect. Loyalty to party can submerge local issues in nationally based partisanship, and the Australian Labor Party (ALP) may have performed precisely this role, particularly if voters have not differentiated between voting for the ALP at state and Commonwealth elections. This article examines the pattern of electoral support for the ALP at state and Commonwealth elections since 1901 and finds that an apparent similarity in long-term voting support masks important variations both within and between states. The potential for mass party loyalty to create uniform voting responses across the federation has been strongly moderated by the diversity inherent in the federal system.     

Neoliberalism and the Institutions for Regional Development in Australia

This paper examines some effects of the pursuit of neoliberalism on regional development policy and practice in Australia, and in particular on the activities and effectiveness of regional development organisations. The paper interprets data from a survey of 505 regional development organisations across Australia through the framework of Jessop's contribution to state theory and his identification of four key trends in economic management under neoliberalism. Regional development policies are seen as a response of governments to electoral pressure from regions, but a response that is constrained by the dominance of neoliberal ideology. The objectives of regional development are predominantly economic, but are often limited to the role of facilitation and the provision of information. Some responsibility for regional development has been shifted downwards to regions, but the effectiveness of the organisations given this responsibility is reduced by the short‐term and competitive nature of much of their funding, the lack of coordination between regional development actors at the local level, the proliferation of agencies and the competition between them. The paper concludes that regional development agencies in Australia are in many ways a product of neoliberalism, since they represent one way in which governments can be seen to be responding to regional pressure for assistance but they can do so without incurring significant costs. Yet regional development bodies are also a victim of neoliberalist thinking, since it denies them the resources and the powers they need to be more successful in their work.     

The evaluation of electoral redistributions: the case of Western Australia*

Electoral boundaries may be delimited by electoral commissioners who are explicitly non-partisan but the consequences of their decisions are generally highly partisan. An evaluation of the State redistribution in Western Australia reveals that the Liberal Party was given a significant initial advantage for the 1983 State Election. Indicators used in the evaluation procedure include political party competition, shape, the integrity of political units, predictors of voting behaviour, as well as the re-aggregation of the 1983 election results by the pre-redistribution boundaries.     

Issue competition between Green and social democratic parties in majoritarian settings: the case of Australia

The emergence of green parties has injected new lines of competition into national party systems, with discernible issue competition effects for established, ideologically-proximate social democratic parties. Despite a burgeoning literature on green and social democratic issue competition tactics in settings where coalition government is common, we have less understanding of these same effects in settings where majority government is the norm. Using the case of the Australian Greens and the Australian Labor Party, we explore issue competition dynamics in a polity where the majoritarian electoral system reduces opportunities for coalition formation. We find that the absence of strong electoral imperatives for either party to enter coalitions has encouraged them to compete adjacent to one another, rather than in direct competition.