Australian politics in the Australian Journal of Political Science: A review

This article examines how contributors to the Australian Journal of Political Science (AJPS) have conceptualised Australian politics over 50 years. It undertakes this task by examining key events in Australian politics that prompted vigorous debate. These include the election of the Whitlam government in 1972, its dismissal in 1975, and how this in turn generated discussion about the nature of responsible government in Australia. The republican debate of the 1990s shifted the focus. Since 2000, however, a few contributors to the journal have attempted to find a central focus for Australian politics in the controversy over the idea of the Australian settlement. Much recent discussion about Australian politics has been influenced by the ‘cultural turn’, and become particularistic. It is argued that despite their diversity, articles in the AJPS generally do not usually contribute to a narrative that sheds light on the larger, longstanding, structural issues of Australian politics.     

Political theory in the Australian Journal of Political Science: A review

The place of political theory in AJPS has historically been a fairly marginal one, partly because Australia does not seem to have a strong national tradition of political theorizing. This is thought to be a function of living in a nation that never produced a great political theorist and was born neither in revolution or utopianism. Yet, although there has been a marked absence of high theory or exegetically-inclined history of ideas over the life of the journal, theorists have responded by contributing work that usefully illuminates applied problems with theoretical insight. Further, it may be the case that there is a peculiarly Australian style of political theory that is pragmatic and self-consciously embedded within our institutions and political culture. The paper explores this and other means by which Australian theorists have adapted in order to retain a presence within the journal.     

Electoral politics in the Australian Journal of Political Science: A review

Australia’s constant experimentation with electoral system design, and its effects on voter behaviour, have been consistent themes in the Australian Journal of Political Science and its predecessor, Politics, for half a century. This article examines this research in the context of three areas: electoral institutions; election campaigns; and voter behaviour. Three distinct stages in the research are identified, starting with basic fact-gathering, then progressing to the application of rigorous methods and evidence to real-world questions. In the third stage, scholarly attention has been devoted to placing Australia within a comparative framework. An underlying theme in the research is Australian exceptionalism in electoral politics.     

Public policy in the Australian Journal of Political Science: A review

This paper surveys the contribution that articles on public policy have made to this journal in its first half-century. To help organise those contributions, the paper makes a rough distinction between works of a primarily explanatory nature and those that can be thought of as having a substantive focus on analysing particular policy areas or issues. It observes the paucity of policy studies in the 1960s and 1970; the rapid rise in the 1980s; and a plateauing and even perhaps decline after that. It notes the desultory interest in theoretical questions and welcome attempts to employ the comparative method.     

Indigenous politics in the Australian Journal of Political Science: A review

This article reviews the slow emergence of writing on Indigenous issues and power in the journal over its first fifty years. It notes that most of this writing is by non Indigenous authors about issues that are thought to effect Indigenous lives. More contributions by Indigenous authors would be useful and will hopefully occur with growing numbers of Indigenous post-graduate students.     

Public administration in the Australian Journal of Political Science: A review

This article reviews publications on public administration in the Australian Journal of Political Science (AJPS). A distinction needs to be drawn between public administration as a discipline and as a field of inquiry that engages specialists from several areas. The latter has been more significant in Australia in contrast to Europe and the United States. The questions discussed in the AJPS cover changes in the field and practice of public administration; the state and government; the structures of local government, public organisation and federalism; interfaces between public administration and other sectors and institutions; and issues with public sector reform and accountability. Despite the emphasis on governance in discourse and practice, the role of government continues to be central, and what emerges from experiments in new governance is that the authority of government and the significance of hierarchy (compared to markets and networks) very often remains pivotal.     

Foreign and comparative politics in the Australian Journal of Political Science: A review

This article reviews analyses of foreign and comparative politics published in the Australian Journal of Political Science over the past 50 years. The article uses a thematic approach, reviewing five broad regional areas: the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe; New Zealand and the Pacific; Canada, the USA and Western Europe; China and the rest of Asia; and Africa and the Middle East. The article assesses changes in the attention given to particular regions and countries over time, and highlights countries that have received relatively little attention. The article uses a Presidential address in 1985 by David Goldsworthy as a key reference text for assessing the study of foreign and comparative politics in Australia since 1966. The main shifts in overall attention since the early 1990s have been a decline in the historical study of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, and increased attention to New Zealand.     

International relations and foreign policy in the Australian Journal of Political Science: A review

The Australian Journal of Political Science (AJPS) has evolved from a publication that deliberately relegated articles in international relations (IR) to a secondary status to one that has defined and encouraged leading-edge contributions to that field. This development can be attributed to successive AJPS editorial teams’ realisation that contemporary political problems are increasingly interconnected and that emerging approaches to IR reflect this condition. Several recent and key IR debates that have emerged within the journal’s pages are assigned special attention here: the linking of Australia’s domestic politics to that country’s foreign policy interests and behaviour; in-depth discussions that relate to ongoing trends in the international political economy; critical analysis of national defence and regional security postures; and diverse theoretical perspectives that are increasingly shaping the IR field’s paradigmatic identity. It is concluded that the AJPS is now a leading source of IR thought and discourse.     

Women,gender and feminism in the Australian Journal of Political Science: A review

This review article, written for the fiftieth anniversary of the Australian Journal of Political Science (formerly Politics), analyses articles focusing on women, gender and feminism that were published in the journal. The analysis demonstrates that the study of gender is relevant to a broad range of fields, and methodological approaches used, in political science. It also demonstrates that political science knowledge is itself historically and socially constructed, reflecting both traditional social power relations and the influence of the social movements that challenge them. Consequently, key articles have drawn attention to the ways in which the frameworks of mainstream forms of political science were gender-biased and have sometimes continued to be so, particularly in terms of narrow constructions of the ‘political’. Such narrow constructions may still be contributing to some ongoing gaps in the literature, despite the important contributions made by work published in the journal.     

Situating Political Agronomy: The Knowledge Politics of Hybrid Rice in India and Uganda

The emergence of ‘political agronomy’ — a research agenda that interrogates the knowledge politics through which agronomic debates are constructed, shaped and contested — has added a new and important tool for the analysis of agricultural research and policy making in development contexts. This article seeks to advance the scope of political agronomy by providing an enhanced framework to link the analysis of agronomic knowledge production to the study of new agricultural technologies in practice. Using case studies of hybrid rice promotion in southern India and western Uganda, the article illustrates the power relations and unanticipated outcomes that accompanied the translation of agronomic research into agrarian settings characterized by pronounced social polarization and marked environmental transformations. These case studies affirm how the starkly uneven outcomes of technological change refract back into the politics of agronomic research and extension as both researchers and policy makers react to the unintended impacts of previous interventions when designing future agendas.     

Ceaser's American Political Science

Abstract

The transition and subsequent consolidation of countries that move from an authoritarian to a democratic regime have been widely explained by factors such as the international environment, economic conditions, political culture, institutions, and most prominently, elite behavior.¹ But although elites can make decisions about the institutional, political, and economic future of a country in transition, they cannot guarantee that those decisions will be implemented or supported by the populace, or that the incipient democratic system will stabilize. What is frequently neglected in these elite-centered accounts of democratic transitions, then, is civil society and its links to elites.     

Australian Geographers and Geographical Information Science

Geographical Information Science (GIScience) has become an important sub‐discipline for North American geographers but in Australia few geographers are engaged in this ‘research in GIS’ area. Australian geographers seem more concerned with ‘research using GIS’ which has become absorbed into the geographical tradition of thinking and communicating with diagrams, images, and maps. The breakdown of disciplinary boundaries in Australia makes it difficult to be sure, but most of those engaged in GIScience in Australia seem to identify with disciplines other than geography.     

Reproducing Political Subjects: Feminist Scholarship and the Political Science Curriculum

In this article we analyse 16 politics textbooks that feature in introductory courses in politics, political theory or political thought taught in Australian universities. Our concern was to investigate how commonly used first-yearintroductory texts position feminist political theory (and its underlying scholarship) within political theory, and by extension within the discipline of political science. Our findings suggest that the scholarship of feminist theorists remains only occasionally visible to students of political science. It is mostly confined to the safety of managed enclaves, occasionally acknowledged, but certainly not integrated into what counts as the real knowledge of political theory.     

Situating design in the Canadian household furniture industry

This paper traces the process of design across the furniture commodity chain and argues that Canadian household furniture producers have been historically reluctant to designate resources that improve the styling of their products. They have emphasized commerce at the expense of art, and relied primarily on the United States for design inspiration. However, in recent years, a series of smaller, more innovative firms have adopted an aggressive design-led strategy. These firms have been more likely to forge tighter relationships with retailers and designers and to exploit place-based signifiers in the marketing and styling of their products.     

James Ceaser and the Restoration of Political Science

Abstract

Fedor Dostoevsky's The Devils (1872) has been habitually denounced as an artistically lacking, reactionary pamphlet. This article demonstrates how the novel instead presents a lucid analysis of basic functional principles of the political sphere, taking apart the inner mechanisms of political developments, their sources of social and intellectual energy, and the instruments of deception and illusion that are vital for their functioning. The Devils is interpreted as a fundamentally anti-political novel that exposes the irrational foundations, the schemes, and the consequences of political manipulation. Particular attention is devoted to the category of charismatic leadership by offering a new reading of the enigmatic character of Nikolai Stavrogin.     

Situating the Asia Pacific in the age of the Anthropocene

ABSTRACT

The unprecedented and unsustainable impact of human activities on the biosphere threatens the survival of the Earth's inhabitants, including the human species. Several solutions have been presented to mitigate, or possibly undo, this looming global catastrophe. The dominant discourse, however, has a monolithic and Western-centric articulation of the causes, solutions, and challenges arising from the events of the Anthropocene which may differ from the other epistemes and geographies of the world. Drawing on the International Relations (IR) critical engagement with the Anthropocene, this paper situates the Asia-Pacific region in the Anthropocene discourse. The region’s historical and socio-ecological characteristics reveal greater vulnerability to the challenges of the Anthropocene compared to other regions while its major economies have contributed recently to the symptoms of the Anthropocene. On the other hand, the region’s ecocentric philosophies and practices could inform strategies of living in the Anthropocene. This contextualised analysis aims to offer an Asia-Pacific perspective as well as insights into the development of IR in the age of the Anthropocene.