Berlusconi,strong government and the Italian state

Over the past decade, state capacity has increased at all levels, including that of central government, and the emergence of effective government in Italy has proved popular. A second trend has been the reassertion of party government since 1996. Given these two trends, the large parliamentary majority obtained by Silvio Berlusconi's alliance, the Casa delle LibertÀ, might be expected to result in strong party government. In fact, Berlusconi's triumph offers something more and something less than party government, challenging Italian democracy. Nevertheless, as a consolidated democracy, Italy should be able to withstand such a challenge. One stable, democratic outcome to Italy's political transformation would be the consolidation of a Schumpeterian model of democracy. This would require the anomalies of the right's accumulation of powers to be resolved, a process which the left could promote by accepting that strong democratic government is a public good, and by organizing itself to challenge Berlusconi by campaigning to provide Italy with such government through parliamentary competition.     

Semi-parliamentary government in perspective: concepts,values, and designs

The article responds to four commentaries on the concept of semi-parliamentary government and its application to Australian bicameralism. It highlights four main points: (1) Our preferred typology is not more ‘normative’ than existing approaches, but applies the criterion of ‘direct election’ equally to executive and legislature; (2) While the evolution of semi-parliamentary government had contingent elements, it plausibly also reflects the ‘equilibrium’ nature of certain institutional configurations; (3) The idea that a pure parliamentary system with pure proportional representation has absolute normative priority over ‘instrumentalist’ concerns about cabinet stability, identifiability and responsibility is questionable; and (4) The reforms we discuss may be unlikely to occur in Australia, but deserve consideration by scholars and institutional reformers in other democratic systems.     

Design in government: City planning,space-making,and urban politics

In recent years, design has appeared in an ever-broadening range of government processes and projects, particularly in cities. What has design become, such that its methods and practices could be applied to urban planning and public administration? And what are the governmental problems that design methods and designers are being mobilized to address? This article answers these questions by tracing the tangled intersections of design, city planning, and urban administration in the last century. Through a genealogical analysis, it shows how a number of designers came to redefine design as a set of procedures for formulating and proposing solutions to “wicked problems.” This understanding of design—which developed in fields such as industrial and product design that were remote from government—has recently gained salience in public administration and city planning. In contrast to an influential geographical analysis of design as spectacular architecture that is divorced from any broad social objective, the article argues that design in government can be analyzed as the design of politics. Its concern is not with the aesthetic or functional qualities of material objects—whether a manufactured product, building, or article of clothing—but with the ongoing work of organizing argumentation and decision making about complex, large-scale problems.     

The Italian Communist Party,local government and the Cold War

The Italian national elections of 18 April 1948 handed power to the Christian Democratic Party. The Italian Communist Party had, however, gained significant municipal control in the local elections of 1946. For the Communists, the local level became the testing ground where administrative practices, political initiatives, social alliances and economic projects were developed. The leaders and the intellectuals worked to outline the cultural framework of a political project which could challenge national politics from town councils. Meanwhile, with a view to making gains in the local elections of 1951–1952, propaganda was used in an attempt to diffuse and proselytise municipal political programmes among different social classes in a divided socioeconomic environment.     

Political communication and democratic government

This paper overviews the Australian System of Political Communication in the light of the communications requirements of modern representative democracy. The broad point of departure is that representative democracy requires political communication in both directions between government and people. In addition to the media, the approach takes account of the following channels for ‘political messages’: direct mail, public opinion polls, elections, government inquiries. Five criteria of satisfactory democratic communication are examined. The Australian system of political communication is reviewed in the light of these criteria. Some research findings and other information is included demonstrating the extent of political communication in Australia. An argument is developed to show what conditions need to be satisfied for the criteria of democracy to be met in the contemporary environment.     

The British government,child welfare,and child migration to Australia after 1945

In 1943, the British Colonial Office initiated a far-reaching process of arrangements to prepare plans for detailed reconstruction in the territories subject to British control. Reconstruction as a concept, a tendency and an action plan was basically directed at building and constructing that which had been destroyed in the war, based on a plan thought out in advance. This article explores the struggle between the British plan for the reconstruction of Mandatory Palestine and the Jewish interpretation that the main aim of their steps is to implement the White Paper policy of May 1939. After six months of confrontation, the British intention to promote economic steps while presenting them as separate from the political tension over Palestine's political future and the Jewish-Arab confrontation proved to be a false assumption.     

Welcome home: reconciliation,Vietnam veterans,and Anzac during the Hawke government

Recent studies regarding reconciliation have argued that restorative justice creates depoliticised consensus. This paper tests this argument by exploring the Hawke government’s role in the reconciliation of the Australian public with Vietnam veterans in 1987, and the opportunities that this resolution created to mark Anzac Day free of the complicating tensions that had characterised the day in the period since the Vietnam War. It argues that the restorative justice evident in the reincorporation of Vietnam veterans into national narratives of Anzac provided opportunities for political elites like Hawke to convincingly employ Anzac as an ideograph and inscribe the day with new meaning. This process had profound continuing effects for the marking of Anzac Day that demonstrate the politically limiting effects of restorative justice.