Killing the Priest-King: Addressing Egalitarianism in the Indus Civilization

Journal of Archaeological Research - The cities of the Indus civilization were expansive and planned with large-scale architecture and sophisticated Bronze Age technologies. Despite these hallmarks...     

The executive lawmaking agenda: Political parties,prime ministers,and policy change in Australia

In Westminster systems, governments enjoy a privileged position in the lawmaking process that they can use to deliver on their campaign promises and achieve their policy goals. What policy areas do governments seek to affect through lawmaking? How stable is the executive lawmaking agenda? How responsive is that agenda to changes triggered by elections or by transitions in prime minister? This study uses a dataset of 3982 Australian bills introduced between 2000 and 2017 to answer these questions. While it finds considerable stability in the policy content of executive lawmaking agendas, the analysis also indicates that Australia's executive lawmaking agenda is more responsive to changes in prime minister than to changes in the party in power. As the first application of the comparative policy agendas approaches to government bills in Australia, this article offers new insights into executive lawmaking priorities during an especially turbulent period in Australian politics.     

Corporatism as Ethnic Compromise: Labour Relations in Post-Apartheid South Africa

Abstract. Conventional wisdom associates corporatism with undemocratic elite collusion, or worse, with the fascist order of Mussolini, Franco or Perq?n. However, another form of corporatism involves institutionalised bargaining between representatives of organised interest groups. This democratic corporatism engages in trade-offs between labour unions, business and state bureaucrats. Where these groups largely coincide with different ethnic constituencies, as in South Africa, the outcome of their bargaining also amounts to an ethnic compromise. This analysis explores the scope, potential and limitations of corporatist labour relations in the new South Africa. Embraced by the African National Congress (ANC) government, legalised codetermination none the less encounters strong reservation from both socialist union leaders as well as the white business establishment. Alienated workers feel shortchanged by elite deals which are also resented by fragmented business sectors. How far state representatives can mediate between different ethno-racial/class interests and realise the promise of less adversarial relations for mutually beneficial growth and stability is being probed with an analysis of the National Economic Development and Labour Council (Nedlac). Liberal South African analysts fear a one-party dominant state, because of likely future ANC hegemony and ethnic voting habits. This legitimate anxiety, however, needs to be balanced by the important checks placed on the ANC by corporatism. Even a poorly implemented corporatism of consensus seeking, it is argued, proves better than an ethno-racial adversarialism of an alternative to the non-racial ANC.