Review symposium

Australian Political Science — Past and Present Directions

Don Aitkin (ed.), Surveys of Australian Political Science, Sydney, George Allen and Unwin, 1985, pp.xi, 365. $14.95 (paper)

Brian Head (Review Editor, Politics)     

SPECIAL INTERESTS AND THE POLICY PROCESS

Books reviewed in this article:
Jeffrey M. Berry, Feeding Hungry People: Rulemaking in the Food Stamp Program
Peter Navarro, The Policy Game: How Special Interests and Ideologues are Stealing America
Richard K. Scotch, From Good Will to Civil Rights: Transforming Federal Disability Policy
Paul Y. Watanabe, Ethnic Groups, Congress, and American Foreign Policy: The Politics of the Turkish Arms Embargo     

Exploring the Political Potential of the Local State: Building a Dialogue with Sheffield in the 1980s

This article explores the political potential of the local state through an engagement with the case of Sheffield City Council in the 1980s. The new municipalism movement has generated renewed interest in the “local” and “urban” as transformative projects. The local state holds a pivotal if problematic role in these debates, often seen as the decisive force facilitating or impeding transformation. In building a dialogue with 1980s Sheffield, we provide a less certain account of the local state's potential. Sheffield occupies an ambiguous position within and beyond traditional municipal labourism and therefore provides a potent example to explore tensions within municipalism between state and autonomist visions of politics. In Sheffield, radical intent turned into a more cautious governmental programme in the city, notwithstanding glimpses of political alternatives. The experience of those years provides insights on the contingencies of bringing movements and state politics together in what was then called “local socialism”.