Political Staff in Executive Government: Conceptualising and Mapping Roles within the Core Executive

Political advisers are attracting increasing attention in Westminster jurisdictions. Typically, scholars focus on the corrosive impact they allegedly have on elements of Westminster convention and practice. We argue that a concern with accountability detracts from other important matters, including understanding and theorising ministerial advisers' roles. In this article we address these issues using primary data from a survey of ministerial advisers in New Zealand. We draw on Maley's typology to classify advisers' activities according to the contribution they make to executive government policy-making. We then theorise these activities through the lens of the core executive. We conclude that ministerial advisers are increasingly important actors in governing environments characterised by complex resource dependencies, modes of operation that are as often relational as they are hierarchical, and bargaining relationships that are often positive and not zero-sum in nature.     

Mass and elite politics in Mill's considerations on representative Government

This paper examines the formal filters of the public's political will defended by JS Mill as consistent with the best form of representative government. Holding that institutions must adjust to democratic society, and that democratic society must be improved to achieve wise rule, Mill rejects secret ballots and electoral pledges, and advocates a constitutional council and graduated enfranchisement. He also recommends but does not require the indirect election of the President and a unicameral legislature. Mill's historically sensitive approach puts pressure on interpreters to be sensitive to their own political and social context when applying Mill's ideas. In particular, obviously undemocratic measures such as plural voting should be adjusted to reflect Mill's view that the ratio between legitimacy and competence is constantly changing. The continual readjustment between the powers of masses and elites is the way that Mill's Considerations on Representative Government manage to avoid the now-traditional charge of expertocracy.     

Contexts of Monumentalism: regional diversity at the Neolithic transition in north-west France

The origins of funerary monumentalism in north-west France remain inextricably linked to questions surrounding the Neolithic transition in that region. Debate continues over the relative importance of influences from earlier Neolithic communities in north-east or southern France on the Mesolithic communities of western France. An alternative interpretation places these influences within the context of broad processes of change affecting indigenous communities throughout northern and western France during the fifth millennium BC. The evidence from several regions of northern and western France is reviewed in this perspective, with emphasis on the regional character of monument traditions. Though at one level these regional narratives must have been interrelated, the regional diversity of the process must also be underlined. The argument moves us away from simplistic notions of extraneous influences to a more nuanced understanding of change within the context of individual communities at the Mesolithic/Neolithic transition.     

Decline and sprawl: an evolving type of urban development – observed in Liverpool and Leipzig1

Much of the empirical research on urban sprawl has been carried out in North America and most theoretical studies on this problem have been concerned with expanding urban areas. This study differs, firstly in that it is concerned with sprawl in two European cities, Liverpool in England and Leipzig in Germany, and secondly because both these cities are in decline. This presents an opportunity to explore whether the process of urban sprawl is somehow specific in a situation of urban decline and what its outcomes might be for both urban form and urban policy.     

Punctuated Equilibria and Budgets in the American States

In this article, we examine long-term state budget trends to find evidence of punctuated equilibrium. We use the American states as a broad set of institutional variation with which to examine the nature of policy change through the lens of incrementalism and punctuated equilibrium theories of policymaking. The strength of this article is its sensitivity of variations in policy outcomes across time (18 years), across space (50 state institutions), and across issue space (10 budget categories). This research advances the characterization of policy outcomes by employing a quantitative measure that is both less sensitive to outliers and one that characterizes budget distributions on a simple numeric scale. Our general findings are: (i) state budget categories are interdependent; (ii) state budgets are generally punctuated; but (iii) to varying degrees: Thus, considerable stability (indicated by tall peaks) and punctuations (represented by fat tails) are a central feature of policy outcomes in the American states. This result confirms the logic of punctuated equilibrium theory, but raises future questions about the impact specific variations in institutional costs have on policymaking across the 50 states.     

An 8000-year history of landscape,climate, and copper exploitation in the Middle East: the Wadi Faynan and the Wadi Dana National Reserve in southern Jordan

Investigations of geomorphology, geoarchaeology, pollen, palynofacies, and charcoal indicate the comparative scales and significance of palaeoenvironmental changes throughout the Holocene at the junction between the hyper-arid hot Wadi 'Arabah desert and the front of the Mediterranean-belt Mountains of Edom in southern Jordan through a series of climatic changes and episodes of intense mining and smelting of copper ores. Early Holocene alluviation followed the impact of Neolithic grazers but climate drove fluvial geomorphic change in the Late Holocene, with a major arid episode corresponding chronologically with the ‘Little Ice Age’ causing widespread alluviation. The harvesting of wood for charcoal may have been sufficiently intense and widespread to affect the capacity of intensively harvested tree species to respond to a period of greater precipitation deduced for the Roman–Byzantine period – a property that affects both taphonomic and biogeographical bases for the interpretation of palynological evidence from arid-lands with substantial industrial histories. Studies of palynofacies have provided a record of human and climatic causes of soil erosion, and the changing intensity of the use of fire over time. The patterns of vegetational, climatic change and geomorphic changes are set out for this area for the last 8000 years.     

Anthropology and populism

This guest editorial probes the inflationary use of ‘populism’ and the contribution that anthropologists can make to this field. Although a highly variable phenomenon historically, contemporary populists in locations as diverse as rural Hungary and urban Wales have much in common in their disaffection with the politics of liberal democracy. While the deeper causes must be sought in political economy, emotion and identity are just as important as material interest in populist movements. In describing and explaining populism, anthropologists should heed the populist traditions of their discipline – even at the risk of political incorrectness.