PUBLIC SECTOR UNIONISM AND TAX BURDENS: ARE THEY RELATED?*

One factor that has affected state and local politics since the 1960's is the growth of public sector unionism. Conventional wisdom assumes that the “fist generation” of public unionism has been a major cause of the fiscal problems faced by many state and local governments in the 1970's. State level cross-sectional analysis (1960–71) questions this widely held assumption with respect to the impact of strike activity and collective bargaining legislation on the tax burden across the states.     

‘A universal,uniform humanity’: the German newspaper Der Kosmopolit and entangled nation-building in nineteenth-century Australia

The focus in this article, through a reading of the German-Australian newspaper Der Kosmopolit, is on the legacies of entangled imperial identities in the period of the nineteenth-century German Enlightenment. Attention is drawn to members of the liberal nationalist generation of 1848 who emigrated to the Australian colonies and became involved in intellectual activities there. The idea of entanglement is applied to the philosophical orientation of the German-language newspaper that this group formed, Der Kosmopolit, which was published between 1856 and 1957. Against simplistic notions that would view cosmopolitanism as the opposite of nationalism, it is argued that individuals like Gustav Droege and Carl Muecke deployed an entangled ‘cosmo-nationalism’ in ways that both advanced German nationalism and facilitated their own engagement with and investment in Australian colonial society.     

From a Politics of Conviction to a Politics of Interest? The Changing Ontologics of Youth Politics in India and Nicaragua

There exists a longstanding association between youth and revolution, partly due to the assumption that the politics of the former are inherently “prefigurative” in nature. Youth politics can often actually be quite conservative, however, as can be observed in contemporary Nicaragua, where rather than attempting to “change the world” in the way that previous militant youth generations were famously associated with, current Sandinista youth activists engage primarily in forms of neo‐patrimonial clientelism. At the same time, the evolving experience of everyday political action by university educated youth in Uttar Pradesh, India highlights how economic endeavours can, under certain circumstances, become a form of politics, often of a more transformative variety than classic forms of collective mobilization. The comparison of Nicaragua and India thus highlights the critical importance of considering the wider environment within which youth mobilize and take action in order to understand how and why particular political “ontologics” emerge.