Labour electoral landslides and the changing efficiency of voting distributions

The translation of votes into seats under first–past–the–post electoral systems with single–member constituencies invariably results in disproportional allocations of seats relative to votes among the main two parties. It also tends to produce biased outcomes, with one party getting a more disproportionate share of the seats with a given share of the votes than does its opponent. In Great Britain, these biases favoured the Conservative party until the 1980s, but now strongly favour Labour. Production of those biases results from a variety of influences involving the interaction of the geography of party support with that of constituency boundaries. Increasingly, that interaction has favoured Labour: without any explicit manipulation of the constituency map to its own ends, it now benefits substantially from the equivalent of the malapportionment and gerrymandering cartographic abuses typical of the United States, because of its ability to manipulate its vote distribution within the constituency system.     

Book reviews

Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia, Australian Academy of Science and Australian Academy of Technological Sciences, Science and Technology for What Purpose: An Australian Perspective. Australian Academy of Science, Canberra, 1979, EP.385 (price not stated).

Ward Morehouse (ed.), Science, Technology and the Social Order. Institute for World Order, New York, 1979, pp. 150. $US4.95.

Ralph Pettman, State and Class: A Sociology of International Affairs. Croom Helm, London, 1979, pp. 270. £5.50.

F. A. Mediansky (ed.), The Military and Australia's Defence. Longman Cheshire, Melbourne, 1979, pp. 165. $6.95.

Sir John Crawford and Saburo Okita (eds.), Australia and Japan: Issues in the Economic Relationship. Australia‐Japan Economic Relations Research Project, Canberra, 1979, pp. v + 140. $3.80.

William R. Kintner and John F. Copper, A Matter of Two Chinas: The China‐Taiwan Issue in U.S. Foreign Policy. Foreign Policy Research Institute, Philadelphia, 1979, pp.127. U.S. $6.00 (paper).

Bill Brugger (ed.), China: The Impact of the Cultural Revolution. Australian National University Press, Canberra, 1979, pp. 300. $20.00.

Parris H. Chang, Power and Policy in China. Second edition. Pennsylvania State University Press, 1978, pp. 331. $14.50 cloth, $7.95 paper.

O. Edmund Clubb, Twentieth Century China. Third Edition. Columbia University Press, New York, 1978, pp. 554. US$25.00 (Cloth), $9.40 (paper).

Alvin Rabushka, Hong Kong: A Study in Economic Freedom. University of Chicago, Graduate School of Business, Chicago, 1979, pp. 129. $US10.00.

John Ingleson, Road to Exile: The Indonesian Nationalist Movement, 1927–1934. Heinemann Educational Books (Asia) Ltd. for ASAA Southeast Asia Publications Series, Singapore, 1979, pp. 254. No price given.

Malcolm Caldwell and Ernst Utrecht, Indonesia: An Alternative History. Alternative Publishing Co‐operative, Sydney, 1979, pp. 208. Cloth $21.95, Paper $9.95.

Heather A. Sutherland,’ The Making of a Bureaucratic Elite: The Colonial Transformation of the Javanese ‘Priyayi. Heinemann Educational Books (Asia) Ltd. (For the Asian Studies Association of Australia), Singapore, 1979, pp. 182. $18.00 (cloth), $7.95 (paper).

James Davidson, Indo‐China: Signposts in the Storm. Longman Malaysia Sdn. Berhad, Kuala Lumpur and Singapore, 1979, pp. 260. $13.95.

Milton Osborne, Before Kampuchea: Preludes to Tragedy. George Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1979, pp. 197. $9.95.

Bruce Grant, The Boat People: An Age Investigation. Penguin Books, Melbourne, 1979, pp. 217. $3.50.

Shelton Kodikara, Strategic Factors in Interstate Relations in South Asia. Canberra Papers on Strategy and Defence No. 19, Strategic and Defence Studies Centre, ANU, 1979, pp. 87. $4.00.     

Book reviews

AUSTRALIA IN PEACE AND WAR: EXTERNAL RELATIONS 1788–1977, T.B. Millar, ANU Press, Canberra, 1978, 578 pp.

CHINA AND AMERICA: THE SEARCH FOR A NEW RELATIONSHIP, William Barnds, ed., New York University Press, New York, 1977. $15.00 cloth.

CHINA AND THE WORLD SINCE 1949, Wang Gungwu, The Macmillan Company of Australia, December 1977, $17.50 bound, $8.75 paper.

THE DIPLOMACY OF DETENTE: THE KISSINGER ERA, Coral Bell, Martin Robinson, London, 1977, pp. 278.

THE PROBLEM OF CHEMICAL AND BIOLOGICAL WARFARE, Volume IV: CB DISARMAMENT NEGOTIATIONS, 1920–1970, Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, Almquist and Wiksell International, Stockholm, 1971.

CHEMICAL DISARMAMENT: NEW WEAPONS FOR OLD, Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, Almquist and Wiksell International, Stockholm, 1975.

DELAYED TOXIC EFFECTS OF CHEMICAL WARFARE AGENTS, Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, Almquist and Wiksell International, Stockholm, 1975.

ECOLOGICAL CONSEQUENCE OF THE SECOND INDOCHINA WAR, Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, Almquist and Wiksell International, Stockholm, 1976.     

REVIEWS

Explorations in the Anthropology of Religion. Essays in honour of Jan van Baal. Edited by W. E. A. van Beek and J. H. Scherer. The Hague, Martinus Nijhoff. 1975. Pp. vi + 303. Price: Dfl. 25.00.     

Complexity thinking and evolutionary economic geography

Thus far, most of the work towards the construction of an evolutionaryeconomic geography has drawn upon a particular version of evolutionaryeconomics, namely the Nelson-Winter framework, which blendsDarwinian concepts and metaphors (especially variety, selection,novelty and inheritance) and elements of a behavioural theoryof the firm. Much less attention has been directed to an alternativeconception based on complexity theory, yet in recent years complexitytheory has increasingly been concerned with the general attributesof evolutionary natural and social systems. In this articlewe explore the idea of the economic landscape as a complex adaptivesystem. We identify several key notions of what is being calledthe new ‘complexity economics’, and examine whetherand in what ways these can be used to help inform an evolutionaryperspective for understanding the uneven development and adaptivetransformation of the economic landscape.     

A theoretical framework for evolutionary economic geography: industrial dynamics and urban growth as a branching process

We propose a framework that specifies the process of economicdevelopment as an evolutionary branching process of productinnovations. Each product innovation provides a growth opportunityfor an existing firm or a new firm, and for an existing cityor a new city. One can then obtain both firm size and city sizedistributions as two aggregates resulting from a single evolutionaryprocess. Gains from variety at the firm level (economies ofscope) and the urban level (Jacobs externalities) provide thecentral feedback mechanism in economic development generatingstrong path dependencies in the spatial concentration of industriesand the specialization of cities. Gains from size are also expected,yet these are ultimately bounded by increasing wages. The contributionof our framework lies in providing a micro-foundation of economicgeography in terms of the interplay between industrial dynamicsand urban growth. The framework is sufficiently general to investigatesystematically a number of stylized facts in economic geography,while at the same time it is sufficiently flexible to be extendedsuch as to become applicable in more specific micro-contexts.A number of extensions related to the concepts of knowledgespillover and lock-in, are also discussed.