Moral Panics and Punctuated Equilibrium in Public Policy: An Analysis of the Criminal Justice Policy Agenda in Britain

How and when issues are elevated onto the political agenda is a perennial question in the study of public policy. This article considers how moral panics contribute to punctuated equilibrium in public policy by drawing together broader societal anxieties or fears and thereby precipitating or accelerating changes in the dominant set of issue frames. In so doing they create opportunities for policy entrepreneurs to disrupt the existing policy consensus. In a test of this theory, we assess the factors behind the rise of crime on the policy agenda in Britain between 1960 and 2010. We adopt an integrative mixed-methods approach, drawing upon a combination of qualitative and quantitative data. This enables us to analyze the rise of crime as a policy problem, the breakdown of the political-institutional consensus on crime, the moral panic that followed the murder of the toddler James Bulger in 1993, the emergence of new issue frames around crime and social/moral decay more broadly, and how—in combination—these contributed to an escalation of political rhetoric and action on crime, led by policy entrepreneurs in the Labour and Conservative parties.     

Torres Strait elections, 2000 and 2004: Changes in political leadership and style?

Torres Strait has 18 local governments, elections for which were held in March of both 2000 and 2004 in conjunction with other local government elections in Queensland. Elections were also held at these times for additional positions on two regional representative bodies for Torres Strait, the Island Co-ordinating Council and the Torres Strait Regional Authority. This paper examines all these elections, focusing on changes in political leadership and also a possible emerging change in political style in Torres Strait.     

The Green Frog and Desalination: A Nyungar Metaphor for the (Mis‐)Management of Water Resources,Swan Coastal Plain,Western Australia

ABSTRACT In common with Aboriginal groups around Australia, the indigenous people, or Nyungars, of Perth adopt a holistic attitude towards groundwater resources. Of cultural significance are lakes, springs, soaks and watercourses that feature in Dreamtime creation narratives. Perth is experiencing major water shortages and many Nyungars feel that the degradation of the freshwater supply is a result of mismanagement and unsustainable development by non‐Aboriginal people. Proposals for dealing with the issue are seen as equally out of balance with the natural order of things. Water regulators have much to learn from indigenous Australians about water and environmental management. Although water continues to be central to Nyungar identity, the study on which this article is based found evidence of attenuated knowledge about the Dreaming, with discontinuities evident in the way significance is increasingly being read in everyplace rather than in specific ‘story places’.     

Book reviews

H.E. Chehabi and Alfred Stepan (eds). Politics, Society and Democracy. Boulder: Westview Press, 1995. xxii + 414 pp. $US64.95.

Ronald Rogowski (ed.). Comparative Politics and the International Political Economy Vols I & II. Hants: Edward Elgar, 1995. xxi + 992 pp. £170.00 (cloth).

Martin Wight. International Theory: The Three Traditions. Edited by Gabriele Wight and Brian Porter. London: Leicester University Press, 1994. xxvii + 286 pp. No price given.

Martin Shaw. Global Society and International Relations. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994. vii + 197 pp. £UK39.50 (cloth). £UK11.95 (paper).

Alvin and Heidi Toffler. War and Anti‐War: Survival at the Dawn of the 21st Century. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1993. xiii + 302 pp. $US22.95 (paper).

Coral Bell (ed.). The United Nations and Crisis Management: Six Studies. Canberra: Strategic and Defence Studies Centre, Australian National University, 1994. 144 pp. $17.50 (paper).

Kevin Dements and Christine Wilson (eds). UN Peacekeeping at the Crossroads. Canberra: Peace Research Centre, Australian National University, 1994. xi + 176 pp. $15.00 (paper).

Rosemary Righter. Utopia Lost—The United Nations and World Order. New York: The Twentieth Century Fund Press, 1995. x + 421 pp. $US29.95 (cloth).

Kevin Clements and Robin Ward (eds). Building International Community: Co‐operating for Peace Case Studies. St Leonards: Allen & Unwin, 1994. xiv + 354 pp. $19.95 (paper).

International Commission on Peace and Food. Uncommon Opportunities—An Agenda for Peace and Equitable Development. London: Zed Books, 1994. xiii + 210 pp. $19.95 (paper), $55.00 (cloth).

Jonathan Dean. Ending Europe's War: The Continuing Search for Peace and Security. New York: Twentieth Century Fund Press, 1994. xv + 439 pp. $US34.95 (cloth).

G. Wyn Rees (ed.). International Politics in Europe: The New Agenda. London: Routledge, 1993. viii + 191 pp. $32.95 (paper).

Hugh Miall (ed.). Minority Rights in Europe: The Scope for a Transnational Regime. London: Pinter, 1994. 120 pp. No price given.

Geoffrey Ponton. The Soviet Era: Soviet Politics from Lenin to Yeltsin. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1994. viii + 293 pp. $39.95 (paper).

Russell Trood and Deborah McNamara (eds). The Asia‐Australia Survey 1994. South Melbourne: Macmillan, 1994. xi + 340 pp. $79.95 (cloth).

Sheldon W. Simon (ed.). East Asian Security in the Post‐Cold War Era. Armonk: M.E. Sharpe, 1993. x + 230 pp. No price given.

Robert S. McNamara (with Brian Van DeMark). In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam. New York: Random House, 1995. xviii + 414 pp. $US27.50 (cloth).

Donald Kirk. Korean Dynasty. Hyundai and Chung Ju Yung. Hong Kong: Asia 2000/Armonk: M.E. Sharpe, 1994. 383 pp. $US25.00 (paper), $US65.00 (cloth).

Pradeep Taneja. Hong Kong and Australia: Towards 1997 and Beyond. Australia‐Asia Papers, Number 70. CSAAR, Brisbane: Griffith University, 1994. 40 pp. $8.00.

Ming K. Chan (ed.). Precarious Balance: Hong Kong Between China and Britain 1842–1992. Armonk: M.E. Sharpe, 1994. xi + 235 pp. $US22.00 (paper), $US55.00 (cloth).

Shinya Sugiyama and Milagros C. Guerrero (eds). International Commercial Rivalry in Southeast Asia in the Interwar Period. New Haven, Connecticut: Yale Center for International and Area Studies, 1994. ix + 222 pp. No price given.

Sarvepalli Gopal (ed.). Anatomy of a Confrontation: Ayodhya and the Rise of Communal Politics in India. London: Zed Books, 1994. viii + 240 pp. £9.95 (paper), £29.95 (cloth).

Richard Evans. Deng Xiaoping and the Making of Modern China. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1993. x + 339 pp. $39.95 (cloth).

Virginia Matheson Hooker (ed.). Culture and Society in New Order Indonesia. Kuala Lumpur Oxford University Press, 1993. xxiii + 302 pp. $49.95 (cloth).

Howard Dick, James Fox and Jamie Mackie (eds). Balanced Development: East Java in the New Order. Singapore: Oxford University Press, 1993. xxi + 367 pp. $64.95 (cloth).

Young Whan Kihl (ed.). Korea and the World: Beyond the Cold War. Boulder Colorado: Westview Press, 1994. xii + 371 pp. $21.95 (paper), $64.00 (cloth).

Christopher Tremewan. The Political Economy of Social Control in Singapore. New York: St Martin's Press, 1994. 252 pp. $88.00.

Francis T. Seow. To Catch a Tartar: A Dissident in Lee Kuan Yew's Prison. Monograph 42, New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Southeast Asian Studies, 1994. xxxiii + 293 pp. $50.00.

Anthony Milner. The Invention of Politics in Colonial Malaya: Contesting Nationalism and the Expansion of the Public Sphere. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. vii + 328 pp. $75.00 (cloth).

David McKnight. Australia's Spies and Their Secrets. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1994. xvii + 350 pp. $24.95 (paper).

Fiona Capp. Writers Defiled: Security Surveillance of Australian Authors and Intellectuals 1920–1960. Ringwood, Victoria: McPhee Gribble, 1993. 239 pp. No price given.

Errol Hodge. Radio Wars. Truth, Propaganda and the Struggle for Radio Australia. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995. 336 pp. $75.00 (cloth), $29.95 (paper).

Joan Beaumont (ed.). Australia's War 1914–18. St. Leonards: Allen & Unwin, 1995. xxii + 195 pp. $19.95 (paper).

Peter Jennings. Searching for Insecurity: Why the ‘Secure Australia Project’ is Wrong About Defence. West Perth: Institute of Public Affairs, 1994. vi + 68 pp. $14.00 (paper).

Bjorn Hagelin. Arm in Arm: Swedish‐Australian Military Trade and Cooperation. Canberra: Peace Research Centre Monograph No.15, Australian National University, 1994. x + 164 pp. $15.00.     

Vichy's Mass Firing of Women Teachers of Colour in the French Caribbean and its Consequences1

This article examines the application to Martinique and Guadeloupe of Vichy's sexist law of 11 October 1940, relating to the employment of women and its impact on female teachers. We argue that Vichy showed greater zeal in applying the new regime's patriarchal law on women's work in the Caribbean than in mainland France. We examine in detail the 11 October 1940 law and the modalities of its application in the metropole and in the Caribbean, its manipulation by various actors and the arguments mobilized over the course of its promulgation in a West Indian context. Next, we consider to what degree female Caribbean teachers were impacted by these measures and analyse some of the underlying causes for their dismissal. We highlight the broader social and administrative transformations into which this particular purge fitted. Finally, we underscore the agency of fired schoolteachers as well as their resilience.     

The Role of Different Raw Materials in Lithic Technology and Settlement Patterns During the Middle Stone Age of Southern Africa

African Archaeological Review - The study of raw materials is an essential step in lithic analysis, regardless of the age, provenance, and technology of the assemblages. As in many other contexts...     

Pyrophyllite formation in the thermal aureole of a hydrothermal system in the Lower Saxony Basin,Germany

A combined clay mineralogical, fluid inclusion, and K‐Ar study of Upper Jurassic metasediments at the Gehn (Lower Saxony Basin, Germany) provides evidence for a transient hydrothermal event during Upper Cretaceous basin inversion centered on a prominent gravimetric anomaly. Kaolinite and smectite in Oxfordian pelitic parent rocks that cap a deltaic sandstone unit were locally transformed into pyrophyllite, 2M₁ illite, R3 illite–smectite, chlorite, and berthierine at the Ueffeln quarry. The pyrophyllite‐bearing metapelites lack bedding‐parallel preferred orientation of sheet silicates and experienced peak temperatures of about 260–270°C consistent with microthermometric data on quartz veins in the underlying silicified sandstones. The presence of expandable layers in illite–smectite and high Kübler Index values indicate that the thermal event was rather short‐lived. K‐Ar dating of the <0.2 μm fraction of the pyrophyllite‐bearing Ueffeln metapelite yields a maximum illitization age of 117 ± 2 Ma. Lower trapping temperatures of aqueous fluid inclusions in quartz veins and the absence of pyrophyllite in metapelites of the Frettberg quarry in a distance of about 2.5 km from the Ueffeln quarry infer maximum paleotemperatures of only 220°C. The highly localized thermal anomaly at Ueffeln suggests fault‐controlled fluid migration and heat transfer that provided a thermal aureole for pyrophyllite formation in the metapelites rather than metamorphism due to deep burial. A pH neutral hydrothermal fluid that formed by devolatilization reactions or less likely by mixing of meteoric and marine waters that interacted at depth with shales is indicated by the low salinity (3–5 wt. % NaCl equiv.) of aqueous inclusions, their coexistence with methane–carbon dioxide‐dominated gas inclusions as well as carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen isotope data. The upwelling zone of hydrothermal fluids and the thermal maximum is centered on a gravimetric anomaly interpreted as an igneous intrusion (‘Bramsche Massif’) providing the heat source for the intrabasinal hydrothermal system.