Does the economy matter? Economic perceptions and the vote in Australia

Does the economy matter for how Australians vote in federal elections? International studies show an association between economic performance and elections, but research on Australia finds that the impact of the economy on voting is modest. What explains this relative absence of economic voting? How do Australians perceive the economy? And how do economic perceptions inform their decisions at the polls? Our results confirm the lack of an association between economic indicators and incumbent vote shares. Analyses of survey data from 1996 to 2013 show that political factors condition perceptions of economic performance, while preferences for – and perceptions of – the government's unified control over economic policy shape the influence of economic perceptions on voter choice. Overall, responsibility attributions are the key to economic voting in Australia.     

Capitalism,Inequality and Ideology in Singapore: New Challenges for the Ruling Party

Amidst popular concerns about rising inequalities and living costs, reduced social mobility and inadequate public infrastructure, Singapore’s ruling People’s Action Party (PAP) suffered significant declines in electoral support in the 2006 and 2011 general elections before regaining support at the 2015 polls. Importantly, these concerns reflect the intensification of contradictions inherent to Singapore’s model of capitalist development. This juncture in the city-state’s political economy has been conducive to greater scrutiny of core PAP ideological notions about the perils of “Western” social welfare and the moral and functional advantages of non-democratic institutions of political accountability and representation. The PAP has responded with creative new defences of its core ideologies in conjunction with social spending boosts, a strategy that will be further tested following the 2015 election.     

Encounters and (in)tolerance: perceptions of legality and the regulation of space

Modern western societies are becoming increasingly diverse, undergoing rapid demographic change as a product of new patterns of migration driven by processes of globalization. As populations and cultures have become more heterogeneous in this way, public space has been increasingly defined as a space of encounter. The growing focus on the significance of everyday contact with difference raises questions about the frameworks within which such encounters occur and, specifically, the extent to which incidental encounters are shaped or regulated by perceptions of formal obligations to comply with legislative frameworks, or informal expectations about appropriate ways of behaving in public space. Using original empirical data about what ordinary people think about equality laws, the paper contributes to social geographies by considering the spatial sensitivities and regulatory frameworks that shape encounters with difference.     

Landscapes at the Periphery of Glacierization – Retrospect and Prospect

This paper reviews the evolution of palaeoglaciological reconstructions in regions at the periphery of glacierization, where an improved understanding of the role of glacial thermal regime has helped refine the delimitation of ice sheet maxima. Also significant has been the recognition in numerical models that some areas, especially ice sheet marginal zones, are subject to short periods of ice occupancy and hence that glacial landsystem signatures can be extremely subtle. This is compounded wherever cold-based conditions dominate during early stages of ice sheet recession, giving rise to a landform imprint typical of peripheral regions and hence often misinterpreted as unglaciated or glaciated only by older glaciations. Subtle landform imprints include meltwater channels, thin glacigenic veneers or scattered erratics and modified tors. More substantial glacigenic landform-sediment assemblages (‘drift belts’) do not always represent ice sheet maxima but instead may record significant changes in thermal regime, possibly linked to periods of ice-marginal stabilization. Some upland areas that lie beyond the traditionally demarcated limits of glaciation (e.g. Dartmoor in SW England) may contain subtle evidence of satellite ice cap development which has been overlooked due to the strong periglacial landform signature.     

Between resentment and aid: German and Austrian psychiatrist and neurologist refugees in Great Britain since 1933

ABSTRACT

This article is a historiographical exploration of the experiences that German and Austrian émigré psychiatrists and neurologists made in Great Britain since 1933, after the Nazi Governments in Central Europe had ousted them from their positions. When placing these occurrences in a wider historiographical perspective, the in-depth analysis provided here also describes the living and working conditions of the refugee neuroscientists on the British Isles. In particular, it looks at the very elements and issues that influenced the international forced migration of physicians and psychiatrists during the 1930s and 1940s. Only a fraction of refugee neuroscientists had however been admitted to Britain. Those lucky ones were assisted by a number of charitable, local, and academic organizations. This article investigates the rather lethargic attitude of the British government and medical circles towards German-speaking Jewish refugee neuroscientists who wished to escape Nazi Germany. It will also analyze the help that those refugees received from the academic establishment and British Jewish organizations, while likewise examining the level and extent of the relationship between social and scientific resentments in Great Britain. A special consideration will be given to the aid programs that had already began in the first year after the Nazis had seized power in Germany, with the foundation of the British Assistance Council by Sir William Henry Beveridge (1879–1963) in 1933.     

El Roto: A political cartoonist in late capitalist Spain

ABSTRACT

Under the pseudonym of El Roto, Andrés Rábago draws editorial cartoons for El País newspaper on an almost daily basis. Unlike other cartoonists, his political satire rarely depicts real politicians or celebrities but instead focuses on social types. This technique helps him to distance himself from current events as presented by the media and signal the more general causes of political conflicts. This article explores cartoons from recent years in which El Roto represents and interprets manifestations of the economy in everyday life. I show that his editorial cartoons aim to unmask the ideological narratives that attempt to naturalize capitalism as the only possible economic system. His “ideology critique” can thus be described as a political intervention to interrupt the creation and shaping of systems of representation that legitimize this economic and cultural hegemony. This article offers a content analysis of some of El Roto's most relevant cartoons, identifying the most recurrent themes and techniques used in order to consider his position as a cartoonist in Spanish politics.     

In the Nature of the Non‐City: Expanded Infrastructural Networks and the Political Ecology of Planetary Urbanisation

This paper proposes extending Urban Political Ecology's (UPE) ideas about the urbanisation of nature in order to include the geographical imprints of expanding, global metabolic flows of matter, energy and capital. It does so through the analysis of Huasco, a small agricultural village in northern Chile that has been overburdened with massive energy undertakings aimed at powering the operations of mines that supply raw materials to international markets. Like the sewage and technological networks that feed the life of cities, the paper argues that Huasco—as a metabolic vehicle of planetary urbanisation—has also been hidden from view, and thus the fetishisation of urban infrastructural networks initially theorised by UPE, has been ratcheted‐up to the global level by the mediating powers of neoliberalising capitalism. Just as the socio‐material arrangements that facilitate the smooth functioning of the modern city and household are riddled with glitches and exclusions, the paper suggests that globally up‐scaled infrastructures reveal even larger contradictions that put into jeopardy the very premises upon which the ongoing commodification of nature is grounded.     

The Power to Plunder: Rethinking Land Grabbing in Latin America

In this paper I rethink land grabbing in Latin America by decentering the rhetoric of novelty and the tendency to focus on large‐scale land transactions. To do this, I attend to the longevity of racial thinking bound up in everyday forms of land control. I look at the ways race is salient in the making of land and territorial arrangements. Drawing on my own research in Honduras and Panama, I situate land grabbing in relation to a range of scholarly insights that disclose how the early postcolonial dichotomy of “civilization” and “savagery”, and its inherently whitening logics, re‐appear in contemporary development projects of biodiversity conservation, land administration, and residential tourism. I argue, therefore, that land grabbing is a longstanding process that is routinely operationalized through the state and naturalized through development practices that are underpinned by ongoing racial hierarchies.     

Exchange economies of late prehistoric eastern Sonora,Mexico: A re-evaluation based on provenance data analyses

This paper presents provenance data on mundane and rare artifact classes from eastern Sonora in order to revise interpretations of the political economy of late prehistoric Northwest Mexico. Previous researchers have argued that long-distance exchange was a predominantly elite activity utilized to generate economic wealth as a means to political ascendance. Data presented in this analysis contradict these previous models and indicate that all segments of society employed exchange to forge relationships for diverse reasons. Aspiring leaders rarely utilized unequal access to regionally acquired goods to attract local supporters. There is no evidence that foreign objects or symbolism imported from Mesoamerica were a component of aspirant leader strategies. Commoner households exchanged mundane artifacts to bank social capital with groups unlikely to undergo simultaneous social depredations. Overall, exchange and other data indicate a fairly balkanized landscape with few signs of elite offices.     

Competition and conflict in the Upper Belize River Valley: Insights from the ancient Maya minor center of Callar Creek,Belize

Political relationships typically entail competition and conflict. Within the ancient Maya world, the Upper Belize River Valley (UBRV) offers one example of an arena of intense political contestation, and recent investigations at the minor center of Callar Creek offer insights into this complex and occasionally antagonistic political landscape. During the Late and Terminal Classic periods (a.d. 600–900), for example, those living at the Callar Creek center appear to have affiliated themselves with the larger center of Buenavista, but not to have developed political ties with those in surrounding hinterland communities. Indeed, Callar Creek provides an example in which the political fortunes of a minor center and its surrounding hinterlands followed divergent paths. Furthermore, a termination event suggests that part of the Callar Creek center was purposefully destroyed by adversaries in the Terminal Classic period, and that discordant relationships in the UBRV at times turned violent.