The executive lawmaking agenda: Political parties,prime ministers,and policy change in Australia

In Westminster systems, governments enjoy a privileged position in the lawmaking process that they can use to deliver on their campaign promises and achieve their policy goals. What policy areas do governments seek to affect through lawmaking? How stable is the executive lawmaking agenda? How responsive is that agenda to changes triggered by elections or by transitions in prime minister? This study uses a dataset of 3982 Australian bills introduced between 2000 and 2017 to answer these questions. While it finds considerable stability in the policy content of executive lawmaking agendas, the analysis also indicates that Australia's executive lawmaking agenda is more responsive to changes in prime minister than to changes in the party in power. As the first application of the comparative policy agendas approaches to government bills in Australia, this article offers new insights into executive lawmaking priorities during an especially turbulent period in Australian politics.     

When Does Government Listen to the Public? Voluntary Associations and Dynamic Agenda Representation in the United States

The aim of the article is to examine how the population size of voluntary associations affects the process through which the public's issue priorities are translated into policy priorities. We conduct a time series analysis of political attention in executive and legislative agendas at the U.S. federal level in the period 1971–2001, covering all issues addressed by the U.S. government. We show that the number of voluntary associations in a policy area has a positive conditioning effect on the link between public priorities and attention for the president's State of the Union Address. However, our results do not find a positive effect for voluntary associations at later stages of the policy cycle, which experience a higher degree of institutional friction. The findings underline the importance of distinguishing between different stages of policymaking when considering the impact of voluntary associations on dynamic agenda responsiveness.     

Collaborating with the Machines: A Hybrid Method for Classifying Policy Documents

Governments produce vast and growing quantities of freely available text: laws, rules, budgets, press releases, and so forth. This information flood is facilitating important, growing research programs in policy and public administration. However, tightening research budgets and the information's vast scale forces political science and public policy to aspire to do more with less. Meeting this challenge means applied researchers must innovate. This article makes two contributions for practical text coding—the process of sorting government text into researcher-defined coding schemes. First, we propose a method of combining human coding with automated computer classification for large data sets. Second, we present a well-known algorithm for automated text classification, the Naïve Bayes classifier, and provide software for working with it. We argue and provide evidence that this method can help applied researchers using human coders to get more from their research budgets, and we demonstrate the method using classical examples from the study of policy agendas.     

Widespread Policy Disruption: Terrorism, Public Risks, and Homeland Security

We address theoretical and empirical aspects of policy disruptions that affect multiple areas of policymaking. Our theorizing leads us to consider the effects of widespread disruptions in gaining the attention of elected officials, in affecting policymaking, and in reshaping the involvement of federal agencies. Our empirical analyses concern the threat of terrorism in the United States and its implications for public risk subsystems over the past 25 years. Our analyses of the attention of policymakers and resultant policymaking volatility show selective patterns of subsystem disruption related to the threat of terrorism. We show that capturing the attention of policymakers in multiple subsystems is insufficient to motivate heightened levels of policymaking across the board. In addition, we find more muted impacts for federal agency involvement than might have been expected from the massive reorganization that created the Department of Homeland Security. More generally, the disjunctions we observe show the powerful influence of policy subsystems in buffering against widespread policy disruptions.     

The Problem in Policy: Representations of Asia Literacy in Australian Education for the Asian Century

This paper examines the strategic arguments articulated in calls for the teaching and learning of Asia in schools. “Asia literacy” is currently framed as a necessary “solution” for Australian education, but acceptance of this “solution” into the mainstream educational policy agenda has been problematised as a neoliberal and neocolonial construct. Subsequent policy debate indicates the dominance of an economic rationale that is seemingly impossible to resist. This paper suggests that critical policy approaches can be used to identify alternatives to these dominant frameworks, which imagine Asia literacy in alternate ways. Re-imagining the “solution” offers three alternatives: working within an economic agenda; restructuring Asia literacy away from a distinct policy agenda; and treating policy gaps as spaces in which teachers can generate locally relevant possibilities.     

Can You Hear us Now? Voices from the Margin: Using Indigenous Methodologies in Geographic Research

Indigenous methodologies are an alternative way of thinking about research processes. Although these methodologies vary according to the ways in which different Indigenous communities express their own unique knowledge systems, they do have common traits. This article argues that research on Indigenous issues should be carried out in a manner which is respectful and ethically sound from an Indigenous perspective. This naturally challenges Western research paradigms, yet it also affords opportunities to contribute to the body of knowledge about Indigenous peoples. It is further argued that providing a mechanism for Indigenous peoples to participate in and direct these research agendas ensures that their communal needs are met, and that geographers then learn how to build ethical research relationships with them. Indigenous methodologies do not privilege Indigenous researchers because of their Indigeneity, since there are many ‘insider’ views, and these are thus suitable for both Indigenous and non‐Indigenous researchers. However, there is a difference between research done within an Indigenous context using Western methodologies and research done using Indigenous methodologies which integrates Indigenous voices. This paper will discuss those differences while presenting a historical context of research on Indigenous peoples, providing further insights into what Indigenous methodologies entail, and proposing ways in which the academy can create space for this discourse.     

Gender and Agenda Diversity: Cognitive Differences in Representatives’ Information Processing

A growing body of research examines the role of information processing on decision making in a variety of organizational settings such as authoritarian and democratic governments, subnational organizations, and market systems. Although an increasing number of scholars point to the importance of cognitive capacities of individuals in explaining macrophenomena, scant attention has been devoted to how individual human beings process incoming information. Utilizing original datasets of parliamentary speeches and the biographies of 1,100 members of parliament (MPs) who served in the Grand National Assembly of Turkey between 2002 and 2011, I explore female–male differences in MPs’ issue attention in the parliament. Drawing together the literatures on political agenda setting, gender studies, and cognitive psychology, I argue that women’s higher potential for empathic response to societal issues (i.e., lower cognitive threshold of urgency for social problems) leads them to speak about a wider range of issues facing society and find strong support for this hypothesis. The conclusion considers potential implications of these findings.     

What Are Policy Punctuations? Large Changes in the Legislative Agenda of the UK Government, 1911–2008

In this article, we argue that policy punctuations differ from each other in ways that reflect distinct types of political change. We identify three main kinds. The first are procedural changes that have unique unrelated policies within the same issue area. Within the remaining large policy changes, high‐salience punctuations are associated with increased attention in the media, whereas low‐salience punctuations do not attract such scrutiny. The analysis applies the typology to data from the UK Policy Agendas Project, identifying punctuations from the content of Acts of the UK Parliament between 1911 and 2008. Using evidence from the historical record and the data series, the analysis places each observation within the typology. We claim that the typology has a more general application and could be replicated in other jurisdictions and time periods. We conclude that attention to the historical record and qualitative studies of punctuations can complement and inform the analysis of aggregate data series.     

The opinion–policy link in Australia

Whether or not policy is responsive to public opinion is central to questions of representation. Democracy by many accounts is premised on there being a strong correspondence between public opinion and policy. This link has not, however, been examined in detail in Australia. This article examines the policy–opinion link in a more robust way than that has previously been achieved in Australia, through the use of legislative data from the Australian Policy Agendas Project (APAP) and public opinion data from Roy Morgan. The article asks: is policy congruent with public opinion in Australia? In addressing this question, we examine to what extent policy accords with the preferences of the public. This in turn provides us with some answers about how representative Australian democracy is, as well as contributing to an international debate about the responsiveness of policy to public opinion.

政策是否要对舆论负责,这是代表制的核心问题。民主的前提往往就在于舆论和政策之间的息息相通。但在澳大利亚,人们并没有仔细地研究过二者间的关联。本文根据澳大利亚政策议题计划提供的立法资料以及罗伊摩根提供的舆情资料,对政策—舆论关联做了比以往充分多的研究。本文试问：政策与舆论在澳大利亚是否一致？我们考察了政策在多大程度上符合民意。这也为澳大利亚民主在多大程度上具有代表性的问题提供了答案,对于国际上争论政策对民意的回应问题也具有参考意义。。