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.     

New South Wales: an accidental case of semi-parliamentarism?

This response to Ganghof, Sebastian Eppner and Alexander Pörschke’s (GEP’s) challenging new account of government systems focuses on the extent to which their typology and arguments forces a reassessment of executive-legislature relations in Australia and particularly in New South Wales. First, I identify when and how different Australian governments might be claimed to have adopted their ‘semi-parliamentary’ model. Second, I question their claim that NSW constitutes an ‘ideal type’ case of semi-parliamentarism. Third, I explore the expectations of leading politicians in the 1970s about what would change following the reforms to the NSW Legislative Council (NSW LC), which in GEP’s terms shifted NSW from a parliamentary to a semi-parliamentary system. While the reforms were controversial, they were not seen as shifting NSW from parliamentary politics to some other type of government system. Fourth, I briefly explore the patterns of increased legislative activity and executive scrutiny exercised by the NSW LC after 1978, arguing that they are consistent with GEP’s concept of semi-parliamentarism. I conclude that semi-parliamentarism in NSW has been an accidental, unconscious development.     

Shopping or Specialization? Venue Targeting among Nonprofits Engaged in Advocacy

Studies of venue shopping have typically analyzed the case of an individual advocacy group or issue campaign rather than comparing venue strategies across multiple groups. Moreover, this literature focuses on interest groups and advocacy coalitions whose principal mandate is to influence public policy. Using original data, we test theories of venue selection among nonprofit organizations that report engaging in policy processes but the majority of which do not self‐identify as an advocacy group. Our analyses explore the “where” of nonprofit advocacy across three different venue types: branch (executive, legislative), domain (bureaucracy, elected officials), and level of government (local, state, federal). Like interest groups, we find that nonprofits shop among both executive and legislative branches and among elected and bureaucratic domains; however, they tend to specialize in one level of government. Geographic scope and revenue source predicted venue targeting, but most other organizational characteristics including age, capacity, and structure did not.     

Political Staff in Executive Government: Conceptualising and Mapping Roles within the Core Executive

Political advisers are attracting increasing attention in Westminster jurisdictions. Typically, scholars focus on the corrosive impact they allegedly have on elements of Westminster convention and practice. We argue that a concern with accountability detracts from other important matters, including understanding and theorising ministerial advisers' roles. In this article we address these issues using primary data from a survey of ministerial advisers in New Zealand. We draw on Maley's typology to classify advisers' activities according to the contribution they make to executive government policy-making. We then theorise these activities through the lens of the core executive. We conclude that ministerial advisers are increasingly important actors in governing environments characterised by complex resource dependencies, modes of operation that are as often relational as they are hierarchical, and bargaining relationships that are often positive and not zero-sum in nature.     

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.