Failing to live up to the promise: the politics of equal pay in ‘new’ workplace and industrial relations institutions

Workplace and industrial relations regulations are key sites for policy intervention to address Australia's gender pay gap, which, at 15.3 per cent, is almost as large as it was in 1997. In both the Fair Work Act 2009 (Cth) and the Workplace Gender Equality Act 2012 (Cth) the goal of equal pay has a more central place than it did in predecessor legislation. In particular, the Fair Work Act has the potential to deliver more gender-equitable wage structures through addressing systemic gender-based undervaluation at the industry level. Adopting a feminist institutional approach this article examines equal pay policy in the operations of workplace and industrial relations regulation to ask why, despite some recent successes, this potential appears unlikely to be realised.     

Avoiding Blame—A Comprehensive Framework and the Australian Home Insulation Program Fiasco

It is widely acknowledged in the literature that the study of blame avoidance behavior (BAB) exhibited by public officials is scattered and unconcentrated, and that, for the most part, it neglects both contextual factors and comparative research. These deficits inhibit the production of the kind of generalized findings necessary to better understand potential consequences for the policy process and the workings of political systems. We address these deficits by developing a framework that takes stock of blame avoidance research, clarifies the explanatory potential of contextual factors, and allows for a systematic context‐sensitive cross‐case analysis. For illustrative purposes, the framework is applied to the Home Insulation Program in Australia as a critical case. This case reveals the explanatory potential of contextual factors for the understanding of BAB and the consequences thereof. We conclude by stating the advantages of our framework and explain how it can be used for comparative research.     

Institutions,informality, and influence: explaining nuclear cooperation in the Australia-US alliance

ABSTRACT

Nuclear cooperation has been a consistent feature of the Australia-US alliance. In the 1950s and 1960s, Canberra explored transferring US nuclear weapons to Australian forces operating in Southeast Asia. Since the 1960s, Australian governments have supported hosting joint facilities that contribute to America’s ability to execute global nuclear operations. And Australia has regularly invoked the nuclear umbrella as part of the alliance. We explain the key sources of nuclear cooperation in the alliance by leveraging realist and institutionalist theories of alliance cooperation. While realism explains limits to US nuclear commitments in the 1950s, institutional explanations are more relevant in pinpointing the sources of nuclear cooperation and in explaining why Australia has often achieved its policy preferences as the junior partner.     

海外中国劳工保护制度的演变与未来展望--基于历史制度主义视角的分析

论文梳理了海外中国劳工保护制度变迁的内在逻辑,探讨了海外中国劳工保护制度变迁的动力机制和新形势下创新与提升的应对举措。研究显示:海外中国劳工保护制度经历起步探索期、规范建制期、调整拓展期、发展完善期的演进轨迹,展示出一个清晰和完整的兼有历时性与共时性的制度谱系。海外中国劳工保护制度演进有五种驱动力:理念转变、国内发展需要、国家实力提升、国际形势转变以及关键节点催化。海外中国劳工保护是我国海外利益维护的重要组成部分。在新冠肺炎疫情肆虐全球背景下,基于历史制度主义视角来重新审视海外中国劳工保护制度的演变具有特别重要的意义。     

New institutionalism,critical junctures and post-crisis policy reform

Two accounts of change dominate with new institutional literature. The first emphasises ‘punctuated equilibria’ in which change is shock-driven, sudden and radical enough to loosen path dependencies. The second emphasises a more gradual-incrementalism and a view of change that is more or less constant. This article argues that neither account is suitable for the policy scholar interested in understanding the complexity of a post-crisis reform period and that a synthesis between these two views would better serve those interested in the nuance of post-crisis change. The article provides this synthesis in the form of a reconceptualization of the critical juncture. This reconceptualization merges the punctuated equilibrium and the gradual-incremental views and, in doing so, presents a much more realistic institutional account of the fine print of policy change post-crisis. The reconceptualization is subsequently justified empirically through the analysis of a specific post-crisis reform period (the Queensland floods of 2010–11).     

Political Time in a Westminster Democracy: The Canadian Case

Stephen Skowronek’s idea of political time is tested by applying it to Canada. Skowronek identified a recurring cycle in US presidential politics, in which a coalition was forged around a distinctive set of ideas, dominated the political scene, and then crumbled, making way for a new coalition; a president’s ability to act as an agent of change depended on his place in this cycle. The concept of political time offers insights for the study of Westminster democracies, but Skowronek’s typology cannot be transplanted from the US to the Canadian context. A political orthodoxy cannot be easily identified in Canada, and prime ministers cannot be clearly labeled as affiliated with or opposed to the ideas of a given era. Some seem determined to play a corrective role, accepting much of the orthodoxy but reconstructing some elements of it. This problem of classification is amplified by the very short term of some prime ministers, by the very long term of others, and by a multiparty system, which has meant that Canadians often end up with prime ministers who are out of synch with the dominant ideas of their age. When applying Skowronek’s ideas to Canada, they emerge as overly structural and not sensitive enough to the possibility that leaders can fail to perform according to type.     

Whose Permits? The Tenacity of Permissive Development Control in Flanders

This paper explains how a permissive planning permit system is embedded in Belgian/Flemish society and how this contributes to urban sprawl. We base our analysis on an institutionalist approach as developed in previous and current research and analyse the Flemish planning permit system since 1962 as one of different interacting planning systems, all (re)produced, maintained, transformed and struggled over by specific individual and collective actors and shaped by a range of institutional dynamics. The analysis shows how in the dynamics of the Flemish planning permit system, a general struggle between actors defending property-based private initiative and actors arguing for collective action in space is especially apparent. In this struggle, property ownership expressed through a permissive planning permit system and limited enforcement of regulations is seen to be predominant, especially in the 1960s, 1980s and 2000s. Changes in the 1990s, making the planning permit system more strict, have partly and momentarily challenged the institutional frame which structures the predominant planning permit practice, but left the logic of individual property largely untouched. Today, the Flemish planning permit system has again been reoriented towards the protection of private property, which hampers the capacity of government to implement a coherent spatial policy.     

Breaking promises and raising taxes: rhetorical path dependence and policy dysfunction in time

Where historical institutionalists have stressed the path-dependent efficiencies that stabilise policy orders, their rationalist assumptions have increasingly obscured the scope for instability. To redress such oversights, I integrate historical institutionalist insights regarding incremental change with discursive institutionalist analyses of interpretive tensions in a way that accords with Daniel Kahneman’s analyses of shifting ‘fast’/principled and ‘slow’/cognitive biases. The resulting framework posits that initial principled constructions of policy ideas are undermined where their subsequent ‘intellectual conversion’ limits flexibility and legitimacy. Empirically, I contrast the practices of George HW Bush and John Howard, as each broke anti-tax promises. Bush’s intellectual justifications undermined his credibility, but Howard’s principled justifications enabled his success. This analysis has implications for theories of institutional agency and dysfunction.     

Agency Evolution, New Institutionalism, and 'Hybrid' Policy Domains: Lessons from the 'Greening' of the U.S. Military

Neoinstitutionalists applying the logic of rational choice institutionalism have leavened our understanding of public agency design and evolution in the domestic and national security policy domains. This paper seeks to advance theory building in empirically grounded ways by assessing the explanatory power of an important theoretical perspective (rational choice institutionalism), in an understudied "hybrid" policy domain where domestic and national security aims interact (domestic environmental policy and national security policy), and in an organizational type (the U.S. military) that has drawn scant attention from students of bureaucracy in political science, public administration, or public management. Analysis of three major efforts to green the U.S. military suggests that the patterns of politics accompanying agency evolution involving hybrid policy domains differ from domestic and national security domains in ways that limit the generalizability of rational choice institutionalism.