The Politics of 'Eurocratic' Structure and the New European Agencies

The establishment of agencies at the European level is one of the most notable recent developments in EU regulatory policy. This article examines how politics has shaped the design of EU regulatory agencies. Building on the American politics literature on delegation, the article explains how principal-agent concerns and political compromise have influenced agency design in the EU context; shows how conflicts between the EU's primary legislative actors - the Council and the Parliament - and its primary executive actor - the Commission - have influenced the design of new bureaucratic agencies; and discusses how the growing power of the European Parliament as a political principal has changed the politics of agency design.     

A ‘Talent for Bureaucracy’: A.F. Davies and the Analysis of Government in Australia*

In an address in 2003, Senator Kim Carr cited A.F. Davies' much‐quoted observation that Australians have ‘a characteristic talent for bureaucracy’ (Carr 2003: 3). He referred to the achievements of bureaucrats like Nugget Coombs, then went on to discuss questions of accountability, values and political control in the Australian public service. How could the public service be responsive and responsible, and contribute to the maintenance of a democratic society, in today's world? Certainly, these were core concerns of Davies, as Walter argues in an insightful article (1999). Davies, Walter argues, ‘was concerned, throughout his career, with the links between bureaucracy and democracy’ (1999, 25), fearful that the life‐world is increasingly being structured by expertise, and in the domain of the experts, there is little room for individual voice, for passion, or for democratic control. Davies' concerns, and those of Carr and Walter, raise important questions about the way in which we understand the structure of government, the significance of our changing understanding for the democratic ideal, and the implications of these changes for social scientists.     

Mainstreaming populist discourse: the race-conscious legacy of neo-populist parties in Australia and Italy

Curran examines the political legacy of far-right neo-populist parties in Australia and Italy. She argues that assessments of their ‘success’ need to extend beyond the electoral decline or organizational implosion of the parties themselves. An important measure of their impact is the influence they have exerted on mainstream political discourse and styles of communication. That they have been successful in having such an impact is well illustrated in the politically expedient adoption of race-conscious, anti-immigration and anti-asylum policies in Australia and Italy. Curran examines the influence of Pauline Hanson’s One Nation party and Umberto Bossi’s Lega Nord (Northern League) on the mainstreaming of populist discourse in these two countries. She focuses on some of the populist themes and styles embraced by the Australian political leader John Howard and his Italian counterpart Silvio Berlusconi, and she concludes that, regardless of their political fragility or outright demise, these far-right neo-populist parties have been successful in injecting populist themes and prejudices into the mainstream political discourse in their respective countries.     

Building capacity in indigenous governance: Comparing the Australian and American experiences

This paper compares key aspects of governance structures for Indigenous populations in the United States and Australia. The paper focuses on policy coordination and administration, in particular the nodes of decision-making in the two countries in relation to government contracting and accountability. The U.S. approach to funding Indigenous organizations stems from the 1975 Indian Self-Determination and Education Act and its subsequent expansions. Through the development of contracting into permanent compacting via block grants, this approach builds established nodes of Indigenous government and facilitates whole-of-government coherence at the level of the American Indian tribe. The U.S. approach seems correlated with better performance and may lighten bureaucratic loads over the long term. The Australian model, on the other hand, seeks to create whole-of-government coherence through top-down financial accountability in a way that hampers the development of Indigenous political capacity. The paper traces the development of these practices through time and illustrates how they contribute to the fragmentation rather than growth of Indigenous political capacities. It suggests ways the Australian model could be improved even in the absence of fundamental reform by drawing on the contracting-to-compacting framework of longstanding U.S. practices.     

Australia's New Federalism: Recipes for Marble Cakes

In July of 1990, the prime minister of Australia announced aprogram to achieve a closer partnership between the three levelsof government. His concern was the degree of bureaucratic overlapin the Australian federation and the hindrances to mobility,portability, and uniformity which made the Australian economymore balkanized than Europe post-1992. The announcement capitalizedon dissatisfaction with Australian federalism that had beengrowing in the 1970s and 1980s, and its timing coincided witha range of catalysts making the current climate favorable forchange. The new federalism unleashed a process of review andreform across some forty program or subprogram areas over aneighteen-month period with a prime objective to attain roleclarification for the three levels of government in shared functionalareas, somewhat akin to the German horizontal model of federalrole allocation. The process survived a political challengethat toppled the prime minister, aspects of the new federalismforming a key element of that challenge. Constitutional changeis also part of the agenda and already the Australian experienceholds a number of lessons for other federal systems.     

Australia and the China Threat: managing ambiguity

A China Threat – the fear of being taken over by China and the Chinese – has been an ever present in the politics of Australia since even before there was a Commonwealth of Australia. It was both a major cause of Federation in 1901 and a determinant of Australia's foreign policy thereafter. In the last 20 years, concerns about China have come to focus less on migration and more on economic integration and China's political influence. There are as always distinct paradoxes in the China Threat. It may be a useful vehicle for making a political point at election time but China has a place in the Australian economy that has led Australia's leaders to at least modify their resistance once in office.     

Political Management in Australia: The Case of the Northern Territory

This article reviews the evolution of administrative arrangements in the Northern Territory since the 1970s, covering both the devolutionary phase and, with somewhat more emphasis, the self-government period since 1978. The article centres on the theme of political management which, as in the recent work by Halligan and Power (1992), has become a major focus in the study of Australian administrative reform. Political management involves a 'modernising reform agenda. internal in orientation and concerned mainly with making the organizational and human resources of the executive branch more responsive to the priorities of superordinates' (Halligan and Power 1992: 249). Particular attention here is given to the evolving pattern of relationships between the political and bureaucratic arms of the Northern Territory executive.     

Cold War Insecurities and the Curious Case of John Strachey

When Socialist intellectual John Strachey was appointed as Secretary of State for War in 1950, his pre-war record as a Marxist writer with close connections to the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) became a matter of public debate. A bitter campaign was run against him in the Beaverbrook press, and some members of the US defense and nuclear establishment pressed for an embargo on sensitive information being passed to the UK War Office. American suspicion of the political reliability of the Labour government was heightened by the appointment, but this does not explain how and why some Americans were so hostile to Strachey. The FBI's dossier on his pre-war activities, circulated amongst his American critics, documented Strachey's supposed secret membership of the CPGB's Central Committee. MI5 and Special Branch files show that this supposition was based on faulty intelligence. The readiness of American anti-Soviet protagonists to lend credence to such suspicions contrasts with the relaxed view of Strachey's past that was taken in Whitehall. Both positions were characteristic of their time, and of this stage in the Anglo-American alliance. This paper explores the ways in which American insecurities and a British climate of tolerance towards fellow travellers shaped the way that episode played out.     

A double agent down under: Australian security and the infiltration of the left

Because of its clandestine character, the world of the undercover agent has remained murky. This article attempts to illuminate this shadowy feature of intelligence operations. It examines the activities of one double agent, the Czech-born Maximilian Wechsler, who in the early 1970s successfully infiltrated two socialist organizations. Wechsler was engaged by the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation. However, he was ‘unreliable’: he came in from the cold and went public. The article uses his exposés to recreate his undercover role. It seeks to throw some light on the recruitment methods of ASIO, on the techniques of infiltration, on the relationship between ASIO and the Liberal Party during a period of political volatility in Australia, and on the contradictory position of the Labor Government towards the security services.     

An Antipodean History of Interpretation

In this paper, we explore the connections between intepretivism's core and its peripheries in both geographical and epistemological terms, by tracing the relationship between interpretivism and Australian political scholarship. In this task, we draw on some of the most celebrated and influential work on Australian politics—by political scientists but before them historians and anthropologists—to show how the approach typically undertaken by these researchers echoes key tenets of interpretivism, especially through an interest in subjective beliefs and experiences, a desire to uncover and bring to life richly contextualised detail, and a commitment to the abductive linking of theory and practice. As such, we suggest that the spread of this counter identity to interpretive researchers in Australia risks manufacturing a sense of methodological antipathy, marginalising the work of interpretivists from mainstream political scholarship.     

Network monarchy and legitimacy crises in Thailand

Abstract

This article argues that widely used ideas such as bureaucratic polity, constitutional monarchy, transitional democracy and political reform fail to characterize accurately the recent politics of Thailand. Instead, Thai politics are best understood in terms of political networks. The leading network of the period 1973–2001 was centred on the palace, and is here termed ‘network monarchy’. Network monarchy involved active interventions in the political process by the Thai King and his proxies, notably former prime minister Prem Tinsulanond. Network monarchy developed considerable influence, but never achieved the conditions for domination. Instead, the palace was obliged to work with and through other political institutions, primarily the elected parliament. Although essentially conservative, network monarchy also took on liberal forms during the 1990s. Thailand experienced three major legitimacy crises after 1992; in each case, Prem acted on behalf of the palace to restore political equilibrium. However, these interventions reflected the growing weakness of the monarchy, especially following the landslide election victories of prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra in 2001 and 2005. Thaksin sought to displace network monarchy with new networks of his own devising. This article suggests that conventional understandings of the power of the monarchy need to be rethought.     

Back to the Future? Senior Federal Executives in the United States

Based on findings from the 1970s, research literature on senior government executives emphasized a growing integration of politics and administration. This integration was reflected in what we called the "Image IV" bureaucrat wherein political role traits combined with those of traditional bureaucratic ones. Although this was by no means a dominant trend, we were led to speculate that traditional divisions between political and bureaucratic roles were eroding. Data gathered from the 1980s and 1990s, however, lead us to infer that divisions between political and bureaucratic roles have reasserted themselves and that integration between them is being diminished rather than strengthened. We conclude that this may be because in an era of governmental austerity the demand for executive policy entrepreneurs has slackened while the political needs have shifted to those of managerial control over an inertial or even contracting state.     

The Brownlow Committee, Regulation, and the Presidency: Seventy Years Later

Analyzing Robert E. Cushman's study within the context of the Brownlow Report substantiates the argument that the immediate failure of the committee's recommendations—and their influence in the longer term—is best explained within the conceptual framework of changing political orders in American political development. Seventy years later, the field has the historical perspective to see that the committee's work was buffeted by tensions between competing political orders. Today, far from being just an interesting episode in American public administration, we see that the Brownlow Committee's work on regulation, as much as work on executive organization, heralded and enabled a new era of presidential administration.     

HEALTH-CARE REFORM UNDER PRESIDENT CLINTON: ISSUES,IDEAS AND IMPLICATIONS

Abstract: President Clinton's proposals to reform health-care in the United States have stimulated unprecedented levels of discussion amongst stakeholders, commentators, policy analysts and the media. It seems obvious that there is a need to reform a system that consumes 14% of gross domestic product, yields only OECD-average morbidity and mortality rates and fails to provide coverage to millions of people. Nevertheless, forces against change are marshalling considerable resources in opposition to Clinton's proposals, and now that the November 1994 mid-term elections have routed the democrats in both the House of Representatives and the Senate, the belief is that his reforms will never be adopted in their original format. Some of the issues and ideas emanating from the American debate parallel trends in Australian health-care. Elements in transition include the switch from an input-to an outcomes-orientation, improving the quality of care, focusing on the customer and securing greater value-for-money. Unlike America, Australia has a limit on national health-care spending and this poses different challenges. However, the American debate is of vital interest to Australia. Australian and American hospitals are increasingly in competition to export services to South-East Asia. Of particular importance to Australia are: the extremely public nature of the American debate, which should be emulated, the fact that explicit rationing is now clearly on the international health-care agenda, the need to reconceptualise western culture's preoccupation with immortality, the need to alter economic incentives to health-care providers and the shift to outcomes measurement and effectiveness. Despite the comparatively healthy state of the Australian system, complacency should not be allowed to set in. Lessons for Australia from America are numerous, and it behoves us to monitor closely developments, trends and options arising from the Clinton-inspired debate.     

Carl J. Friedrich on Responsibility and Authority

Carl J. Friedrich’s concept of administrative responsibility is examined in his published works from 1935 to 1960. Friedrich’s idea of responsibility encompassed not only political and personal responsibility within the hierarchy of bureaucratic organizations, but also functional responsibility based on scientific knowledge and professional standards required by the reality of administrative discretion. Friedrich’s notion of responsibility is contrasted with that of Herman Finer, who espoused strict obedience to political and administrative superiors. An examination of the NOMOS series of edited volumes from the later stage of Friedrich’s career reflects the consistency of his views on responsibility and on the relationship of responsibility to authority based on reasoned communication. Friedrich’s optimism regarding such authority contrasts with Hannah Arendt’s view that authority is no longer an operative concept in modern society. Friedrich lays an important foundation for continued interest among public administrative scholars in the concept of administrative responsibility.     

Do Parents’ Life Experiences Affect the Political and Civic Participation of Their Children? The Case of Draft-Induced Military Service

Myriad studies show that politically-salient events influence civic and political engagement. Yet, on the other hand, decades of research indicate that familial factors mold political and civic dispositions early in life, before an individual experiences political events outside the family. Viewing these two lines of research together, we ask if individuals’ political and civic dispositions might be influenced not solely by their own experiences, but, also, by the experiences of those individuals who create their family environment—namely, their parents. Do parents’ life experiences—before the birth of their children—affect their offspring’s public engagement? To answer that question, we examine how the assignment of military service, via the Vietnam-era Selective Service Lotteries, affected rates of public participation among the children of draft-eligible men. Our analysis finds a negative relationship between a father’s probability of draft-induced military service and his offspring’s public participation. In addition to highlighting how parents’ life experiences can influence the social behavior of their children, this finding challenges the prevailing view that the Vietnam conflict did not contribute to declining civic engagement and it shows how experiences within bureaucratic institutions can yield long-standing effects on politically-relevant behaviors.     

A Political Science of Punishment: Francis Lieber and the Discipline of American Prisons

This article examines the history of political science in relation to the history of the prison. It considers how theories of the state in political science have assumed that proper states should punish with prisons, and traces these ideas to the work of Francis Lieber, the first academic political scientist in the USA. Because his ideas about prison reform were central to his conceptualization of the discipline as a science of punishment, his theory of the state is an understudied part of the history of mass incarceration. Lieber argued that the state had a moral duty to punish its citizens with the prison, and an obligation to manage the risks of democracy through the prison's principles of scientific certainty, less eligibility, and disciplinary solitude. By examining the life and work of Francis Lieber, this article offers new ways of thinking about political science's past, and its status as part of the history of the American prison.     

Friedrich Engels and the Origins of German Revisionism: Another Look

The precise nature of Friedrich Engels' theoretical role following Marx's death in 1883 has remained a hotly disputed topic among historians of socialist thought. However, despite their intellectual disagreements, the exponents of various perspectives frequently share a serious interpretive deficiency: the failure to anchor their readings of crucial texts in an analysis of specific political contexts. Situating Engels' later writings—his 1890s Letters on Historical Materialism, and his 1895 Introduction to Marx's The Class Struggles in France —within the dramatically changed political situation in fin de siècle Germany, this essay seeks to recast the entire gestalt of the quarrel over Engels' alleged revisionism by illuminating the historical and political framework that shaped his late Marxism and its theoretical premises.     

The Bureaucracy and Its Masters: The New Madisonian System in the US

The bureaucracy's masters have redesigned the American political system over the past 20 years. As before, checks and balances play a critical role. This time, however, relations between one branch of government (the bureaucracy) and the rest are decidedly and deliberately asymmetrical. While acknowledging the need for bureaucratic accountability, the author raises questions about a growing emphasis on highly coercive controls from above. Instead he recommends greater reliance on catalytic controls from below, which energize the bureaucracy without stifling bureaucratic creativity and eroding bureaucratic integrity.