A Cautionary Tale: Council Amalgamation in Tasmania and the Deloitte Access Economics Report

Contemporary Australian public policy has come to rely increasingly on technical reports produced by commercial consultants in contrast to the traditional approach, which employed disinterested public servants to generate the specialist information required to inform decision makers. This approach is fraught with problems, not least the fact that ‘hired guns’ have strong incentives to create the ‘answers’ sought by their employers. By way of a ‘cautionary tale’, this paper examines the empirical evidence adduced in favour of radical amalgamation of Tasmanian local authorities in Local Government Structural Reform in Tasmania, produced by Deloitte Access Economics (DAE) (2011), and commissioned by the Property Council of Tasmania. In particular, the paper provides a critical analysis of the econometric modelling undertaken in the DAE (2011) Report. We find that if the DAE model is re‐estimated – employing alternative functional forms – then the empirical evidence in support of Tasmania council merges evaporates.     

Materials and devices of the public: an introduction

Abstract

This introduction provides an overview of material- or device-centred approaches to the study of public participation, and articulates the theoretical contributions of the four papers that make up this special section. Set against the background of post-Foucauldian perspectives on the material dimensions of citizenship and engagement – perspectives that treat matter as a tacit, constituting force in the organization of collectives and are predominantly concerned with the fabrication of political subjects – we outline an approach that considers material engagement as a distinct mode of performing the public. The question, then, is how objects, devices, settings and materials acquire explicit political capacities, and how they serve to enact material participation as a specific public form. We discuss the connections between social studies of material participation and political theory, and define the contours of an empiricist approach to material publics, one that takes as its central cue that the values and criteria particular to these publics emerge as part of the process of their organization. Finally, we discuss four themes that connect the papers in this special section, namely their focus on (1) mundane technologies, (2) experimental devices and settings for material participation, (3) the dynamic of effort and comfort, and (4) the modes of containment and proliferation that characterize material publics.     

A comparative study of representations about disability in primary school children's drawings: a sociosemiotic approach

Over the past few years, perceptions about disability – at least at the theoretical level – have been shifted toward a more progressive approach, which stresses the social aspects of the construction of disability (social model) rather than personal limitations, as supported by the traditional disability approach (medical–individual model). Drawing upon the sociosemiotic approach as developed by Kress and van Leeuwen, the present study examines from a comparative perspective the representations about disability and people with disabilities, as emerging from the drawings produced by 4th grade Greek primary school children. The sample consists of two groups of children. Group A does not share the same school environment with schoolchildren with special education needs, while group B shares the same school surroundings with students attending a special education needs School. The comparative analysis of their drawings indicates that children of both groups reproduce the dominant meanings they receive from their direct social environment.     

Democratic legitimacy in regional economic organizations: the European Union in comparative perspective

Regional organizations have been widely criticized for lacking democratic legitimacy, but these criticisms have been rather ad hoc, concerned with single case studies and reliant on unclear standards or metrics. Are all organizations similarly deficient? And how does the European Union (EU), the target par excellence of the criticisms, fare in comparative perspective? In this paper, we take a first step towards answering these questions by leveraging the rich debate on the EU to identify several institutional dimensions of democratic legitimacy and operationalizing them for comparative analysis. We then investigate the most important regional economic organizations (REOs) in the world. Our findings are three-fold: (i) there is systematic variation across REOs, with a group doing rather well, one mixed, and one poorly; (ii) procedural dimensions fare better than those related to representation or local self-determination; (iii) no organization exhibits or lacks legitimacy in all dimensions. These results qualify the perception that democratic legitimacy deficits are indiscriminately pervasive and indicate that the EU belongs to the most democratically legitimate group.     

Solidarity as environmental justice in brownfields remediation

Abstract

What do individuals owe to affected communities in the name of environmental justice? Principal accounts of environmental justice have made inroads in developing a pluralistic and activist-led approach. Yet precisely because of their strengths, such accounts face three problems – indeterminacy, epistemology, and structure/agency – that hinder activism and widespread engagement and threaten to leave ‘every neighborhood for itself.’ The current article examines an effort at brownfields remediation in Louisville, Kentucky, asking where environmental justice lies and how individuals ought to be engaged. Activist-led environmental justice cannot guide action, so the article defends a principle of solidarity as equity. Such solidarity requires individual engagement and, in the Louisville case, opposition to the proposed brownfields remediation plan.     

Singing in interaction

Drawing on a database of 26 hours of video-recorded Finnish conversations from three different settings – everyday conversations among family and friends, instrumental lessons and church workplace meetings – we consider the ways in which singing can be used as an interactional resource to enact the three basic communicative motives of humans: requesting, informing, and sharing. Singing has the potential to initiate joint activities, which allows the participants to share their emotional stances. The usage of singing is, however, more limited in requesting or informing – a disadvantage which people, especially in musical settings, need to deal with. There are, nevertheless, situations where the possibility to choose to perform such actions through singing can help maintain mutual solidarity between participants. We argue that people's distinct ways of interpreting spoken and sung utterances can be best understood from the perspective of participants' orientations to agency and accountability.     

On Sen's Liberal Paradox and its Reception within Political Theory and Welfare Economics

In this article, Amartya Sen's seminal proof of the impossibility of a Paretian liberal is briefly reviewed. I then discuss the reception of this alleged 'liberal paradox' within the fields of political theory and welfare economics. In particular, I examine the criticisms made by Brian Barry, and their wider implications for the field of social choice theory. It is argued that the various criticisms made on Sen's characterisation of liberty are fundamental, and that Sen's subsequent defence of his position is unconvincing. Moreover, there remain some wider doubts as to the usefulness of social choice theory's SWF approach to individual rights and freedoms.     

Organising Response to Extreme Emergencies: The Victorian Bushfires of 2009

How can people and organisations best respond to emergency events that are significantly beyond the boundaries of what they had generally anticipated, expected, prepared for – or even imagined? What forms of organisations are likely to be best able to cope with such events – and what procedures and practices will aid in their ability to do so? Obviously, extreme events – events that are in scope or scale or type beyond the range of our ordinary experience and expectations – by definition will occur only relatively rarely (and very rarely to any given emergency organisation). Nonetheless, when they do occur they tend to be of defining importance to the people and institutions that are thrust into them and that must find their way through them. September 11, 2001 in Manhattan and at the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia; the Indian Ocean Tsunami in 2004; Hurricane Katrina on the Gulf Coast of the United States (US) in 2005; major earthquakes like the ones in Pakistan in 2005, Wenchuan in 2008, Haiti in 2010, Chile in 2010, and Christchurch in 2010 – these and other catastrophic events catapult people and response agencies into a new, unfamiliar, and largely unexplored dimension.     

Religion as Catalyst or Restraint of Radical Right Voting?

It is often found that religious people are underrepresented among the radical right electorate, despite radical right parties’ claim of being defenders of the Judeo-Christian society. This study investigates this paradoxical finding and examines to what extent two dimensions of religion – practice and belief – play a role in voting for a radical right party across seven West European countries. Using the European Values Study from 2008, it was found that religiously active people are indeed less likely to vote for a radical right party, because they tend to vote for a Christian party. However, the study challenges the common wisdom that religion alone is a restraint on radical right voting and shows that orthodox believers in three countries – Belgium, Norway and Switzerland – feel more threatened by the presence of immigrants and therefore are more likely than their mainstream counterparts to vote for a radical right party.     

Cost–benefit analysis: New foundations on shifting sand

New Foundations of Cost–Benefit Analysis, by Matthew Adler and Eric Posner, represents the most ambitious and credible effort to date to build a solid theoretical defense of the use of cost–benefit analysis (CBA) in evaluating government regulation. In this review, three cost–benefit “skeptics” offer their reactions to this ambitious and important book. We note its virtues – its humility, its scrupulousness, its open‐mindedness. We also explore its vices. If preferences are to be “laundered,” is it intellectually defensible to remove the bad but not consider adding the good? Does Adler's and Posner's welfarism really play the limited role they suppose, or does it risk “crowding out” other important deontological and distributional values? If CBA is merely a decision procedure that provides an imperfect proxy of welfare – the moral criterion we really care about – how do we know that the proxy it provides in practice will actually be accurate enough to be useful? Isn't this at bottom an empirical question that cannot be answered by this thoroughly theoretical book? If CBA is no more than an imperfect proxy for welfare, then alternative imperfect decision procedures may perform better in the real world.     

How Democratic Is “Governance”? Lessons from Swiss Drug Policy

Public action increasingly takes place in self-organizing networks that are remote from direct governmental control. While these transformations have been subject to scrutiny in regard to their efficiency, less attention has been paid to their democratic quality. This article discusses governance-induced problems of democracy by isolating two major criticisms. Deliberative criticism argues that governance, rather than allowing for true deliberation in the public space, may lead to a loss of accountability. Participatory criticism stresses that governance impinges on participatory venues. The article discusses these criticisms theoretically and empirically, drawing from research on drug policy in Switzerland. The findings show that the criticisms are relevant, albeit not entirely justified.     

Social contract theory and the semiotics of guns in America

We present a semiotic model of gun possession in America based upon the social contract theories put forward by Locke, Rousseau, and Rawls. Our central focus is upon the rights of self-preservation and the protection of property. The model proposes that American political history has cycled between two sets of symbolic threats to the social contract: tyranny imposed by a despotic central government and chaos represented by outsiders designated as savages. We propose that the two central semiotic images presented in the origin myth of the USA – that of pioneers living on a savage frontier and citizens rebelling against tyrannical government – endorse the individual possession of firearms. The specific models of guns chosen by private citizens are found to be closely intertwined with military patterns of usage; thus, the US military seems to serve as a rhetorical vessel from which cultural ideals of appropriate weaponry are derived. Examples of American autobiographical writings, contemporary gun advertising, and popular culture fictional narratives are presented to ground the arguments. We conclude that individual access to the use of deadly force for self-defense and the defense of property is the semiological basis of the American social contract and that US government efforts to reduce civilian possession of firearms are unlikely to succeed.     

Beyond opportunism: Intermediary loyalty in regulation and governance

Regulators and other governors rely on intermediaries to set and implement policies and to regulate targets. Existing literatures focus heavily on intermediaries of a single type – Opportunists, motivated solely by self-interest. But intermediaries can also be motivated by different types of loyalty: to leaders (Vassals), to policies (Zealots), or to institutions (Mandarins). While all three types of loyalists are resistant to the traditional problems of opportunism (slacking and capture), each brings pathologies of its own. We explain the behavioral logic of each type of loyalty and analyze the risks and rewards of different intermediary loyalties – both for governors and for the public interest. We illustrate our claims with examples drawn from many different realms of regulation and governance.     

Why do street-level bureaucrats risk themselves for others? The case of Israeli police officers

What factors influence police officers’ willingness to risk themselves for others? Police officers are street-level bureaucrats, who are not only given the mandate to use deadly force in order to keep public order but also risk their most important resource – their lives – to protect society. We suggest three factors that prompt police officers to risk their lives: individual characteristics (a desire to gain respect and recognition, and testing one's courage, ideology, and personality), organizational conditions (expectations of peers and supervisors, promotion opportunities), and environmental context (a hostile working environment and the importance of public opinion to them). Using an abductive approach combined with a triangulated qualitative method, our findings indicate that personal characteristics are indeed important, but so too are organizational conditions and environmental context. The practical insight, therefore, is that decision makers ‘can’, in various formal and informal ways, influence street-level bureaucrats’ behaviour. Here, the interactions among managers, workers, and clients are a crucial element.     

The abiding voter: The lengthy horizon of retrospective evaluations

Although the theory of retrospective voting receives wide support in the literature on voting behaviour, less agreement exists on voters’ time horizon when assessing the government's performance – that is, whether voters are myopic. Previous studies on voter myopia tend to focus on aggregate-level measures of the economy, or use an experimental approach. Using panel data, this article offers the first investigation into voter myopia that uses individual-level evaluations of government performance in a representative survey at several points during the electoral cycle. The study focuses on The Netherlands, but it also provide tests of the generalisability and robustness of the findings, and a replication in the American context. The results indicate that voter satisfaction early in the government's term adds to explaining incumbent voting. Thus, rather than the myopic voter, evidence is found of the abiding voter – steady at her or his post, evaluating government performance over a long length of time.     

What the Secretary Said Next: ‘Public Rhetorical Leadership’ in the Australian Public Service

Every year, senior departmental secretaries in Australia deliver keynote speeches to a range of audiences. What are these secretaries talking about, and to whom are they directing their comments? This article will examine keynote addresses by the secretaries of the two key central agencies in Australia – the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet and The Treasury – over the calendar years 2009 and 2010. I argue that ‘public rhetorical leadership’ by secretaries poses challenges for traditional understandings of Westminster governance. Utilising the concepts of public value theory, the significance of this ‘public rhetorical leadership’ is assessed in terms of its impacts on policy implementation and questions of accountability.     

Witness testimony from the Church Committee hearings on covert action, 1975

One of the most controversial uses of intelligence by the United States is covert action – secret efforts to change the course of history by intervening secretly into the affairs of other nations or factions. In 1975, the Church Committee held hearings on this subject – a rarity – and four expert witnesses laid out for the panel their recommendations for changes in the conduct of covert action. This dip into the intelligence archives by Intelligence and National Security reveals that much has changed in the world of covert action since 1975, with some of the witness recommendations coming to fruition and others widely ignored.     

Blind Hierarchism and Radical Organizational Forms

This paper explores the challenge posed by current initiatives in anti - institutional theory and practice. It outlines these initiatives, and then proceeds to clarify the criticisms made against them, concentrating on their alleged ineffectiveness and undemocratic nature. When carefully analysed, however, such criticisms are seen to be more an expression of a particular organizational paradigm than the product of rational evaluation. By explicating the nature of this paradigm, here termed "hierarchism," the paper shows how radical organizational forms become occluded, with the result that the important advances they offer are missed.