The Electoral Effectiveness of Party Organization: Norway, 1945–1977*

Latent Variable Partial Least Squares analysis has been used to model the impact of political party organization on stable and changing patterns of party vote in Norway from 1945 to 1977. For the Norwegian Labor Party, the elaboration of a strategy of organizational encapsulation is at least as important as the economic base for maintaining the stability of the party's electoral support; it also depresses support for the opposition parties. Short-run fluctuations around the long-run stability, however, are more influence by economic changes than party organizational strategies, with the exception of the divisive 1973 election, when party organization was important for maintaining the party vote. For the non-Labor parties, party organization is less important than economic variables.     

Social Capital and Public Policy – The Current Challenge Facing the Victorian Government

Social capital, since Putnam's 1993 work, has captured the imagination of policy‐makers the world over, and Australia is no exception. In 2005 the Department of Victorian Communities launched its Actions for Community Strengthening policy statement, which draws heavily on social capital theory. This article explores the theoretical underpinnings of the government's policy and critiques its failure to deal adequately with the causal relationship between social capital and its supposed community benefits. The article then seeks to isolate the missing factors through a look at recent research on volunteerism and argues that the institution of collaborative/interactive governance needs to be underpinned by sound socio‐economic reform.     

Treasury and Economic Policy – Beyond the Dismal Science

‘Treasury advises and assists the Treasurer, and through him the Government, in the discharge of his and its responsibilities in relation to economic, fiscal and monetary matters. The Department's main responsibilities lie in the field of general economic management’, Treasury, Annual Report 1983. ‘The Treasury's mission is to improve the wellbeing of the Australian people by providing sound and timely advice to the Government, based on objective and thorough analysis of options, and by assisting Treasury ministers in the administration of their responsibilities and the implementation of government decisions’, Treasury, Annual Report 2010a . ‘You can't really evaluate the performance of Treasury in terms of “outputs and outcomes” in any formal or public way because most of the time we are dissuading Treasurers and governments from doing stupid things’, Senior Treasury Official 2000. ‘We once had a “Treasury line”, but now we are more pluralistic’, Senior Treasury Official 2010. ‘Treasury's executive board hunts as a pack, they trust each other and they’ve known each other for long times’, Senior Treasury Official 2010.     

From Accountability to Assurance – Stakeholder Perspectives in Local Government

This article reports on research which sought to explore the understanding of accountability for performance amongst constituents of local government in Western Australia. Recent trends to increase the public accountability and financial reporting requirements for local governments underline the need to understand the value and use made of this performance information by local government constituents.     

Policy Stalemate and Policy Change in Israel's Water Sector 1970–2010: Advocacy Coalitions and Policy Narratives

This paper seeks to explain policy stalemates that persist despite recognition of their risks and damages, as well as the factors and processes that enable a breakthrough and lead to policy change. The paper seeks to fill a gap in the Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF) theory by supplementing it with Narrative Analysis (NA). We claim that NA provides a link missing in the ACF that is required for the transformation of “necessary” conditions—like external and internal shocks to the system—into “sufficient” conditions for policy persistence or change. We use the ACF to delineate coalition members and their belief systems and policy positions, as well as external, internal, and structural shocks to the system. We rely on NA to analyze the narratives employed in the public arena, which turn conditions necessary both for hurting stalemates and for policy change into sufficient conditions. We illustrate the benefits of combining the two approaches through a study of Israel's water policy during four decades (1970s–2000s) based on government records and on information from interviews with key players.     

Partisan Differences in Swedish Macroeconomic Policy

The purpose of this paper is to trace partisan differencesamong Swedish governments during the period 1958-2000. According tothe Partisan Theory of macroeconomic policy left-wing governmentsare relatively more concerned with the performance of the realside of the economy (real output and unemployment) as compared toright-wing governments, that place a higher weight on the nominalvariables (inflation). Left-wing governments would therefore pursue moreexpansionary aggregate demand policy, and thereby be willingto risk a higher inflation, in order to improve real economicperformance. In this paper we apply the model developed in Hibbs (1994) onSwedish data. Our empirical results support the partisan theory,showing that, ceteris paribus, aggregate demand policy under left-winggovernments is relatively more expansionary than under right-wing governments, even if the expansionary policysometimes leads to higher inflation.     

The Economic Policy Agenda in Australia, 1962–2012

This paper surveys Australian economic policy over the last half century, identifying patterns and punctuations in the management of both macroeconomic and more structural challenges. It highlights the extent to which the economic policy agenda has been dictated by economic forces, while acknowledging the ideological preferences governments bring to their task. In retrospect, this half century in Australia has been dominated by macroeconomic turmoil and structural adjustment in the middle decades. Australian governments had to deal simultaneously with the macroeconomic problems of inflation and recession from the mid‐1970s to the early 1990s while also facing the need to dismantle the development framework that had been in place since Federation or even earlier.     

Blowing Hot and Cold – Intergovernmental Relations Capacity in the Commonwealth Government

The role of the intergovernmental affairs specialist is to protect and extend the powers of the jurisdiction for which he works (Donald Smiley quoted in Warhurst 1987 ).     

Civic Decline? Trends in Political Involvement and Participation in Norway, 1965–2001

Electoral turnout in Norway has been declining over a long period for local elections and, at the four most recent Storting elections, turnout has been at a lower level than in the preceding 25 years. This article investigates whether the fall in turnout generalises to other forms of political participation and political involvement. Data from the Norwegian Election Studies 1965–2001 and the Norwegian Values Studies 1982–1996 are analysed. In contrast to the decline of turnout, the authors find that the broader political activity of citizens has increased. The rise in political involvement and activism is quite widespread, covering dimensions like political interest, political discussion and political action. The increase includes forms of participation where political parties play a strong role and in direct action where parties are supposed to be less important. Education is strongly associated with most forms of civic participation and the rise in educational levels normally leads to an increase in participation rates. Data show that women are now as active as men in most dimensions of participation. In Norway, turnout at elections displays one pattern over time, while other indicators of political participation and involvement show different trajectories. There is no general civic decline. Using political involvement and participation as a criterion for judging the state of democracy, and taking into account the whole set of indicators studied in this article, one may reasonably conclude that Norwegian civic democracy is in better health than if one focused only on the fall in electoral turnout.     

Local Corporatism in Norway*

In several countries changing market conditions and legislation regulating economic activity have led to the emergence of corporalist structures at the local as well as the national level. In Norway these have generated local institutional innovations which have had several important actual and potential consequences, ranging from a growth of neo-mercantilist policies to increased inter-community competition for industrial establishment and aid.     

Setting the Post War Australian Policy Agenda – Causes and Content

What are the origins of policy agendas and what determines agenda setting? The one robust theory in the literature associates different agendas with different moments in the evolution of the broader party system namely mass, catch‐all and most recently cartel patterns. This article explores Australian evidence for this thesis. It also argues the cartel moment has recently mutated. Agenda setting is now circumscribed by a mismatch between the needs of policy making and the political incentive structure. The media have become primary tissue connecting political elites to their publics. But this traps the system in short term, primarily populist stances. Systemic capacities to mediate agenda setting have thus been corrupted.