Trading party preferences: the Australian experience of preferential voting

Political parties respond to electoral rules in ways which gain them partisan advantage and enable them to make strategic choices about the use of their electoral support. The alternative vote (AV) and proportional representation by the single transferable vote (STV) provide considerable opportunity for this kind of partisan activity. The ability of the voter under such electoral systems to rank candidates in order of the voter's preference creates a kind of property which can be used by parties, especially minor parties, to influence the behaviour of both candidates and other parties. The paper investigates this aspect of preferential voting systems and the extent to which the context of electoral rules can encourage or discourage a trade in partisan preferences. Elections for the Australian House of Representatives and Senate are used to show how political actors can respond to electoral rules which permit the control and trading of preferences to be developed into a series of sophisticated transactions.     

Controlling money during socialist economic reform: the Chinese experience

Contrary to the easy job that some conservative economists imagine, the task faced by the socialist monetary authority in controlling the money supply during economic reform is a daunting one, as recent experience in China indicates. It is difficult to estimate the demand for money in the mixed system that has emerged from the reform process, with all its structural disequilibria. Given prevailing economic and political interferences, keeping the money supply within targets is also beset with problems. Monetary issues have not received much attention in the conventional discourse about socialist economics, before or during reform. Hence the Chinese central bank often has to take uninformed action on events that it cannot effectively control. The results could be very serious, even tragic. In any case, it seems that the bank should not shoulder the main blame.     

Institutions and economic growth: Recent British experience in an international context

The impact of institutions and political constraints on economic growth is greater than many economists’ models acknowledge. At the same time judgements about growth performance and policy effectiveness need to take account of differential scope for growth through ‘catch‐up’ across countries and over time. British performance, particularly that of the 1980s, seen in the light of the earlier relative economic decline of the UK, is reviewed and comparisons with other European countries are highlighted. This evidence confirms the importance of an approach to growth based on political economy and permits some predictions about relative growth rates in the 1990s.     

Achieving a negotiated compensation agreement in siting: The MRS case

Theoreticians claim that negotiated compensation plans could overcome local resistance to nuclear waste (or other less than desirable) facilities, and the Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982 gives the Department of Energy considerable flexibility to negotiate with and compensate states in which it locates waste storage. DOE's monitored retrievable storage (MRS) proposal is the first attempt under the NWPA to site nuclear waste operations, and both DOE and one local community tried the negotiated compensation approach with some success. State and regional leaders chose to oppose the project rather than to negotiate, however. The limited experience to date suggests that local reluctance to negotiate is a generic weakness of the compensation approach to siting and must be given greater attention.     

Innovation strategies for the adoption of new information technology in government: an Australian experience

Adopting and diffusing new technology, creating user awareness and managing organizational innovation effectively are major tasks for contemporary organizations. In large-scale organizations, with centralized information technology (IT) environments, the tasks of technology evaluation, IT change and diffusion require considerable coordinating efforts. The article recounts the experience of a large-scale public organization in managing work-process innovation and the adoption of IT options that could be adequately cost-justified. Such options need, at least, to encourage users to simultaneously learn to utilize IT to improve current practices and to embrace entirely new functions.     

The Council for the Australian Federation: A New Structure of Australian Federalism

In October 2006, state premiers and territory chief ministers gathered in Melbourne for the first meeting of the Council for the Australian Federation (CAF). This little‐heralded event marked the beginning of the first formalised structure for state and territory only collaboration since Federation. This article describes the genesis and creation of this new structural response to ongoing state concerns about the trend to an increasingly centralised pattern of Commonwealth‐state relations. It identifies the intended functions of the Council, which include: acting as a mechanism for coordinating approaches to negotiations with the Commonwealth; operating as a clearing house for policy ideas in Australia and internationally; harmonising regulatory frameworks; and developing improvements to service delivery in areas of state responsibility. Informed by interviews with key players involved with its establishment and documentary sources, this article assesses CAF's performance during its first 18 months of operation. It explores the hopes and aspirations of key CAF stakeholders, and some of the issues that have confronted the fledgling organisation. Personnel changes among the cohort of state and territory leaders, and the election of a federal Labor government in November 2007 have altered the dynamics of CAF. The article argues that CAF's emergence is an attempt by sub‐national governments to develop new capacity and leverage to address the asymmetries that characterise contemporary Australian federalism. However, there are questions about CAF's future, particularly about state and territory governments' capacity to pursue collaborative agendas given the pace and scope of Kevin Rudd's ‘new federalism’ reforms and the demands it is placing on their policy and administrative systems.     

Multi-dimensional economic voting in Spain: The 2008 election

Economic voting studies remain contentious in Spain. The notion is widely-held that there is no economic vote in that country, due to the pervasive and effacing influences of left-right ideology. Still, a growing number of investigations show a significant impact of economic evaluation on the vote choice in Spanish national elections. At least one possible exception here is the 2008 election, where the question has received no systematic treatment. In this study, we explore the impact of economic voting in that contest. We find, first, the presence of strong economic voting of the valence kind. Second, we find that two hitherto unstudied dimensions of economic voting – position and patrimony – have their own independent effect.     

Cross-pressured economic voting in America: The 1984 election

Prior work on U.S. presidential elections has concluded consistently that voter evaluations of national economic conditions have had a greater impact on electoral outcomes than have perceptions of personal economic situations. Utilizing data from the 1984 National Election Study, we find confirmatory evidence for such a pattern. A more disaggreated examination of voters and their economic perceptions for that year, however, reveals some important refinements of earlier findings. Specifically, there is a sizable minority for whom personal economic conditions appear to matter more. Further, the role of noneconomic issue voting in distinguishing economic groups, a topic which has been largely ignored up to this point, is found to be quite pronounced — overriding, in several instances, the influence even of partisan and economic predispositions.     

Welfare,work experience,and economic self‐sufficiency

The potential of former AFDC recipients to earn a living wage is central to the success of welfare‐to‐work programs. Previous studies have found that welfare recipihyphen;ents see little increase in their wages over time. Low wage growth could arise from either low returns to work experience or low levels of experience. This distinction is important for designing effective welfare policy. In the following paper, we estimate how wages grew with work experience between 1978 and 1992 for a national sample of women from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth. We compare women who never received welfare with both short‐ and long‐term recipients in order to see to what extent the rates of wage growth with work experience differ. We find that they differ very little. We use numerous specification checks to test the robustness of our results and find consistent evidence that the wages of AFDC recipients grew at a rate similar to those of nonrecipients once work experience is taken into account. © 2001 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management.     

Nondemocratic nonplanning: The French experience

During the de Gaulle and Pompidou regimes, the French executive claimed that its Economic and Social Development Plan fitted an ideal model of democratic planning. It was democratic in both process and substance, devised after wide consultations, and designed to pursue the welfare of the nation as a whole. It also met the standards of planning, outlining a coherent set of actions which could realistically be taken during each planning period, and which were rationally calculated to further carefully-defined long-term aims. An analysis of the preparation process and of the quality of the Plan as written and executed, however, indicates that it did not meet the standards of either democracy or planning. The conclusion of the paper expresses serious doubt about the possibility of ever achieving the ideal of democratic planning in France.This article was written while the author was an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Connecticut. The research was supported by the University's Research Foundation. The author is now employed by the Office of Political Research, Central Intelligence Agency. The views expressed here are her own and do not reflect those of the Agency.     

现代民主政治的两种实现形式

民主政治是现代政治的基本存在形式。现代民主政治主要有两种实现形式:资本主义民主政治和(中国)社会主义民主政治。资本主义民主政治的实质是主权在民,核心是委托授权,基石是权力分立与制衡,政党制度是两党制和多党制;中国社会主义民主政治的国体是先进阶级的代议制度(中国共产党执政),中国政府的行政根据是先进阶级的方针政策,中国社会主义民主政治的政党制度是一党执政、多党参政,各参政党(民主党派)的主要特征是目标趋同性、政治参与性、成员精英性和基层松散性。     

The economic metric

This essay is about a money wage subsidy intended to reduce unemployment in regions with high unemployment and increase net exports. The genre of the essay is an idealised narrative of the historical development of the Regional Employment Premium, a money wage subsidy proposed by Nicholas Kaldor when he was fiscal adviser to the British Chancellor of the Exchequer and enacted by the labour Government in 1967. The article takes up the story of REP both as an innovative Keynesian instrument of intervention at the regional level and an illustration of the scientific coherence with which economic policies may be designed.     

Assessing swings in multi-party systems: The Indian experience

India has a single member, first-past-the-post system. Owing to the importance of wasted votes in a multi-party system, the relation between votes and seats cannot be explained by traditional swing analysis. In this paper a measure of vote-splitting¹ is developed and used to decompose changes in margins into the ‘swing’ and the ‘split’. This method of analysis is applied to the study of electoral change in India and its usefulness for prediction is examined.     

The Personal Vote in Australian Federal Elections

Although there has been little reliable evidence to date, the 'personal vote' for local Members of Parliament in Australian elections is generally thought to be negligible by political scientists. This article analyses new data from the 1987 Australian National Social Science Survey which demonstrate that the personal vote is a significant factor in federal lower house elections even when numerous other variables known to influence voting behaviour are controlled for. The data allow a calculation of the potential electoral effect of the personal vote which shows that it could be worth at least ³ per cent in some circumstances. The analysis tests for varying levels of personal voting in safe and marginal seats, Labor and coalition seats, urban and rural seats and according to the length of time the incumbent has been in office. Lastly, the electoral effects of the social background of local members are examined.     

The Third Way: the Dutch experience

The Third Way in the Netherlands rests upon the institutionalized co-operation between the trade unions, the employers' organizations and the state. During the period of high unemployment in the 1980s this co-operation led to several agreements to moderate wage costs and to reduce statutory working hours with the object of reducing unemployment. In the 1990s,when labour became scarce, new measures were agreed upon to increase participation in the labour market and to boost productivity. Critics of the agreements suggest that the policies adopted by the socio-economic partners in the 1980s, particularly the moderation of wages and the reduction of work time to create more jobs, have a negative effect on the long-term prospects of attaining higher productivity.