Construction Procurement and State Government Strategy: Aligned or Disconnected?

Australian state governments are engaging in strategic planning processes and publishing departmental and/or overall state strategic plans. One means of achieving the goals outlined in these strategic plans is via public procurement processes. Investments in construction projects by governments are strategic in nature and made to create infrastructure, which enables the provision of public services. This article investigates the contribution that construction procurement across the five Australian state governments who expend the most money on infrastructure makes towards the achievement of government strategy. The research draws on interviews with experienced project managers to assess whether public sector construction procurement is aligned or disconnected with publically stated government strategies.     

Easy Money: Tax Exporting and State Support for Higher Education

There is a substantial literature that assesses the effects of tax‐exporting capacities on the tax structures and aggregate spending levels that state governments choose to implement, but no work exists that isolates the effects of state tax exporting on higher education spending. Using state‐level data for 1989, 1995, 2002, and 2007, we estimate for the median voter in each state the change in the marginal cost of higher education subsidization generated by tax exportation, and calculate the increased higher education spending that results. We consider three types of spending: state appropriations to public universities as well as need‐ and non‐need‐based aid awarded to in‐state students. We find that neither type of aid is responsive to the marginal cost, or tax price, faced by the median voter. However, the median voter's price elasticity of demand for state appropriations is statistically significant and negative. We find that the median voter's tax price is substantially reduced by the presence of prominent mining and tourism industries and by the federal deductibility offset available to firms. Thus, these tax‐exporting capacities exert upward pressure on voter demand for state appropriations to public universities.     

Co‐Production of Public Services in Australia: The Roles of Government Organisations and Co‐Producers

This article adds to the emerging empirical literature on citizen co‐production. Based on a telephone survey of 1000 Australian adults, it replicates a five‐country European study focusing on three policy domains: neighbourhood safety, environment, and health (Loeffler et al. 2008). It shows that individually performed and closely reciprocal activities with high levels of private value are performed the most often, whereas group activities producing mainly public value are the least performed. We found no evidence of a relationship between service satisfaction and co‐production, or between information provision/inclusion/consultation and co‐production, which challenges some of the previous literature on what might motivate citizens to co‐produce. Citizen self‐efficacy has a modest relationship with co‐production levels in each of the three policy domains. These findings have implications for policymakers, and pave the way for future empirical research in this field.     

Commercial Lobbying in Australia: Exploring the Australian Lobby Register

Politicians and policy makers routinely engage with lobbyists and see them as crucial agents in the political process. But how much do we really know about the Australian lobby system? Although there are a range of reviews of lobby regulation schemes and discussions about the work of lobbyists, a comprehensive contemporary picture of the commercial lobbying system in Australia is missing. Using data from the ‘federal lobby register’, this article sets out to map the commercial lobbying scene at the national level. Using this as a backdrop, the article goes on to discuss what questions this raises and how we might develop a deeper understanding of the commercial lobbying system in Australia.     

Reloading the Armalite? Victims and Targets of Violent Dissident Irish Republicanism, 2007–2015

The centenary of the 1916 Rising marks a time of peaceful commemoration, across the island of Ireland. However, several violent dissident republican groups wish to seize it as an opportunity to re-organise in an attempt to bolster and legitimise their sustained paramilitary campaign. This study seeks to provide a greater understanding of how this paramilitary activity has manifested from 2007 to mid-2015. We do this by assessing target selection, through analysis of the Violent Dissident Republican (VDR) events database. The data suggest that civilian targets are the most regularly attacked. However, when exclusively analysing targets of detonated explosives, the data show that police, security personnel, and their infrastructure are more consistently targeted. The target selected can and does have an effect on attack method. These findings can both assist in protecting the potential targets of VDR attacks and contribute to the development of a strong nationalised, and localised, counter VDR narrative.     

Nationalist Protests,Government Responses,and the Risk of Escalation in Interstate Disputes

While the existing literature emphasizes that elites often have incentives to pander to nationalist sentiment, much less attention has been paid to elite efforts to subdue popular nationalism, either to avoid domestic instability or international escalation. This article examines how different governments respond to nationalist protests and the resulting effects on the risk that interstate disputes will escalate to armed conflict. We argue that government responses to nationalist protests tend to vary in patterned ways across regime types. Nationalist protests present particular dangers in weakly institutionalized democracies, where demonstrations often pose serious threats of instability but are difficult or costly for the government to subdue, tempting or forcing leaders to escalate to appease domestic critics. We illustrate the theory with four cases representing a range of regime types: Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, and the Philippines.     

In Defense of the Responsibility to Protect: A Response to Weissman

This article defends the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) doctrine (adopted by the United Nations in 2005) against critiques by Fabrice Weissman in this journal, and against similar criticisms of humanitarian intervention and human rights norms made by postmodern thinkers in the Nietzschean tradition, such as Alain Badiou and Anne Orford. I argue against Weissman that R2P can be effective in stopping or preventing mass atrocities, and in particular that opposition to military intervention in Syria during the 2013 debates was a terrible mistake. Moreover, the moral ground for humanitarian aid efforts is the same as the basis for forceful rescue from mass slaughter, ethnic cleansing, and persecution (when other conditions of just war can be met). Weissman's critiques misinterpret just war theory on key points and rely on inflated rhetorical strategies inspired by extreme forms of cultural and moral relativism that are intellectually bankrupt—both in blaming “Western imperialism” for most crimes against humanity committed by tyrants, and in leaving hundreds of thousands without the only protection that could prevent their murder and exile. These extreme positions and the strained rhetorical devices used to defend them do not deserve the wide respect they command in some parts of academia.     

Does Minority Representation in Police Agencies Reduce Assaults on the Police?

Following recent high-profile deaths of unarmed African American suspects at the hands of police, a number of reforms have been proposed, among them improved minority representation in the ranks of law enforcement organizations. Previous research has explored the effects of minority representation on complaints against the police and other behaviors, but very few studies have examined violence toward the police. We merged several data sources together and tested the hypothesis that minority representation within police departments is inversely associated with assaults against the police. In an extension of prior research, we also conducted separate analyses for African American, Hispanic, and Asian officer representation. The results did not support the expectation that diversity within police organizations results in improved police-citizen interactions, as measured by assaults on police. This study is one of the few to examine how different measures of minority representation in police agencies relates to assaults on the police.