Identity Style,Parental Authority,and Identity Commitment

The role that parental authority patterns and social-cognitive identity styles may play in establishing identity commitments was investigated. The results indicated that family authority and identity style variables combined accounted for 50% of the variation in strength of identity commitment. As hypothesized, the relationship between parental authority and identity commitment was mediated by identity style. The findings are consistent with the view that family authority patterns may contribute to the way in which late adolescents negotiate the task of constructing a sense of identity. Alternative explanations of the findings are considered.     

Enduring Tensions in the 2000 Defence White Paper

In 2000 the Howard government formed a consultative committee to review defence policy and gauge public opinion on defence issues. It concentrated on the impact of budgetary stringency and dramatic strategic change and supported increased defence spending on equipment to cater for high‐level threats. Was there a thorough review? Inconsistencies occurred in the reports developed from the review and statements made by senior policy‐makers while it was being conducted. The way the review was undertaken points to conceptual tensions in Australia's strategic culture and serious problems with entrenched interests in the services. Unless these challenges are addressed, a thorough review of defence policy cannot be undertaken. The review process itself needs to be reviewed.     

Justice and Culture: Rawls, Sen, Nussbaum and O'Neill

Is it possible, in a multicultural world, to hold all societies to a common standard of decency that is both high enough to protect basic human interests, and yet not biased in the direction of particular cultural values? We examine the recent work of four liberals – John Rawls, Amartya Sen, Martha Nussbaum and Onora O'Neill – to see whether any of them has given a successful answer to this question. For Rawls, the decency standard is set by reference to an idea of basic human rights that we argue offers too little protection to members of non-liberal societies. Sen and Nussbaum both employ the idea of human capabilities, but in interestingly different ways: for Sen the problems are how to weight different capabilities, and how to decide which are basic, whereas for Nussbaum the difficulty is that her favoured list of capabilities depends on an appeal to autonomy that is unlikely to be acceptable to non-liberal cultures. O'Neill rejects a rights-based approach in favour of a neo-Kantian position that asks which principles of action people everywhere could consent to, but this also may be too weak in the face of cultural diversity. We conclude that liberals need to argue both for a minimum decency standard and for the full set of liberal rights as the best guarantors of that standard over time.     

A Strategic Theory of Bureaucratic Redundancy

Do redundant bureaucratic arrangements represent wasteful duplication or a hedge against political uncertainty? Previous attempts at addressing this question have treated agency actions as exogenous, thus avoiding strategic issues such as collective action problems or competition. I develop a game‐theoretic model of bureaucratic policy making in which a political principal chooses the number of agents to handle a given task. Importantly, agents have policy preferences that may be opposed to the principal's, and furthermore may choose their policy or effort levels. Among the results are that redundancy can help a principal achieve her policy goals when her preferences are not aligned with the agents'. But redundancy is less helpful if even a single agent has preferences relatively close to the principal's. In this environment collective action problems may cause multiple agents to be less effective than a single agent. Redundancy can also be unnecessary to the principal if the agent's jurisdiction can be terminated.     

In the Wake of 'A Certain Maritime Incident': Ministerial Advisers, Departments and Accountability

This article considers the accountability of ministerial advisers and their relationship with departments in the light of 'the children overboard' incident. It argues that if ministers are not going to accept responsibility for the actions of their advisers then on those occasions the advisers should be separately accountable to the parliament. The article further suggests that the department heads have a particular responsibility for ensuring the integrity of ministerial advice, and proposes steps to reinforce their capacity to fulfil that responsibility.     

Optimal Central Banker Contracts and Common Agency

This paper considers the contracting approach to centralbanking in a simple common agency model. We suggest thatcentral banker contracts that do not consider the possibilityof more than one principal existing are incomplete contracts.Such incomplete contracts can be a poor form ofmonetary policy delegation under common agency. We develop amodel with two principals – society (government) and ageneric interest group, whose objective conflicts withsociety’s ex ante preferences by incorporating an inflationarybias. We determine when the government-offered orinterest-group-offered contract dominates the central banker’sdecision. The results largely depend on whether theinterest-group-offered contract is written in terms of outputor inflation.