Of ‘Strong’ Leadership,Crisis Communication,and Pooper Scoopers: Change in the Queensland Public Service Under Newman

Governments have historically offered their workforce a public service bargain founded on stable pay and conditions and job security. However, while the Westminster system aims for public service employment to be protected from the whims of government, public servants are nonetheless affected by the political environment in which they operate and changes to this bargain can occur with a new government. This paper focuses on a Queensland public service change process that resulted in large‐scale forced redundancies, non‐renewal of temporary contracts, and legislative changes that nullified the provisions in job security, organisational change, and redundancy policies. Using communication as a lens through which to understand leadership, it examines how the government communicated with the public service about this organisational change, immediately before and after the 2012 election. In particular, through analysis of public and media commentary, speeches and Hansard records, it examines Premier Newman's change leadership and communication by contrasting pre‐election messages to the public service with post‐election messages about the public service and the justifications for change during this period of downsizing. This analysis is used to reflect on political leadership, communication, fair treatment, and trust in public service change.     

Opinion Backlash and Public Attitudes: Are Political Advances in Gay Rights Counterproductive?

One long‐recognized consequence of the tension between popular sovereignty and democratic values like liberty and equality is public opinion backlash, which occurs when individuals recoil in response to some salient event. For decades, scholars have suggested that opinion backlash impedes policy gains by marginalized groups. Public opinion research, however, suggests that widespread attitude change that backlash proponents theorize is likely to be rare. Examining backlash against gays and lesbians using a series of online and natural experiments about marriage equality, and large‐sample survey data, we find no evidence of opinion backlash among the general public, by members of groups predisposed to dislike gays and lesbians, or from those with psychological traits that may predispose them to lash back. The important implication is that groups pursuing rights should not be dissuaded by threats of backlash that will set their movement back in the court of public opinion.     

Federalism in the 2000 Presidential Election

Federalism was not an explicitly prominent feature of the 2000presidential election, but it exerted significant influencein shaping the political landscape as well as the candidates'positions on the role and purposes of the federal government.America's federal system created powerful undercurrents thatinfluenced the selection of the two major presidential candidates,the campaign issues, and the candidates' messages. At the sametime, George W. Bush and Albert Gore differed considerably intheir answers to how the United States' federal system shouldfunction and the objectives it should seek. Bush favored a federalgovernment that promotes economic opportunity through a marketplaceand allows state and local governments to determine their ownmoral and policy objectives. Gore preferred a national commonwealth,where the federal government determines the moral objectivesand the states cooperate to achieve those objectives.     

Oil Wealth and Regime Survival in the Developing World, 1960–1999

This article examines contrasting claims made by scholars of oil and politics that oil wealth either tends (1) to undermine regime durability or (2) to enhance it. Using cross-sectional time-series data from 107 developing states between 1960 and 1999, I test the effects of oil wealth on regime failure, political protests, and civil war. I find that oil wealth is robustly associated with increased regime durability, even when controlling for repression, and with lower likelihoods of civil war and antistate protest. I also find that neither the boom nor bust periods exerted any significant effect on regime durability in the states most dependent on exports, even while those states saw more protests during the bust. In short, oil wealth has generally increased the durability of regimes, and repression does not account for this effect. Future research focused on the origins of robust coalitions in oil-rich states is most likely to provide fruitful explanations to this puzzle .     

Grant Levels and Debt Issuance: Is There a Relationship? Is There Symmetry?

Although previous work on fiscal federalism and grants has focused on the effects of grants on expenditures, no published research examines the impact of decreasing grants on state financing. This research addresses how decreasing levels of federal grant money to states affect states' long-term debt issuance, and whether the relationship is symmetric for increasing and decreasing grants. The model is tested with time series, cross-sectional data from 1984 to 1999. The results show that grants affect debt issuance, the effect is asymmetric, and direction of the effect differs for different types of debt issuance.     

Law Enforcement Lessons Learned from Hurricane Katrina

Major disasters represent infrequent events that often require response organizations to vicariously learn from the experiences of others in order to improve their operations. A primary mechanism for such knowledge diffusion is the different practitioner and empirical journals for the organizational fields that comprise disaster response. A review of the literature for the law enforcement field, however, reveals that little attention is given to how these organizations manage actual disasters. In particular, the presentation of organizational experiences, whether through case studies or other methodologies, is very limited in the practitioner and empirical literature of this field. This represents a considerable problem for improvements of disaster response operations given that law enforcement agencies represent a key component in such efforts. The research presented in this article is an effort to fill this knowledge gap and thereby facilitate organizational learning to improve future law enforcement disaster response activities. The authors traveled to Mississippi and Louisiana after Hurricane Katrina to examine the response efforts of state and local law enforcement agencies to the storm. The findings from this research are reported here in a lessons‐learned format to inform law enforcement disaster response policy.     

Flipping burgers or flipping pages? Student employment and academic attainment in post-Soviet Latvia

Latvian higher education has undergone a dramatic transition since 1991. This study employs a survey of nearly 1000 social science students studying in 13 different institutions in Latvia to consider the impact of the increase in the number of students who are working while studying. Evidence indicates employment has a strong and significant negative impact on school performance, and the negative impact increases as weekly hours worked increase. This manifests itself through reduced class attendance and reduced time spent in independent study. Finally, we find that the probability of student employment is most significantly affected by the availability of financial aid, gender, ethnicity, and age.