Public Meetings and the Democratic Process

Public meetings are frequently attacked as useless democratic rituals that lack deliberative qualities and fail to give citizens a voice in the policy process. Do public meetings have a role to play in fostering citizen participation in policy making? While many of the criticisms leveled against public meetings have merit, I argue that they do. In this article, I explore the functions that city council and school board meetings serve. While they may not be very good at accomplishing their primary goal of giving citizens the opportunity to directly influence decisions made by governing bodies, they can be used to achieve other ends, such as sending information to officials and setting the agenda. As a complement to deliberative political structures, public meetings have a role to play by offering a venue in which citizens can achieve their political goals, thereby enhancing governmental accountability and responsiveness.     

A Critical Evaluation of Virtual Local Government in Australia

The vigorous debate surrounding local government amalgamation in Australia remains unresolved. In an attempt to break the current stalemate Percy Allan (2001) has proposed a model of 'virtual local government' that seeks to combine the service appropriateness and effectiveness purportedly associated with demographically small councils with the service efficiency of large municipalities. This paper attempts to place his model in the context of the literature on the theory of public sector policy reform. It then goes on to examine virtual local government in the light of new institutional economics, public choice theory and the characteristics of Australian local government.     

Intersection of 21st century technology with 20th century laws: a case study in proactive issues management

The intersection of a high‐tech product with 20th century laws that would have inadvertently restricted its use provides an interesting case study in issues management. The authors describe how using ‘high‐tech?high‐touch’ as a technique for public policy change, as well as employing other traditional issues management tools, enabled significant success in achieving the company's public policy goals. As a result of this proactive issues management approach, the high‐tech Segway^TM Human Transporter (HT), a low‐speed self‐balancing, electrically powered, two‐wheeled personal mobility device (Figure 1) is permitted to operate freely in a significant part of its potential market area. Copyright © 2003 Henry Stewart Publications     

Signals from the Tenth Justice: The Political Role of the Solicitor General in Supreme Court Decision Making

Conventional explanations of the solicitor general's influence on the Supreme Court emphasize his expertise or experience. We articulate and test a more political account based on insights from signaling theory. We argue justices will be more receptive to signals from the solicitor general (S.G.) when either the justice and S.G. are ideologically proximate or the S.G.'s signal is contrary to his ideological predisposition. We test our account over the period from 1953 to 2002 using a newly developed interinstitutional measure of ideology that places executive and judicial actors on the same spatial scale. Our results highlight the political nature of the S.G.'s influence, challenging the received wisdom about the S.G.'s impact on the Supreme Court.     

Institutional Capacity and Choice in Australia's Integrity Systems

This article examines recent debate over core or ‘independent’ integrity institutions in the Victorian and Commonwealth governments to highlight some of the need, and potential, for more careful deliberation over options for building the capacity of integrity systems ‐ the second of the analytical themes used in Australia's national assessment. The first part compares resourcing of major integrity institutions by Australian governments over the past 15 years. Staffing and finances are seen as a useful basic measure of capacity, helping lift attention away from the assumption that creation of new bodies necessarily increases capacity. The data also show that some jurisdictions—including Victoria—may yet have some way to go if they wish to match other governments. The second part of the analysis identifies eight further issues for consideration in deliberations on institutional design. Our conclusion is that by working through such issues more systematically, it may be possible to identify new or different institutional options for configuring integrity resources. This could help avoid inappropriate choices—whether unnecessary new bodies, overloads on existing ones or the import of frameworks that do not necessarily ‘fit’ local conditions—of particular relevance to current proposals for a new Commonwealth anti‐corruption agency.     

Institutions of the Offensive: Domestic Sources of Dispute Initiation in Authoritarian Regimes, 1950–1992

What are the most important sources of institutional variation among authoritarian regimes, and how do such institutions influence these dictatorships' propensity to initiate military disputes? This article argues that most existing studies in both comparative politics and international relations employ a flawed conceptualization of authoritarian institutions. Excessive focus on the personalization or institutionalization of authoritarian regimes' decision‐making procedures has distracted attention from the more critical issue of what institutions these regimes deploy to enhance social control and secure political incumbency. Since military regimes are systematically less effective than single‐party regimes at developing these types of authoritarian institutions, they more frequently resort to desperate measures to fend off domestic challenges to their power. In particular, we find compelling empirical support for our hypothesis that military regimes are more likely than single‐party regimes to initiate military disputes, irrespective of whether those regimes are highly personalized or not.     

A Problem of Politics of Technique? Insights from Waste-Management Strategies in Sweden and France

Sweden and France are in many respects in the vanguard of high-level radioactive waste disposal efforts, and they offer sharp contrasts regarding basic strategies and underlying philosophies for waste management. We compare their waste disposal programs for insight into the dilemma of siting and developing a permanent waste repository. We find that technical decisions, as well as the more obvious sociopolitical decisions about repository development, are shaped by deep-seated social and political forces in each nation.     

Australian Federalism: Developments and Prospects

This article discusses the principal recent developments in,and future prospects for, constitutional change, judicial review,fiscal arrangements, local government, public policy, and intergovernmentalrelations since the 1977 Publius issue on Australian federalism,taking into account the arguments presented in the other contributionsto this volume. It highlights the continuing vertical imbalanceof Australian fiscal federalism, and the Hawke Labor government'srecent initiative for a closer working partnership with thestates for reforming intergovernmental arrangements. It arguesthat while there is scope for the latter, there is greater needfor the former. Nevertheless, the 1980s was significant as adecade of predominantly Labor governments working with the federalConstitution, while the 1990s promises to be a decade of celebratingthe centenary of the Australian Constitution and working towardimproving the functioning of its federal system.