Thinking Ahead: Strategic Foresight and Government

The technique of strategic foresight — developing policy based on long-run scenario planning — has much to offer Australian governments. By paying greater attention to identifying emerging issues, and drawing on a broad range of information sources, policies are more likely to prove durable and effective. Drawing on examples from the private sector, and from governments in the UK, USA and Australia, I outline what strategic planning entails, and how it might be implemented.     

Chinese Views of US Hegemony

In the past several years, Chinese analysts have acknowledged that the United States possesses a vast amount of power and influence, which has allowed it to act in arrogant and often aggressive ways, and has fueled its ambitions of achieving global hegemony. While many PRC authors attribute to the US a coherent grand strategy of world domination, others have followed and assessed the debates that pervade US foreign policy-making, analyzed the nature of American hegemony, and critiqued the theoretical discussions on the subject carried out in US political science journals. Chinese analysts see both strengths and weaknesses in American hegemony, for while the country currently has superior comprehensive national power, there are also vulnerabilities in its economic and military strength, as well as in its relations with its allies. The views of Chinese authors are not uniform on the subject of US hegemony, however, for some believe that the US already is a hegemon, while others view America as a superpower seeking hegemony, or argue that the nation simply displays hegemonic behavior. Consequently there are several different schools of thought on the characteristics of US hegemony, as well as its tactics, goals and manifestations.     

Book reviews

Journal of Chinese Political Science -     

Multiparty electoral competition in the Netherlands and Germany: A model based on multinomial probit

A typical assumption of electoral models of party competition is that parties adopt policy positions so as to maximize expected vote share. Here we use Euro-barometer survey data and European elite-study data from 1979 for the Netherlands and Germany to construct a stochastic model of voter response, based on multinomial probit estimation. For each of these countries, we estimate a pure spatial electoral voting model and a joint spatial model. The latter model also includes individual voter and demographic characteristics. The pure spatial models for the two countries quite accurately described the electoral response as a stochastic function of party positions. We use these models to perform a thought experiment so as to estimate the expected vote maximizing party positions. We go on to propose a model of internal party decision-making based both on pre-election electoral estimation and post-election coalition bargaining. This model suggests why the various parties in the period in question did not adopt vote maximizing positions. We argue that maximizing expected vote will not, in general, be a rational party strategy in multiparty political systems which are based on proportional representation.     

From Heroes to Whingers: Changing Attitudes to British Migrants, 1947 to 1977

Shifts in attitudes towards British migrants from the late 1940s to the late 1970s chart the development of a non-British Australia. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, British migrants were accorded a special prestige based on a belief that Australia and Britain had fought to defend shared imperial British values. Although British migrants protested at hostel conditions, public sympathy remained on the side of the migrants. The rise of the Whingeing Pom stereotype around 1960 reflects the declining weight of British wartime experience and a strengthening of the idea of an independent non-British Australia. The 1970s saw the ending of British preference, and the debate surrounding British activism in Australian trades unions raised the question of whether British migrants were now merely an ethnic group within a multicultural Australia.