Reclaiming Community? From Welfare Society to Welfare State in Australian Catholic Social Thought

Influenced by both conservative and left wing communitarian thinking, current debate about welfare governance in Australia reflects an inflated evaluation of the potential role of the third sector or civil society organisations in the production of welfare. This paper gives an overview of twentieth century Australian Catholic social thinking about state, market and civil society relations in the production of welfare. It highlights the neglected, historical role of the Catholic Church in promoting a "welfare society" over a "welfare state" in Australia. It points to the reasons for the Church's later embrace of the welfare state and suggests that these reasons should make us deeply sceptical of the current communitarian fad.     

Citizenship and Civic Engagement: Attitudes and Behaviour in Britain

Analysis of patterns of participation revealed three dimensions of civic activism in modern Britain: individualistic activism; contact activism; and collective activism. Three alternative theories of participation were examined to account for these dimensions: general incentives; social capital; and civic voluntarism. None proved sufficient in itself to account for civic activism in modern Britain: each provided only part of the explanation.     

Professionalism and the Millbank Tendency: The Political Sociology of New Labour's Employees

This article analyses party employees, one of the most under-researched subjects in the study of British political parties. We draw on a blend of quantitative and qualitative data in order to shed light on the social and political profiles of Labour Party staff, and on the question of their professionalisation. The latter theme is developed through a model derived from the sociology of professions. While a relatively limited proportion of party employees conform to the pure ideal-type of professionalism, a considerably greater number manifest enough of the core characteristics of specialisation, commitment, mobility, autonomy and self-regulation to be reasonably described as 'professionals in pursuit of political outcomes'.     

Credit card debts of the poor: High and rising

In this article we report on a little‐known aspect of the consumer credit explosion: It has also happened among the poor. Focusing on credit cards, we use data from four releases of the Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF), 1983–1995, to trace the evolution of the debt position of the poor as compared to that of the population at large. The data indicate that from 1983 to 1995 the fraction of poor households with a credit card more than doubled, and the average balances held on these cards rose almost as rapidly as the balances of nonpoor households. In 1983, fewer than 1 in 30 poor households had credit card debts greater than twice their monthly incomes; by 1995, more than 1 in 8 did. There is no strong evidence at the moment that the added debt has increased the financial distress of these households. Nonetheless, because of the debt increase, poor households at the end of the 1990s are more vulnerable to an economic downturn than they were at the end of the 1980s.© 1998 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management     

How well is the United States competing? A comment on Papadakis

We contend that Papadakis's inferences regarding past and future competitiveness crises cannot be made on the basis of the evidence she has presented. We support this assertion in three ways. First, we argue that the import penetration ratio is not a reasonable measure of national competitiveness in international markets. Second, we show that conventional macroeconomic models can explain the deterioration in the trade balance during the 1980s. Third, we present data demonstrating that, as of 1990, the United States had very low unit labor costs relative to other developed countries, and had the highest level of aggregate productivity in the world.     

Policy-Specific Alienation and Indifference in the Calculus of Voting: A Simultaneous Model of Party Choice and Abstention

This article aims to combine the spatial models of candidate/party choice and abstention/participation choice in a single decision model and to provide empirical reaction functions. The starting point of this study is the hypothesis of a sequential ordering of candidate choice and participation choice (Riker and Ordeshook, 1973). The proposed model simultaneously considers the choice among n≥ 2 parties and the abstention option. It differentiates between policy-specific effects of alienation and indifference. The models are estimated with nested multiattributive discrete choice models which are theoretically founded on random utility theory.     

Federalism, Preemption, and Implementation of the 1996 Telecommunications Act

This essay provides a positive analysis of regulatory federalismin the dynamic telecommunications industry since the 1996 federalTelecommunications Act. While the 1996 legislation clarifiedsome contentious issues, and established a framework for resolvingothers, implementation by the FCC has not been as smooth asmany participants originally assumed. State regulators havecontinued to play an important role in the industry, which courtdecisions have often upheld. As some jurisdictional issues doget resolved, others that were not anticipated in the legislationare emerging, largely related to regulation of Internet services.