Leading from Below: How Sub-National Governments Influence Policy Agendas

This article takes a state's eye view of trends towards a more centralised system of governance in Australia. It argues that while globalisation strengthens the roles of national governments it also provides less noticed public policy and management opportunities for sub-national governments. The article shows how state governments in Australia can use high-level policy proposals to reinforce their continuing relevance as key members of a federal system of government. It proposes that skilful deployment of policy ideas and analyses can enable the states to sustain alternative national agendas despite hostility or lack of interest by the federal government. In conclusion, the article examines the implications for federal-state relations under the Rudd government. It suggests that the elements for productive reform agendas are present but that bringing them together will require considerable effort.     

Indigenization of the Holocaust and the Tehran Holocaust Conference: Iranian Aberration or Third World Trend?

It is understandable that Iran’s December 2006 hosting of an international conference casting doubts on the historicity of the Holocaust would raise questions about treatments of the Shoah elsewhere in the Third World. In fact, indigenization the Holocaust—the manifold ways in which serious scholars, activists, and writers from Asia, Africa, and Latin America have come to incorporate the Holocaust in their intellectual work—has been positive overall. Within the framework of intellectual globalization, much of the Third World intelligentsia has come to include this most Western of human rights violations within the framework of their own cultures and histories. Although some of the indigenization of the Holocaust is political and instrumental, the deviant variant expressed at the Tehran Holocaust conference is atypical. Governmental respect for the memory of victims of genocide should be considered as an emerging human right.     

Risk assessment and suicide prevention in primary care

General practitioners (GPs) are assumed to occupy an important position in the prevention of suicide through the introduction of risk assessment techniques commonly used in psychiatric practice. Despite this theoretical role for primary care services, it remains unclear how frequently GPs implement risk assessment in patients who may be vulnerable to suicide. To address this, a retrospective survey of probable suicides was conducted within a primary care setting utilizing a questionnaire of GPs who had experienced a patient suicide and was augmented by hospital and coroners' records. 85% of questionnaires were returned and 61 deaths were adjudged as suicides during the year long census period. 75% of suicides were male and 54% were aged under 35.28% were in contact with psychiatric services prior to death, although 60% had some diagnosis of mental disorder. GPs had little knowledge of a patient's life circumstances in up to half of cases. Recording of risk assessment occurred in 38% of subjects, was positively associated with prior psychiatric contact (p = 0.001) but negatively associated with presence of physical illness (p = 0.004), older patient age (p = 0.04), and GPs length in practice (p = 0.05). One GP felt their suicide case was preventable. The low rate of risk assessment and limited knowledge of patient lifestyle point to the need for active engagement of GPs in future suicide prevention strategies and should influence the content of training programs in primary care.     

Ethics and public policy: an analysis of a research tradition ∗

This article focuses on the relevent scholarly literature devoted to ethics and public policy. A literature search revealed an extensive body of research which lacked a coherent ordering. This article provides a model to understand a field of academic inquiry which has a rich tradition.     

Note on land reform in Bangladesh: The efficacy of ceilings

In this note, new data concerning the agrarian structure of Bangladesh are employed to test the efficacy of ceilings on the size of landholdings as a means of making land available to the landless and the near landless. The data confirm that the numbers of potential claimants for land far exceeds the potential supply, even if ceilings on holdings were lowered from 100 standard bighas (331/3 acres) to 25 standard bighas (81/3 acres).     

Approaches to the Politics of Systemic Economic Reform in the Soviet Union

Political support for economic reform in the USSR is evaluated at five different levels of Soviet society, or more properly, of the political-administrative hierarchy: the top leader (Gorbachev himself), the collective leadership (Politburo), the bureaucracy, knowledge specialists (intelligentsia), and the population at large. Attitudes and motivations within each group are examined in order to demonstrate how interest group relations in the Soviet Union have made and will continue to make basic economic change a protracted, complex, and unpredictable process. journal of Economic Literature, Classification Numbers: 052, 113.