Building foundations for the comparative study of state and non-state terrorism

In this article, we argue that a comparative study of state and non-state terrorism that uses the minimal foundationalist definition of terrorism as its central analytical framework offers a unique and instructive approach for answering the question: “what is terrorism?” To date, most recent comparative case study analyses of terrorism focus on ideologies, political/governance models, structural/contextual enablers, practices, organisational structures, and/or the basis of issues such as trust, belonging, and membership. We uniquely contribute to the growing literature on comparative terrorism studies by comparing and contrasting state and non-state terrorism on the basis of strategic communication vis-à-vis the preparation, execution, and outcomes of political violence (the “terrorism attack cycle”), the instrumentalisation of victims, and fear management. We argue that state and non-state terrorism are co-constituting and co-enabling phenomena, possibly best conceptualised as two bounded and coiled strands of the political violence DNA.     

A Hard Culture? Religion and Politics in Turn-of-the-Century Australian History

The idea that Australia developed a uniquely "hard" political culture after 1788 — a culture that prized the rational and made short shift of religion — has had plenty of currency over the years. This idea has been challenged in recent scholarship, along with the broader notion that Western society became secularised during the twentieth century. Set against the backdrop of a wider challenge to the "secularisation narrative", this article explores the work of several historians dealing with the relationship between religion and Australian politics at the turn of the twentieth century. These historians, who include Al Gabay, Frank Bongiorno, Bruce Scates, and Judith Brett, are creating "softer" understandings of Australian political history. As a consequence, I suggest, their work has implications for the way we think about the relationship between the religious and secular Left, as well as for the way we think about Australian masculinities and culture more generally.     

The New Racial Calculus: Electoral Institutions and Black Representation in Local Legislatures

In this study we revisit the question of black representation on city councils and school boards using a novel substantive and methodological approach and longitudinal data for a sample of over 300 boards and councils. Conceptualizing black representation as a two-stage process, we fit Mullahy's hurdle Poisson models to explain whether and to what extent blacks achieve representation in local legislatures. We find that while the size of the black population and electoral arrangements matter more than ever, especially for overcoming the representational hurdle, the extent to which the black population is concentrated is also strongly associated with black council representation. Further, whereas black resources and opportunities to build "rainbow" coalitions with Latinos or liberal whites are marginally if at all related to black legislative representation, we find that legislative size is an underappreciated mechanism by which to increase representation, particularly in at-large systems, and is perhaps the best predictor of moving towards additional representation.     

Substantive Symbols: The Attitudinal Dimension of Black Political Incorporation in Local Government

Traditional studies of minority incorporation focus on the redistribution of public resources that purportedly follows black gains in representation. The present study departs from this approach by focusing on the attitudinal effects of black leadership. Two research questions guide this study: To what extent do blacks' assessments of neighborhood services and conditions stem from black representation in local executive and legislative offices? Are these attitudinal effects rooted in policy and service delivery outcomes? Employing survey data from 3,000 blacks embedded in 52 cities and 53 school districts, this study reveals that blacks report higher levels of satisfaction with their neighborhood conditions, police services, and public schools when represented by blacks in city hall and on school boards and that these evaluations are most positive when improvements in local services are conspicuous. Overall, these findings extend conventional conceptualizations of substantive benefits and challenge more pessimistic accounts regarding the effects of black representation in local politics.