Sustainability Reporting by Australian Universities

There is continuing debate about the consequences of climate change and an increasing emphasis placed on the disclosure of social and environmental indicators by organisations. Universities have been traditionally known as places where intellectual inquiry and advances in knowledge are paramount. Therefore, there is an expectation that universities would place much emphasis on sustainability reporting to fulfil the needs of a range of stakeholders. The objective of this study is to investigate the nature and extent of sustainability disclosures reported by Australian universities in stand‐alone sustainability reports. The findings suggest significant differences in the nature and extent of sustainability disclosures. This study has implications for policy‐makers and university administrators and is a call to senior university leaders to take up the challenge and contribute to the global conversation with regard to sustainability reporting.     

Dimitriadis,G. (2003). Friendship,Cliques, and Gangs: Young Black Men Coming of Age in Urban America

No abstract available for this article.     

Wedge Politics and Welfare Reform in Australia

The election of the Howard Government has marked a paradigm shift in welfare policy with the implementation of far reaching reforms around the concept of mutual obligation. At the same time, there has been media speculation about the Government's use of 'wedge politics' to sustain its political agenda with respect to welfare and other policies. Wedge politics, however, is yet to receive detailed analysis in Australian political science. We define wedge politics to be a calculated political tactic aimed at using divisive social issues to gain political support, weaken opponents and strengthen control over the political agenda. The purpose of this paper is thus twofold: to develop a definition of wedge politics and to investigate how the Howard Government's welfare reform agenda might be understood as an example of such politics, drawing out its longer-term implications.     

A School-Level Analysis of Adolescent Extracurricular Activity,Delinquency, and Depression: The Importance of Situational Context

In this article we investigate the extent to which the relationship between extracurricular activities and youth development depends on situational contexts. Using a national sample including 13,466 youths in grades 7–12 across 120 schools, we conduct school-level analyses of the association between extracurricular activities, delinquency, and depression. Three main findings are reported. First, we observe near-normal distributions across schools in the proportions of delinquent or depressed youths involved in extracurricular activities, illustrating that extracurricular activities can be positive, neutral, or negative settings for youth development. Second, within individual schools we fail to uncover consistent associations in the propensity of delinquent or depressed youth to be involved with different types of extracurricular activities. Third, standard macro-level context variables do not explain the observed variations within or between schools. The results suggest that the relationships between extracurricular activities, delinquent conduct and depressive symptoms among youth ultimately depend more upon micro-level contextual factors than the type or content of the activities themselves.

Plaintiffs by proxy: A firm-level approach to WTO dispute resolution

Lobbying by multinational business firms drives the agenda of international trade politics. We match Fortune Global 500 firms to WTO disputes in which they have a stake and to their political activities using public disclosure data. The quantitative evidence reveals traces of a principal-agent relationship between major MNCs and the US Trade Representative (USTR). Firms lobby and make political contributions to induce the USTR to lodge a WTO dispute, and once a dispute begins, firms increase their political activity in order to keep USTR on track. Lobbying is overwhelmingly patriotic—the side opposing the US position is barely represented—and we see little evidence of MNCs lobbying against domestic protectionism. When the United States is targeted in a dispute, lobbying by defendant-side firms substantially delays settlement, as the affected firms pressure the government to reject concessions. Lobbying on the complainant side does not delay dispute resolution, as complainant-side firms have mixed incentives, to resolve disputes quickly as well as to hold out for better terms.     

How policy agendas change when autocracies liberalize: The case of Hong Kong, 1975–2016

This article considers how autocrats decide to expand or narrow the issue diversity of their policy agenda during a period of political liberalization. Prior studies have two competing perspectives. First, political liberalization increases the social and political freedom that enhances information exchange, and thus expands issue diversity. Second, political liberalization decreases government's control of the legislature and thus narrows the issue diversity. This article offers a novel theoretical perspective by combining these two countervailing theories. Specifically, it predicts a diminishing marginal benefit of information exchange and an increasing marginal bargaining cost. As such, this article argues that issue diversity follows a negative quadratic (inverted‐U) relationship as the regimes liberalize. The analysis of a new and unique dataset of Hong Kong's legislative agenda (1975 to 2016) offers support for this theory. This study sheds light on policy‐making in authoritarian regimes and democracies, and advances the theory of information processing.     

Asia's Regional Security Order: Rules,Power and Status

East Asia's security order is experiencing significant change as it moves from a stable and peaceful geopolitical setting into one of increasingly open contestation. There is no scholarly consensus about the core character of East Asia's old security order, thus making analysis of this period of change especially challenging. The aim of this paper is two‐fold. Firstly, it seeks to provide some order to the broader debate about East Asia's regional security environment. Secondly, it provides a novel account of East Asia's security order that better captures the key dynamics at play in the region than the literature currently does. The paper's first part discusses the different types of security orders identified by scholars and analysts. The second examines the ways in which scholars have attempted to explain East Asia's security order and explores the key forces that they have argued shaped their form. The third part develops a distinctive account of Asia's security order which focuses on the interplay of domestic and international factors and argues that it was the political consensus that existed across the region about its structure and purpose that made the region stable and it is the breakdown of that consensus that is destabilising East Asia today.     

Costly Signals: Voter Responses to Parliamentary Dissent in Austria,Britain, and Germany

When Members of Parliament (MPs) disagree publicly with their party, this provides a signal to voters regarding both their political views and their character valence. We argue that the strength of this signal to voters depends on the personal career costs an MP incurs by dissenting. The greater the perceived costs of dissent to the MP, the more positively voters should react to dissent. In line with this theory, we use a series of conjoint analysis experiments in Britain, Germany, and Austria to show that: (1) dissent has a more positive effect on voter evaluations in systems where the costs of dissent are higher, and (2) more costly types of dissent have a greater impact on voter evaluations. These findings have important implications for understanding how voter evaluations of MPs depend on beliefs about parliamentary systems and how parliamentary institutions condition the link between voters and MPs.