Compulsory Voting Rules,Reluctant Voters and Ideological Proximity Voting

Political Behavior - Political theorists have argued that democracies should strive for high turnout, leading to an argument for the introduction of compulsory voting, one of the surest ways to...     

Museum Outreach Programs to Promote Community Engagement in Local Environmental Issues

Ideas of ‘community’ and ‘community voice’ have been mobilised in collaborative programs developed between the National Museum of Australia and the Murray‐Darling Basin Commission since 1992. This collaboration is set within a broader context of changing ideas and practice around governance, community and environmental issues. The recent Murray‐Darling Outreach Project (MDOP), a series of museum outreach projects with regional communities aiming to increase community engagement in local environmental issues in the Murray‐Darling Basin, is specifically examined. Evaluation research on the MDOP found that the approach to program development significantly shaped the types of voices, range of issues presented and the nature of the communicative forums established. The potential impacts on online audiences are discussed along with broader implications for government agencies involved in community partnerships.     

Deinstitutionalisation and Managerialism in Queensland's Public Psychiatric Institutions: Challenging ‘Rhetoric’ with Empirical Results

This article places the experience of public psychiatric institutions for the long term mentally ill in the context of New Public Management (NPM). This managerialist school of thought has been in widespread ascendancy since the 1970s. Some key characteristics of deinstitutionalisation and NPM are outlined. We then present some historical data about the temporal process of deinstitutionalisation in Queensland's public psychiatric institutions. The time series analysis provided is of a single state since Australia's public health care system is state‐based. Although NPM is not a coherent set of principles or doctrines, it is argued that ideology and the reality may be contradicting. Some of NPM's particular emphases are empirically analysed, in particular the view that administration/management expenditures are to be reduced, while emphasising workers ‘at the coal face’. The empirical results provide no evidence of a ‘parsimonious’ approach to management: parsimony occurs only for nursing staff. Relative expenditures on managerial functions have increased.     

Otto Kahn‐Freund and Collective Laissez‐Faire: An Edifice without a Keystone?

This paper describes Otto Kahn-Freund's advocacy of the British 'collective laissez-faire' system of regulation of industrial relations, in which regulation proceeded autonomously of the state. It suggests that a weakness of collective laissez-faire as a normative principle was its failure to make adequate provision for the furtherance of the public interest. It links this failure to a more general reluctance, on the part of Kahn-Freund, to conceive of the state as representative of the public interest. And it seeks to explain this reluctance with reference to Kahn-Freund's experiences of living and working as a labour court judge in the Weimar Republic, and of moving to the UK as a refugee from Nazism.     

Women's empowerment in challenging environments: a case study from Balochistan

This article offers strategies for women's empowerment in conservative, tribal, and religious environments, based on an innovative programme in Pakistan. Mainstreaming Gender and Development (MGD) encouraged participants to build on their communities' strengths, minimised resistance among families and communities by including them in the development process, and succeeded in building a cadre of women activists. Drawing on its experience, the author questions the importance of collective action, suggests that the selection of participants should be based on aptitude rather than socio-economic status, and highlights the potential for women's empowerment in challenging environments.     

Public International Law and the Regulation of Private Spaces: Does The Convention on the Rights of the Child Impose an Obligation on States to Allow Gay and Lesbian Couples to Adopt?

Opposition to the adoption of children by gays and lesbiansis invariably based on the claim that such a practice is contraryto the rights and best interests of children. The aim of thisarticle is to examine this claim in light of the provisionsof the United Nations Conventions on the Rights of the Child.It will be argued that an approach to the interpretation ofa child's rights and best interests which is based on empiricalevidence reveals that there is no basis for sexual orientationto be a relevant consideration in assessing a person's suitabilityto adopt a child.     

Constructing an “Iron” Unity: The Statue of Unity and India’s Nationalist Historiography

In October 2018, the Indian Prime Minister, Narendra Modi inaugurated a pet project, the “Statue of Unity”, in Gujarat, India. The world’s tallest statue, the Statue of Unity cost USD416.67 million to construct, and depicts India’s first deputy prime minister, Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel as the “Iron Man of India”, staring resolutely out over the controversial Sardar Sarovar Dam. This article examines the meanings of the statue as a political project of memorialisation. We argue that the statue is an attempt to reimagine India’s nationalist historiography around Patel, taking the emphasis off the secular, socialist first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru. In doing so, the statue constructs a hyper-masculine idea of India centred on an assimilatory idea of “unity”. The statue’s construction materially enforced this symbolism by pushing aside the site’s previous Adivasi owners, and presents an ordered, majoritarian, business-led vision of public space in Modi’s India. Within this space, the statue materialises Patel as the image of Indian identity. He is made from the stuff of progress, concrete and reinforced steel, and coated in bronze, which links his image with India’s long history of religious statue-making. The project then circulates these ideas through tourist marketing and visitor experience.     

Identifying reliable ions for the statistical differentiation of structurally similar fentanyl analogs

Definitive identification of fentanyl analogs based on mass spectral comparison is challenging given the high degree of structural and, hence, spectral similarity. To address this, a statistical method was previously developed in which two electron-ionization (EI) mass spectra are compared using the unequal variance t-test. Normalized intensities of corresponding ions are compared, testing the null hypothesis (H₀) that the difference in intensity is equal to zero. If H₀ is accepted at all m/z values, the two spectra are statistically equivalent at the specified confidence level. If H₀ is not accepted at any m/z value, then there is a significant difference in intensity at that m/z value between the two spectra. In this work, the statistical comparison method is applied to distinguish EI spectra of valeryl fentanyl, isovaleryl fentanyl, and pivaloyl fentanyl. Spectra of the three analogs were collected over a 9-month period and at different concentrations. At the 99.9% confidence level, the spectra of corresponding isomers were statistically associated. Spectra of different isomers were statistically distinct, and ions responsible for discrimination were identified in each comparison. To account for inherent instrument variations, discriminating ions for each pairwise comparison were ranked based on the magnitude of the calculated t-statistic (t_calc) value. For a given comparison, ions with higher t_calc values are those with the greatest difference in intensity between the two spectra and, therefore, are considered more reliable for discrimination. Using these methods, objective discrimination among the spectra was achieved and ions considered most reliable for discrimination of these isomers were identified.     

German Voters in Times of Crisis: The Impact of Perceptions and Economic Context on Electoral Behaviour

This paper analyses the connection between economic context, voters’ individual assessment of the economy, and party identification, taking the German national elections of 2009 as an example. Based on the results of multinomial and multilevel regression models, the article shows that partisanship moderates how the economy affects the vote. In cases of increasing unemployment in the constituency, voters are less likely to vote for the Social Democrats instead of the CDU and the opposition. This effect is particularly strong amongst voters who report that they identify with the Social Democrats. Regarding the effect of voters’ assessment of the national economy, the results are different. In this case, a better evaluation of the regional economy increases the probability to vote for right-wing parties – notably amongst voters without partisanship. These findings suggest that the moderating effect of partisanship on the economy’s impact on voting behaviour should not be overestimated. What is more, this analysis implies that research on economic voting should always account for both contextual factors and voters’ personal assessment of the economy, as these measures reveal different dimensions of economic voting.