RECONSTRUCTING ABORIGINAL HOUSING POLICY FOR REMOTE AREAS: HOW MUCH ROOM FOR MANOEUVRE?

Abstract: This article applies Schaffer's 1984 critique of the "sectoralism" of mainstream public policy practice and discourse to Aboriginal housing policy in Australia. It analyses the approaches and programs of the Aboriginal housing policy sector and the priority given to them over the years. It then identifies the dominant agenda of Aboriginal housing policy defined in terms of massive statistics of nationwide Aboriginal housing need. An alterative agenda defined in terms of appropriate non-conventional housing and facilities for remote areas is also identified and its struggle for recognition traced. The final sections of the article suggest reasons why this alternative agenda has remained on the margins of the Aboriginal housing policy sector and examine its prospects for becoming less marginal in the future.     

Multilingual Sentiment Analysis: A New Approach to Measuring Conflict in Legislative Speeches

Comparative scholars of legislative politics continue to face the challenge of measuring a key theoretical concept: conflict at the level of legislative bills. We address this challenge with a multilingual sentiment‐based approach and show that such a measure can effectively capture different types of parliamentary conflict. We also demonstrate that an automated translation of the dictionary yields valid results and therefore greatly facilitates comparative work on legislatures. Our applications show that a sentiment approach recovers government‐opposition dynamics in various settings. The use of a simple, translatable sentiment dictionary opens up the possibility of studying legislative conflict in bill debates across languages and countries.     

Engaging the narrative in ontological (in)security theory: insights from feminist IR

Ontological security theory (OST) provides a unique account of how state Self-identity is formed and reformed in international relations. OST postulates that state Self-identity is usefully understood by inquiring into the foundation of a state's sense of Self: its autobiographical narrative. We seek to amend this line of argument by further suggesting that the autobiographical narratives of states are ‘gendered’. Feminist theorizing about the relationship between gender and power implies that the dominant autobiographical narrative of state Self-identity is ‘gendered’ masculine. The power of this masculinized autobiographical narrative flows from an ‘internal othering’ process of counter ‘feminine’ autobiographical narratives that exist alongside the masculinized autobiographical narrative. Our goal is to suggest that opportunities do arise for counter ‘feminine’ narratives to challenge the dominant autobiographical narrative due to their interdependence and we explicate two practices by which masculinized narratives can be engaged, challenged and disrupted.     

Roger Scruton and Mark Dooley, <Emphasis Type="Italic">Conversations with Roger Scruton</Emphasis>

English philosopher and critic Roger Scruton considers his intellectual odyssey, which has ranged from analytic philosophy at Cambridge to Hegel, Burke, and Plato’s Socrates, with topics including music, moral philosophy, and the relation of science to religion. Providing an overview of Scruton’s philosophic quest, the book shows how its elements cohere and serves as an unsurpassed introduction to his work.     

Penal Populism and the Public Thermostat: Crime,Public Punitiveness,and Public Policy

This article makes the case that feedback processes in democratic politics—between crime rates, public opinion, and public policy—can account for the growth of penal populism in Britain. It argues that the public recognize and respond to rising (and falling) levels of crime, and that in turn public support for being tough on crime is translated into patterns of imprisonment. This contributes to debates over the crime–opinion–policy connection, unpacking the dynamic processes by which these relationships unfold at the aggregate level. This uses the most extensive data set ever assembled on aggregate opinion on crime in Britain to construct a new over‐time measure of punitive attitudes. The analysis first tests the thermostatic responsiveness of punitive attitudes to changes in recorded crime rates as well as self‐reported victimization, and then examines the degree to which changes in mass opinion impact on criminal justice policy.     

Threat Perception and American Support for Torture

When do Americans support the government’s use of torture? We argue that perceptions of threat undermine the extent to which American public opinion serves as a bulwark against government torture. Although surveys demonstrate that a slim majority of the American public generally opposes torture, using a nationally-representative survey experiment, we show that Americans are considerably more supportive of government abuse when it is directed at individuals who they perceive as threatening: specifically, when a detainee has an Arabic name and when the alleged crime is terrorism. Given the malleability of public opinion as a potential constraint on abuse, our results underscore the importance of institutional protections of human rights.     

On filtering longitudinal public opinion data: Issues in identification and representation of true change

The Kalman filter is a popular tool in engineering and economics. It is becoming popular in political science, touted for its abilities to reduce measurement error and produce more precise estimates of true public opinion. Its application to survey measures of public opinion varies in important ways compared to the traditionally understood Kalman filter. It makes a priori assumptions about the variance of the sampling error that would not usually be made and does so in a way that violates an important property of the Kalman filter. Consequently, the behavior of the filter modified for public opinion measures is less well-known. Through simulations we assess whether and to what extent filtering: reliably detects the characteristics of time series; does so across series with different rates of autoregressive decay; and does so when the variance of the sampling error is unknown. We also examine whether the filtered data represents the level of true underlying variance and the extent to which filtering assists or hinders our ability to detect exogenous shocks. We learn a numbers of things. Most importantly, taking into account sampling error variance when filtering data can work well, though its performance does vary. First, filtering works best identifying time series characteristics when assuming a stationary process, even if the underlying process contains a unit root. Second, the performance of filtering drops off when we incorrectly specify the variance of the sampling error, and especially when we overestimate it. Third, when estimating exogenous shocks it is better to make no a priori assumptions regarding a measurement error variance unless we are absolutely certain we know what it is. In fact, applying the filter without specifying the measurement error variance is more often than not the best choice.     

Social Withdrawal and Aloneliness in Adolescence: Examining the Implications of Too Much and Not Enough Solitude

Journal of Youth and Adolescence - Adolescence is a developmental period when spending time alone becomes particularly important. The aim of this study was to explore adolescents’ experiences...     

Covid-19 and the Blunders of our Governments: Long-run System Failings Aggravated by Political Choices

More urgently than ever we need an answer to the question posed by the late Mick Moran in The Political Quarterly nearly two decades ago: ‘if government now invests huge resources in trying to be smart why does it often act so dumb?’. We reflect on this question in the context of governmental responses to Covid-19 in four steps. First, we argue that blunders occur because of systemic weaknesses that stimulate poor policy choices. Second, we review and assess the performance of governments on Covid-19 across a range of advanced democracies. Third, in the light of these comparisons we argue that the UK system of governance has proved itself vulnerable to failure at the time when its citizens most needed it. Finally, we outline an agenda of reform that seeks to rectify structural weaknesses of that governance capacity.     

Offenders’ uncoerced false confessions: A new application of statement analysis?

Purpose. Deception detection research has mainly studied denials and distortions given by students. This study examined true and false confessions as told by offenders. It was hypothesized that the statement analytic techniques Criteria‐Based Content Analysis (CBCA) and Reality Monitoring (RM) would discriminate truths and lies. Methods. Truthful and deceptive confessions to crime were given by 30 offenders (both women and men) in a within‐subject design. The participants were in prison at the time of data collection, and told the truth about a crime they had committed and been sentenced for. In addition, they made up a lie about a different crime after a few minutes of preparation. The transcribed statements were scored for CBCA and RM criteria. Results. Results showed that neither total CBCA nor total RM scores differentiated between lies and truths. Some individual CBCA criteria, however, showed differences: more self‐deprecations and doubts about own testimony in the told lies, and more unexpected complications in the truths. Conclusions. The results are discussed in relation to statement analysis of offenders’ accounts, individual CBCA criteria, as well as the development of criminal experience and familiarity with the event and setting. Implications for triers of fact and suggestions for future research are considered.