Beyond Electocracy: Rethinking the Political Representative as Powerful Stranger

This year's Chorley lecture examines certain theoretical and practical questions concerning political representation in constitutional democracies and advances three claims. (1) That electocracy (rule by elections) reduces the role of citizens to a series of discrete choice points, often shifting the actual moment of choice to the politician. (2) That a preoccupation with winner-take-all elections encourages representatives in the US to see themselves as powerful strangers with a proprietary interest in their position. (3) That representatives can deepen democracy by functioning as catalysts for citizen involvement not just surrogates for citizen views or identities. Drawing on historic and contemporary examples of ordinary people who mobilize collectively to build new forms of citizen power before and after elections, Professor Guinier adapts the framework of collective efficacy to describe this conceptual move. She argues that vibrant constituencies of accountability can transform the representational relationship to reimagine democracy as self-governance not just self-government.     

Selective attention and self-control in delinquent adolescents

Research studies are briefly reviewed to examine the hypothesis that delinquent adolescents may process information in a different manner than non-delinquents. Studies suggest that delinquents may have less control over which information they attend to, may expose themselves to more stimulation, may process information more slowly, and may selectively attend to different information than matched controls. Findings from a recent study are presented in support of the latter hypothesis. A clinical example illustrates how these attention differences may appear in the course of treatment.This work was conducted while Dr. Rosenthal was a Clinical Research Training Fellow in Adolescence in a program jointly sponsored by the Adolescent Program of the Illinois State Psychiatric Institute, the Institute for Psychosomatic and Psychiatric Research and Training at Michael Reese Hospital and Medical Center, and by the Departments of Behavioral Science (Human Development) and Psychiatry of the University of Chicago. The training program was funded by Public Health Service grant T32MH14668.A version of this paper was presented at the Conference on the Psychology of Adolescence, Chicago, June 20–21, 1980. Portions of this article are based upon the doctoral dissertation submitted by Frank Lani in partial fulfillment of the Ph.D. degree, Loyola University, Chicago, Illinois.Received his Ph.D. in clinical psychology at Vanderbilt University. Current research interests include delinquency, hyperkinesis, and evaluation of hospital treatment.Received his Ph.D. in clinical psychology at Loyola University. Current research interests include social cognition in delinquency.     

The Rise and Fall of the Australian Women's Bureau

Policy textbooks often overlook the importance of international borrowing in their accounts of the policy process. Analysis of feminist policy influence also tends to neglect the international dimension of the opportunity structure and the leverage provided by international agendas. In this article we tell the story of how the Women's Bureau, the first women's unit in Australian government, came into being in the 1960s. This story encompasses the overseas modelling of such bureaux and the promotion of such models through international women's organisations and their national affiliates. The international dimension has been inseparable from the development of women's policy machinery in Australian government; the current disengagement from international standard setting coincides with the dismantling of domestic machinery, including the Women's Bureau.     

Co-design or top-down welfare conditionality? An analysis of the impact of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander submissions to six parliamentary inquiries into the Cashless Debit Card

The former Coalition Commonwealth Government consistently asserted that representative Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander (hereafter Indigenous) organisations supported the introduction of the Cashless Debit Card (CDC) in multiple trial sites. Consequently, they depicted the CDC policy as an alleged exemplar of a co-designed policy model based on partnership with Indigenous community groups. This article examines the validity of this argument by analysing the views expressed by Indigenous organisations via written and oral submissions to the six parliamentary inquiries into the CDC from 2015 to 2020. Our findings suggest that with the exception of the first inquiry, most Indigenous submissions opposed the introduction or the expansion of the CDC. Yet, these critical views received only limited acknowledgement in the inquiry reports, and seem to have little or no impact on government policy concerning the CDC. It appears that the CDC policy is more accurately identified as a top-down policy imposed by government on local Aboriginal communities which, with some exceptions, neither requested nor consented to the policy.     

Combating Asymmetric Threats: The Interplay of Offense and Defense

The overarching objective of this analysis is to examine the ways and means by which the United States could take the asymmetric battle-space and win against the ever-changing array of threats posed by nation-states and non-state actors. Today's security challenges are predominantly hybrids: offense and defense; symmetric and asymmetric; synchronous and asynchronous; regular and irregular; geographically-focused and globally-ubiquitous. This reality requires multi-dimensional thinking, nuanced approaches, and nimble, decisive execution guided by a new strategic paradigm. Fighting on the enemy's terms, scoring short-term wins at unjustifiably high costs in lives, treasure and lost opportunities is simply unacceptable.