John Uhr

Testing Deliberative Democracy: The 1999 Australian Republic Referendum

THIS ARTICLE EXAMINES AUSTRALIAN REFERENDUM PRACTICE WITH the aim of contributing to the growing international debate over concepts of deliberative democracy, defined in terms of democratic regimes structured to maximize community deliberation in public decision-making. Theories of deliberative democracy go beyond earlier approaches to participatory democracy by specifying in greater detail the nature of the deliberative process in which citizens should be able to participate and of the importance of institutions of civil society to an effective deliberative process. The focus on ideals of public deliberation ref lects the ambition of deliberative democrats (the ‘deliberati’ if you will) to ground political decision-making in norms of shared public reason. Where earlier approaches to participatory democracy investigated rights to political participation, current approaches to deliberative democracy also investigate responsibilities of political participants – particularly responsibilities to comply with norms of rational political deliberation.

Professional Ethics for Politicians

Democracies typically impose onerous regulation on the conduct of bureaucratic officials and remarkably light regulation of the conduct of elected officials. The traditional presumption was that politicians should be allowed to self-regulate. In many democratic regimes, politicians have shown themselves unable to carry this burden of public trust. As a result, political ethics is regulated from a perspective of public distrust, associated with fears of political corruption. Despite my personal reservations about professional ethics models (recorded here by reference to recent fictional work of novelist J.M. Coetzee), I revive a trust-based perspective to make a case for a regime of self-regulation for democratic politicians, based on a democratic hope that politicians can be trusted to act as responsible professionals.

The Australian and New Zealand parliaments: Context, response and capacity

We compare Australian and New Zealand parliamentary demands on executive governments to ‘do something’ about globalisation, noting that parliaments are distinctive institutionally—functioning as umbrellas protecting arenas of adversarial competitiveness, with little scope for cohesive institutional capacity. We define ‘globalisation’ as it is defined by the parliamentary actors themselves: that is, quite broadly with different actors taking different postures towards globalisation depending on party and on political and institutional perspectives. Whether parliaments can respond effectively to globalisation depends on their institutional capacity and political composition—their political resources. We establish the international context in which the two parliaments operate, establishing our hypotheses about institutional capacity from Lisa Martins book Democratic Commitments: Legislatures and International Cooperation. We conclude that both parliaments have made significant, if often unnoticed, contributions to the political management of globalisation.

Budget talk: rhetorical constraints and contests

This article examines the budget surplus debate that occurred during the Gillard minority government (2010–13) to broaden the range of linguistic phenomena that are typically scrutinised in relation to Australian political rhetoric. The budget debate reveals the persistent efforts of both major parties to compete for control of the normative force that derives from using what Skinner calls ‘evaluative–descriptive terms’. In this case, ‘responsible economic government’ was the legitimating principle, yet use of this term became entwined with the issue of trustworthiness. Delivering a budget surplus by 2012–13 was converted from a judgement regarding prudent macro-management into an election promise. Thus, Labor surrendered rhetorical control of a flexible legitimating principle for an immobile test of morality, to its political misfortune. 本文研究了杰拉德少数党执政（2010—13）期间发生的关于预算剩余的辩论，这个辩论扩展了一般会与澳大利亚政治修辞结合起来考察的语言现象。预算的辩论显示，两个主要政党总是争夺规范性力量，这力量即斯金纳所谓“评—述词汇”。“负责任的经济政府”是成为了价值的原则，但这个词的使用与是否值得信任的话题纠缠在了一起。兑现2012至13年的预算剩余，从一个关于审慎宏观管理的判断转化成为了选战承诺。工党放弃了一种灵活的合法化原则而取一种固定的道德检查，这在政治上是不幸的。

Explicating the Australian Senate

This article is a revised version of a paper outlining the role and performance of the Australian Senate originally prepared for the seminar in March 2002 on House of Lords Reform organised by the Constitution Unit, University College London and the Centre for Legislative Studies, University of Hull. For the most part, the article follows the original conference form of brief answers to questions identified by the conference organisers. The article argues that the Senate provides an important working model of an elective upper house in a Westminster-derived parliamentary system. It does not pretend to be a comprehensive account of the Australian Senate. Rather, the main aim is to examine the Senates evolving place in the Australian system of responsible parliamentary government.

Bipartisanship and Bicameralism in Australia's ‘War on Terror’: Forcing Limits on the Extension of Executive Power

In Australia, John Howards coalition government responded to the attacks of September 2001 by introducing a series of bills that would grant the executive and the security services unprecedented new powers in its ‘war on terror’, and by committing troops to Afghanistan and, later, Iraq. Australia governments normally dominate the lower House of Representatives whereas the Senate, with near co-equal powers, elected by proportional representation, and thus usually denying the government or opposition an overall majority, proved to be a more significant obstacle, often requiring the government to make substantial concessions in order to secure passage of its legislation. Following the 2005 General Election, however, Howards coalition secured a rare Senate majority, which it was anticipated would curtail parliaments ability to block or amend legislation. In the event, the Senate continued to play a role, albeit a diminished one, in shaping Australias ‘war on terror’.

Institutions in context: Reconstructing Aristotle's defence of cultural studies

Within political science, there are two alternative approaches to understanding political institutions: traditional ‘institutional studies’ and the newer ‘cultural studies’. Each approach tends to go its own way, with little debate between the two. The former explains institutions by reference to their independent behaviour which has a formative influence on political culture. The latter explains institutions by reference to their dependent behaviour which reflects the formative influence of political culture. This paper proposes a synthesis between the two approaches, offering a third alternative based on a reconstructured application of Aristotles ‘regime analysis’, along lines experimented with by J.S. Mill. My primary aim is analytical rather that historical: to reconstruct an approach to institutional analysis which better relates institution and culture.

John Rohr’s Concept of Regime Values: Locating Theory in Public Administration

John Rohr’s concept of “regime values” marks out a distinctive approach to regime analysis in contemporary governance. Very few commentators, however, have recovered the foundations of Rohr’s regime values in his early work as a political scientist, particularly in his largely ignored first book called Prophets Without Honor. My aim is to recover those foundations through an examination of the emergence of the type of regime analysis in that original book, which reveals much of the formative political theory shaping Rohr’s subsequent work in the United States and comparative public administration.

Modernised Modes of Government Ethics

This chapter reviews international trends in “government ethics”, taking that term to refer to the evolving ethics regimes typically managed by political executives to regulate the official conduct of the administrative branch of government. I begin by noting some examples of the ways that chief political executives now take prominent public responsibility for government ethics. Ethics plays an important role in defining political leadership. Heads of government increasingly use “ethics” as an important instrument to manage public trust in government. Competing trends distribute responsibility for government ethics widely across what I term “the lattice of leadership” that is characteristic of modernized democratic governance. In liberal-democratic regimes, government ethics is increasingly at the junction of competing institutional interests. At times, public trust demands greater ethical responsibility from heads of government; at other times, public trust calls for wider public accountability across the governance system (Bovens 1998, pp. 22).

Power Transitions and Leadership Successions in Government

The peaceful transition of power from one set of hands to another is one of the basic features of a working democracy. The simple image is of a new pair of hands replacing a former pair or indeed collection of hands, each set of hands able and willing to hold the reins of power, or in a more contemporary image, exercise the levers of power. In some eyes, the levers are almost neutral instruments of power which lend themselves equally to any set of authorized hands. In democratic systems, authorization involves democratic processes of election and representation, with popular support (and not mechanical competence) taken as the primary test of eligibility to exercise power.