Nicholas Faulkner

Change and Continuity in the Ideology of Australian Prime Ministers: The Governor-General's Speeches, 1946–2010

In Australian politics, narratives have developed around the ideological lineage of prime ministers from the same party so that, for example, Howard is often compared to Menzies and Hawke to Whitlam. In this article we examine the extent to which the ideology (left–right) of prime ministers from the same party has changed over time. We analyse the contents of speeches the Governor-General delivered at the opening of parliament between 1946 and 2010. We validate a number of narratives around the ideological lineage of prime ministers in relation to their party predecessors, and invalidate others, by analysing the speeches using the Comparative Manifestos Project coding scheme. This article also argues that parties do matter and shows how the addition of coding for ideology can complement the Policy Agendas Project method.

‘It’s okay to be racist’: moral disengagement in online discussions of racist incidents in Australia

ABSTRACT Racist views expressed on the Internet have damaging consequences for social harmony and well-being. This article examines how and why individuals express support or opposition to racist behaviour in a prominent online medium: comments on news websites. Specifically, we examine how supporters and opponents of racist behaviour use a particular type of subtle discursive strategies known as moral disengagement in their online responses to three notable racist incidents that occurred in Australia in 2013. Moral disengagement strategies allow individuals to avoid distress, self-condemnation, and social-sanctions when supporting or engaging in harmful behaviour by making that behaviour appear moral and acceptable. We show that supporters, but not opponents, of racist behaviour consistently use moral disengagement strategies in their rhetoric, and demonstrate that moral disengagement provides a powerful theoretical framework through which racist rhetoric on online news websites can be understood.

Priming political trust: evidence from an experiment

Political trust is one of the most researched areas in political science. Yet little is known about what causes political trust to vary. Past research has relied almost solely on survey data, and focused on exploring the correlation between political trust and various micro- and macro-level factors. This research note reports the findings from an experiment designed to examine the causal effect of one of the most commonly cited causes of political trust: political probity. Results show that political trust and trust in specific institutions change when participants read an article about political probity and complete a word-association task. The treatment we used is low cost, straightforward and may be used by other researchers to alter political trust in experiments.

Motivating cosmopolitan helping: Thick cosmopolitanism, responsibility for harm, and collective guilt:

Political theorists and philosophers have recently directed their attention to understanding how individuals may become motivated to act as ethical cosmopolitans. A prominent theory – termed “thick cosmopolitanism” – argues that the realization one’s ingroup is responsible for causing harm to people in distant nations will increase cosmopolitan helping behavior. Additionally, thick cosmopolitanism suggests that guilt may explain this effect. This article presents the first experimental tests of these claims, and is the first research to use experiments to investigate cosmopolitan helping. Results demonstrate a substantial, but previously unrecognized, limitation to thick cosmopolitanism. Specifically, reminders of ingroup responsibility for causing harm not only increased individuals’ acceptance of responsibility and collective guilt, which indirectly enhanced cosmopolitan helping (Studies 1 and 2), but simultaneously increased dehumanization of the harmed outgroup, which indirectly diminished helping (Study 2). These conflicting processes resulted in no overall increase in cosmopolitan helping, contrary to the predictions of thick cosmopolitanism.

Avoiding Theoretical Stagnation: A Systematic Review and Framework for Measuring Public Value

Public value theory has become a hot topic in public administration research, but its proponents have long recognised difficulties in empirically testing the theorys central propositions. There has been a lack of clarity about how to measure the extent to which organisations are generating public value, which has rendered researchers unable to quantitatively study the causes, consequences and correlates of public value. The current study systematically reviews the growing literature on public value measurement to identify, evaluate, and synthesise available measures. Through a qualitative synthesis of the themes present in published measures, we identify four key components for measuring public value that appear to be important across a range of policy and national contexts. Our review identifies a promising framework that could be used to structure a comprehensive measure of public value and, in doing so, provides a means to progress theoretical development and testing of the public value approach.