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- How democracies exit small wars: the role of opposition parties in war termination
- Public Sector Unions Need the Private Sector
- After Eden: The Transformation of the Landscape of Political Power in the United States
- In Search of Soft Power: Does Foreign Public Opinion Matter for U.S. Foreign Policy?
- Evaluating civil development in counterinsurgency operations: the case for a field experiment in Afghanistan
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Publications FeedJournal Articles
How democracies exit small wars: the role of opposition parties in war termination
8 May 2012
by Adam Lockyer
This article published in the Australian Journal of International Affairs argues that opposition political parties can play an important role in determining when and how a democracy exits a small war. Recent theoretical and empirical research on small wars has further uncovered the restrictions and constraints that democratic societies place on their government’s war strategies. However, the mechanisms through which public opinion constrains and pressures government strategies have received relatively less academic attention. This article examines the role that opposition political parties play in providing an avenue through which society can shape foreign policy - namely, the exiting from small wars. It argues that opposition political parties can be instrumental in determining democracies’ war termination in three ways: through ‘elite cuing’, applying electoral pressure, or winning an election and assuming government. Read article
Public Sector Unions Need the Private Sector
23 March 2012
In this paper, Ahlquist argues that in the US, the extension of collective bargaining rights and formation of public sector labour unions requires the prior existence of these rights among signi cant sections of the private sector economy. He says the secular decline in private sector unionisation will undermine the political bases of support for public sector unions. Ahlquist demonstrates that public sector unionism emerged where private sector unions were initially strong. Declining private sector unionism has led to a marked decrease in support for public sector unions. The diminution of their allies in the private sector and the prospect of extended periods of austerity at the state and local level have put public sector unions in a precarious position that Republican governors and legislatures are taking full advantage of, leaving the prospects for renewal in the labour movement dim. Read article
In Search of Soft Power: Does Foreign Public Opinion Matter for U.S. Foreign Policy?
15 February 2012
Does “soft power” matter in international relations? Specifically, when the US seeks cooperation from countries around the world, do the views of their publics about US foreign policy affect the actual foreign policy behaviour of these countries? Benjamin E. Goldsmith (University of Sydney) and Yusaku Horiuchi (Australian National University) examine this question using multinational surveys covering 58 countries, combined with information about foreign policy decisions in 2003, a critical year for the US. Goldsmith and Horiuchi were able to complete this research with the assistance of a grant from the US Studies Centre. Read article
Evaluating civil development in counterinsurgency operations: the case for a field experiment in Afghanistan
3 February 2012
It is a widely held belief that civil development programs play a central role in any counterinsurgency campaign. It is assumed that civil development assistance is key to ‘winning the hearts and minds’ of the civilian population, which, in turn, is crucial for victory. However, there is currently little evidence to support this belief. This article by Dr Adam Lockyer begins by analysing the different methods that have been used in Afghanistan in order to evaluate the effectiveness of civil development programs since 2001. It finds that these methods have severe limitations. Indeed, based solely upon current methods of evaluation, we have no reliable evidence whether civil development programs are actively improving security, having no impact or making matters worse. As such, this article makes the case for a field experiment approach to be adopted in Afghanistan. It argues that field experiments are the most powerful methodology currently available to social scientists for making causal inferences and, by making minor changes to the way in which civil development is distributed, we can vastly improve our understanding of the relationship between aid and security. Read article
Karl Rove's Ghost of Gilded Age Past
14 December 2011
US Studies Centre postdoctoral fellow Marc Palen reviews William T. Horner's book Ohio's Kingmaker: Mark Hanna, Man and Myth. The book examines the life and partisan media portrayal of Gilded Age presidential advisor Mark Hanna, who has been commonly compared to former President George W. Bush's Deputy Chief of Staff, Karl Rove. Read review
Foreign intervention and warfare in civil wars
16 November 2011
by Adam Lockyer
This article explains how foreign assistance to one or both sides in a civil war influences the dynamics of the conflict. It submits that external assistance has the potential of affecting the military capabilities available to the belligerents. It then argues that the balance of those capabilities impacts significantly on whether the warfare in a civil war assumes a conventional, guerrilla or irregular form. These theoretical assertions are tested against the case of the Angolan Civil War. It is shown that during that war, variations in the form of warfare correlated closely to the type, degree, and direction of foreign intervention given to each of the belligerents. Read article
Leadership: What it means, what it does, and what we want to know about it
15 May 2011
by John S. Ahlquist and Margaret Levi
Leaders are part of virtually all organized political life. There have been important recent advances in modeling "leaders" as well as clever and innovative empirical studies. We review recent contributions from the political science, economics, and management literatures. We discuss the extent to which these new works represent advances over the major classic works on leadership and organization from the twentieth century. We identify important gaps, chief among them (a) theorizing a role for coercion, (b) modeling the endogenous emergence of leaders, and (c) empirically disentangling the effect of an individual leader from her office, especially when leaders emerge endogenously. Read Article
Distinction, boundaries or bridges?: Children, inequality and the uses of consumer culture
28 February 2011
by Allison Pugh in Poetics
Much existing work in the sociology of culture implicitly assumes actor motivations of status and domination. Yet this theoretical consensus attends only glancingly to the flip side of such behavior: those moments when people deploy culture, not only in a mobility project, but to connect. Based on a three-year ethnography of children's consumer culture in three diverse communities, Pugh finds that children often use consumer culture to belong—both to connect to others, and to achieve visibility in their social worlds. Pugh contends that children's common desires make inequality, particularly in their access to consumer goods, a challenge to the accomplishment of the connection for which they strive. Using insights from Erving Goffman and Randall Collins, Pugh finds children use processes of facework to navigate the problems arising from their differences from others, including those stemming from discrepancies in commodity possession. Out of five facework processes that Pugh identifies, she elaborates upon two that seem to challenge the notion that children seek sameness. Children's goals for consumer culture also differed from those of (particularly affluent) adults. Pugh suggests scholars need to reconsider their theoretical emphasis on exclusion over inclusion, and document the circumstances under which each is particularly salient. Read Article
Measuring the gaps
16 December 2010
Center for American Progress
The Affordable Care Act in America expands the current requirements for the collection and analysis of health care disparities data. Dr Lesley Russell says these data will be critical for guiding both government policy and the programs and practices of individual health care institutions and providers. Dr Russell is a research associate at the US Studies Centre.
Read more
Easing the burden
16 December 2010
Center for American Progress
Lesley Russell contends the ultimate goal must be that all Americans, regardless of race or ethnicity, get the quality health care services they need when they need them. Dr Russell is a research associate at the US Studies Centre. Read more
VIDEOS & INTERVIEWS
Dr David Smith analyses how Obama's public support of same sex marriage may affect his re-election chances.
Edward Blakely discusses his new book 'My Storm' and the lessons that Australians can learn from Hurricane Katrina.
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