Country Party Research Articles

Party politics and prospects for democracy in North Africa

What are the prospects for democracy in North Africa in the wake of the Arab Spring? Addressing that question, Lise Storm provides a rich analysis of party politics in the region. Storm focuses on Tunisia, Morocco, and Algeria, examining the key characteristics and political dynamics of each country's party system as they have evolved over time. Her research sheds light not only on the origins, development, and functioning of these parties, but also on their contribution to the survival of authoritarianism, and their potential as vehicles for democratisation.

Politics on a human scale: the American tradition of decentralism

Chapter 1. Introduction: The Quadratic Persuasion Chapter 2. The Country Party: Agrarianism Surveyed Chapter 3. Nullification and the Politics of State Sovereignty Chapter 4. The Path Not Taken by the Progressive Era and New Deal Chapter 5. Southern Democrats and Selective Devolutions Chapter 6. Me-Too Republicans and Averted Revolutions Chapter 7. Ronald Reagan: Conservatism Co-Opted Chapter 8. Dissident Voices in an Age of Centralization Appendices A. Two Southern Populists with National Ambitions B. Wilson and the Coming of War C. Thomas Bayard, Grover Cleveland, and the Rise of Empire D. Personal Links between Taft '52 and Goldwater '64

Alliances, Coalitions and the Political System in Lesotho 2007-2012

This paper assesses political party alliances and coalitions in Lesotho, focusing on their causes and their consequences for party systems, democratic consolidation, national cohesion and state governability. We agree with Kapa (2008) that formation of the pre-2007 alliances can be explained in terms of office-seeking theory in that the political elite used alliances to access and retain power. These alliances altered the country's party system, leading to conflict between parties inside and outside Parliament, as well as effectively changing the mixed member proportional (MMP) electoral system into a parallel one, thereby violating the spirit of the system. However, the phenomenon did not change state governability; it effectively perpetuated the one-party dominance of the Lesotho Congress for Democracy (LCD) and threatened national cohesion. The post-2012 coalition, on the other hand, was a product of a hung parliament produced by the elections. The impact of the coalition on the party system, state governability and democratic consolidation is yet to be determined as the coalition phenomenon is still new. However, state governability has been marked by a generally very slow pace of policy implementation and the party system has been both polarised and reconfigured while national cohesion has been strengthened. The major challenge for political leaders is to manage the coalition arrangement for the good of the country, which we strongly feel they must, since it seems that coalition governments are very likely to be a permanent feature of Lesotho politics.

“Keep Government Out of Business”: Bank Nationalisation, Financial Reform and The Private Trading Banks In The 1930s

During the early 1930s the private trading banks came under sustained attack from sections of the Australian Labor Party and the Country Party, and from supporters of Major C.H. Douglas. Repeated calls for bank nationalisation or “socialisation of credit” or “social credit” heightened tensions within the banks and conservative political circles. In response, the banks secretly funded a nationwide campaign in support of the Lyons government in the lead‐up to the 1934 federal election. While the campaign was successful, the outcome resulted in the establishment of a Royal Commission to investigate the banking sector. The Royal Commission's recommendations and the Lyons government's proposed banking legislation were about providing greater government control of the sector. Opposition from the Bank of New South Wales and its supporters during the late 1930s helped forestall the legislation. The onset of war and, in 1941, initiatives from the federal Curtin Labor government and the National Security (Wartime Banking Control) Regulations ended what was a decade‐long struggle waged by the trading banks against greater government control of the banking sector.

Dealing with the King's Enemies: The Drafting of the Communist Party Dissolution Bill 1950

The lawyers called upon to draft a Bill which, if enacted, could validly give effect to the promise of the successful Liberal–Country Party coalition in the 1949 federal election to outlaw the Communist Party of Australia, faced a difficult assignment. Their political instructors faced a dilemma: should the new government take a less confrontational approach to communist disruption of the economy and risk undermining the government's popular support, or should it press ahead with the promised ban and risk having the High Court of Australia invalidate it? In a process in which the politics of pragmatism gave way to Cold War ideology, the choice of the latter path led to failure.

Fifty Years of the OECD and Forty Years of Australian Membership

The Country Party leader Jack McEwen said that Australia would join the OECD “over my dead body” and it did not do so until 1971, the year he retired from politics. Since then Australia has taken part in what is a complex “network of networks” linking over 40,000 senior public servants from many of the most influential states via some 200 committees spanning a wide range of policy areas. Yet Australian scholars have paid little attention to the OECD and to its effect upon Australia. Our essay is a first step in remedying this gap. Using both archival sources and interviews with public servants, we examine Australia's reasons for taking up OECD membership and assess its impact on policymaking since, the most obvious of which has been upon policy learning. We also ask about Australia's impact on the OECD.

‘Attaque and Break Through a Phalanx of Corruption . . . the Court Party!’ The Scottish Representative Peers' Election and the Opposition, 1733–5: Three New Division Lists of the House of Lords of 1735*

In the early 1730s, Archibald Campbell, the earl of Ilay, gained a dominant position in Scotland, and Sir Robert Walpole, the prime minister, entrusted him with the distribution of patronage there. Ilay took full advantage of this power, and controlled the votes of the financially weak Scottish peers in the election of 16 representative peers. The excise crisis of 1733–4, however, changed the political scene in Scotland. Although they had been chosen as supporters of the court party, some of the Squadrone Volante members (the duke of Montrose and the marquess of Tweeddale) and two courtiers (the earls of Marchmont and Stair) raised a standard of revolt against Walpole and Ilay. The Scottish opposition co‐operated with the English country party (‘the Patriots’) and such Scottish tories as the duke of Hamilton. In the 1734 peers' election they launched a challenge to the ministry, but the opposition was crushed by a bankrolled election campaign organised by the court party. Although the English and Scottish opposition petitioned in the house of lords to criticize the ‘undue practices’ of Walpole and Ilay at the election, the ministry was backed up by English and Scottish courtiers and bishops, and overwhelmed the opposition. Three new division lists related to the aftermath of the Scottish election shed much light upon the party alignment of the upper House in the middle of the 1730s.

The Electoral System and Japan's Partial Transformation: Party System Consolidation Without Policy Realignment

Japan's electoral system, which emphasizes first-past-the-post, single-member district rules, has led the country's party system to become consolidated around the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) and Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ). At the same time, Japan's electoral rules also made it likely that the two parties would not differ markedly in their policy positions, as well as hinder the emergence of new partisan alignments that could offer more clearly distinct policy options. Put differently, Japan's electoral rules have encouraged the development of what is essentially a two-party system, but one in which party alternation in power need not produce sharp policy change.

A “Foundation in Nature”: New Economic Criticism and the Problem of Money in 1690s England

People in 1690s England were concerned about money. They needed to decide how they wanted to deal with problems like a degraded currency and with new realities like credit and national debt. This essay argues that many contemporary English writers addressed these problems by paying close attention to created natural world.These writers wanted their money and their economic systems more generally to have - John Locke put it - a Foundation in Nature.1 Exciting recent work that attempts to do economic history history of science has recognized something similar: in Margaret Schabas's words, until mid-nineteenth century economic theorists regarded phenomena of their discourse part of same natural world studied by natural philosophers.2 1 extend Schabas's argument to focus on what this belief meant for pragmatics of economic theorizing. English economic thinkers of 1690s approached natural world a rich source of concrete clues about proper ways to order their economies, even about God's will for human economies. Silver bullion could dramatize imperative of not meddling with value, or invite governments to take advantage of its stretchiness. Bits of metal could actually prompt human decisions.This argument - that contemporaries understood natural world a key source of information about how economy should be ordered - is unusual. A more usual story about 1690s takes period a crucial site for emergence of modern capitalist ideas, emergence of modern world itself. Important work in the new economic criticism explores a move away natural order in this period, towards an immaterial economic order. These scholars are fascinatfed] with debt and with proto-capitalist phenomena like paper money, and with processes by which economy was loosened its natural material base and built instead on imaginations and a play of signifiers. For example, with historical and theoretical nuance, James Thompson traces complex cultural processes by which eighteenth-century England shifted from realist to nominalist conceptions of [monetary] value, in a dematerialization metal to paper medium, and Sandra Sherman and Colin Nicholson investigate how resulting new sense of money's insubstantiality and instability (even fictionality) affected contemporary writers.3 The assumption guiding this work - an assumption encouraged by both liberal and Marxist narratives of modernization - is that, English economy became more modern, it increasingly lost touch with nature.4Of course, new economic critics also recognize that some contemporaries made sense of these developments by appealing to material world - land. In this, they are good students of J. G. A. Pocock's influential work on civic humanism. Pocock argues that civic humanists of Country party in early eighteenth-century England resisted corruptions of a new finance by grounding political personality in land. Land quite literally connected owner to country and its ancient customs, enabling him to contemplate public good free that corrupting mix of human fantasy, appetite, and selfinterest characteristic of emergent commercial society.5 Much recent scholarship associates Pocock's argument that civic humanism could be used as vehicle of a basically hostile perception of early modern capitalism with Isaac Kramnick's treatment of politics of nostalgia. Scholars thus recognize both a new money culture and a deeply conservative eighteenth-century reaction against it.6 Novelty, credit, City, and Daniel Defoe are on one side, and a conservative Country tradition, land, bullion, and Lord Bolingbroke, on other. Of course, best new economic critics argue that these categories were contested late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century constructs. And they recognize that at any given moment economic thought proceeded a messy mixture of the residual and the emergent. …

Transnational Airlines in Latin America Facing the Fear of Nationality

Latin America has been the recent scenery of cross-border mergers and acquisitions of airlines in countries in which their domestic law allows important foreign investment in air carriers. However, the still present architecture of bilateral exchange of traffic rights between countries, encouraged by the 1944 Chicago Convention, is a serious threat for the development of these transnational airlines, operating through a complex network of corporations incorporated in different countries. Typically, this bilateral architecture includes 'ownership and effective control' clauses that require an airline designated by a country party to a bilateral air services agreement (ASA) to be majority owned and effectively controlled by its nationals. Such nationality clauses were founded, back in the 1930s for security (including military) and economic reasons. Recently, some Latin American countries are liberalizing nationality requirements for designated airlines under bilateral ASAs in conformity with their locally relaxed posture pertaining to foreign investment in air carriers. Regional initiatives have also been taking place, slowly waiving the traditional restrictive attitude towards the previously mentioned nationality requirements. Hence, it is argued that airline's designation under a bilateral ASA in Latin America should be focused on criteria that are linked with the corporative structure rather than on the nationality of the final ownership of the airline. This position will be coherent with today's reality in regard to the airline industry of the region.

"What an Englishman in Parliament oughto be": The Politics of Dryden's "To My Honour'd Kinsman"

John Dryden uses one of his final, original poems, "To My Honour'd Kinsman," published barely a month before his death, to define his political and poetic legacy. Couched in the guise of traditional verse forms—retirement poetry, panegyric, familiar verse epistle—"Kinsman" voices the oppositional politics of Country Party ideology. Dryden recognized fully that real political power had, by 1699, shifted from monarch to Parliament. With this poem, he seized the opportunity that his cousin's return to a Parliamentary seat afforded him to create a portrait of an ideal MP and the views that he should hold. Dryden's kinsman, however, is not that ideal, and the poem is about Dryden himself, rather than his namesake cousin. "Kinsman" articulates the tenets of the Country Party: the natural suitability of the landed gentry for governance; the necessity of individual integrity and virtue; an isolationist foreign policy; an emphasis on naval power, rather than land forces in Europe; and a nostalgic English chauvinism. For Dryden, writing "To My Honour'd Kinsman" is a patriotic act, appropriate to the public role of the poet. At the end of his life, he employed the cultural power of oppositional poetry to dictate to Parliament the direction that he wished English politics to follow and to leave what he calls a "memorial" to himself.

Estrutura da competição pela Presidência e consolidação do sistema partidário no Brasil

In this article, the authors: (1) argue that the structure of the Brazilian Presidential race represents the decisive factor in the recent consolidation of the country's party system; (2) identify three distinct party blocs based on an analysis of the strategies developed by the parties within the Presidential race; (3) examine the blocs' positions based on surveys conducted in the Chamber of Deputies in 2005 and 2010; and (4) demonstrate that the situation in the electoral sphere has its correlate at the Congressional level, allowing an ideological distinction between two of these blocs, while the third bloc calculates its moves exclusively on the disconnect between government and opposition.

Representation as a median mandate: Taking cross‐national differences seriously

AbstractThe extent and ways in which popular preferences influence government policy are absolutely central to our understanding of modern democracy. Paul Warwick's discussion of these in the European Journal of Political Research in 2010 puts itself at the heart of the debate with its critique of the median mandate theory of McDonald and Budge, proposing an alternative ‘bilateralist’ concept of representation. This article questions whether this concept has much to add to our theoretical understanding of representational processes. However, Warwick's further conceptual points deserve serious consideration. These concern the time horizons within which representative processes work, and the status of the median position given multi‐motivated voting. At the evidential level, Warwick argues that survey‐based measures of voter and party left–right positions fail to produce the correspondence between median and government policy positions that median mandate theory would have us expect. However, survey‐based measures of median voter and party placements obscure important cross‐national variation. Using the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES 2007), as Warwick does, this article shows that survey respondents norm their own and their country's party positions to their national context. The consequence is to make the political centre in all nations appear similar. Allowing for the relevant cross‐national differences brings the relationship between the median voter and government position back in line with expectations.

Australia’s curious coalition

While there exists a large and expanding comparative literature on coalition formation and government, it either ignores or seriously distorts the Australian experience, despite coalitions having been in power nationally for 60 of the past 88 years. Most authors have been content to follow the lead of Giovanni Sartori’s contention that in Australia there exists not a coalition but a coalescence because ‘the permanent alliance between the Liberal and Country (National) Party is such that the two parties do not compete, in the constituencies, against each other’.1 Both contentions are erroneous, but have proved influential. While it is true that the Australian variant does not closely resemble the coalition models of Europe and elsewhere, and sometimes gives the appearance of a single party, it is, nonetheless, a coalition and deserves to be analysed as such. This article locates Australian coalitionism within the broader comparative literature by focusing on the following: coalition formation and termination; ministerial allocation; coalition agreements; policy similarities and differences and the impact of coalition on policy-making; the power of a coalition Prime Minister or opposition leader; the tension between a coalition and a strong Westminster-style cabinet system; and the impact of Australia’s federalized party organization on the national coalition. The key argument of the article is that Australia exhibits a tight and closed form of coalition.

‘A worse importation than chewing gum’: American Influences on The Australian Press and Their Limits—The Australian Gallup Poll, 1941–1973

In studies of the Australian press, a wide range of American influences—on news genres, on notions of newsworthiness and presentation, and on the language in which stories are written—has been larg...

Complying with the Kyoto Protocol under uncertainty: Taxes or tradable permits?

The Kyoto Protocol allocates tradable emission allowances (AAUs) to developed countries, but they are free to choose a set of policy instruments to comply with these targets. We compare two different policy instruments: a tax and purely domestic tradable permits, for the European Union, the US and Japan. Information on abatement costs and international permit price is imperfect and stems from nine global economic models. For a country party to the Protocol, the benefit of emission reduction is that it can sell more or has to buy less AAUs. We show that in this context, permits entail a slightly lower expected cost than a tax for the US and Japan, whereas both instruments yield an almost equal outcome for Europe. Applying Weitzman’s framework (Prices vs. quantities, RES, 1974) in this context, we show the importance of the positive correlation between costs and benefits: technology shocks that lead to low abatement costs in one country generally lead to low abatement costs in other countries too, thereby leading to a low international permit price in the true-up period.

Ministerial Transposition of EU Directives: Can Oversight Improve Performance?

This paper argues that the extent to which national administrations transpose EU directives in a timely fashion may be related to how transposition is coordinated inside national ministries. Focusing on transposition through secondary legislation in Estonia, Poland and Slovenia, the paper finds initial evidence that oversight can contribute to better transposition performance. Ministries with strong internal oversight tend to be better at timely transposition, while ministries with no or weak oversight perform worse. The results tend to hold if one controls for country effects, party preferences and transposition workload.

Countrymindedness and the democratic intellect: permutations and combinations in a Victorian country state school, 1853 to 2007

‘Countrymindedness’ is a resonant but perhaps manufactured term, given wide currency in a 1985 article by political scientist and historian Don Aitkin in the Annual, Australian Cultural History. Political ideology was his focus, as he charted the rise and fall ‐ from the late nineteenth century to around the 1970s ‐ of some ideological preconceptions of the Australian Country Party. These were physiocratic, populist, and decentralist ‐ physiocratic meaning, broadly, the rural way is best. Aitkin claimed the word was used in Country Party circles in the 1920s and 1930s, but gave no examples. Since the word is in no dictionary of Australian usage, or the Oxford Dictionary, coinage may be more recent. No matter. Countrymindedness is a richly evocative word, useful in analysing rural populism during the last Australian century. I suggest it can usefully be extended to analyzing aspects of the inner history of Euro‐settlement in recent centuries.

Afternoon Light on the Thailand Controversy: An Afterword

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1. In the 1964 National Service Act, introduced compulsory National Service for 20-year-old men and selection of conscripts was based on date of birth. Conscripts were obligated to two years continuous full-time service, followed by three years on the active reserve list. The full-time service requirement was reduced to 18 months in 1971. 2. The left-leaning ALP won the federal elections in 1975, after 23 years of conservative rule under the Liberal–Country (now National) Party Coalition, which had enthusiastically supported the American war in Vietnam. The ALP was led by Gough Whitlam, who became Prime Minister.

“Insignificant” Lives, Significant Writing

“Insignificant” Lives, Significant Writing Mary McCune (bio) Elisheva Baumgarten. Mothers and Children: Jewish Family Life in Medieval Europe. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004. xvi + 275 pp; ill. ISBN 0–691–09166–8 (cl). Hinde Bergner. On Long Winter Nights... : Memoirs of a Jewish Family in a Galician Township (1870–1900). Translated, edited and with an Introduction by Justin Daniel Cammy. Harvard: Harvard University Center for Jewish Studies/Harvard University Press, 2005. 122 pp; ill. ISBN 0–674–01969–5 (cl); 0–674–01970–9 (pb). Edith B. Gelles, ed. The Letters of Abigaill Levy Franks, 1733–1748. With an Introduction by Edith B. Gelles. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004. lv + 186 pp; ill. ISBN 0–300–10345–x (cl). Brenda Serotte. The Fortune Teller’s Kiss. Lincoln: University of NebraskaPress, 2006. xii + 218 pp; ill. ISBN 0–8032–4326–X (cl). Margalit Shilo. Princess or Prisoner? Jewish Women in Jerusalem, 1840–1914. Translated by David Louvish. Lebanon, NH: University Press of New England, 2005. xxviii + 330 pp; ill. ISBN 1–58465–483–X (cl); 1–58465–484–8 (pb). In the introduction to their mother’s memoir, Melekh Ravits and Herts Bergner note that the book does not “presume to have social or scholarly significance. When our dear mother was recording her memoirs exactly as they appear in this book, she could count on one hand an audience comprised entirely of her closest family” (31). Such was the case for most of the women profiled or studied in the books under review. Sure that their letters and memoirs had no “significance,” most wrote for their families. Others were rendered nearly voiceless due to the lack of documentation regarding their lives. And the ones who did write for publication discussed family, either their own or others. The books include memoirs, collected letters, and two scholarly studies of the intimate details of family life in the medieval and modern eras. Despite clear differences in form and time period, strong themes run throughout these books. Certainly all belie the contention that women’s private lives hold no significance. Instead, these [End Page 174] works underscore just how much a study of the family realm can tell us about “public” topics, most notably the interactions between minority and majority populations, and the ways people have struggled to remain faithful to family and tradition while simultaneously interacting with the broader world. Abigaill Levy Franks was a Jewish woman residing in New York City in the first part of the eighteenth century. As Edith B. Gelles points out in her highly informative introduction, we know little about Franks’s life other than what we can glean from the thirty–five extant letters that she wrote to her son Naphtali, then living in England. Most of these letters were first published in 1968 in Letters of the Franks Family (1733–1748), edited by Leo Hershkowitz and Isidore S. Meyer. In this new edition, Gelles provides an overview of the period and argues for the importance of Franks’s letters to colonial, Jewish, and women’s history. The footnotes to the letters, most of which were written by Hershkowitz and Meyer, offer detailed background on the numerous figures who appear in the letters. Both the introduction and the footnotes make the collection accessible to a much wider audience than specialists in colonial American history. The letters are an invaluable resource as few sources survive from this period penned by women themselves. Franks’s letters reveal a woman who read widely and was not solely consumed by domestic affairs. Keenly observant, she commented on the small New York Jewish community, noting the tensions between Sephardim and Ashkenazim, and observed the political maneuvering of the colony’s leaders. These private letters, created for her son’s eyes alone, show the fluidity between domestic and public realms. Private missives discuss many public topics including the major political struggle between the new governor, William Cosby, and his supporters in the “town party” with opponents in the “country party.” Today her letters, considered by Franks to hold no significance, have proven to be exceedingly useful, Gelles notes, as they are among the few sources that describe this particular battle in...