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This paper compares the adoption of new information and communication technologies (ICTs) by Australian and UK legislators, with a view toward how this may affect styles of representation and roles of the MPs in the two polities. In particular we provide an overall picture of the scope of current activity in each country in terms of website adoption, and whether this is accelerating over time. In addition we profile the basic functions that legislators are using their websites for and what differences, if any, emerge in approach across the two systems. Finally, we examine factors at the individual, organisational and systemic level that might help explain the variance in rates and levels of uptake of the new technology. In addressing these issues we build on the extant literature that has examined the individual and organisational factors that have influenced candidates and parties adoption of ICTs in the UK and Australia as well as a range of other countries. In addition, the paper comparatively extends to Australia our recent benchmarking work on British MPs’ use of the Internet, which helps illuminate the macro and institutional-level factors influencing the diffusion of ICTs among elected representatives. We are thus able to examine larger questions about the extent to which national traits are determinative of political and particularly representational uses of the Web, over and above micro- and meso-level factors as well as of course, the imperatives of the technology itself. Finally, we can begin to start to look more broadly at what the new ICTs can offer to traditional models of representation in rapidly changing advanced industrial democracies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines attitudes toward policies intended to enhance the political rights and representation of indigenous populations. The analysis is based on a parallel set of questions about the under-representation and the expansion of rights for minority groups that were asked of populations in three countries. Election studies administered in Australia, Canada and New Zealand asked respondents a series of questions regarding support for government assistance for aborigines, self-government, and guaranteed representation. We examine several explanations for variations in the support of majority populations for these policies. Specifically, we examine how perceptions of threat, values such as post-materialism and personal identity structure preferences for the expansion of rights. The paper ends with a discussion of the implications of the results for building support for expansion of political rights for indigenes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A conference paper about dominant party regimes in Canada and Australia is presented which is prepared for presentation at the 2011 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, in Seattle, Washington, from September 1-4, 2011. The paper discusses topics including the claim that single-party dominance is less frequent in the Anglo-Saxon world and the rise and fall of dominant party regimes.

As liberal democracies tighten membership criteria for citizenship and place greater expectations on new immigrants to adopt liberal values of democracy, this paper examines whether this is necessary if democracy support is determined by other factors other than one's political background. The paper's main focus is on the children of immigrants born in authoritarian regimes. While previous research has shown that pre-migration socialization in authoritarian regimes influence immigrants' democratic transition, less is known whether authoritarian values are passed onto children born and educated in established democracies. Given that findings show that immigrants from authoritarian regimes lag behind the rest of the population in terms of support for democracy, this paper seeks to find out whether the influence of education in an established democracy and perceptions of government performance may take precedence over the political values learnt at home as determinants of democratic support. Using the Australian Election Study, these findings highlight the extent of adult migration experiences and evaluations of government performance on democratic support. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many papers use regression discontinuity (RD) designs that exploit "close" election outcomes in order to identify the effects of election results on various political and economic outcomes of interest. Several recent papers critique the use of RD designs based on close elections because of the potential for imbalance near the threshold that distinguishes winners from losers. In particular, for U.S. House elections during the post-war period, lagged variables such as incumbency status and previous vote share are significantly correlated with victory even in very close elections. This type of sorting naturally raises doubts about the key RD assumption that the assignment of treatment around the threshold is quasi-random. In this paper, we examine whether similar sorting occurs in other electoral settings, including the U.S. House in other time periods, statewide, state legislative, and mayoral races in the U.S., and national and/or local elections in a variety of other countries, including the U.K., Canada, Germany, France, Australia, India, and Brazil. No other case exhibits sorting. Evidently, the U.S. House during the post-war period is an anomaly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Jacob Hacker's notion of 'drift' is an important addition to the conceptual toolkit of institutionalists and welfare state analysts concerned with change as well as continuity. Drift occurs when policy fails to adapt to changing patterns of social risk either because of the 'stickiness' of welfare institutions, or as a result of 'deliberate efforts by political actors to prevent the recalibration of social programs' (Hacker 2005: 46). While many institutionalists concerned with policy change have focused particular attention on ideas (inter alia Blyth, Cox, Hay, Schmidt), they feature less explicitly or prominently within Hacker's framework. This paper brings together 'ideational' perspectives with the analysis of policy drift through a comparative analysis of Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) in three 'liberal welfare regimes'. Although existing accounts of drift are predominantly concerned with the (non) adaptation of existing policies to new circumstances, social-structural change can also create needs that could only be met by wholly new policies. Indeed, Hacker himself notes that 'US social policy could have adapted to changing social realties …some nations … have dramatically expanded public protections that help women enter the labour force and balance work and child rearing … however, the US clearly did not follow this path.' (2005: 54). But this argument is too sweeping. Here I excavate and analyse attempts to follow this sort of path in the US and two other 'liberal' states.First, the paper insists that purportedly 'new' risks are rooted in social (gendered and socio-demographic) trends that date back to the 1950s and 60s. Second, drawing on Barrington Moore's classic, but neglected concept of 'historically suppressed alternatives' (1978) it retrieves US, Australian and UK political and policy initiatives that sought or seek to address the new risks associated with change gender roles. Despite expectations that liberal regimes would treat ECEC as largely a private/market matter, the paper shows that each of these countries has each played the role of ECEC 'leader' during different decades since the 1950s (first the US in the 50s and 60s, then Australia in the 70s, and particularly 80s and early 90s, and the UK since the late 90s). This pattern - both the achievement of and (at least in two cases) decline from leadership - requires explanation. The paper focuses particularly on two aspect of the role of ideas. First their international currency - the manner in which ideas developed in one state can help to shape debate and policy elsewhere - especially the early - and enduring - influence of US policies and policy ideas (especially those surrounding the Head Start programme) in Australia and the UK. Second, it argues that the existence or non-existence of ideas is rarely crucial - apparently influential policy ideas have been present in and since the 1950s and 60s in all three states. Indeed, elements of policy that attempt to 'counter' drift induced by changing gender roles have also been present in them (some, like Head Start apparently well entrenched). As Crouch and Keune (2005) note, states' policy configurations can contain diverse - even contradictory - elements (or as TH Marshall classically argued they can 'make a square meal of a stew of paradox'). Much more than the existence of particular ideas or even individual policies, drawing on work by Blyth and Hay I argue that to address changing social risks requires the skilful articulation of particular ideas and policies into a broader political project. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the world today there is a large gap between the number of states that could easily obtain the military power of nuclear weapons and the number of states that actually choose that power. Curiously, a number of states that sought that power at one time or another have abandoned it. Yet, in other states, the quest for nuclear weapons continues. What causes this variance in behavior?Scholars generally rely on one of three explanatory models to address this question. The security model argues that states develop nuclear weapons when they find them useful to bolster their own security and deter external threats. The domestic model finds that states develop nuclear weapons if it strengthens the regime internally to do so. Finally, the normative model suggests that a desire to reinforce positive aspects of a states identity will lead it to pursue nuclear develop or adhere to a prohibition against nuclear weapons. This paper evaluates the relative weight of these three explanatory models in the decision-making process of three very early nuclear-capable states. This paper codes the justifications made by political leaders in Great Britain, Canada, and Australia in the 1950s and 1960s. The purpose of this analysis is to determine the relative weight of three distinct and competing explanations for nuclear acquisition, and to suggest a means of evaluating additional cases nuclear and potential nuclear states. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on the game-theoretical dominant player concept and power indices, this paper introduces a re-conceptualization of single-party dominance that we consider to be more intuitive and less dependent on ad hoc criteria than standard operationalizations of the phenomenon. This operational definition is then used in the presentation of a few descriptive inferences on the incidence and nature of single-party dominance in the subnational jurisdictions of four federally organized parliamentary democracies, namely, Canada, Australia, Germany and Austria. The paper also reviews extant hypotheses on the rise and fall of dominant party regimes and discusses their plausability against the backdrop of our cases. We conclude that there are few, if any, individually necessary or sufficient causes of single-party dominance. Instead, nationally and perhaps even regionally specific configurations of factors seem to account for the rise and fall of dominant party regimes - a finding that underlines the necessity of further multi-method research on the topic. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To check executive authority and enhance democratic accountability, many nations have attempted to increase government transparency by adopting freedom of information legislation. This research compares Freedom of Information Acts (FOIAs) in the US, Australia, and the UK. First, we trace the history of freedom of information and describe FOIAs in the three countries. Studied in a cross-national context, the history of freedom of information shows how and why political developments in the three nations have often been linked. Increased executive authority and concerns about democratic accountability have led to the creation of FOIAs in all three systems, although some differences between the countries help to explain the differences between their FOIAs. Second, to start to assess the effectiveness of FOIAs, this paper briefly examines their use during the Iraq war, and then describes our work in progress, which includes FOIA audits in the US, Australia, and the UK. To date, our research indicates that the effectiveness of FOIAs has varied, and many limitations exist in all three countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses data from the 2001 Australian Candidate Study (ACS) to examine the extent to which candidates used the new media to communicate with voters and for private consumption, such as news gathering and email. These uses of the new technology are then related to other more traditional forms of election campaigning, such as direct mailing and canvassing. Finally, the impact of all of these various forms of campaigning are assessed in terms of their effects on the vote. The findings reveal that personal Internet use and public web campaigning are influenced by different factors, the latter being more common among younger members of the Australian Labor Party. However, both types of new media usage by candidates are linked with conventional forms of campaigning and most significantly, linked to the level of support they receive. The findings, while clearly relevant to scholars of politics and new ICTs, also add to the growing literature on local parties and election campaigning, which has been a relatively understudied area until recently. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In America, the proposition that rights are best protected by judicial institutions through the operation of judicial review goes virtually unquestioned. With the increasing trend of the judicialization of rights protection around the globe, consideration of other institutional arrangements to secure rights has fallen by the wayside, victim of this growing judicial orthodoxy. However, Australia has never adopted a bill of rights, instead relying largely on their legislature to ensure that individual rights are protected. This reliance on a republican institution to protect rights represents an increasing global rarity, which is unfortunate considering the virtues attendant to republican guardianship of liberty. The Australian Constitutional design offers a republican institution that mixes Westminster responsible government with American-style bicameralism, federalism and separation of powers, allowing the protection of rights through a considered legislative process of scrutiny, publicity and debate. This paper explores the theoretical basis for reliance on republican institutions, as opposed to judicial institutions, as a means of determining and protecting rights, and analyzes and assesses the effectiveness of the Australian model of pre-legislative scrutiny in securing the rights and liberties of its citizens, perhaps inviting a reconsideration of the growing judicial orthodoxy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Democracies differ in important ways with regard to interest articulation and representation. Many scholars concentrate on how well the electoral system translates votes for political parties into legislative seats. When the seats/votes relationship appears unbalanced, scholars consider the outcome disproportional. Some suggest that the level of disproportionality has something to do with what we can call the ‘quality of democracy’ in a given country (Lijphart 1999). By ‘quality of democracy’ we intend a concept that measures how well a political system articulates 1) interests into votes in the legislature and 2) votes into tangible political power in the executive. This paper has two interrelated objectives. First, we devise a new measure - what we call ‘executive disproportionality’ (ED) - to complement traditional notions of legislative disproportionality. Executive disproportionality measures the extent to which a country experiences political stagnation or alternation within executive institutions. When the same political actors remain in the executive for long periods of time, we suggest that the executive is ‘disproportionate’ because there are legislative parties that are continually denied executive representation. Second, armed with our new empirical measure, we begin to evaluate the consequences of executive disproportionality for the quality of democracy across four established parliamentary systems: Australia, Canada, Germany, and Sweden. Here we formulate hypotheses to gauge whether or not executive disproportionality matters for the functioning of a democratic system. Intuitively we suspect that executive disproportionality does indeed matter for measures of democratic quality. Only empirical testing can determine the extent to which these statements can be validated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Deciding how to finance multiple levels of government is a challenging task for all political systems. Federal states, in addition, have a constitutional contract to divide financial accountability across national and subnational governments. In comparison with unitary states, federal states are arguably more committed to fiscal decentralization precisely because of this constitutional contract. Nevertheless, a wide variation in the extent of fiscal centralization is observed even among developed federal states. This paper explores the political economy of fiscal centralization in six developed federal states, Australia, Canada, Austria, Germany, the United States, and Belgium, from 1961 through 1995. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In light of a series of innovative and spectacular transnational and domestic campaigns by port workers in advanced capitalist countries in the 1990s, this paper argues against a variant of the ‘race to the bottom’ thesis that holds little hope for worker resistance under conditions of assumed state weakening and capital globalisation or for the development of transnational strategies. Using a process tracing technique across horizontal (transnational) and vertical (domestic) axes of contention, and focussing specifically on the process of coalition building, evidence from the Liverpool and Australian campaigns by dockers under threat indicates the salience of both arenas of contention, but with greater importance to outcome resting on domestic level coalitional capacity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawn from a forthcoming book, this paper establishes the case for comparing labour politics in Australia, Chile, New Zealand, Uruguay and Ireland since 1975. It then argues that union fortunes in small open democracies undertaking market-oriented shifts are determined by a combination of four factors: location in the global marketplace, prior histories of insertion in the political sphere, pre-existing labour market institutions, and trade union ideology and unity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent decades, the possibilities of explicit "electoral engineering" -- designing electoral systems to encourage cooperation, bargaining and inter-dependence between rival politicians and the groups they represent - has become increasingly attractive for promoting democracy in divided societies. This article looks at one strategy of electoral engineering that I call "centripetalism": the use of preferential, vote-pooling electoral systems to encourage cross-ethnic vote-transfers, inter-ethnic bargaining and the development of broad, multi-ethnic political parties. This paper examines the empirical record of elections in a range of countries that use preferential voting systems - including Northern Ireland, Estonia, Australia, Fiji and Papua New Guinea. It finds that centripetal strategies can influence the trajectory of democracy in divided societies, but that its application is dependent on some important facilitating conditions, including social and demographic factors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Why was it that the banking system of Australia was more resilient than virtually any other OECD country'? Why the banks in these countries did not take on the increased degree of risk that led to the downfall of so many well-known institutions in the US, the UK and Europe"1 Were Australian bankers, regulators, politicians and investors smarter than their counterparts in the US, the UK and Europe? This paper argues that a more nuanced understanding of structures, institutions and agencies and their interaction can inform research into a specific area, namely the comparative analysis of banking systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Immigration is becoming an increasingly important issue in virtually every Western democracy. However, immigrants' participation in politics varies greatly from country to country. This article identifies and explains the two key determinants of this variation. We establish that ethnicity along with traditional socioeconomic factors are the two primary forces that determine immigrant political behaviour. We theorise immigrants' ethnic differences from the native population, along indicators such as language and residential segregation, increase information costs and create barriers to participation in politics as well as influencing partisanship. To test our theory, we analyze data from the Australian Election Study (AES) from 1993 to 2010. The results of the analysis in this paper provide strong empirical support for our theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While national election campaigns have become increasingly personalized, it is unclear to what extent this trend has been replicated at the local constituency level. Using surveys of both candidates and voters in the 2007 Australian federal election, this paper examines the personalization of the local election campaign in Australia's candidate-centred preferential voting system. The results suggest that a combination of candidate-focused and party-focused factors operate to shape local constituency behavior. In general, candidate factors stem from the preferential voting system, while party factors stems from the system of compulsory voting. Each set of factors has significant consequences for the votes that the candidates and parties receive. Overall, the study emphasizes the importance of institutional design in shaping the personalization of election campaigning at the constituency level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the globalizing economy, knowledge generation can catalyze local, regional, and national economic development. Governments everywhere face pressures to adapt to this new environment, and universities are recognized as strategic resources. This paper assesses changes in the ideas and actions of stakeholders concerning the role of universities in the United States, the United Kingdom, New Zealand, Canada, and Australia, focusing on universities operating in a dynamic sub-region in each country. Attention is given to how different levels of government promote or inhibit innovative actions by universities and the organizations they partner with to commercialize research. Efforts to create regional knowledge economies effectively linked to the global marketplace are shown to have generated a range of tensions and dilemmas. The findings presented here highlight themes likely to feature in future debates over policy design and governance arrangements for universities and other strategic public and quasi-public organizations. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What difference does e-government make to the capacity of governments to interact with citizens? How does it affect government's place in social and informational networks - the 'nodality' of contemporary government? What is the structure of 'government on the web' and how do citizens experience government on-line? This paper uses methods from computer science (particularly webmetrics) and political science (a 'tools of government' approach) to go further than previous work in developing a methodology to quantitatively analyse the structure of government on the web, building on Petricek et al (2006). It applies structural metrics (via webcrawling) and user metrics (via user experiments) to the web sites of comparable ministries concerned with foreign affairs in three countries (Australia, the US and the UK). The results are used to assess the on-line presence of the three foreign offices along five indicators: visibility, accessibility, extroversion, navigability and competitiveness. These indicators might be developed further in the future for use by both researchers (to assess e-government initiatives) and by governments (to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of their on-line presence). Governments which are successful in developing their web sites in this way are likely to have greater visibility to citizens, businesses and other governments, strengthening nodality as a policy tool. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The effects of judge gender are examined in the decisions of judges in the appellate courts of Australia, Canada and the United States. Overall, there were few significant differences in the voting choices of male and female judges in either the top court or the intermediate appellate courts of the three nations examined. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Public Accounts Committee (PACs) is typically one of the most important committees in Parliament, due to the key role such committees play in promoting public sector accountability and effective governance. This paper reports on the results of a survey of structures, responsibilities, processes and working practices adopted by PACs in ten jurisdictions across Australia and New Zealand. In examining the results of this survey, the paper devotes particular attention to key issues relating to Australasian PACs such as establishment and authority of PACs, powers and responsibilities of PACs, membership and leadership, staffing, relationships with other committees, and the evaluation of PAC performance. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents information on residence patterns of trade union member and their political references. It focuses on members in three unions involved in the transport sector. The three unions include the ILWU and the International Brotherhood of Teamsters in the U.S. and the Maritime Union of Australia in Australia.

Parties tend to be wary of candidate-centred electoral systems, which explains the use of the Single Transferable Vote (STV) being limited to a few cases. One source of this wariness is that STV is thought to favour non-party candidates, or independents, a claim based primarily on the experience of Ireland. The relative absence of independents in Australia and Malta, the other two countries using STV for national elections, challenges the merits of this reasoning. This study re-examines the nature of this causal link using constituency-level data from the Irish and Australian cases. The results indicate that there is not a great deal of evidence to support the hypothesis that STV favours independents, in particular because electoral system detail can affect a system's ability to realize expected consequences. While constituency size, ballot access and ballot design affect support for independents, it is not always in the expected manner. This suggests that the non-party phenomenon is more than just a by-product of electoral system effects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses a study that the trans-Tasman experience against conventional explanations constructed for enhancing European economic integration. It also discusses European integration since the 1960s and discusses comparative study of economic regionalisation and economic relations between Australia and New Zealand.

The article discusses the study on employee empowerment practices in the public sector in Australia. It details how the study was conducted which involved data from the 2010-2011 survey of government employees. The results reportedly revealed that offering rewards to employees based only on performance had a negative effect and statistically significant impact on viewing roadblocks to innovation.

Global public health matters span national borders and affect multitudes of people. The spread of infectious disease has neither political nor economic boundaries, and when elevated to a status of epidemic proportions, necessitates immediate action. In federalized systems the national government leads the policy formation and implementation process, but also collaborates with supranational organizations as part of the global health network. Likewise, it cooperates with subnational governments located in both urban and rural areas. Rural areas, particularly in less developed countries, tend to have higher poverty rates, and lack the benefits of proper medical facilities, communication, and technology to study and avert the spread of disease. This article will examine federal health policies relating to epidemiological surveillance and intervention in four federal systems: Australia, Malaysia, the United States, and Venezuela. It contributes to the literature on federalism by introducing federalist theory to epidemiology, and specifically examines discrepancies between policy implementation in urban and rural areas. It also explores the roles of supranational organizations as members of the global health network. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article the author focuses on the role of political economy variables in the evolution of federal states and its impact on the contours and working of political parties, the main organization of interest aggregation and articulation in contemporary democracies. It further discusses federal systems in Australia and Canada, impact of party systems on the working of federal states and evolution of the Australian and Canadian welfare states.

The article investigates the electoral consequences of web use and web 2.0 applications including video sharing and social networking sites in the 2007 Australian election. A distinction in how both voters viewed and candidates provided web 1.0 and web 2.0 tools during the election campaign is presented. Charts are presented that show the growth of the Internet for election news from 1998-2007 and voters' web 1.0 and web 2.0 Internet use. It is concluded that web campaigning has the ability to attract votes.

The article explores the role of the video sharing web site YouTube campaigning in Australia's federal election of 2007. It examines the kind of material political parties posted on the web site and its difference from the television advertising campaigns of some political parties. The manner in which the YouTube phenomenon might serve as an aid for political scientists to better understand political advertising is also examined.

The article identifies a broader definition of party capability theory by examining changes within the Australian High Court since 1970. The study is premised on an article written by Marc Galanter which hypothesized there would be differential success rates in litigation among parties who came from the "haves" as opposed to the "have-nots."

One of the unintended but inevitable consequences of federal constitutions is the creation of transboundary waters, river basins that are shared among multiple states/provinces, and, in some cases, other countries, as well. The existence of transboundary waters creates difficulties for the riparian governments sharing them because they are locked in a common pool situation in which each government faces simultaneous and contradictory incentives: in their own interests, they are motivated to secure access to resource flows, but, in the collective interest, they must also conserve the resource stock. Managing such a situation requires collective action, and much has been written about the factors that are important in facilitating such collective action, such as the importance of shared interests, mutual trust, and the enforceability of intergovernmental commitments. However, in many basins there is a long history of intergovernmental cooperation in water management, and this history, in itself, has become an important factor shaping more recent water management efforts. Early efforts at transboundary water management focused mostly on either water apportionment or dispute resolution, and these early water management regimes have proven strongly path dependent, shaping more recent management efforts that have focused on water conservation. In other words, early institutional choices in transboundary water management, when water conservation was not a priority, have shaped transboundary conservation regimes now that water conservation is a priority, pointing to the importance of institutional path dependency as a factor in shaping intergovernmental cooperation. This argument is explored through a comparison of four distinct transboundary river basins in Australia, the United States and Canada. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I review the state of election administration in the United States and Australia, and evaluate which aspects of the Australian Electoral Commission could be imported into the U.S. Nonpartisan election administration is a key reform, although students of election administration have yet to work out an adequate accountability measure that balances independence and accountability. I argue that uniform national standards might be one possible measure. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An "over-compliant" state is one that paradoxically takes actions which recognize specific rights or a category of rights that go beyond or even against that state's international human rights treaty obligations or its normative international commitments. Since there is no existing literature in International Relations which would explain why a state might paradoxically comply or "over-comply" with its stated commitments, there is also no theory to explain what would propel a state to "over-comply" with an emergent norm. "Over-compliance" in indigenous rights occurs under a particular set of conditions: 1) when there is a strong presence of the international indigenous rights movement within the state, 2) when the state places high value on its reputation as a "good global citizen", and 3) when change occurs in the state's domestic discourse as it seeks to locate its own post-colonial identity in a globalized world. By examining the "over-compliance" of Australian behavior in indigenous rights, I aim to expose the limits of the current international discourse and the potential to push that discourse further to better accommodate the full spectrum of indigenous rights. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article investigates the political socialization and democratic commitment of immigrants from authoritarian regimes in Australia and Canada. It discovered that immigrants from authoritarian regimes participate more in democratic political process and less in protest movements. It illustrated that pre-migration political experiences influence the political outlook and behavior of immigrants.

The article contends that neo Marxist theorising of the state is still an important theoretical tool for analysis of the structured inequalities that remain a key feature of contemporary democratic societies. It considers the utility of the neo Marxist approach for theorizing the role of the state in a recent case study of mineral development in the Gulf of Carpentaria, North Queensland, Australia. The focus of the article is the relationship between the state and capital.

The article explores the argument on why states would choose to merge in a federal union when they could instead cooperate through an international organization, such as an alliance or customs union, or simply remain independent. It argues that there are conditions in which states will be able to agree to cooperate through a federation precisely because they will be unable to agree to cooperate through an international organization. It illustrates and test the theory using a case study of Australia's federation process.

Determinants of green party activism. 15 pages of text, 40 pages of tables. An exploratory analysis of surveys of 18 green parties in 15 countries in Europe and Australia, with more than 7500 respondents. A typology of party activism is given. Comparisons of demographic characteristics (gender, age, education, length of party membership), of motivation to join the party. Reasons for lack of activism and description of activities within the party, and green activities. Relationship to other parties and organizations (environmental, peace, labor and gender). ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]