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The article analyses the type of bicameralism we find in Australia as a distinct executive-legislative system – a hybrid between parliamentary and presidential government – which we call ‘semi-parliamentary government’. We argue that this hybrid presents an important and underappreciated alternative to pure parliamentary government as well as presidential forms of the power-separation, and that it can achieve a certain balance between competing models or visions of democracy. We specify theoretically how the semi-parliamentary separation of powers contributes to the balancing of democratic visions and propose a conceptual framework for comparing democratic visions. We use this framework to locate the Australian Commonwealth, all Australian states and 22 advanced democratic nation-states on a two-dimensional empirical map of democratic patterns for the period from 1995 to 2015.
In October 2016, following a campaign led by Labour Peer Lord Alfred Dubs, the first child asylum-seekers allowed entry to the UK under new legislation (the ‘Dubs amendment’) arrived in England. Their arrival was captured by a heavy media presence, and very quickly doubts were raised by right-wing tabloids and politicians about their age. In this article, I explore the arguments underpinning the Dubs campaign and the media coverage of the children’s arrival as a starting point for interrogating representational practices around children who seek asylum. I illustrate how the campaign was premised on a universal politics of childhood that inadvertently laid down the terms on which these children would be given protection, namely their innocence.
The universality of childhood fuels public sympathy for child asylum-seekers, underlies the ‘child first, migrant second’ approach advocated by humanitarian organisations, and it was a key argument in the ‘Dubs amendment’. Yet the campaign highlights how representations of child asylum-seekers rely on codes that operate to identify ‘unchildlike’ children. As I show, in the context of the criminalisation of undocumented migrants‘, childhood is no longer a stable category which guarantees protection, but is subject to scrutiny and suspicion and can, ultimately, be disproved.
The impact of the Trump administration’s potential withdrawal from the values of globalisation that have underpinned the vast majority of foreign aid agencies since WWII is discussed. Two megatrends are offered for discussion, one is the transition from globalisation to de-globalisation the other one is the transition from neoliberal ‘Aid-for-Trade’ to mercantilist ‘Trade-not-Aid’. Subsequent scenarios are offered, specifically how the USA’s retreat from soft power diplomacy to harder military power will affect the social and political principles maintained since WWII. In conclusion, the discussion turns to the impact of USA’s potential retreat as a global development aid leader and afford China dominance within a context of Beijing Consensus as a global player in development aid and the decline of neoliberal ideology as it relates to development aid.
Trumponomics
(2017)
Trump’s foreign policy vision and Trumponomics is deconstructed in an attempt to find a theoretical framework. It is shown that Trump projects a vision without much ideology but arguably a vision with sufficient potential for pragmatism and Realpolitik. Theoretical and conceptual frameworks, including philosophical, political and economic perspectives, and Trump’s mercantilist groundings are articulated. It is argued that Trumponomics contrasts with the ‘transformational diplomacy’ of previous USA administrations. Instead it is immersed in short-sighted ‘transactional diplomacy’, which will have a significant impact on the values of development aid.
Despite the fact that development aid has broadened from economic growth theory to include human and social capital, there is a lack of a general agreement as to its benefits. This critical review and analyses of the development aid academic and institutional discourse identifies some major shortcomings. The dominance of economics at the expense of politics, and the imposition of development aid neoliberal conditionalities act as barriers to socio-economic development in aid recipient countries. An inference is offered to recast development aid through reconciliation within critical frameworks of different sides of the political spectrum.
Struggling over crisis
(2018)
If you put two economists in a room, you get two opinions, unless one of them is Lord Keynes, in which case you get three opinions.” Following the premise of this quotation attributed to Winston Churchill, varying perceptions of the European crisis by academic economists and their structural homology to economists’ positions in the field of economics are examined. The dataset analysed using specific multiple correspondence analysis (MCA) and hierarchical agglomerative clustering (HAC) comprises information on the careers of 480 German-speaking economists and on statements they made concerning crisis-related issues. It can be shown that the main structural differences in the composition and amount of scientific and academic capital held by economists as well as their age and degree of transnationalisation are linked to how they see the crisis: as a national sovereign debt crisis, as a European banking crisis, or as a crisis of European integration and institutions.
The framing of EU policies
(2018)
This chapter discusses how framing analysis can contribute to studies of policy making in the European Union (EU). Framing analysis is understood as an analytical perspective that focuses on how policy problems are constructed and categorised. This analytical perspective allows researchers to reconstruct how shifting problem frames empower competing constituencies and create changing patterns of political participation at the supranational level. Studies that assume a longitudinal perspective on EU policy development show how the framing of EU policy is constitutive of the way in which the jurisdictional boundaries and constitutional mandates of the EU evolve over time. Reviewing the growing body of empirical studies on EU policy framing in the context of the diverse theoretical origins of framing analysis, the chapter argues that framing research which takes seriously the notion that policy-making involves both puzzling and powering allows this analytical perspective to contribute a unique perspective on EU policy making.
Intensive bondage
(2018)
Is Vienna still a just city?
(2022)