Political Parties

"Australia, since the early 1980s, has been a leading advocate and practitioner of the
neo-liberal economic model, also known as the Anglo-Saxon (or Anglo-American) model due to its
geographical origins in the UK and the US, and its subsequent ascendancy in Australia, New Zealand
and Canada, prior to its global hegemony (Bayari 2012a). A major component of this model has
been the deregulatory market policies that have come to dominate all aspects of life. There are prior
discussions of Australia’s deregulation dogmas and practices that this paper does not cover (Bayari
2012c, Bayari 2012d). Interestingly, Australia was a pioneer of a proto-regulatory economic model
at the turn of the twentieth century. The emergence of the federal state in Australia in 1901 led to a
level of hitherto unseen level of intervention in the market. Australia, like Canada, the US and New
Zealand inherited the political, legal and other institutions of the UK. However, the Australian state
followed a different path by regulating capital and labour relationship through the enforcement of
compulsory conciliation and arbitration, which eventually led to the creation of a continuous system
of minimum wage determination for unskilled labour, and skilled occupational categories (Bayari
2012b). This proto-regulatory state model of the Antipodes preceded the post-Second World War
regulatory state in the West by decades. This paper does not argue that a proto-regulatory model of
state continued to develop which is a question that is outside the discussion here, however the
1941-1949 Labor governments, under John Curtin and Ben Chifley, created new institutions for
welfare, and health care provision, and attempted to create a new society, such as in terns of defining
the content of citizenship, and creating the notion of entitlement to non-market wage, while the
governments of the period from thereafter until 1972 can be characterised as calculatingly inert. This
paper however focuses on the period ending with the1907 Harvester judgment."

Gus O'Donnell's vision of ‘better government’ is presented as a critique of party politics, most specifically the short-termism, selfishness and incompetence of elected politicians. There are few people better placed than O'Donnell to form such judgements. However, O'Donnell goes much further, by calling into question the legitimacy of the democratic system which gives rise to party politics. His article outlines several mechanisms by which the exercise of power by elected ministers could be constrained by a managerialist accountability framework, without addressing the question of who determines the appropriate framework for ministerial performance. The House of Commons is condemned as ‘too politicised’. O'Donnell also offers substantial praise for apparently ‘depoliticised’ policy-making processes, overlooking the inherently political constitution of such processes. In doing so, O'Donnell claims to be challenging party politics on behalf of voters/taxpayers, but instead seeks to dismantle any possibility of the public expressing a collective will via the ballot box that might challenge the immutability of the market economy.

Cieľom tejto publikácie je analýza vzťahu medzi politikou, publicistikou a politickou vedou prostredníctvom používania politologickej terminológie. Jazyky uvedených sfér sa vzájomne prelínajú, hoci neraz sa ocitajú vo vzájomnom rozpore. Pojmy, ktoré sa z teoretických disciplín politických vied dostávajú do verejného diskurzu, žijú ďalej vlastným životom.

It is often not clear which ideas of political thought occur in our political parties. The end of this text is to examine the political ideas of Free Citizen’s Party from the Czech Republic and to provide the answers to the following questions: What is their political philosophy; which trend in the liberty tradition is closest to them; how much and if ever are they influenced by conservative ideology; if their euroscepticism is motivated by classical liberalism or nationalism; if in their ideology is it possible to identify some role of the early Czech liberals; and how much is their classical liberalism compatible with the emphasis on democracy, in the more to direct democracy.

""Given the rapid economic and political changes in Europe over the last decades, it has become paramount to re-examine the partisan-government hypothesis. In this paper we suggest a “conditional model of party mandate” attuned to partisan, economic and institutional correlates. Parties’ desire to keep their electoral promises must be balanced with a need to adapt their policy priorities to the economic and social reality. Favourable economic conjuncture and the instutional setup affect the autonomy of parties in government, influencing the distribution of power within the polity. And this, in turn, shapes the influence of parties on policy agendas.
To test this theory, we use panel models to investigate how the legislative agenda, .i.e. adopted legislation, in Denmark, France, Spain and the UK respond to party manifestoes and to economic and political context, between 1983 and 2008. This is new territory in the study of party mandate and it is worth exploring further.
""