Political sociology

Stream convenors(s): Alastair Greig (Australian National University)
Complete list of papers

Other streams:     Australia's contribution to political studies    The disciplinary history of political science    Australasian politics    The politics of resistance and class    Health, politics and policy    Women and politics    International politics    Political theory    Environmental policy and politics

Presenters: John Cash    Giorel Curran, Elizabeth van Acker & Robyn Hollander    Stuart Dawson  Richard DeAngelis   Ann Firth    Toby Ganley   Angela Keys    Brendon O’Connor   Margaret Southwell 

PANELS

Panel: Populism in America, Australia and Europe

Brendon O’Connor, Flinders Institute of Public Policy and Management. Flinders University
Who’s afraid of populism? American populism, conservatism, and welfare reform
From the late 1960s onwards, the rise of new right ideology in America and the demise of liberalism was mirrored at the public level as increasing numbers of Americans were describing themselves as “conservative”. Furthermore, this period saw a significant growth in grassroots conservative movements. Commentators linked this public conservatism to hardening attitudes towards issues like education, welfare, and crime. Some describe this shift in public opinion - or perception of a shift - as a backlash against liberalism or as signs of a cultural war. This paper will explore what is meant by the term populism and how populist politics plays out in practice by looking at the relationship between “populist” and “elite” forces. I will use the issue of welfare to explore these questions.
Email: brendon.oconnor@flinders.edu.au

Richard DeAngelis, Political and International Studies, Flinders University
Le Pen and the rise of populism in Europe
Some analysts are linking recent events in Italy, Portugal, Scandinavia, Holland, and France to the (re-)emergence of a wave of xenophobic populism, based on anti-elitism, anti-migrant, anti-crime and corruption sentiments of many mass publics. The grandfather of the current wave is Jean-Marie Le Pen, whose success in eliminating the Socialist candidate Lionel Jospin and winning the right to challenge Jacques Chirac shocked the French political system and foreign observers alike. Despite a split in his party, continuing infighting with former deputy Bruno Megret, Le Pen's age and spotted public record, he did better than ever before in electoral terms. What accounts for the relative success of xenophobic populism such as Le Pen's and why has sit become more acceptable as a coalition partner in numerous European governments? What is the likelihood that xenophobic populism will be institutionalized in policy and party political terms? or is this just another in a periodic wave of protest which will ultimately fade away?
Email: Ptrda@sigma.sss.flinders.edu.au

ABSTRACTS

John Cash, Ashworth Program in Social Theory, HPS Department, University of Melbourne
Politics, history and the unconscious
Where psychoanalysis and history join hands in the re-construction of an individual life, or in the exploration of a group experience, the best practitioners of the art address the contingent effects of social and political process (and specific, often traumatic, events), by analysing the ways in which such processes and events mark themselves upon and are registered by the subject. Despite its many strengths, there is a limit to such a method. This limit is approached as analytic attention shifts from the study of an individual or a specific grouping with a common and, for the moment, shared identity, towards the analysis of larger groupings, more complex institutions and whole societies. At some point along this continuum it becomes necessary to pull back from an immersion in the imaginary identifications and symbolic anchorings of an individual or group and attempt to more systematically theorise social processes and their blind impress upon subjects. This is where the difficulties begin; it is in executing this move that a flattening out of experience, memory and fantasy is typically produced. This occurs because most political science, sociology and social theory has appropriated psychoanalysis as a theory of socialisation. In turn, this psychoanalytically-inflected socialisation theory has cast a long, dark shadow upon a multitude of empirical studies that turn to psychoanalysis for a better conceptualisation of subjectivity. This paper explores this major theoretical blindspot, through a discussion of work by Fromm, Adorno, Goldhagen, Althusser and Zizek. It briefly proposes an alternative approach.
Email: johndcash@optushome.com.au

Giorel Curran, Elizabeth van Acker & Robyn Hollander, Griffith University
Xenophobia: Is it enough? Populist parties in Australia and Europe
The rise and fall of Pauline Hanson and her One Nation party remains a fascinating episode in recent Australian political history. Australia's flirtation with this example of far right populism lasted less than a decade. Elsewhere far right populist political parties have proved to be far more successful and enduring. This paper is interested in why Australia's One Nation Party withered while European far right counterparts thrive. The paper thus focuses on recent developments in France, the Netherlands and Austria in looking for clues to explain the Australian experience. While the far right populist experience in these European countries and in Australia has much in common including a strong anti-immigrant stance, there are also elements that are significantly different. This comparative research focuses on three key areas. First, it investigates the degree to which a particular country's electoral method contributes to both the emergence and endurance of their populist parties. Second, clues to explain endurance are sought in comparisons of party dynamics. Finally, the contribution that the incorporation of populist policies into the platforms of mainstream parties is also explored. Overall, what this research shows is that there are no simple explanations for the rise of these parties and we need to avoid crude generalisations.

Stuart Dawson, School of Historical Studies, Monash University
Dialogical hermeneutics and political inquiry
Dialogical hermeneutics is a recognised, yet still relatively unknown, research method that has been used primarily in anthropological and religious studies. It comprises a group interview or interviews with members of a defined community, the subsequent formulation of understandings by the interviewer, and the restatement of these understandings to the target community to enable refinement and a deeper understanding. In essence, it is a focus group with individual follow up. The technique was championed in anthropology by Barry Michrina and Cherylanne Richards (Person to Person: Fieldwork, Dialogue, and the Hermeneutic Method, New York: State University of New York Press, 1996). Drawing on previous work, the authors wrote this practitioner text as a guide to ethnographic field research. Yet its uses are by no means limited to comparative anthropological studies. It can be applied to the study of any recognisable form of community or organisation as defined by regular and organised membership. I see value in adopting the technique to explore the nature, construction and coherence of values among members of recognisable political subcultures, networks or groups that comprise communities constructed from a set of shared ideals. Dialogical hermeneutics provides a method of accommodating and realistically representing the plurality of perspectives that could be expected to appear in a situation where the shared consciousness of a community has been self-constructed. This presentation will explain the background of dialogical hermeneutics in more detail, and explain how the technique applies to my present research.
Email: pathways@optusnet.com.au

Ann Firth
The breadwinner, his wife and their welfare: Identity and redistribution in Australian post-war reconstruction
Nancy Fraser argues that contemporary concerns with identity, both when emancipatory or merely self-interested, are serving to marginalize or displace the political grammar of redistribution, which has its roots in the construction of a new social order after WWII. The priority accorded to the expression of identity reverses the overriding concern with redistribution, which characterised post-war reconstruction in Australia. However, this is not to suggest that questions of identity were absent in the debates and policies which surrounded plans for a new social order after WWII. The architects of post-war reconstruction in Australia sought to address the deprivation and insecurity which had characterised life for wage earners during the interwar period. They assumed an integrated society in which class concerns were subordinated to a limited set of shared social objectives. The main objectives, full employment and rising living standards were expressed through a particular anthropology, constituted around the identities of the entrepreneur, the expert, the breadwinner and his wife. The paper argues that an examination of post-war reconstruction suggests that a commitment to redistribution entails the imposition of constraints upon the expression of personal identity. For the architects of the Australian welfare state, the nature of these constraints was determined by the adoption of a stance which saw the alleviation of deprivation as the critical task created by the uncertainties of capitalism.

Toby Ganley, University of Queensland
Australia the show-dog: An identification and analysis of the mongrel metaphor in The Bulletin
In this paper I offer an analysis of what I have identified as the Mongrel Metaphor — a structuring metaphor in the popular discourse of early 20th century Australia which allowed people to articulate their concerns about race, immigration, and population in the language of animal breeding. I trace the deployment of this metaphor in popular discourse through the examination of articles published in The Bulletin in the early 20th century. This analysis is part of on-going doctoral work exploring the construction of whiteness in Australia.
Email: toby.ganley@mailbox.uq.edu.au

Angela Keys, Politics, University of Western Sydney
Yippies: Rebels without a cause?
James Dean was not among them but the Yippies in the late 1960s and early 1970s seemed like rebels without a cause. Learned opinion proffers the Yippies as one of the worst examples of self-indulgence and self-promotion of the youth radicalism of that period. But who were the Yippies? Were they as Ward Churchill and Jim Vander Wall (in The COINTELPRO Papers) lampoon 'largely a mythical organisation' founded by the self-defined anarchists Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin. Were they, as Donald White in The American Century contends, children of the affluent society who wanted to do anything to be free but 'theirs was a freedom lacking in rationale, and they had no clear vision of the alternative society that they wanted to buid.' Were they as Julie Stephens concludes (in Anti-Disciplinary Protest) rejecting all "modern" forms of 'logic and causality, discipline, order, work, consumption and both internal and external regulation'? The Yippies found few friends in the academy. If they were no more than self-indulgent phantoms rejecting modernism, how are we to understand them? This paper will attempt to critically examine the Yippies as a political and cultural phenomenon in the context of Cold War America at war overseas and at home. Why did Dylan sing 'your sons and daughters are beyond your command, the old is rapidly fading'? Did he sing for the Yippies?
Email: angelakeys@hotmail.com

Margaret Southwell, University of Western Sydney
A community tested: A test of class in a cotton town
The few rural class studies undertaken in Australia in the past decades have focused on social relationships within the township over a protracted period of time. However, this work-in-progress is a study of Wee Waa, in north-western new South Wales, which analyses community class relationships within the context of the regional political economy, in relation to one specific incident. In April 2000, Wee Waa became the venue for Australia's first DNA testing of an entire male population. The testing was instigated as a response to the rape and bashing of a 93 year old woman in the town fifteen months earlier. The crime magnified Wee Waa's sense of community. It brought to the fore the hidden structures of class, power and authority within the town. The Wee Waa case allows us to analyse the "hidden class hierarchy" in rurla communities. Oxley (1978) argues that people like to maintain that they are all equal, despite the fact there are often substantial class differences. Yet in Wee Waa, despite class and racial differences, the town was united, or so it seemed. Its sense of community was both heightened and put under strain. The traditional small town environment evokes feelings of social acceptance and justification. These qualities were played upon, as the DNA testing became more a source of proving innocence and community solidarity rather than the police actually finding the guilty party. This crime in Wee Waa brought into play the vexed and contradictory nature of the politics of community in rural Australia.
Email: margsouthwell@hotmail.com

Jack Vowles, Political Studies, University of Auckland
Is responsible party government dead? Government strength or weakness, globalisation, and public perceptions in 27 countries, 1996-2001
Responsible party government is one of the key concepts in contemporary democratic theory. A series of empirical studies question whether responsible party government is feasible given low voter information, and where governments are weakened by divided constitutional powers or multi-party coalitions. More recently, there have been claims that responsible party government cannot survive under conditions of economic globalisation that are said to promote policy convergence between countries, and policy convergence of parties within countries. This paper identifies some key cross-national differences in political institutions and in exposure to the international economy. Using data from the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES), it tests whether and how these influence the voter perceptions and expectations that are needed to underpin the effective practice of responsible party government.
Email: j.vowles@auckland.ac.nz

Robert White and Jed Donoghue
Marshall, Mannheim and modern citizenship
In this paper we address a little-studied tension in Marshall's account of the successive emergence of civil, political and social rights in citizenship as 'a status bestowed on those who are full members of a community.' Although Marshall noted that conflicting principles in citizenship arose 'from the very roots of our social order,' he did not elaborate the point in this first tripartite model. When he returned to it by emphasising strains between democratic, welfare and capitalist moments that were co-present in the 'hyphenated society' rather than successive, he did so in a pessimistic tone at odds with the progressive modernism of his first schema. To blend the two models we read Marshall through Karl Mannheim's early studies of political knowledge. Here Mannheim had anticipated the shift from stages to co-presence, and had prefigured a resolution of Marshall's sense of impasse. In his account of liberal, socialist and conservative 'thought-styles' - the ways of seeing and knowing that are characteristic of particular ways of life - he saw political change as an interactive effect of individually calculating, dialectically collective and culturally symbolic forms of rationality. Since this approach has a classical heritage in keeping with Marshall's neo-Aristotelian sense of citizenship it can be usefully applied to the tensions in his work. In effect, that is, we invent a collegial interaction between Marshall and Mannheim that does not seem to have occurred when the two writers actually were colleagues at the LSE in the 1930s and 1940s. This invention has dual benefits. Mannheim's work can restore the interrupted dynamism of Marshall's, while Marshall's Fabian pragmatism can limit Mannheim's later and hubristic claims for politically engaged intellectuals.

This site maintained by Phil Griffiths. This page updated 2 September 2002