Academic literature on the topic 'Fields of Research – 360000 Policy and Political Science – 360100 Political Science'

This thesis is an exploratory study of women's attitudes to political issues. The thesis poses the broad questions of what is the range of women's attitudes to specific issues, what patterns are there to women's attitudes and how well do traditional political categories describe women's attitudes? Attitudes of women to five civil rights or moral policy issues censorship, corporal punishment, the death penalty, abortion and homosexual law reform - are examined and the way women identify themselves in terms of feminism and the left-right spectrum is also discussed. A feminist approach is adopted and focus group interviewing is the methodology which is used for the study. Some of the labels used to describe attitudes to political issues and political identification are discussed. The way the women interpret the labels of left and right and feminism are examined and patterns of self-identification with these political terms are looked at. The attitudes expressed by the women to the five policy issues are categorised according to libertarian, liberal, conservative, neo-conservative, authoritarian or humanitarian labels. The patterns of attitudes and identification are explored. The findings are that diversity and plurality characterise the women's views. Their opinions cover almost the whole range of views on the five issues, they respond differently to the use of the left-right spectrum and the label of feminism, and almost every woman demonstrates an ideological profile which is uniquely her own. There are some similarities among the women, but patterns cannot be easily identified using the traditional political labels. There is also an assessment made of the value of the focus group methodology which has been used rarely in political science. The thesis ends by posing more questions. The adequacy of the liberal and conservative categories for classifying attitudes is raised and there are questions about whether the focus group interview method is gender specific.

There is a strain of social criticism, dating back to the fifties and sixties, which alleged that New Zealand was about to become a society more clearly divided by lines related to "class". New Zealand was presented as a society in which a natural egalitarianism of social habits and attitudes had flourished. The critical voices of this earlier period feared that as New Zealand's economy evolved further, so would the degree of social demarcation within society. They expected that these changes would show up most rapidly, and with deeper effects, in the northernmost part of New Zealand, particularly in Auckland. There the postwar period's industrial development and population growth was greatest. In the suburbs of the north, middle class beliefs and life styles would develop. Suburban life, in areas of new housing containing those who most notably benefited from these changes, would provide mutual reinforcements for the evolution of a much more consciously middle class way of life. Many of the implications of this social criticism are explored in this thesis by means of a questionnaire professionally administered to a sample of 312 respondents in three Auckland electorates. East Coast Bays was chosen as an example of a burgeoning middle class suburb, Te Atatu as a newer area of working class settlement, and Birkenhead as a bridge between the two of them, socially and politically. The survey was administered shortly before the 1978 general election. A variety of facts about, and attitudes to, housing, employment, life styles, suburban locations and indistrialisation are explored. These are normally related back to the basic dependent variables of voting choice, electorate, the propensity to think in class terms, and subjective class identification. The overwhelming pressure of the evidence is that of continuity with the egalitarian past. The chief hypothesis tested is that "following on the most rapid processes of postwar industrialisation in New Zealand, new suburban contexts have evolved in Auckland in which the middle class beneficiaries of Auckland's growth are reinforced in attitudes that reject egalitarianism, accept differential rewards and life styles, and are associated with distinctive political and social attitudes". On the evidence presented in this study it must be rejected.

In 1996, at a special session of the United Nations General Assembly, the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) was opened for signature. Within one week, seventy states, including all five nuclear-weapon states, signed the Treaty. This brought to an end fifty years of both nuclear tests and nuclear test-ban negotiations. For many states, the achievement of the CTBT was a major success for nuclear arms control. New Zealand played an important role in the early stages of the CTBT negotiation. Every year from 1972, New Zealand and Australia tabled a resolution in the General Assembly calling for a CTBT. After two decades of diplomacy, the resolution was adopted by consensus in 1993, allowing negotiation for a CTBT to take place in the Conference on Disarmament. Substantive negotiation for a CTBT began in 1993, but test-ban negotiations had been taking place almost since the start of nuclear testing in 1945. Like many other nuclear arms control issues, the negotiations had been dominated by the United States and the Soviet Union. Engaged in their own nuclear arms race, the two superpowers pursued their own bilateral nuclear arms control negotiations to manage their strategic relationship. Until the CTBT negotiation, multilateral nuclear arms control was mostly limited to the Treaty for the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT). The NPT reflected the desire of many non-nuclear states to become involved in nuclear arms control and use multilateral agreements to place obligations on the nuclear-weapon states. While both bilateral and multilateral nuclear arms control often languished due to disagreements, multilateral nuclear arms control negotiation has also dealt with the complexity of reconciling the perspectives of many states. This complexity has made the use of negotiation theories difficult, although if used pragmatically, theory can be a useful tool for the study of negotiation events. Through the test-ban resolution, New Zealand was able to contribute to the process of reaching consensus by acting as a facilitator. New Zealand is a good example of how a small non-nuclear state can make a useful contribution in multilateral nuclear arms control negotiation, typically dominated by large nuclear-weapon states, and still advance its national interests.

Ideally, a citizen is an individual who is a formal member of a self-governing political community, with individual rights and freedoms that are equal to those of other citizens, and which are protected by law. This thesis investigates how closely the citizenship status of non-Maori ethnic minorities in New Zealand approximated this ideal during the 1990s. Its particular focus is on how the neo-liberal ideology of National and Coalition Governments between 1990 and 1999, and those Governments' understandings of the nature and political significance of ethnicity, affected the ability of those belonging to non-Maori ethnic minority groups to be full and equal members of the New Zealand political community, with an equal capacity for self-governance at the individual level and as members of the political community. The thesis takes the form of a survey of public policy and law over a period of nine years. Five broad areas or aspects of public policy are examined: the collection and dissemination of official 'ethnic' statistics; immigration and citizenship policy; civil rights provided for in domestic and international law; mechanisms for ensuring access to political decision-making; and social policy. The question asked in the thesis is whether the policies developed and administered in each of these areas during the 1990s enriched or detracted from the citizenship status of non-Maori ethnic minorities.

In New Zealand there is a marked scarcity of material on the workings of the indigenous news media. This thesis is intended to partially fill the large gap in New Zealand scholarship in this area. It provides a case study of the production of meaning by mainstream New Zealand news media organisations. Its purpose is to explicate the dominant messages in circulation from 1981 through 1983 regarding unemployment. The neutral face of the news discourse is shown to conceal the routinized signification practices of journalistic professionalism. These practices act to separate the normative from the deviant. They also serve the interests of society's established and legitimated institutions. This process was aided by the simplistic, as opposed to simplified, nature of news media presentations.

This study argues that 'new' ways of speaking about the nature and status of women are evident in the literary record of late seventeenth century England, particularly in the writings of Mary Astell (1666-1731). Writing to oppose the natural rights-based political theory of the 'Father of Modern Liberalism', John Locke, Astell employed the secular, rationalist, individualistic language which Locke himself used to argue the equal human dignity of women with men. Hers was the first unequivocal plea made by an English writer. The subject of this study is the provenance of these new modes of thinking about women. The result of a survey of primary sources, dating primarily from the period 1600-1700, it first seeks to show that seventeenth century England inherited a 'traditional' notion of women and their status from antiquity; scriptural, philosophical and empirical evidence of women's moral and intellectual equality with men coexisted uneasily with the consensual notion that they were men's subordinates. This notion survived the Continental and English Reformations to be incorporated into the theology of both the Church of England and the Puritans alike. Thinking and writing about women took place in the context of an 'ideology of order', wherein individuals were considered solely in relation to society and in terms of their obligations and status. It is then argued that the paradox of women's equal humanity and subordinate status first received serious interrogation during the political crises of 1640-1660. Radical Protestants, who placed the individual believer - male or female - at the centre of religious life, allowed women to participate to an unprecedented degree in worship. The potential of radical Protestantism to challenge the traditional subordination of women was obvious in the political theory of the 'Levellers', who secularised religious individualism to produce a programme of democratic reform. The invisibility of women in this proto-liberal programme is given special attention here. The paradox inherent in the traditional notion of woman was thrown into sharp relief, furthermore, in the course of the political debates between royalists and parliamentarians during the Civil War; both sides attempted to liken the relationship between king and people to that between husband and wife. The marriage analogue served to highlight the gap which was opening between political analysis and the justifications for the subordination for women. Finally, it is argued that renewed political crisis in the last two decades of the century saw the introduction of secular individualism to English political thought, reinforced with the 'new' metaphysics of Descartes. John Locke considered that since individuals constructed society for their own ends, they could resist government where these were not being served. Yet as Astell pointed out, Locke fell back upon the traditional assumption that women ought to be subordinated in this society to men. She adopted the new metaphysics to show not only that Locke's political conclusions were wrong and dangerous, but also to show that women, their subordinate social status notwithstanding, were of equal dignity and worth to men.
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This thesis examines the ability of the European Union (EU) to impact on the Palestinian people and their institutions. Before using the formal concept of actorness to examine the extent of this impact, it presents a model of actorness that synthesises aspects of Bretherton and Vogler’s and Sjösjedt’s models. It uses the components of this model as a series of lenses through which to focus on and examine various facets of the EU’s influence. The analysis deals with diplomacy, aid, and the effects of the unexpected Hamas victory in the 2006 Palestinian Legislative Council (PLC) elections. The thesis finds that the EU’s early lack of diplomatic direction improved for a period but was limited by its consistent inability to have an effect if it ignored the US. In the field of aid, the EU has been a more successful actor. However, the EU’s best efforts in these spheres have been undone by two EU blunders. First, it classified Hamas as a terrorist organisation and subsequently felt unable to provide aid to a Hamas-run government. Second it joined the Quartet in the hope of increasing its own diplomatic clout, but found that it had given the US the opportunity to erode its ability to act as an independent financial agent.

The political ideas of Auberon Herbert are usually associated with the late Victorian Individualist thinkers primarily influenced by the philosopher Herbert Spencer. Although Herbert derived his political philosophy of Voluntaryism from Spencer’s thinking it also owed much to J. S. Mill. Voluntaryism was based on a Lockean-Spencerian conception of individual natural rights that asserted self-ownership and the moral obligation for individuals to respect the rights of other people. Rights protection against force and fraud constituted the primary purpose of government. Herbert, aptly describing Voluntaryism as the system of liberty, peace and friendliness, applied these principles to a range of situations from street maintenance, to collective property purchase, and, finally, to the voluntary support of the state. Voluntary taxation was the most controversial component of Herbert’s theory, emphasising its distinctiveness. Although Herbert resisted socialist and new liberal attempts to expand the role of the state, his reasons for doing so shared little in common with conservative critics of this direction. Herbert, a republican and democrat, repeatedly attacked privilege, seeking widespread change including land reform and universal suffrage. His position represented that of a radical reformer seeking to promote Voluntaryism as the basis for friendly co-operation among free individuals at home and abroad. An internationalist, Herbert opposed aggressive imperialism, but also supported national self-determination, including Irish Home Rule. The notion of the voluntary state has led to claims of Herbert’s anarchism, but research indicates a greater complexity to his political ideas. Overall, Herbert was an extreme libertarian who never completely lost sight of the state, although he greatly limited its role. While Herbert’s political theory was idealistic, it avoided the social prescription usually associated with utopianism. Herbert’s commitment to an ethos of radical progressivism was one he shared with other contemporary socialist and anarchist thinkers who, like Herbert, attempted to live the politics they espoused. For his political philosophy and activism, Herbert warrants acknowledgement as one of the most prominent English libertarians of the nineteenth century.

The main purpose of this thesis is to provide a history and political analysis of the organisation, policies, membership and leadership of the Social Credit party between 1953 and 1986. The introductory chapter describes the methodology and reviews the literature on third parties in general and Social Credit in particular. Chapter Two provides a prelude to the formation of the Social Credit Political League in 1953. It traces the movement's decline as an education and pressure group under the first Labour Government. Chapter Three examines the debate surrounding the decision t o engage in direct political action and describes the process by which the Political League was formed. Chapter Four considers the reasons for and the findings of the Royal Commission on Monetary, Banking and Credit Systems (1956) and accounts for the growing internal debate culminating in the removal of Mr Wilfrid Owen as Leader in 1959. In Chapter Five the impact on the party of Mr Vernon Cracknell's victory in Hobson in 1966 is considered, along with an assessment of his role in Parliament as the sole third party representative. The reasons for his defeat at the 1969 general election and replacement as Leader some six months later are investigated, and Chapter Six is devoted to the brief but stormy experiment with Mr John O'Brien as Leader, followed by his split from the League in 1972 and the formation of the New Democrat Party. The early Beetham years, including attempts to revise the party's monetary reform dogma, broaden the scope of its message, and to give it a more professional organisation are considered in Chapter Seven. I n Chapter Eight the reasons for and the internal consequences of the party's rapid rise in popularity from early 1978 and its decline after March 1981 are analysed. The chapter ends with an account of Mr Beetham's defeat as Leader in 1986. The thesis concludes that Social Credit's history as an electoral organisation has been conspicuously cyclical, that its progress has been regulated largely by the electoral performances of the two major parties and by the presence or absence of minor party competition, that its leadership has been distinctly oligarchic, and that Social Credit has not been one, but several different parties. Why has the party not been more successful? And why has it lasted so long? These questions are addressed in the final chapter.

Policy makers in the Southeast Asian region are faced with many challenges in national policy taxation from globalization, in particular the increasing cross-border mobility of capital. One of the challenges is the competition to attract a mobile capital base which leads to a trend towards declining statutory corporate taxation rates and a pressure to harmonize taxation policy. This study explores taxation literature and uses empirical evidence from the period of 1996-2006 to examine tax competition and tax harmonization in the region. The study seeks evidence for the existence of tax competition by analyzing recent trends in two groups of measures of taxation: tax rates and tax revenues. This begins with looking at the trends of statutory corporate tax rate. Evidence is found for a decline in statutory corporate tax rates, developments commensurate with the existence of tax competition. On the contrary, the tax revenue data presented here, show that the expected decline in total tax revenues has not occurred; indeed, a significant increase has been recorded. It is also supported by empirical evidence of the ratio of corporate tax revenue either relative to GDP or to total tax revenue. The strengthening of these revenues has meant that the expected shift in the tax burden away from mobile to immobile factors has also failed to materialize. The two groups of measures of taxation thus provide apparently inconsistent views of the impact of tax competition. There follows an analysis of the elements of tax competition according to literature, in an attempt to draw out its implications for the experience within the Southeast Asian region. This study also examines the case for tax harmonisation and the Southeast Asian experience and it is concluded that the progress of tax harmonisation between countries has tended to be difficult to achieve because of the differences among the countries in terms of the tax structures and level of economies.