Practising Political Science:

50 Years of the RSSS Political Science Program

(This paper was originally written for a Conference in November 2001 celebrating the Jubilee of the Political Science Program.   Many people helped in different ways with its preparation.   In particular, I’d like to thank Don Aitkin, David Butler, Frank Castles, Gillian Evans, Gerry Kristianson, Barry Hindess, Michael Lee, Harry Rigby, John Warhurst and Patrick Weller.   I would also like to thank Marian Sawer whose idea it was to prepare this history and who has provided much advice.   None of these people are responsible for what follows.

Peter McCarthy)

In May 1951 Leicester Webb arrived in Canberra to establish the Department of Political Science in the ANU Research School of Social Sciences.  His initial reaction to the task was that:

Political science research is a difficult field in Australia, partly because of the relative isolation of some States and partly because little basic historical work has been done on political parties, parliamentary government, and administration (ANU Council 1953: 14).

How Webb responded to this situation and how political science has been practised over the next fifty years is the subject of this paper.

 

The sources of this work are varied.   They include the memories of people involved in some way with the Program, as members or visitors, over the years—though too few, unfortunately, are now left from the early years of the Department.   The Annual Reports, first of the University and later of the School, are invaluable as they include material on the Program’s plans and achievements.   Though these are of varying degrees of detail and some are much more informative than others (a few look like cut-and-paste jobs from the previous year), they reveal a lot of activity which would otherwise be forgotten.   The records of the Program and the School add to this information.   The most important source used here is the publications of staff, students and visitors.  While there are a great many such works, it is possible to pick out typical examples and to concentrate on what was claimed to be important.   The approach tries to take account of the differing situations of different practitioners and do ‘full justice to past contexts’ (Dryzek & Leonard 1988: 1246).  This points in the direction of authors’ statements about their purposes and methods, the influences they responded to and the gaps they tried to fill with their work.  The judgments of contemporary reviewers (making allowance for varying degrees of expertise) can also be informative and a number are referred to in this paper.

 

The paper begins with a brief history of the Program (or Department as it was until 1990), identifying major areas of work and the approaches adopted at different periods.   Then six key areas—electoral studies , political history , public administration and public policy , trade unions , international politics , and the training of postgraduates —are examined in greater detail.  The paper finishes with a discussion of recent and future work which covers Program activities since 1990 and outlines the aims of the Democratic Audit of Australia, a major activity to be carried out in the Program over the next few years.

 

A Brief History of the Program

 

Leicester Webb saw two major problems confronting him when he commenced in the Department: geographical isolation; and the lack of political history.  Isolation was an issue because of the difficulty in getting a picture of what was happening across the country. For example, in his study of the 1951 Communist Party Dissolution Referendum, Webb wrote that ‘the normally even balance between the electoral strengths of the political parties makes relatively minor local and sectional interests potentially important’ but that, given ‘the immensity of the distances between large centres of population, . . . to be fully aware of these influences would require greater resources than were at my disposal’ (Webb 1954: vi ).

 

 

In addition to the problem of distance, little work had been done on Australian political history and this hindered an appreciation of the roles and strategies of different institutions.   To take one example, Gerald Caiden found (as he reports at the beginning of his Career Service) that:

the key to what was actually happening [in the Commonwealth Public Service] as compared to what was supposed to be happening, lay in the past.   The attitudes held by the main participants and the persistence of outmoded beliefs stemmed not from what was taking place but from what had already taken place (1965: vii).

Thus before writing the profile of the contemporary Public Service—which he was subsequently to do in The Commonwealth Bureaucracy (1967)—Caiden set out to ‘reconstruct as accurate a picture as possible of the past’ (1965: vii).

 

During the years till about 1960, work in the Department focussed on electoral studies, political history, and public administration.  Major appointments during that time were Robert Parker as Reader in Public Administration from 1954, Don Rawson from 1956, Bruce Graham from 1960 and Colin Hughes from 1961.  All will figure large in the story of the Department.  The approach they adopted in these years was focussed on the behaviour of groups, with Webb arguing that:

Changes now taking place in the theory and structure of the State are in a large measure due to the increasing importance of other social groups and the tendency of certain types of groups (e.g. trade unions and groups of producers) to become drawn into the governmental process (ANU Council 1954: 23).

This concentration on groups such as churches (church-state relations was a particular research interest of Webb’s) and trade unions (an area in which Rawson was to become a leading figure) would seem to show the influence of British pluralist approaches, both normative and analytical.  Webb was in fact dismissive of these approaches: ‘their real-personality formula was far too simple to cover the complexities of group-State relations’.   However, he regarded the development in American political science of analytical pluralism very favourably: ‘this analytical pluralism is not, as was English pluralism, the preoccupation of a distinctive school of political thought; it is rather a permanent enlargement of the scope of political science’ (Webb 1958: vii-viii).

 

By the time of Leicester Webb’s death in a car accident in 1962, the Department was well established.   The then Director of the Research School, P. H. Partridge, wrote that ‘his energy, initiative and versatility are reflected in the Department of which he was the chief architect’ (ANU Council 1963:33)¹

 

The 1960s and 70s saw the consolidation and further development of the direction established by Webb, with the Department growing rapidly in size and attempting a very wide range of work.   The following breakout shows the staffing situation in 1968 (and the gendered division of labour at that time).

 

 

 

 

When people look back to the sixties and seventies, they speak of golden years.   Don Aitkin, a student in the Department from 1961 to 1964 and subsequently a Research Fellow until he moved to Macquarie University as Professor of Politics in 1971, wrote recently that:

I could have stayed at the ANU forever, so attractive was it as a home for someone who happily worked day and night on a variety of research projects.   I had exceptional colleagues, excellent students, and tons of support (Aitkin 2001a).

And David Butler, who visited from Nuffield College for the first time in 1967, recalls ‘lively and provocative seminars’ and describes the Department as ‘a very warm and affectionate’ place.   He remembers Robert Parker (who headed the Department from 1963 to 1978) as having a wide range of interests and as being very encouraging in his approach to people (Butler 2001).   Wettenhall (1981: 13) identifies a broader contribution by Parker to Australian political science, noting that he ‘read, commented on and thereby improved countless draft articles, papers, and book and thesis chapters prepared by colleagues in other institutions’.

 

In the 1960s, work continued on electoral studies, with Aitkin beginning the Australian Political Attitudes Surveys in the mid ‘60s, as well as on political history where (reflecting the same influences as drove the Survey work) there is a significant shift to quantitative methods.  Much work was also done on the political aspects of Australian trade unionism.   New approaches were adopted to the study of public policy and significant resources were directed at the study of international politics with groups focussing on Papua New Guinea, Western Europe (led by Arthur Burns) and Soviet and Eastern Europe (led by T. H. Rigby).   The general approach was much as it had been in the first years of the Department, an approach described by Parker as:

empirically directed.  That is to say, [the Department] has not embarked upon studies in political philosophy (which are conducted elsewhere in the School), and it has not engaged to any great extent in the construction of “cumulative empirical theories” or in explanatory model-building as an enterprise in its own right.

This is not to say that members of the Department were theoretically naive; rather, as Parker (1978: 6) continued, they were attentive to ‘explanatory theorising in the conduct of their empirical work’.

 

Parker’s reference to political philosophy prompts questions about how people in different parts of the Research School, and in other parts of the University might have influenced work in the Department.  One very likely source of influence was the RSSS Department of Social and Political Philosophy.   As Sir Keith Hancock, the School’s Director from 1957-61, noted:

our School in Canberra possessed deep and tough roots in history and philosophy.   For example, it was almost impossible for our economists, political scientists, demographers and lawyers to see their problems in shallow perspective when almost every day they were exchanging ideas with two such competent philosophers as P. H. Partridge and J. A. Passmore (Hancock 1976: 43).

(‘Competent’, the context makes clear, was a word Hancock used as very high praise indeed.)   Partridge is particularly interesting given the role proposed for him in the School and given his background.   He was appointed to the Chair in Social Philosophy in 1953 and a tentative definition of what his research might encompass is offered in the Annual Report for that year:

social philosophy is the examination of the more general and fundamental conceptions, the more general assumptions and principles, which are employed both in the several social sciences and in the thinking of ordinary men about the organization of political and social life (ANU Council 1954: 26).

Partridge brought to the ANU his experience as Head of the Department of Political Science at the University of Melbourne in 1947 and the Department of Government and Public Administration at the University of Sydney from 1948-53 and was to succeed Hancock as Director of RSSS in 1961, a position he held until 1968.   A possible further source of influence is that Partridge taught both Robert Parker and Harry Rigby who joined the Department in 1964.

 

A second point to note about political science at the ANU in the 1950s and 60s is that it was being practised in a number of places in what was then a very small university so there was every likelihood of staff influencing one another’s approaches.   The Research School of Social Sciences and the Research School of Pacific Studies (RSPacS) had overlapping interests, particularly in the area of international politics and jointly organised seminars were common.   A sign of the overlap is that, the RSPacS Department of International Relations was shifted to RSSS during 1958, after a period of staff conflict, and administered by Webb.  Note too that a major area of research on Australian political life was undertaken outside the Program.  That was ‘an examination of the interrelation between Australian Federal politics and the Constitution’ (ANU Council 1953b: 23), which was done in the RSSS Law Department, particularly by Geoffrey Sawer.

 

The 1960s and 70s were boom years for the Department and contrasted markedly with what was to come.   The 1980s and 90s saw the winding down of various earlier projects.   And, in the 1990s there was both a stronger focus on the relationship between empirical and theoretical work accompanied by disputes in the School about whether the Program should be heading in that direction.

 

In 1980, Don Aitkin returned from Macquarie to head the Department and though much was achieved over the next ten years it is ironic that the skills that he and other staff possessed meant that many spent a good deal of their time working outside the Department.   Instead, staff contributed to the broader administration of the ANU or the university sector.  Aitkin himself was Chairman of the Australian Research Grants Committee (ARGC) from 1986, as well as a member of the Australian Science and Technology Council and Chair of the Board of the Institute of Advanced Studies.   Rawson spent half his time from 1986 as Executive Director of the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia, leaving this position in 1989 to become Associate Director of RSSS, a position he occupied until 1992.   And Brian Galligan, who was appointed to the Department in 1984 and published the first major study done in the Department of the High Court (Galligan 1987), spent half his time from 1988 as Deputy Director of the Centre for Research into Federal Financial Relations before leaving the Department altogether to become Director of the renamed Federalism Research Centre in 1992.

 

During the 1980s the work of T. H. Rigby’s Soviet and East European group continued and much was done in response to the enormous changes in that part of the world, while Don Rawson continued his work on Australian trade unions.   Broadly, the Department’s approach to political science continued much as it had in earlier times.  Echoing Parker’s comments in 1978 about the empirical focus of the work done here, Aitkin noted in 1987 that:

members of the Department have not sought to add to the theoretical or methodological literature of the discipline in other than an incidental way: we have been a research department, intent on empirical research (Aitkin 1987: 5).

In his own case, Aitkin more recently (2001b) described himself as ‘a thorough empiricist’ who has a ‘numerical, pattern seeking, style’, something he recalls sharing with both Rawson and Hughes.

 

From 1981 the Department was to make a significant contribution to the professional organisation of political science in Australia when it housed the Australasian Political Studies Association.   (Five members of staff—Webb, Rigby, Aitkin, and more recently Marian Sawer and Barry Hindess—have been presidents of APSA.)   Gillian O’Loghlin produced regular issues of the APSA Newsletter over a long period.  Aitkin and Galligan filled the role of Treasurer and built up the Association’s reserves.   And O’Loghlin, together with Trevor Matthews, produced a listing of Australasian Theses in Political Science to 1990 (O’Loghlin & Matthews 1994).  The Department has hosted APSA conferences in 1970, 1980, 1981, 1992 and 2000.

 

As well as the newsletter for APSA, the Department produced newsletters in the 1980s on ‘Federalism’, ‘Ethnic Politics’, and ‘Socialist Countries’.   Another part of its role as a source of information came about because the Department had from its beginnings built up a large collection of newspaper cuttings on Australian political issues (staff donations meant that some of this material went back to the 1930s).   The collection was widely used within the University and in the 1980s the Department had a substantial amount of the material put on microfiche which it sold to other universities (Aitkin & Evans, 1986).   Unfortunately, financial pressures in the early 1990s meant the end of this contribution.

 

When a Review of the School was conducted in 1988, the Committee recognised that the Department could claim significant achievements, particularly the work of Rigby and Rawson.   But, as the Review Report continued:

it is clear that political science in the RSSS is currently at a lower ebb.   In a regime of fixed establishments and historic budgeting, Rigby’s very success in building a distinguished Soviet and East European group has diminished the resources available for the study of Australian politics, a study the Department helped pioneer in an earlier era—and one that should be a central element of political science at the Commonwealth capital. But the career paths of various of its members kept the Department from exploiting such resources as it had.

The Committee noted the various contributions which staff were making elsewhere in the university sector as well as the prospect of Rigby’s retirement before concluding that:

Political science is plainly short of the human resources it needs to play a vigorous role in reshaping the School’s research agenda (Review Committee 1988: 55-56).

While 1988 is the point at which the ‘lower ebb’ is observed, other problems had arisen much earlier.   Aitkin, recently recalling his return to the Department in 1980, observed that ‘money was tighter and my sort of social science was no longer possible at ANU because we were prevented from applying to the ARGC (seen as double dipping)’ (Aitkin 2001a: 35).

 

Aitkin left the Department to head the newly created Australian Research Council in 1988 and Barry Hindess, formerly Professor of Sociology in the Faculties, joined the Program as its Head in 1990.  While more conventional political science was practised (particularly the comparative work on welfare systems undertaken by Frank Castles), Hindess took the Program in a new and controversial direction, one which showed a greater attentiveness to political theory.  Earlier work in the Department had been theoretically informed and Webb may have had the goal of going further since, in embarking on the study of elections, he wrote that his ‘ultimate objective . . . [was] a re-examination of theories of party government in the light of Australian experience’ (ANU Council 1954: 22).   However, this did not happen and, as we have seen, both Parker and Aitkin stressed the empirical orientation of the Department during their times as Head.   By contrast, as Hindess wrote in 1998, he wanted:

to ensure a creative interaction between theory and empirical research rather than (as is the norm in many political science departments) simply allowing them to operate as independent, largely self contained activities (Political Science Program 1998: 3).

That approach was by no means universally accepted and any academic dispute about its viability was exacerbated by concern that it would be unattractive to potential funding bodies given that Institute staff had no direct access to the Australian Research Council.

 

The dispute reached a head with the Report of the Committee which reviewed the Program in 1998.   The Committee’s view was that:

while recognising the value of Professor Hindess’ work on political theory and Professor Castles’ work in comparative public policy, [it] believes that the future work of the Program should have a clear focus on issues of Australian national governance, capitalising on the location of the Program in the national capital. . . . such a focus would provide scope to contribute more directly to national policy debates and to practical issues of governance, perhaps in conjunction with other parts of the university.   Moreover the Committee noted that major work on political theory was already conducted by the Social and Political Theory Group and that in the future this Group should be the focus of such work (Review Committee 1998: 13, para. 6.8).

The Committee’s recommendations included that the Program:

be based on problem solving groups, to encourage an applied, policy focus, and to facilitate the attraction of external funds and the participation of scholars outside the School in such projects (1998: 2, Recommendation 2).

The Program response argued that:

There is clearly a place for research that aims to solve problems for policy-makers.   However, no Program within the School should be expected to compromise its academic integrity to the degree of allowing the concerns of policy-makers to be the sole determinant of its intellectual agenda.   There is, for instance, an important place in the School for research that takes the concerns of policy-agencies themselves and the consequences of their activities as significant objects of study (Political Science Program n. d. [June 1998]: 1).

This dispute cannot be said to have been resolved in that debates continue about the way in which political science is practised (debates which are paralleled throughout the profession).   However, access to the ARC Competitive Grants System from 2002 has opened up a source of funding more likely than government agencies to be interested in supporting approaches outside the mainstream.

 

Frank Castles, who headed the Program in 1999 and 2000, describes this period of one and a half years as being almost completely taken up with trying to ensure that the Program would survive (Castles 2001).  He had some success, organising the appointments of John Uhr and Ian Marsh from 2001.   However, when Castles left Australia in February 2001 to take up a Chair at the University of Edinburgh, he was reported in the Sydney Morning Herald as saying that the state of the Australian academic system was so deplorable, he would discourage his children from working in any Australian university.

 

The remainder of this paper considers in more detail a number of research areas pursued in the Program over the last fifty years before concluding with some information about the current and future activities of the Program.

                       

Electoral Studies

 

At the Department’s beginning, Webb’s view was that a major way in which contemporary Australian politics could be studied was through the study of the country’s elections.   Webb believed (and it is a passage which reveals something of his wider agenda) that:

just as the engineer learns much about materials by observing their behaviour under abnormal stresses, so the political scientist can learn much about political institutions by watching their behaviour in a period of crisis (1954: vi).

His ambition was to:

produce a series of electoral studies comparable with those being produced by research organizations in the United Kingdom and the United States.   These will later become the basis for a comprehensive analysis of Australian political life (ANU Council 1956: 30).

Thus began something not previously attempted in Australia, a series of electoral studies which included:

 

§          Webb’s Communism and Democracy in Australia (1954)—an examination of the 1951 Referendum which proposed banning the Communist Party;

 

§          The Gwydir By-Election 1953, also published in 1954 and prepared by Joan Rydon, then working as a Research Assistant in the Department together with Henry Mayer from the Department of Government at the University of Sydney—a study of a particularly vociferous by-election, seen as a test of the Menzies Government as well as involving a contest between three candidates from within the Government coalition;

 

§          Politics in Eden-Monaro , published in 1958 by Don Rawson and Susan Holtzinger (from Pennsylvania State University)—a study of the State election of 1955 and the Federal election of 1956 in the area bounded by the Federal electorate of Eden-Monaro, the South-West of New South Wales;

 

§          Australia Votes by Don Rawson, published in 1961 and covering the 1958 Federal election—a work which was, according to the Preface, ‘the first attempt to survey an Australian election on a national scale’ and had as its ‘main aim . . . the working of the electoral process, especially the attitudes and responses of the electors to this process’ (Rawson 1961: v); and

 

§          Stability and Change in Australian Politics by Don Aitkin with a first edition published in 1977 after the Australian Political Attitudes Surveys of 1967 and 1969 and with a second edition published in 1982 after a further Survey in 1979—the project, which began in 1966, set out to find relationships between, on the one hand, class, occupation, personality, religion, and national origin, and on the other, political habits, voting habits and party adherence (ANU Council 1967: 65).

 

While Webb referred to an ambition to match both British and American works, an examination of the first four studies on this list shows that it was the British approach, as found in the various early Nuffield Studies, that was adopted.   Those Studies, which began with The British General Election of 1945, were ‘based primarily on a selection of the principal newspapers throughout the country, on the party literature and propaganda, including a large number of election addresses’ (McCallum & Readman 1947: xiv ).  Similarly, the major resources Webb used in Communism and Democracy were press and radio reports and he made extensive use of these, commenting on their ‘adequacy’ as sources of information.  (Webb was evidently drawing on his newspaper experience prior to the Second World War—he had been a political journalist in Christchurch while also lecturing in political science.)   In addition, the book uses voting statistics, results of opinion polls and records of expenditure to build up a picture of the referendum campaign.

 

The American work in this area was quite different in character.  The most influential material came from the Survey Research Center of the University of Michigan, which was formed in the 1940s and which produced The Voter Decides (Campbell et al. 1954) and then The American Voter (Campbell et al. 1960).  These works used the sample survey method, because of ‘the capacity it gives to make inferences about total populations from the characteristics of relatively few cases’.  This was the basis for attempting to understand the reasons (attitudes, perceptions and group loyalties) that influenced voters’ choices in US presidential elections (Campbell et al. 1954).  However, up until the mid 1960s such a nation wide approach would have been too expensive to pursue in an Australian university.

 

The pioneering nature of the earlier Australian studies was recognised by various critics (Masey 1955; May 1962) and reviewers commented favourably on the cautious approach that was adopted, contrasting this with the more usual kind of Australian election commentary.   Thus Sol Encel wrote of the Gwydir study that:

criticisms . . . are of less importance in view of the pioneer character of the work: in a sense the abstinence of the writers from pushing their conclusions is all the more welcome when compared with the endemic tendency of Australian political writing to erect an imposing structure of generalisations on an all too thin substratum of fact (Encel 1955-56: 137).²

Nevertheless, criticism was directed at the various attempts in the studies by Rawson & Holtzinger and by Rawson to survey voters’ attitudes.  The Eden-Monaro study had included interviews with two hundred Queanbeyan electors who were ‘asked questions relating to their past voting record and present voting intentions, their occupation and their religion, their opinion of the work of the sitting members and their exposure to press, radio and other propaganda’.  The results were then used to produce ‘an impressionistic condensation’ (Rawson & Holtzinger 1958: 130).  Writing about the sample survey, E. D. Killen (1959: 103) acknowledged the authors’ proper reluctance to make any generalisations from their findings but concluded that ‘the results of this attempt at a positivistic approach . . . are not very satisfactory’.   What was needed, according to Killen, were a good deal more money and a large group of research workers to undertake a sufficiently broad survey to understand the electoral behaviour of people across the country.

 

Rawson’s Australia Votes was more ambitious in the surveys it attempted, containing chapters on campaigning in metropolitan constituencies.   Brisbane was covered by Colin Hughes and B. A. Knox and the electorate of Parkes by P. B. Westerway.   These were intended ‘to supplement’ the earlier rural surveys done in the Department (Rawson 1961: 164).  In Parkes a sample survey was conducted with some 428 electors interviewed before and again after polling day to find out a wide range of information, including their intentions and preferences in earlier elections, when these intentions were formed, their knowledge of candidates and party policies, their exposure to political propaganda, their opinions about the qualities of electors who typically supported the different parties, who they discussed political issues with, and what religion they belonged to (1961: ch. 11).   Rawson concluded that:

The picture presented by the survey in Parkes is similar in many respects to the outcome of similar surveys in the United Kingdom and the United States.   Most electors have a very limited knowledge of the candidates and their parties; in some respects they are almost incredibly ignorant (1961: 165).

Reviewers (May 1962; A. Hughes, 1963) complained that, because the survey work was focussed on only three electorates, it could not be linked to Rawson’s larger analysis of voting across Australia.

 

In the mid 1960s it became possible (primarily because the money became available) to advance the study of voters’ behaviour.  That study had always been seen as missing from the works published in the 1950s.   Webb had identified the gap in Communism and Democracy (1954: 147) and Rawson had written in Australia Votes that:

Ideally, the study of a national election campaign should be complemented by an investigation of a nation wide sample of the voters to examine how they reacted to the campaign and why, and also the extent to which factors other than the campaign determined how they voted.   It is not necessary here to go into the statistical and other difficulties which this would raise, because there seems no possibility of undertaking it successfully in Australia (1961: 164).

By 1966 funding could be found for the Australian Political Attitudes Surveys from the Research School as well as the Ford Foundation (via the University of Michigan), the Australian Broadcasting Commission, John Fairfax & Sons, and News Ltd.   (Aitkin notes, however, that ‘the whole project was never free from financial crises’ [Aitkin 1977: Preface].)   The 1967 and 1969 Surveys were co-directed by Aitkin and Michael Kahan and originated in work which both had done for David Butler and Donald Stokes on their Political Change in Britain (1969; 1974).   (The Department brought Stokes and Butler to Australia at different points to advise on the early stages of the Surveys.)   Political Change in Britain reflected, its authors wrote, the merging of two traditions of electoral research’—the ‘more historical approach’ found in the Nuffield Studies and the University of Michigan model with its emphasis on the motives of voters (Butler & Stokes 1974: 11-12; see also Aitkin 1977: 272, and Aitkin 1982: 355 for his acknowledgment of the influence).

 

In 1967 and 1969, approximately 2000 electors were interviewed across Australia by 150 interviewers.   Aitkin argued in the first edition of Stability and Change that:

the shape of Australian politics has been largely unchanged since 1910, and that the causes of this stability are to be found in the adoption, by millions of Australians, then and since, of relatively unchanging feelings of loyalty to one or other of the Australian parties (1977: 1).

His conclusion was ‘that the foundation of Australian democracy is habit, not understanding’ (1977: 270).   Yet, though its major concern is with stability, the book also seeks to understand the ‘quite small movements in popular support’ that could lead to changes of government (1977: 209).   Reviewing this edition, Neal Blewett placed the work in terms of earlier studies while praising what Aitkin was able to do:

Stability and Change is almost wholly derivative in approach.  While Aitkin does develop particular instruments for handling distinctive aspects of the Australian scene, for example preferential voting, he is overwhelmingly dependent on his predecessors for framework and method.

But Aitkin has splendidly quarried the works of his predecessors for comparative ends.  His work is explicitly more comparative than the earlier studies, and he makes constant use of the earlier studies to illuminate the characteristics of the Australian electorate (1977: 463).

Blewett concluded that the book was ‘one of the relatively few Australian works of political science demanding to be appraised in an international context’ (1977: 464).

 

While at Macquarie University in the 1970s, Aitkin had found the money—from that University and from the Australian Research Grants Committe which was to provide $75,000, as well as from CRA Ltd—to undertake a new Australian Political Attitudes Survey in 1979.  Using the design and methods of the 1967 and 1969 surveys, a fresh sample was interviewed and reported on in a second edition of Stability and Change which Aitkin wrote on his return to the ANU and published in 1982.   The third survey confirmed earlier findings, concluding that ‘there can be no doubt that partisanship, stable, predictable partisanship, is the basis of the party system, and we have seen that it remained so in 1979’ (1982: 353).

 

The three Surveys form the basis of the Social Sciences Data Archives founded at the ANU in 1981 (for information about the Archives, see SSDA 2001) and are a background to the Australian Election Studies conducted since 1987 by researchers from various universities.   It is a nice note on which to end this survey of electoral studies to remember that one of those researchers, Clive Bean, began his career with a thesis in the Department on ‘A comparative study of electoral behaviour in Australia and New Zealand’ (Bean 1984).

                       

Political History

 

As well as the electoral studies, a second important aspect of the Department’s activity in the period from the, the 1950s to the mid 1980s was the ‘basic historical work’ which Webb had identified in 1952 as needed to enable an appreciation of the roles and strategies of different institutions.   In the mid 1950s, Robert Chapman undertook a study of voter behaviour in Australian elections between 1926 and 1935 and what this behaviour revealed about reactions to economic crisis.   The work was justified in the 1953 ANU Annual Report by an appeal to the views of noted social scientists and historians—it was to be ‘a study of the type that has been called for by Professors Hancock, Crawford, Overacker and Parker as a necessary foundation for an extended political history of Australia’ (ANU Council 1954: 25-26).

 

B. D. (Bruce) Graham’s thesis, begun in the Department in 1955, on ‘The Political Strategies of the Australian Country Parties, from Their Origins until 1929’ (1958) led to his book on The Formation of the Australian Country Parties (1966).   The book ‘combines’, he wrote:

an examination of the electoral and parliamentary strategies of the first Australian Country Parties and their effect on the party system, with an account of the social and economic factors which produced these parties and enabled them to survive (1966: vii).

 

Building on Graham’s work, Don Aitkin sought to identify the reasons for the Country Party’s survival, first in his thesis, begun in 1961, on ‘The Organisation of the Australian Country Party (NSW) 1946 to 1962’ and then in his The Country Party in New South Wales (Aitkin 1964 and 1972 respectively).   The book also aimed to fill a major gap in the literature; as Aitkin noted ‘Australian political science unfortunately lacks any detailed studies of the structure and organisation of the political parties in the various states’ (1972: xiii).

 

Throughout the 1960s, Aitkin was to continue his study of the Country Party with The Colonel (1969), a biography of Sir Michael Bruxner who led the New South Wales Party from the late 1920s until 1958.  This is, incidentally, the one substantial political biography prepared in the Department.   Other work of this kind had been a major activity in the School’s History Department; La Nauze’s Alfred Deakin and Fitzhardinge’s political biography of William Morris Hughes are examples.   It is also the one attempt to apply a form of political psychology pursued in the University of Melbourne’s Politics Department during this period and Aitkin acknowledges the influence of Alan Davies of Melbourne in a brief concluding chapter which speculates about the origins of Bruxner’s political style (1969: 264-267).

 

The results of another major project in political history were collected in The Emergence of the Australian Party System (Loveday et al. 1977), edited by Parker and Peter Loveday, together with Alan Martin from the School’s History Department.   This was a cross-university project with one of the chapters, by Pat Weller, based on his thesis done in the Department on ‘Non-Labor parties, 1894-1912’ (Weller 1972; 1977).   The collection covered the period from the late 1880s to 1910, a time in which ‘recognised overt parties had developed and the old personalised systems of division had disappeared . . . setting the essential patterns of politics in Australia up to our own time’ (Martin & Parker: 1977: 1).   The claim was that:

methods of political action . . . came to show a relatively high degree of regularity, uniformity and publicity, compared to the improvisations, the variety of forms, and the private—even clandestine—methods of colonial times (Martin & Parker 1977: 2).

Evidence for that claim was found in ‘files of newspapers, . . . parliamentary debates and division lists and . . . computer output’ (1977: xviii).   The reference to use of a computer points to the considerable quantitative aspect of this work.  As Loveday explains in an Appendix to the book, ‘the votes of all members in all house divisions, and in all committee divisions in some instances, in all parliaments from 1890 to 1910 have been coded for analysis by computer’ to determine the cohesion, solidarity and absenteeism of party members (Loveday 1977: 488).   Reviewing the collection, Bruce Graham concluded that it was:

a considerable achievement [combining] the interpretation of painstaking and systematic empirical research with a sophisticated discussion of the general theoretical issues posed by this period of Australian political history.   It is bound to attract the attention and admiration of historians and political scientists for many years to come (1978: 422).

 

As part of the focus on political history, a massive project was started in 1961 to prepare a series of handbooks on ‘gubernatorial, cabinet and electoral data’ together with supplements providing ‘detailed results for each election, constituency by constituency . . . and candidate by candidate’ covering both the Commonwealth and the States (Parker 1968: v).  The project started under the direction of Bruce Graham who was soon joined by Colin Hughes, appointed as a Fellow in 1961.   It was Hughes who, on Graham’s departure for Britain in the mid 1960s, went on to bear major responsibility for the project.  The first publication in the series was A Handbook of Australian Government and Politics 1890-1964 (Hughes & Graham 1968).   The scale of the Handbook was impressive: it was over 600 pages long with the ‘Acknowledgements’ thanking five typists as well as two research assistants and noting that sections of the work drew on the extensive research of two former members of the Department.   The Handbook was only the first in a series of works ³   which Don Aitkin described in 1987 as ‘possibly the most used singlreference in the whole of Australian political studies, and the endeavour itself the most helpful single contribution to the discipline in our country’ (Aitkin 1987: 4).  When Hughes left the University in 1984 it was to become the first Australian Electoral Commissioner and in that role, as well as in his subsequent membership of the Queensland Electoral and Administrative Reform Commission, he was to make a major contribution to electoral governance.

 

Again in political history, another major project was to find and publish the records of the Federal Parliamentary Labor Party.  Pat Weller’s edition in three volumes of a full transcription of the Caucus Minutes, 1901-1949 was published in 1975.  This was followed in 1978 by Weller and Beverley Lloyd’s Federal Executive Minutes, 1915-1955.  The editors managed, after considerable searching, to bring together records of all but four of the Executive meetings that had been held over forty years.

 

The study of political parties continued during the 1980s with the collection, edited in 1983 by John Warhurst, together with Andrew Parkin from Flinders University, on Machine Politics in the Australian Labor Party (Parkin & Warhurst 1983).   And Don Aitkin contributed further to the study of political history with his edition, published in 1984, of the diaries of Peter Howson who he described as ‘our most important source about the “inside” of Australian government’ in the period from 1963 to 1972 (Aitkin 1984: vii).   Howson had occupied various junior ministerial portfolios during this period and kept a diary so extensive that Aitkin’s selection of over 1000 pages represented only a third of the total.   Again in the 1980s, Brian Galligan added a major element to the study of political institutions with his Politics of the High Court , published in 1987 and intended to show how, in a history of its exercise of judicial review, that ‘the High Court plays an important role in Australian politics that is both adjudicative and constitutional’ (1987: 2).

 

Thesis work in political history also extended beyond political parties with G. L. Kristianson’s work on ‘Pressure group activities of the Returned Servicemen’s League’ (1965).   The thesis was published in 1966 as The Politics of Patriotism and was a study of the then fifty year history of the RSL as ‘a political pressure group, deeply involved in attempts to influence the decisions of Australian governments’ (1966: xxxiii).   Perhaps reflecting controversy in Australia at the time about the influence of the RSL, the book sold 20,000 copies, 10,000 in hardback and another 10,000 in a paperback edition for which Kristianson signed over rights to the RSL and which raised money for veterans’ charities.

                       

Public Administration and Public Policy

 

Considerable work was done in the 1950s and early ‘60s on public administration and, related to this, there are many examples of staff providing advice to parliamentary and government bodies.  Webb was particularly active as an adviser.  In 1953, he prepared material for the Commonwealth Royal Commission on Television, involving ‘a survey of the effects of broadcasting and television on politics and suggestions for the regulation of televised political matter’ (ANU Council 1954: 26).   And in the second half of the 1950s he was involved with planning ‘research into the social effects of broadcasting and television’ for the Australian Broadcasting Control Board and the Australian Broadcasting Commission (ANU Council 1956: 31).

 

In 1955 Webb was appointed by the Minister for the Interior, ‘a Commissioner to inquire into problems associated with the milk supplies of the Australian Capital territory’ (ANU Council 1956: 31).  Webb’s Report concluded that ‘the public interest has been inadequately safeguarded’, calling for a reduction in milk prices and the establishment of a position of Milk Controller to oversight Canberra’s arrangements (Webb 1956: 54-55).   What may seem now a rather quaint matter was in the mid 1950s a significant issue of public health. (Incidentally, there is a link to Webb’s work on electoral studies since the inquiry included a survey of public attitudes!)

 

Both Webb and Robert Parker, who joined the Department in 1954 as Reader in Public Administration, were active in the beginnings of the ACT group of the Royal Institute of Public Affairs.   Webb worked with a team assembled by RIPA which focussed on public corporations and presumably that experience contributed to the memorandum he wrote on the accountability of public corporations for the Joint Committee of Public Accounts.   The memorandum is critical of the view that the public corporation is ‘a recipe for managerial efficiency’, pointing to British, Canadian and New Zealand experience in this area (Webb 1955).

 

Writing about Parker’s work on public administration⁴ , John Uhr makes a strong case for Parker as ‘very much a reformer of both the academic and political traditions’.   He notes that:

Parker’s distinctive reform investment is directed to the professional public administrator, with the aim of enhancing democracy through professional development of the political capacities of the managers of democracy (Uhr 1993: xiii & xiv).

Concern with political capacity is particularly evident in the work Parker did between 1957 and 1959 as a member of the Inquiry into Public Service Recruitment (the Boyer Committee).   As Scott and Wettenhall (1981: 226) report, Parker was more than a member, being also ‘general mentor and primary report writer’ of the Committee.   The Committee had been asked to address ‘recruitment processes and standards of the Commonwealth Public Service’ and arose in part from a Government concern ‘to see an enrichment of the field from which are drawn the senior administrators and higher executive staff of the Service’ (Boyer Committee 1959: iii & 9).   The Report argued for ‘the growing importance of the policy-advising role of higher administrators and the resultant need for administrative talent of a high order of intelligence, education and integrity’ (1959: 26, para. 108).   However, as Parker was later to write, the opportunity was lost to:

advance . . . the idea (included in the nineteenth century British reforms) of a separate personnel classification for this work, with its own defined avenues of entry, qualifications for recruitment, conditions of service and criteria for promotion (1993: 166).

The opportunity was lost when ‘Sir Richard Boyer rashly linked this recommendation with what he admiringly called “the world-famed British device of the Administrative Class”.’   It would be the 1980s and the creation of the Commonwealth’s Senior Executive Service before ‘the fully fledged administrative cadre achieved respectability in the antipodes’ (1993: 169).   Parker’s influence on the Boyer Committee is also evident in the view it took on the removal of the marriage bar on the employment of women in the Commonwealth Public Service (Sawer 1996: 2-3).

 

The study of Australian public administration in the Department was linked with its work, outlined above, on political history.  The first history of personnel administration in the Commonwealth was Gerald Caiden’s Career Service (1965).  His task was particularly difficult because of the Crimes Act and Caiden noted that ‘the confidentiality of material has affected the writing of this study from 1920, and particularly after 1939’: material was unavailable and various people he had interviewed refused to be quoted (1965: 31-32).   Reviewing the book, Gordon Reid described it as ‘a remarkable achievement.   As a study of administrative history Career Service is unprecedented in its scope and intensity’.   Reid went on to note that ‘Caiden managed to reveal so much, in spite of the official limitations’ (1966: 483).   The problem of access was no better by the time Caiden came to publish his The Commonwealth Bureaucracy in 1967.   This work was the book for which Career Service was the preliminary; it profiled the Commonwealth Public Service as well as examining personnel authorities and administration in the mid 60s.   It was motivated by Caiden’s view that ‘basic to an understanding of the outlook, quality and behaviour of Commonwealth officials is the personnel system which determines entry qualifications, competitive conditions of employment, rate of advancement, security, rights and obligations’ (1967: viii ).  Caiden noted the ‘friendly, cooperative and talkative attitude in private’ of the officials he interviewed but:

amendments to the Crimes Act in 1960 have had the effect of silencing past and present officials, since they require outsiders to undertake to submit for surveillance before publication all work based on official records.   Thus the survey is not as complete or comprehensive as at first contemplated and much of the supporting evidence has had to be omitted (1967: viii ).

 

Within a few years, two major changes had occurred: first, a shift (prompted by overseas work) towards the study of public policy issues and second, far easier access to policy makers.   As to the first change, Parker noted that:

in the 1970s, we have deliberately switched a substantial part of our resources . . . toward to study of governmental institutions—partly because we found our other Australian colleagues had been neglecting them as well, and partly because the most dynamic part of this field, policy-making in bureaucracies and political executives, had attracted a wave of more sophisticated thinking and comparative analysis abroad (1978: 4).

As to easier access, Geoffrey Hawker, R. F. I. Smith and Pat Weller (all Research Fellows in the Department during the 1970s) write in their Politics and Policy in Australia that ‘the advent of the Whitlam government in 1972 led to increased interest in the machinery and processes of Australian government and to more access to outsiders than had previously existed’ (1979: ix).   All three were employed by the Royal Commission on Australian Government Administration (the Coombs Commission) as researchers and both the work they did there and the contacts they made were invaluable.   (Weller remembers in particular the assistance of Sir Geoffrey Yeend, then in the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet [Weller 2001].)

 

Building on work done for the Coombs Commission, Weller, and another consultant to the Commission, James Cutt, wrote Treasury Control in Australia (1976).   The authors noted that, although the budget is credited with great political significance, ‘we know little about how the budget is shaped and the role of the various people in that process’ (1976: 2).   Treasury Control is an example of work influenced by overseas policy studies, drawing on Heclo and Wildavsky’s The Private Government of Public Money (1974) to apply what Weller and Cutt termed a ‘sociological-anthropological approach’ to understanding the workings of bureaucracies in terms of informal practices and using ‘a similar technique of interviewing officers’ as the basis for their investigations (1976: 9).

 

In the 1980s, staff in the Department continued to focus on the study of public policy.   Loveday’s Promoting Industry sought to understand industry policies ‘as elements in an examination of how things are done and of the organization, power and activities of the bodies doing them’ (1982: 2).  In a similar vein, and again using extensive interviews, John Warhurst examined the area of tariff policy in Jobs or Dogma (1982), exploring there the role of the Industries Assistance Commission in Australian politics.

                       

Trade Unions

 

As well as work on elections and parties, Don Rawson did considerable work on the politics of the labour movement and of industrial relations.⁵   Between 1970 and 1980 he produced—together with Suzanne Wrightson in the case of the first and fourth editions—a series of Handbooks of Australian Trade Unions and Employee’s Organisations with the fourth edition subsequently revised by Rawson and Wrightson (1985) as Australian Unions 1984.   These were intended ‘simply to provide the only published listing of all the trade unions in Australia. . . . our tables show the membership of each union, divided by state and territory and by sex’ as well as showing the legislation under which each union was registered and any political affiliations (1985: 2).  Rawson also wrote the first edition of his Unions and Unionists in Australia, which he described as about ‘the present state of trade unionism’ at a time when one third of the adult population belonged to unions and when, paradoxically:

organisations which are so large and so pervasive as to constitute a very large and representative portion of the population [were] widely regarded as instruments of social division and an area of constant controversy (1978: 5, 9 & 11).

 

Rawson went on, between 1980 and 1986, to head the Law and Politics of Industrial Relations Project, one of a series of limited duration projects involving members from across the School which was set up in response to increasing budgetary constraints.   The Project examined Australia’s highly centralised and highly regulated wage system and its most notable product was the book Rawson wrote with Douglas Smith of the Law Faculty, Trade Union Law in Australia (Smith & Rawson 1985).  The intention at the outset was that the book would be ‘an authoritative statement of the law but will be infused with a much greater recognition of political and social dimensions of the subject than is usual with legal text’ (RSSS 1980: 16).   The authors noted that ‘the real world of trade unionism continually modifies the operation of the law, in some cases even when apparently incontrovertible legal propositions are involved’ (1985: x).   Rawson’s work in this area came to a close with the second edition of Unions and Unionists in Australia (1986), written at a time when, in contrast to the late seventies, ‘Australian unionism [is] in some respects at the height of its influence and importance’ with the Accord between the Hawke Government and the ACTU as a major contributor to that influence (1986: viii & 3).

                       

International Politics

 

From the early 1960s, members of the Department did considerable work on the politics of other countries.   Bruce Graham, while continuing his work on the early Australian Country Parties, studied both Indian and French party politics.   A paper he first published in 1964, on ‘Theories of the French Party System under the Third Republic’, was recently republished (Graham 2000) as part of the celebrations of fifty years of the British Political Studies Association in a collection of nineteen works which, according to the editors, represented ‘the best work in our discipline’ (Dunleavy et al. 2000: 1).

 

During the 1960s and 70s many members of the Department (often working together with members of RSPacS) turned their attention to Papua New Guinea as the country moved from colonial status to independence, applying there approaches to electoral studies and public administration.  Reflecting his concern with administrative development, Parker was a member of the Interim Council of the Administrative College for the Territories of Papua and New Guinea from 1962 and in 1973, together with John Ballard, advised on the creation of a National Public Service for the country.   Parker jointly edited The Politics of Dependence (Epstein et al. 1971) and John Ballard edited Policy Making in a New State (1981).   Studies were also done by various staff on political change including an analysis of voting in the first and second House of Assembly elections (see, for example, Bettinson et al. 1965 and Loveday 1976).   Work on Papua New Guinea was phased out with the creation of the Department of Political and Social Change in RSPacS at the end of the 1970s.

 

Western European political and economic integration and superpower relations, as well as contemporary theory in international relations, were the research areas of Arthur Burns (see, for example, Burns & Heathcote 1963).   Burns moved to the Department from RSPacS as a Reader in 1961 and was given a Chair in 1966.  From 1974 he headed a new Centre for Foreign Politics (Western Europe).

 

In what was to become one of the Department’s most important areas of work, study of the politics of Soviet and East Europe began in 1964 when T. H. (Harry) Rigby joined the Department as a Professorial Fellow.⁶   He headed a team which subsequently included Robert Miller, appointed in 1974, and Rigby has recently described how the pair worked: ‘both were closely interested in internal politics, but Bob buttressed this with strength on the Soviet economy and international relations, while I had a penchant for political sociology and history’ (Rigby 2001).  Rigby is widely regarded as one of the world’s leading authorities on this area and this was recognised in his appointment to a personal Chair in 1987.   As Parker noted, the shift into Soviet and East European politics came about because of:

the availability of distinguished staff, the relative dearth of effort in this important area in other parts of Australia, the widening of horizons it conferred on the department, and also the wealth of library resources for the purpose in Canberra, . . . The continuation of this side of the work is justified by recognition of the department as the leading centre for research in this field in the country (Parker 1978: 6).

 

A period spent examining ‘the main lines of CPSU recruitment policies and trends in membership, particularly social and occupational trends’ resulted in the publication of Rigby’s (1968) Communist Party Membership in the USSR, 1917-1967.   That work has been described, in the Soviet Studies Guide (White 1992: 89), as a ‘landmark study of the evolution of party membership’.   In the 1970s, responding to new material by Russian scholars on the early years of Soviet rule, Rigby worked on what was to become Lenin’s Government (1979).  The book deals with the organisation and operation of Sovnarkom, that is the Council of People’s Commissars which in the period from 1917 to 1922 governed the Soviet Union (1979: ix-x).   A review by E. A. Rees observed that ‘this study, impressively detailed and meticulously researched, fills a major gap in an important and much neglected area and raises at the same time key questions regarding the political development of the Soviet regime’ (1980: 599).

 

During the 1980s, the Soviet and East Europe group continued and much of its work examined the major upheavals of that period.  Rigby and Robert Miller (together with John Miller on secondment from LaTrobe University), edited Gorbachev at the Helm (Miller et al. 1987).   And Rigby’s retirement (marked by Rawson [1990]), saw the publication of two collections of papers (1990a & 1990b), allowing him to comment on the ‘death agonies’ of a system he had then been studying for forty years (1990b: 239)—and which, as a Visitors to the Program, both he and Miller, who retired in 1993, continue to study.   One of these collections, Rigby’s The Changing Soviet System (1990a: 5-7), summarises the concept by which he is probably best known in Soviet studies, his ‘view of the Soviet society as mono-organisational socialism’.  As he explains, ‘this is not just as society made up of formal organisations, but a society structured and operating substantially as a single organisation’.