College of Business, Government and Law

In this paper we address claims made by those supporting the abolition of compulsory voting about the relationship between turnout levels and compulsory voting. Via a critique of the methodology used, we query estimations of the effectiveness of compulsory voting laws and dispute common assertions about how high Australian turnout would be under a voluntary system. We then show that projected comparisons with places like Malta, New Zealand and The Netherlands are questionable. We also challenge other projections, that are based on data that has been insufficiently disaggregated. We conclude that when compulsory voting is properly administered in a congenial setting (such as Australia), it is the best means for guaranteeing high and socio-demographically equal rates of voting participation. Without it, Australian democracy would be experiencing the same citizenship crises currently being experienced in most other industrialised, voluntary voting settings.

This paper addresses some residual misunderstandings about the effects of compulsory voting and, in particular, the effectiveness of compulsory voting laws as a mechanism to stimulate voting turnout. It also compares its efficacy with alternative turnout-raising mechanisms.

Some critics of compulsory voting refer to the minimal percentage difference of voter turnout between compulsory and voluntary voting electoral systems. We address studies in which the effectiveness of compulsory voting is either underplayed or miscalculated due to an inappropriate use of atypical cases or a methodological error known as the ‘ecological fallacy’. Specifically, treating all compulsory voting regimes as a synthetic group can give rise to inaccurate perceptions of the performance of individual regimes like Australia’s.

After canvassing a number of alternatives methods for raising turnout we suggest that, provided the setting is congenial, and provided it is accompanied by appropriate levels of enforcement and institutional support, compulsory voting is the only institutional mechanism that is able, on its own, to raise turnout into to the 90% range. Using a social norms approach we also suggest that turnout problems are best solved by mandatory means. There is a particular focus on the Australian case which is, arguably, the benchmark standard for compulsory voting performance.

Despite the slight increase recorded at the 2005 poll, turnout at British national elections continues to be low. The slight rise in turnout was driven by the increased voting participation of baby boomers whereas the youth vote dipped well below the fifty percent mark. This is worrying, not only because youth is a surrogate for other forms of social and economic exclusion, but also because it augurs ill for the future of British democracy.
Although the low voting turnout of the young was once dismissed as merely a life-cycle phenomenon, this no longer appears to be true with the early low participation habits of young people apparently becoming entrenched over time.
In Britain a number of reforms have been instituted to stem the tide of electoral demobilisation but none have been particularly successful. Since such piecemeal reforms seem unable to solve the problem, we recommend compulsory voting as the most reliable means of raising voting participation. And, as we show, compulsory voting has a good chance of being adopted in Britain due to its growing popularity with both policy makers and the public.

The White Building is an apartment complex in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. It was built in 1963 as a keystone of the Sihanouk governments’ urban social housing scheme. After the fall of Khmer Rouge in 1979, the few surviving artists were called to live in The White Building due to its proximity to the National Theatre in order to re-build Khmer culture (the National Theatre has since been demolished). After decades of no maintenance and ongoing restructuring of the exterior, the White Building is in poor condition. However, behind the fading facade and dilapidated infrastructure there lives a complex community of over three thousand people including artists, musicians, community activists and everyday city dwellers. This paper explores the role of recent projects to document the everyday lives of the Building’s inhabitants as both a means of resistance and to enable critical reflexivity among participants. Through the development of a number of initiatives across a variety of mediums and media platforms – including the very successful Humans of Phnom Penh series, whitebuilding.org and the Sa Sa Art Projects artists’ collective based in the building – there is a desire to not only celebrate and document the living memory of this unique community, but to push back against government and property developers’ interest in the site. By utilising a Lefebvrian analysis we argue, first, that the dominant discursive acts of the more powerful can be challenged through the expression of the ‘lived’ and the elevation of everyday life.  And, second, we argue that the very perception of the space and the sense of place is (re)produced through these interactions across these new and diverse mediascapes.


Paper presented to the ‘Locating Lives in the Asia-Pacific-Australian Region' as part of the inaugural Conference for the IABA Asia-Pacific Chapter, Flinders University, Adelaide, December 1-4.

The article considers how the employment of domestic workers by middle class Malaysian households has been thrown into flux by the imposition of bans on the sending of workers by states such as Indonesia and Cambodia, as well as the decline in numbers of women seeking employment as domestic workers in Malaysia and rising employment costs. This article does not seek to focus on the high-level policy negotiations and disputes that have come to characterize systems of temporary return migration for domestic work in Asia, but to focus in on the everyday political economies (of social reproduction, work and everyday agency) that constitute the conditions of possibility within which bilateral disputes and labour agreements between Southeast Asian states take shape. We examine three dimensions of migration for domestic work in Southeast Asia in ways that bring together literatures on everyday life and social reproduction. These interconnected yet distinct dimensions are (a) the relationship between strategies to boost remittances and flows of workers from some of the most impoverished parts of Southeast Asia; (b) the centrality of low cost migrant domestic workers to Malaysian middle class 'success stories', and (c) the day to day production of 'good' worker subjects – a process that is actively and constantly resisted by workers themselves. Through a focus on these dimensions, the article provides important insights into the mechanisms through arenas of everyday life – and the household in particular-are transformed; becoming sites for the ever widening and deepening of the market economy.

In recent decades neoliberalism has emerged as the ruling economic, political and cultural ideology of our time. Originally construed as an economic philosophy, neoliberalism is better understood today as a broad world view that emphasises free-market policies, deregulation, individualism, self-management and personal resilience at the expense of more collective, social-democratic policies and principles. Neoliberalism is a pervasive ideology that has shaped our lives for more than 40 years, from the wide-ranging organisational structures of our global economy to our most intimate bodily practices.

In this engaging and accessible volume, Jonathon Louth and Martin Potter bring together researchers working in and across Europe, Asia, Australia and North America to elucidate on the manifold ways in which neoliberalism produces our subjectivities. Taking in nations and citizenship, urban transformation, gender, work, (dis)ability, sexual performance and cognitive function, this volume demonstrates the astonishing scope of neoliberalism to inform and delimit our identities on both macro and micro levels of social and personal life. Combining thoughtful theoretical accounts with fascinating fieldwork and spanning areas of inquiry including the UK, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Pakistan, Cambodia, Japan and Australia, Edges of Identity provides a remarkable collection of global perspectives on the impact of neoliberalism in contemporary international contexts.

This tenth volume in the Issues in the Social Sciences series is an absorbing introduction to the practical affects and lived realities of neoliberal ideology that will appeal both to readers encountering neoliberalism for the first time and expert scholars in the Social Sciences and Humanities.


Contents

The Production of Neoliberal Subjectivities: Constellations of Domination and Resistance
Jonathon Louth (Flinders University) and Martin Potter (James Cook University)

Consuming Environmental Citizenship, or the Production of Neoliberal Green Citizens
Benito Cao (University of Adelaide)

‘Empowered Girls’ in Neoliberal Times:  Malala as the Effect of Heterogeneous Discourses
Shenila Khoja-Moolji (University of Pennsylvania)

Our Borders: Neoliberalism, Identity and Asylum Seeker Policy in Australia, 2001–2013
Ben Revi (University of Adelaide)

“The Way You Make Me Feel”: Shame and the Neoliberal Governance of Disability Welfare Subjectivities in Australia and the UK
Karen Soldatic (Western Sydney University) and Hannah Morgan (Lancaster University)

Subjects or Subjected? The Puzzle of Identity in Neoliberal Times
Tom Brock (Manchester Metropolitan University) and Mark Carrigan (University of Warwick)

Ejaculatory Timing and Masculine Identities: The Politics of Ab/normalising Sexual Performance
Hannah Frith (University of Brighton)

Neoliberal Ideology and Shifting ‘Salarymen Identity’ Under Corporate Restructuring in Japan
Nana Okura Gagné (Chinese University of Hong Kong)

Urban Transformations, Work and the Idea of Social Solitude Among Two Generations of Men in Surabaya, East Java
Matteo Carlo Alcano (University of Milano-Bicocca)

Neoliberalising Mostar: Governmentality, Ethno-National Division and Everyday Forms of Resistance
Giulia Carabelli (Max Planck Institute) and Rowan Lubbock (Birkbeck College)

Urban Transformations in Phnom Penh:  Creative Collectives, the White Building and the Production of Space
Jonathon Louth (Flinders University) and Martin Potter (James Cook University)

Exploring the Formation and Reproduction of Neoliberal Subjectivities: A Socio-Cognitive Approach
Rodolfo Leyva (Middlesex University)