John Uhr
Biographic Data
| ID | 690510 |
|---|---|
| NAME | John Uhr |
| GIVEN NAMES | John |
| FAMILY NAME | Uhr |
| SIGNATURE | UHR J |
| AFFILIATIONS | Australian National University |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-5446-9742 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 36 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 67 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 34 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 2 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1981 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
Norman and Nietzsche: The Political Project of Lindsay's The Magic Pudding
Australian artist and writer Norman Lindsay (1879–1969) wrote 11 novels and two children's books, one of which— The Magic Pudding first published in 1918—remains a national classic. This article argues that readers and critics have long misunderstood Lindsay's intention in writing this lengthy cartoon‐story about the adventures of Bunyip Bluegum in protecting Albert, the somewhat cantankerous pudding, as valuable treasure for the Pudding‐Owners' …
The Pivot of Power: Australian Prime Ministers and Political Leadership, 1949–2016. Paul Strangio, Paul 'T Hart, James Walter. The Miegunyah Press 2017
The Rhetorical Standards of Public Reason in Australia
Our article examines recent Australian political speech to discover rhetorical standards for deliberation. Unlike philosophical standards for public reason — such as those developed by Jürgen Habermas and John Rawls — rhetorical standards are not anchored in reason, but in the institutional and linguistic constraints of partisan political speech. Accordingly, rhetorical standards are unwritten, malleable, and permissive. Two standards are apparen…
Investigating Public Integrity inMacbeth
Managing investigations of official misconduct committed by one’s superiors is a particularly fundamental problem of administrative ethics. Frequently, such investigations include testing the integrity of the leader’s senior followers, including one’s closest colleagues. Shakespeare’s Macbeth dramatizes the situation confronting senior executives who are convinced that their leader is corruptly abusing power but are uncertain how far this corrupt…
John Rohr’s Concept of Regime Values: Locating Theory in Public Administration
John Rohr’s concept of “regime values” marks out a distinctive approach to regime analysis in contemporary governance. Very few commentators, however, have recovered the foundations of Rohr’s regime values in his early work as a political scientist, particularly in his largely ignored first book called Prophets Without Honor. My aim is to recover those foundations through an examination of the emergence of the type of regime analysis in that orig…
Budget talk: Rhetorical constraints and contests
This article examines the budget surplus debate that occurred during the Gillard minority government (2010-13) to broaden the range of linguistic phenomena that are typically scrutinised in relation to Australian political rhetoric. The budget debate reve
How Power Changes Hands: Transition and Succession in Government
How can we strengthen the capacity of governments and parties to manage arrivals and departures at the top? Democracy requires reliable processes for the transfer of power from one generation of leade
Bicameralism
This article provides a review of the current research on bicameralism. It argues that there is no single model of bicameralism and no single explanatory theory. It shows that contemporary bicameral systems blend ‘inheritance’ and ‘innovation’ to form distinctive legislative arrangements of political representation.
Bipartisanship and Bicameralism in Australia's ‘War on Terror: Forcing Limits on the Extension of Executive Power
In Australia, John Howard's coalition government responded to the attacks of September 2001 by introducing a series of bills that would grant the executive and the security services unprecedented new powers in its 'war on terror', and by committing troops to Afghanistan and, later, Iraq. Australia governments normally dominate the lower House of Representatives whereas the Senate, with near co-equal powers, elected by proportional representation,…
Deliberating About Democracy: Five Perspectives
John Dryzek, Deliberative Global Politics (Oxford: Polity Press, 2006), xii + 191 pp., £14.99, ISBN 0745634133 Ian O'Flynn, Deliberative Democracy and Divided Societies (Edinburgh: Edinburgh Univer
Public Leadership: Perspectives and practices
"Leadership is routinely admired, vilified, ridiculed, invoked, trivialised, explained and speculated about in the media and in everyday conversation. Despite all this talk, there is surprisingly little consensus about how to answer basic questions about the nature, place, role and impact of leadership in contemporary society. This book brings together academics from a broad array of social science disciplines who are interested in contemporary u…
The Australian Welfare State: Has Federalism Made a Difference
This paper examines the historical development of the Australian welfare state with a view to identifying the role that Australia's federal constitutional arrangements have played in shaping that development. Theoretical paradigms have been unanimous in their prognoses: that federal states are likely to be slow in developing welfare state programmes and typically spend less on them than unitary states. But recently it has been argued that federal…
The Australian and New Zealand parliaments: Context, response and capacity
We compare Australian and New Zealand parliamentary demands on executive governments to 'do something' about globalisation, noting that parliaments are distinctive institutionally - functioning as umbrellas protecting arenas of adversarial competitiveness, with little scope for cohesive institutional capacity. We define 'globalisation' as it is defined by the parliamentary actors themselves: that is, quite broadly with different actors taking dif…
How Do We Know if it's Working
This article introduces the first of the three cross-cutting themes used to assess Australian integrity systems: evaluation of their consequences. It argues that an evidence-based approach to assessing the overall impact of integrity and corruption prevention measures is possible, based on experience in Australia, drawing on measures including the evolving State of the Service surveys of the Australian Public Service Commission. However, differen…
Explicating the Australian Senate
This article is a revised version of a paper outlining the role and performance of the Australian Senate originally prepared for the seminar in March 2002 on House of Lords Reform organised by the Constitution Unit, University College London and the Centre for Legislative Studies, University of Hull. For the most part, the article follows the original conference form of brief answers to questions identified by the conference organisers. The artic…
The Australian senate in its second century
Testing Deliberative Democracy: The 1999 Australian Republic Referendum
THIS ARTICLE EXAMINES AUSTRALIAN REFERENDUM PRACTICE WITH the aim of contributing to the growing international debate over concepts of deliberative democracy, defined in terms of democratic regimes structured to maximize community deliberation in public decision-making. Theories of deliberative democracy go beyond earlier approaches to participatory democracy by specifying in greater detail the nature of the deliberative process in which citizens…
Deliberative Democracy in Australia; The Changing Place of Parliament
Collaborative Federalism: Economic Reforms in Australia in the 1990s
Three Accountability Anxieties: A Conclusion to the Symposium
Public Service Renewal: Clues from the Commonwealth
Towards a Best Practice Australian Public Service. Discussion Paper issued by Minister for Industrial Relations and Minister Assisting the Prime Minister for the Public Service, Hon Peter Reith. Canberra: AGPS, November 1996
Testing the Policy Capacities of Budgetary Agencies: Lessons from Finance
The Commonwealth Department of Finance, together with the Treasury from which it was hived off in 1976, constitutes the central budgetary agency at the Australian federal level. For the purposes of this article, I identify Finance as a convenient working model of central budgetary agencies, at least in their traditional Australian incarnation. I accept that Finance is unlikely to be fully representative of all such Australian agencies, and I ackn…
Institutions in context: Reconstructing Aristotle's defence of cultural studies
Within political science, there are two alternative approaches to understanding political institutions: traditional ‘institutional studies’ and the newer ‘cultural studies’. Each approach tends to go its own way, with little debate between the two. The former explains institutions by reference to their independent behaviour which has a formative influence on political culture. The latter explains institutions by reference to their dependent behav…
The Report of the Australian Commonwealth Task Force on Management Improvement: Two Perspectives
Instituting republicanism: Parliamentary vices, republican virtues
According to some amongst us, a republic does not mean the reign of the majority, as hitherto conceived, but the rule of its strenuous partisans. In governments of this type, it is not the people who control affairs, but those who know what is best for the people: a happy distinction which allows rulers to act in the nation's name without consulting it and to claim its gratitude while trampling it under foot (Tocqueville, Democracy in America, I,…
Testing Deliberative Democracy: The 1999 Australian Republic Referendum
THIS ARTICLE EXAMINES AUSTRALIAN REFERENDUM PRACTICE WITH the aim of contributing to the growing international debate over concepts of deliberative democracy, defined in terms of democratic regimes structured to maximize community deliberation in public decision-making. Theories of deliberative democracy go beyond earlier approaches to participatory democracy by specifying in greater detail the nature of the deliberative process in which citizens…
Bipartisanship and Bicameralism in Australia's ‘War on Terror: Forcing Limits on the Extension of Executive Power
In Australia, John Howard's coalition government responded to the attacks of September 2001 by introducing a series of bills that would grant the executive and the security services unprecedented new powers in its 'war on terror', and by committing troops to Afghanistan and, later, Iraq. Australia governments normally dominate the lower House of Representatives whereas the Senate, with near co-equal powers, elected by proportional representation,…
Testing the Policy Capacities of Budgetary Agencies: Lessons from Finance
The Commonwealth Department of Finance, together with the Treasury from which it was hived off in 1976, constitutes the central budgetary agency at the Australian federal level. For the purposes of this article, I identify Finance as a convenient working model of central budgetary agencies, at least in their traditional Australian incarnation. I accept that Finance is unlikely to be fully representative of all such Australian agencies, and I ackn…
Ethics and Public Service
John Rohr’s Concept of Regime Values: Locating Theory in Public Administration
John Rohr’s concept of “regime values” marks out a distinctive approach to regime analysis in contemporary governance. Very few commentators, however, have recovered the foundations of Rohr’s regime values in his early work as a political scientist, particularly in his largely ignored first book called Prophets Without Honor. My aim is to recover those foundations through an examination of the emergence of the type of regime analysis in that orig…
Three Accountability Anxieties: A Conclusion to the Symposium
Towards Resourceful Public Administration: A Management Polemic
Doctrines of public administration are in ferment. Proponents of the newer public management challenge defenders of the traditional public service. Academic commentators frequently oppose both the newer managerialism and the traditional apolitical professionalism. The net effect is to distort the call for better public management. One useful step out of the mess is backwards—toward a recovery of the fundamentals of democratic political theory, of…
Australian Federalism and the Debate Over a Bill of Rights
Successive Australian Labor governments have tried to nationalize standards for the protection of rights either by means of a statutory bill binding on the states under the Commonwealth's much expanded external affairs power, or by further entrenching specific rights in the Constitution. All these attempts have failed for a variety of political and constitutional reasons including, importantly, the strength of Australia's established system of fe…
Budget talk: Rhetorical constraints and contests
This article examines the budget surplus debate that occurred during the Gillard minority government (2010-13) to broaden the range of linguistic phenomena that are typically scrutinised in relation to Australian political rhetoric. The budget debate reve
How Do We Know if it's Working
This article introduces the first of the three cross-cutting themes used to assess Australian integrity systems: evaluation of their consequences. It argues that an evidence-based approach to assessing the overall impact of integrity and corruption prevention measures is possible, based on experience in Australia, drawing on measures including the evolving State of the Service surveys of the Australian Public Service Commission. However, differen…
Institutions in context: Reconstructing Aristotle's defence of cultural studies
Within political science, there are two alternative approaches to understanding political institutions: traditional ‘institutional studies’ and the newer ‘cultural studies’. Each approach tends to go its own way, with little debate between the two. The former explains institutions by reference to their independent behaviour which has a formative influence on political culture. The latter explains institutions by reference to their dependent behav…
Rethinking the Senior Executive Service: Executive Development as Political Education
Investigating Public Integrity inMacbeth
Managing investigations of official misconduct committed by one’s superiors is a particularly fundamental problem of administrative ethics. Frequently, such investigations include testing the integrity of the leader’s senior followers, including one’s closest colleagues. Shakespeare’s Macbeth dramatizes the situation confronting senior executives who are convinced that their leader is corruptly abusing power but are uncertain how far this corrupt…
The Australian and New Zealand parliaments: Context, response and capacity
We compare Australian and New Zealand parliamentary demands on executive governments to 'do something' about globalisation, noting that parliaments are distinctive institutionally - functioning as umbrellas protecting arenas of adversarial competitiveness, with little scope for cohesive institutional capacity. We define 'globalisation' as it is defined by the parliamentary actors themselves: that is, quite broadly with different actors taking dif…
Explicating the Australian Senate
This article is a revised version of a paper outlining the role and performance of the Australian Senate originally prepared for the seminar in March 2002 on House of Lords Reform organised by the Constitution Unit, University College London and the Centre for Legislative Studies, University of Hull. For the most part, the article follows the original conference form of brief answers to questions identified by the conference organisers. The artic…
The Ethics Debate: Five Framework Propositions
Deliberating About Democracy: Five Perspectives
John Dryzek, Deliberative Global Politics (Oxford: Polity Press, 2006), xii + 191 pp., £14.99, ISBN 0745634133 Ian O'Flynn, Deliberative Democracy and Divided Societies (Edinburgh: Edinburgh Univer
Australian liberalism and corporatism
George Brandis, Tom Harley and Don Markwell (eds), Liberals face the Future: Essays on Australian Liberalism, Melbourne, Oxford University Press, 1984, pp. 386, $14.99 (paper) and Katharine West, The Revolution in Australian Politics, Melbourne, Penguin Books, 1984, pp. 116, $4.95 (paper). John Rickard, H.B. Higgins: the rebel as judge. Sydney, Allen & Unwin, 1984, pp.350. $29.95 (cloth). Stuart Macintyre, Militant: the life and times of Paddy Tr…
Parliament and Public Administration
Democratic theory and consensus: Roots of the civic culture
Political sociology and political reality: The concept of democratic consensus
The investigation of consensus was a leading theme in the political sociology of democracy from the early 1950s until the late 1960s. Consensus has since become something of a suspect category of social inquiry. The consensus literature (V. O. Key, R. Dahl, H. Eckstein, S. M. Upset, G. A. Almond) has been charged by the ‘post‐behaviouralists’ as conservative politics disguised as impartial social science. This paper investigates the possibility o…
Australian liberalism and corporatism
George Brandis, Tom Harley and Don Markwell (eds), Liberals face the Future: Essays on Australian Liberalism, Melbourne, Oxford University Press, 1984, pp. 386, $14.99 (paper) and Katharine West, The Revolution in Australian Politics, Melbourne, Penguin Books, 1984, pp. 116, $4.95 (paper). John Rickard, H.B. Higgins: the rebel as judge. Sydney, Allen & Unwin, 1984, pp.350. $29.95 (cloth). Stuart Macintyre, Militant: the life and times of Paddy Tr…
Rethinking the Senior Executive Service: Executive Development as Political Education
Towards Resourceful Public Administration: A Management Polemic
Doctrines of public administration are in ferment. Proponents of the newer public management challenge defenders of the traditional public service. Academic commentators frequently oppose both the newer managerialism and the traditional apolitical professionalism. The net effect is to distort the call for better public management. One useful step out of the mess is backwards—toward a recovery of the fundamentals of democratic political theory, of…
Ethics and Public Service
Australian Federalism and the Debate Over a Bill of Rights
Successive Australian Labor governments have tried to nationalize standards for the protection of rights either by means of a statutory bill binding on the states under the Commonwealth's much expanded external affairs power, or by further entrenching specific rights in the Constitution. All these attempts have failed for a variety of political and constitutional reasons including, importantly, the strength of Australia's established system of fe…
The Ethics Debate: Five Framework Propositions
Focus on Senior Executive Services: Guest Editor's Introduction
Australian politics
David Black (ed.), The House on the Hill: A History of the Parliament of Western Australia 1832–1990 (Perth: Parliament of Western Australia, 1991) pp.558. $n.p. ISBN 0 7309 3983 9. D.H. Borchardt, Commissions of Inquiry in Australia: A Brief Surrey (Melbourne: La Trobe University Press, 1991) pp.107. $24.95 ISBN 1 86324 011X. John Connell and Richard Howitt (eds), Mining and Indigenous Peoples in Australasia (Sydney: Sydney University Press in a…
The Report of the Australian Commonwealth Task Force on Management Improvement: Two Perspectives
Instituting republicanism: Parliamentary vices, republican virtues
According to some amongst us, a republic does not mean the reign of the majority, as hitherto conceived, but the rule of its strenuous partisans. In governments of this type, it is not the people who control affairs, but those who know what is best for the people: a happy distinction which allows rulers to act in the nation's name without consulting it and to claim its gratitude while trampling it under foot (Tocqueville, Democracy in America, I,…
Institutions in context: Reconstructing Aristotle's defence of cultural studies
Within political science, there are two alternative approaches to understanding political institutions: traditional ‘institutional studies’ and the newer ‘cultural studies’. Each approach tends to go its own way, with little debate between the two. The former explains institutions by reference to their independent behaviour which has a formative influence on political culture. The latter explains institutions by reference to their dependent behav…
Testing the Policy Capacities of Budgetary Agencies: Lessons from Finance
The Commonwealth Department of Finance, together with the Treasury from which it was hived off in 1976, constitutes the central budgetary agency at the Australian federal level. For the purposes of this article, I identify Finance as a convenient working model of central budgetary agencies, at least in their traditional Australian incarnation. I accept that Finance is unlikely to be fully representative of all such Australian agencies, and I ackn…
Public Service Renewal: Clues from the Commonwealth
Towards a Best Practice Australian Public Service. Discussion Paper issued by Minister for Industrial Relations and Minister Assisting the Prime Minister for the Public Service, Hon Peter Reith. Canberra: AGPS, November 1996
Three Accountability Anxieties: A Conclusion to the Symposium
The Australian senate in its second century
Testing Deliberative Democracy: The 1999 Australian Republic Referendum
THIS ARTICLE EXAMINES AUSTRALIAN REFERENDUM PRACTICE WITH the aim of contributing to the growing international debate over concepts of deliberative democracy, defined in terms of democratic regimes structured to maximize community deliberation in public decision-making. Theories of deliberative democracy go beyond earlier approaches to participatory democracy by specifying in greater detail the nature of the deliberative process in which citizens…
Deliberative Democracy in Australia; The Changing Place of Parliament
Collaborative Federalism: Economic Reforms in Australia in the 1990s
Explicating the Australian Senate
This article is a revised version of a paper outlining the role and performance of the Australian Senate originally prepared for the seminar in March 2002 on House of Lords Reform organised by the Constitution Unit, University College London and the Centre for Legislative Studies, University of Hull. For the most part, the article follows the original conference form of brief answers to questions identified by the conference organisers. The artic…
How Do We Know if it's Working
This article introduces the first of the three cross-cutting themes used to assess Australian integrity systems: evaluation of their consequences. It argues that an evidence-based approach to assessing the overall impact of integrity and corruption prevention measures is possible, based on experience in Australia, drawing on measures including the evolving State of the Service surveys of the Australian Public Service Commission. However, differen…
The Australian and New Zealand parliaments: Context, response and capacity
We compare Australian and New Zealand parliamentary demands on executive governments to 'do something' about globalisation, noting that parliaments are distinctive institutionally - functioning as umbrellas protecting arenas of adversarial competitiveness, with little scope for cohesive institutional capacity. We define 'globalisation' as it is defined by the parliamentary actors themselves: that is, quite broadly with different actors taking dif…
The Australian Welfare State: Has Federalism Made a Difference
This paper examines the historical development of the Australian welfare state with a view to identifying the role that Australia's federal constitutional arrangements have played in shaping that development. Theoretical paradigms have been unanimous in their prognoses: that federal states are likely to be slow in developing welfare state programmes and typically spend less on them than unitary states. But recently it has been argued that federal…
Political science (35 works) · Law (31 works) · Sociology (28 works) · Politics (26 works) · Law (24 works) · Commonwealth, Australian Politics and Federalism (16 works) · Public Administration (16 works) · Public Administration (14 works) · Philosophy (12 works) · Public Policy and Administration Research (10 works)