by Peter John Chen
Chen, P, 2001, Australia's online censorship regime: the Advocacy Coalition Framework and governance compared - Australian National University
This study assesses the value of two analytical models explaining particular
contemporary political events. This... more
This study assesses the value of two analytical models explaining particular
contemporary political events. This is undertaken through the comparative evaluation of
two international models: the Advocacy Coalition Framework and Rhodes's model of
Governance. These approaches are evaluated against an single case study: the
censorship of computer network ("online") content in Australia. Through comparison
evaluation, criticism, and reformulation, these approaches are presented as useful tools
of policy analysis in Australia.
The first part of the thesis presents the theoretical basis of the research and the
methodologies employed to apply them. It begins by examining how the disciplines of
political science and public policy have focused on the role of politically-active "interest"
groups in the process of policy development and implementation. This focus has lead to
ideas about the role of the state actors in policy making, and attempts to describe and
explain the interface between public and private groups in developing and implementing
public policies. These, largely British and American, theories have impacted upon
Australian researchers who have applied these ideas to local conditions. The majority of
this part, however, is spent introducing the two research approaches: Paul Sabatier's
Advocacy Coalitions Framework and Rod Rhodes's theory of Governance. Stemming
from dissatisfaction with research into implementation, Sabatier's framework attempts to
show how competing clusters of groups and individuals compete for policy "wins" in a
discrete subsystem by using political strategies to effect favourable decisions and
information to change the views of other groups. Governance, on the other hand,
attempts to apply Rhodes's observations to the changing nature of the British state (and
by implication other liberal democracies) to show the importance of self-organising
networks of organisations who monopolise power and insulate the processes of decision
making and implementation from the wider community and state organs. Finally, the
methodologies of the thesis are presented, based on the preferred research methods of
the two authors.
The second part introduces the case serving as the basis for evaluating the models,
namely, censorship of the content of computer networks in Australia between 1987 and
2000. This case arises in the late 1980s with the computerisation of society and
technological developments leading to the introduction of, first publicly-accessible
computer bulletin boards, and then the technology of the Internet. From a small
hobbyists' concern, the uptake of this technology combined with wider censorship issues
leads to the consideration of online content by Australian Governments, seeking a
system of regulation to apply to this technology. As the emerging Internet becomes
popularised, and in the face of adverse media attention on, especially pornographic,
online content, during the mid to late 1990s two Federal governments establish a series
of policy processes that eventually lead to the introduction of the Broadcasting Services
Amendment (Online Services) Act 1999, a policy decision bringing online content into
Australia's intergovernmental censorship system.
The final part analyses the case study using the two theoretical approaches. What this
shows is that, from the perspective of the Advocacy Coalition Framework, debate over
online content does not form a substantive policy subsystem until 1995, and within this
three, relatively stable, competing coalitions emerge, each pressuring for different levels
of action and intervention (from no regulation, to a strong regulatory model). While
conflict within the subsystem varied, overall the framework's analysis shows the
dominance of a coalition consisting largely of professional and business interests
favouring a light, co-regulatory approach to online content. From the perspective of
Governance, the issue of online content is subject to a range of intra- and inter-
governmental conflict in the period 1995–7, finally settling into a negotiated position
where a complex policy community emerges based largely on structurally-determined
resource dependencies. What this means is that policy making in the case was not
autonomous of state institutions, but highly dependent on institutional power relations.
Overall, in comparing the findings it becomes apparent that the approaches lack the
capacity to fully explain the role of key sovereigns, defined here as those individuals with
legal authority over decision making in the policy process, because of their
methodological and normative assumptions about the policy process. By showing these
individuals as part of wider networks of power-dependencies, and exploring the complex
bundle of real, pseudo, symbolic, and nonsense elements that make up a policy, the role
of Ministers as "semi-sovereign sovereigns" can be accommodated in the two
approaches.
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