Tony Blair and John Howard: comparative predominance and 'Institution Stretch' in the UK and Australia

It has recently been argued that the UK premier enjoys a level of executive power unavailable to US presidents, but how does he or she compare to another prime minister operating within a broadly similar system? Commonalities of intra-executive influence and capacity exist under the premierships in the UK and Australia. Discrete institutional constraints and deviations are evident, but trends and similarities in resource capacity can be clearly identified. These include: the growth of the leaders' office; broadening and centralising of policy advice and media operations; and strengthening of the role and function of ministerial advisers. I contend that this amounts to 'institution stretch', with new structures, processes and practices becoming embedded in the political system by the incumbents. © 2007 The Author. Journal compilation © 2007 Political Studies Association

The Europeanization of UK Government: From Quiet Revolution to Explicit Step-Change?

In this paper we review - from a UK perspective - how the UK government and its policy process have adapted to European integration. Has adaptation been a quiet revolution, a step-change, or both? In exploring this puzzle we draw upon the conceptual literature of Europeanisation. We employ it to shed light on the longer-term pattern of UK adaptation as well as to put into context the domestic changes currently under way. Although commentators frequently alight upon continued non-membership of the euro as an indicator of the UK's continued incomplete adaptation to integration, we argue that there is a step-change under way in the Europeanisation of UK EU policy making, though not necessarily in its outcomes

Do you see what I see? Exploring differing awareness of the same situation

Fundamental limits on the human ability to process all available information in real-world situations necessarily require that some information is filtered out by attentional processes, and so that information is not used to build ‘situation awareness’ (SA). The implication is that two (or more) people in the same situation may not perceive it in the same way, nor make the same decisions as to how to operate. Such differences in perception can become very important in safety critical situations such as the one that we report here—firefighter attendance at a road-traffic collision (RTC). Using a desktop virtual reality simulation of a RTC, we examined firefighters’ awareness of their situation (SA)—and also their understanding of what aspects of that situation are relevant to the successful completion of their task (situation understanding, SU). Our data, collected from 685 firefighters, suggest that the firefighters showed pronounced individual differences in the amount of information they accepted when building SA, but that they were almost universally predisposed to believe that information was relevant to their task (even though it may not have been). Non-firefighters, when compared with firefighters were generally more likely to accept a wider range of information spatially distributed across the RTC situation, but less likely to believe it to be relevant. The implication of our data is that individuals in the same situation may perceive that situation in different ways due to the way they handle the available information—and that training and experience affect that perception