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Although membership is declining, parties continue to perform roles central to democratic governance in modern societies. Given this seeming paradox, we suggest that partisan identification, in complementing studies of formal membership, is a promising way of assessing the strength of parties' democratic linkage. Using data from an original survey of voters in Australia and the United Kingdom, we analyse the participatory and demographic profiles of party supporters. We show that there are significant differences between supporters and those not committed to any party, as well as between supporters based on the strength of their party identification, substantiating the idea that parties can be conceptualized as a series of concentric circles of increasing engagement but declining representativeness. Stronger supporters are more likely to engage with parties online, volunteer and donate, but are older, more likely to be male and less likely to be foreign-born. Our findings have important implications for democratic practice as parties seek to expand and rejuvenate their networks of affiliates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cultural efforts to mobilise populations behind the war in Britain and its Dominions, Canada and Australia – especially through the exhibition of war trophies – solidified after the Armistice into state-supported institutions creating and promoting a culture of victory. This culture was most pronounced, and most centralised, in Australia. Wartime propaganda institutions grew into national war museums which effectively froze the victorious national war effort, and the moment of triumph, in three-dimensional form. The institutions, and the people who ran them, did not demobilise with the peace. These museums used substantially the same objects and techniques they had used in wartime to support the war effort to create a postwar narrative in which victory established a clear (and martial) national identity, and also justified the war itself. At the same time, the narrative of a British imperial victory was used to create claims of unity which denied the reality of divisions in society. Trophies wrested from wartime enemies were used as pride-inducing objects to fundraise for peace, and fashioned into war memorials that were at once sites of mourning and monuments celebrating military dominance. Visions of postwar peace and progress could not be disentangled from victory and the violence that enabled it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article compares the rise of anti-Muslim racism in Britain and Australia, from 1989 to 2001, as a foundation for assessing the extent to which the upsurge of Islamophobia after 11 September was a development of existing patterns of racism in these two countries. The respective histories of immigration and settlement by Muslim populations are outlined, along with the relevant immigration and 'ethnic affairs' policies and the resulting demographics. The article traces the ideologies of xenophobia that developed in Britain and Australia over this period, It records a transition from anti-Asian and anti-Arab racism to anti-Muslim racism, reflected in and responding to changes in the identities and cultural politics of the minority communities. It outlines instances of the racial and ethnic targeting by the state of the ethnic and religious minorities concerned, and postulates a causal relationship between this and the shifting patterns of acts of racial hatred, vilification and discrimination. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]