A Presentation By Dr John Hart, School of History, ANU

Hosted by the AIIA ACT Branch

—

This presentation attempts to explain the outcome of the US mid-term congressional elections and identify some of the major consequences of the new Republican majority in the Senate and the enlarged Republican majority in the House.

This covers the principal changes that are likely to occur in the behaviour of Congress including budgetary and foreign policy, the impact on President Obama, and the effect on the 2016 presidential election.

—

John Hart was born in London in 1946 and lived in Britain until emigrating to Australia in 1978.

He gained a BA and a Ph.D degree in Political Science from the University of Kent and then taught at the Universities of Keele and Swansea until appointed to a lectureship in American politics at the Australian National University in 1978.

He taught at ANU for 35 years until retiring as Reader in Political Science in January of last year. During that time he twice served as Head of the Department of Political Science. He has since been appointed a Visiting Fellow in The School of History where he continues his research on various aspects of American politics.

Dr. Hart has also taught at Georgetown University in Washington D.C. as a Visiting Professor in 1984 and 1986, a Visiting Professor at the American University in Washington in 1993, spent six months as a Visiting Fellow at the Roosevelt Center for American Policy Studies in 1982, was an American Council of Learned Societies Visiting Research Scholar in 1972. He was also a member of the Canadian Government’s International Governance Network in 1995 and 1996.

He is a specialist on the American presidency and is best known for his work on the operation of the presidential staff system. He is the author of The Presidential Branch: From Washington to Clinton (published in 1995), a contributor to the four-volume Encyclopedia of the American Presidency (published in 1994) and the International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioural Sciences in 2001. He has also authored numerous articles in books, academic journals and newspapers on various aspects of American politics.

Dr. Hart has been a frequent commentator on American politics for the ABC, SBS, Channel Nine and Sky News.