John Howard, constitutive politics and overlapping consensus

All political leaders in liberal democracies engage in “constitutive politics”. However there is a qualitative difference between a constitutive politics centered on liberal values and one centered on conservative or populist commitments. This paper seeks to explore John Howard’s political identity during his period as Australian Prime Minister by examining the extent to which his constitutive politics took on liberal, conservative or populist dimensions. The paper will show that although Howard embraced, at various times, all three ideologies, with all of the tensions and conflicts involved, his political identity cannot be reduced to any one of them, nor to an underlying electoral pragmatism. In this respect, John Howard’s political identity is far more complex than has ordinarily been assumed.