How do democratic institutions function in authoritarian states? This study answers this question by examining the political institutions in rural China ¨C democratic elections of villagers committees and village oversight agencies. Using a nationwide survey on China¡¯s villager self-governance conducted in 2005 and in-depth case data collected in 2007 and 2008, this study finds that rural political institutions have significantly changed the political processes in China¡¯s countryside. The quality of village elections and the functioning of oversight agencies such as villager representative assemblies and financial supervision teams all have been crucial to affect the level of electoral participation and the quality of rural governance. The study shows that Chinese peasants are more active to vote as the village election methods feature more competitiveness and transparency. Moreover, higher quality of village elections and well-maintained village oversight structures have improved the quality of rural governance by holding village cadres more accountable to peasants¡¯ demands, as demonstrated in the higher level of peasant satisfaction with the performance of villagers committees in public services provision. The study also reveals that the effect of rural political institutions is a function of village economic conditions. The effect of village elections and oversight agencies in holding cadres accountable is significantly higher in villages that own substantial collective resources than in the ones that do not. This study challenges the traditional view in comparative politics that democratic institutions are established in authoritarian states for cosmetic purposes. It shows that, under economic pressure, political institutions matter in making democracy work in authoritarian regimes by encouraging political participation and generating better governance. It also suggests the necessity for the Chinese government to reinforce its efforts of standardizing village election rules and regulations and enforcing the establishment and maintenance of village oversight institutions.

Through the lenses of Social Identity Theory, this thesis endeavours to understand how perceptions of intergroup relations and in-group identifications affect the choice for different mobility strategies and forms of political participation among the second-generation Turkish migrants in the Netherlands. To this end, two political participation paths are specified: ethnic and mainstream. The former is defined as promoting ethnic group interests in the political arena while the latter is defined as participation in national Dutch politics. Perceptions of illegitimate and unstable status differences, of impermeable group boundaries, and of discriminatory intergroup relations are expected to contribute to the choice for collective mobility strategy and ethnic political participation mediated by Turkish identification. Conversely, legitimate, stable and permeable intergroup conditions are hypothesized to lead to the choice for individual mobility strategy and mainstream political participation through affecting Dutch identification. Three path models including perceptions of legitimacy, stability, permeability and discrimination as predictors, Dutch and Turkish identification as mediators, mobility strategies as both outcomes and mediators, and ethnic and mainstream political participation as outcomes were tested in a sample of 161 participants. Results generally confirmed the expectations except for the stability hypothesis. The theoretical implications of the findings are discussed.

This study aims to find out the patterns of economic, social and political participation of the youth in urban South-eastern Anatolia Region of Turkey. Analyses of the data reveal that youth in the South Eastern Anatolia Region does not and cannot participate in various dimensions of the society. Youth in South-eastern Anatolia cannot participate into the labour market. There are too limited job opportunities in the region. On the other hand, working young people are prone to low quality working conditions. Young people also cannot participate into the social life in the public sphere. Social and economic pressures and lack of opportunities are limiting young people in a social life mainly in the private sphere within a closed community. Finally, youth in South-eastern Anatolia Region are keeping themselves away from political mechanisms. Political structure is not attracting young people because of the negative experiences that the people participated in politics having for years. One of the most important findings of the study is that different dimensions of participation namely participation in the labour market, participation in social life and political participation are dependent on each other. Another result is that both the level and experiences of youth participation are highly determined by the social characteristics such as gender, family background, education level and age.

More and more foreign spouses have been immigrating to Taiwan. The ¡§New Taiwan Children¡¨ are consequently expected to become the elites of Taiwan¡¦s next generation. The political education and learning in families, as well as the political attitude of the husband¡¦s family, will all influence the political attitude and national identity of foreign spouses and their children. Most of the dissertations regarding foreign spouses now, however, are focused on the life adaption and Chinese character recognition services for foreign spouses. Little effort has been made to explore their political attitudes. In this research, therefore, we focus our research on the participants of the Chinese-character Recognition Classes in 24 elementary and junior high schools in Kaohsiung City and probe their political attitude after attending the courses. In this paper, we will discuss the factors influencing the political attitudes of foreign spouses, particularly, their personal backgrounds (including nationality, language and education), family backgrounds of their husbands (e.g., the political party supported by their spouse and their perspectives on unification or independence), and social inclusion factors (for example, political-related discussions with neighbors and friends, community activities, participation in Chinese-character recognition classes or life adaptation-courses organized by the government, etc.) The ultimate purpose of the study is to determine whether innate factors (i.e., personal backgrounds) or environmental factors (i.e., the social factors) are more influential on their political attitudes. If environmental factors turn out to be more influential, we may expedite the social inclusion process through collaborative efforts between the government and private agencies. We will also incorporate in the ¡§conclusion¡¨ our recommendations for further facilitating social inclusion. It was found in the research process that, in terms of political inclusion, a significant level (P<.001) has been reached in four aspects including ¡§Evaluation of Government Performance¡¨, ¡§National Identity¡¨, ¡§Political Participation¡¨ and ¡§Political Efficacy¡¨. The correlation coefficients between social inclusion and political inclusion are, respectively, .370, .362, .187 and .270. It is therefore recommended that increasing the political participation of foreign spouses may be achieved by encouraging their social inclusion. The research results also show that, for foreign spouses with different language proficiency, there is a significant variance in the extent of social inclusion. On the average, more foreign spouses communicate with the families of their husbands in English, Mandarin or Fukienese, as compared with those communicating in the language of Thailand, Philippines or Indonesia. We suggest that the authorities should provide more subsidies/incentives to encourage foreign spouses to participate in language-training courses. The survey also shows that foreign spouses rarely attend the community activities or discuss with their friends, mainly because of language barriers. Improvement of language ability will be a motivating factor for their social inclusion. Foreign spouses seldom participate in community activities or in political discussions. The main reasons for this include busy with childcare or household chores, language problems or inadequate Chinese proficiency, which causes insufficient social inclusion. It is recommended that the government should provide subsidies/incentives to encourage their participation in community activities, including attending the life coach classes and Chinese-character Recognition Classes, etc. The research shows that foreign spouses with better Chinese proficiency are better prepared to participate in political activities. For example, they will find it easier to read election-related information. Among the foreign spouses surveyed this time, few have the habit of reading political commentary in newspapers or TV programs; this is due to their incompetency in Chinese language. One of the ways to improve their abilities in political participation, therefore, is to encourage them to participate in the Chinese-character Recognition Classes. In our visit to the Immigrant Center of Learning in the city, we learned from an instructor at the YMCA that free Chinese courses are now offered by the YMCA to the foreign spouses. It is our hope that through close cooperation between the government and the private institutions we can expedite the social and political inclusion of foreign spouses, enabling them to enjoy a happy life in Taiwan with all of us.

Deliberative democracy has been promoted as a way improving legitimacy and political equality in policy debates. This dissertation seeks to understand how deliberation takes place within the intersection of two unique spaces: dialogue among members of regional civil society groups and communication in online fora. The motivation for this research is based on the notion that existing forms of decision-making have contributed to political inequality, a major issue in areas such as the Caribbean. Accordingly I examine the online discussions of three different civil society groups in the Caribbean. I looked at how certain variables in these fora were related to three of the main dimensions of deliberation, the use of reasoned arguments, reciprocity and reflection. With regard to reasoned arguments I examined how diversity among members, the participation of the moderator and the topic and scope of the conversation were pertinent to a discussion in a regional and multi-national setting. For reciprocity I looked at how variables related to time and the posting structure of a conversation were relevant in an online forum. Finally I looked at the strategies that were employed by participants as part of the communication process in an online forum and how these were related to processes of reflection. To address these questions I used a combination of content analysis and conversation analysis of email conversations and interviews with participants. One set of contributions from this dissertation is methodological through the development of a codebook and the novel application of conversation analysis to online deliberation. Also, the results are significant and can contribute to our understanding of deliberation in a context for which there has been little previous research. For example, I showed that national and occupational diversity can contribute to an increase in the proportion of reasoned arguments used in a conversation as does the presence of the moderator. However, these factors along with the scope and topic of a thread vary in their degree of influence on the use of reasoned arguments by the civil society group in question. I also showed that there are specific communication strategies that participants employ such as preference organization or speaker selection that are related to different forms of reflection evident in a conversation. Finally I observed that the posting structure of a conversation specifically the distribution of emails that participants send becomes less equal as reciprocity increases. This does not augur well for a deliberative ideal that envisions both reciprocity and equal participation. Furthermore, when considering deliberation as a whole, the results indicate that its different parts are not always correlated with each other. None of the lists has more than one significant correlation between the three dimensions of deliberation. In fact, reciprocity and the use of reasoned arguments were never significantly correlated in any of the lists. Together these results point to another main finding of this dissertation which is deliberation as a whole is difficult to observe in practice. Nevertheless I suggest that separately the results for each dimension can be useful from both a design perspective and for policy-makers in general. For example, encouraging the sharing of information and a more active moderator, having the opportunity to discuss regional issues could all help to promote a greater use of reasoned arguments overall. Experimenting with different ways in which group members can get to know each other might help to reduce the disparity between participation and reciprocity. Also encouraging participants to reply inline where possible, creating easier access to the message archives and having a system for collating threads and discussions online could all promote better reflection in the lists. Finally the list might benefit from having members go through an exercise of determining whether or not and in what way decision-making should be part of their discussions. With regard to policy-makers I note that several members reported benefits for policy-makers who themselves were members of the lists. This could stem from listening and learning from the discussions of other members or actually contributing to discussions. The groups also showed the potential to collate many different policy positions around a specific problem, thus assisting policy makers in understanding issues at a regional level.

This dissertation seeks to understand how issue publics contribute to citizen competence and the functioning of democracy. In the first part of the dissertation, a new measurement was constructed by theoretically and empirically analyzing the attributes of issue public members. Through the hypotheses testing, the new measure was more reliable in identifying issue public members compared to previous measurement strategies. Employing the new measure, results show that issue public members with concern about a specific issue, exercised their issue-specificity in seeking information (i.e., issue-based selectivity) with exposure to both attitude-consistent and counter-attitudinal perspectives. Issue public membership also had significant effects on issue-specific knowledge, and generating rationales for their own and other's oppositional viewpoints. These direct effects were mediated by issue-based selectivity. The relationships highlight the importance of issue publics in contributing to the deliberative democracy. In addition, issue publics play a significant role in contributing to the participatory democracy in that issue public members have greater intentions to participate in issue-related activities than nonmembers. However, while issue publics come close to solve the deliberative-participatory paradox, it was found that their information selectivity and argument generation were unbalanced in a way of favoring pro-attitudinal perspectives over counter-attitudinal perspectives. The second part of the dissertation examined conditional factors--accuracy and directional goals in affecting information selectivity and processing. The findings show that directional goals influenced participants to apply either the strategies of selective approach or selective avoidance to seek information depending on the issue. Accuracy goals exerted a main effect on the issue that is relatively less controversial and less obtrusive. They also interacted with issue public membership in influencing the less controversial and less obtrusive issue. Argument generation was not affected by accuracy or directional goals. Overall, through conceptualizing citizens as members of different issue publics, individuals are more competent then we thought. Their intrinsic interest in an issue serves as a strong factor affecting their information selectivity, information processing, and political actions. Despite finding an optimistic role for issue publics in the democratic process, their limitations also should be recognized. The implications for the deliberative and participatory democracy are discussed.

This dissertation seeks to improve our understanding of the process by which emotions enable citizens to learn about public affairs and engage in political activities during electoral campaigns. It advances a theoretical model that incorporates the dynamics of emotions, various forms of media use, interpersonal communication and political involvement. This affective citizen communication model integrates into a single framework the insights of affective intelligence theory (Marcus, Neuman, & MacKuen, 2000) and the work on communication mediation (McLeod et al., 1999, 2001) and its two iterations, cognitive mediation (Eveland, 2001) and citizen communication mediation (Cho et al., 2009; Shah et al., 2005, 2007). More specifically, it suggests that the effects of emotions triggered by political candidates (e.g., enthusiasm, anxiety, anger) on knowledge of the candidates’ stands on issues and on political participation are largely mediated by communication variables, including news media use, political discussion and debate viewing. By positing emotions as an antecedent of both mediated and interpersonal communication, the study extends current research based on affective intelligence theory. At the same time, the study adds emotions to communication mediation processes, which to date have been studied from a mostly cognitive perspective. To test the relationships between the variables identified in the affective citizen communication model, I rely on panel survey data collected for the 2008 and 2004 U.S. presidential elections by the American National Election Studies (ANES) and the National Annenberg Election Surveys (NAES), respectively. Two types of structural equation models are tested, cross sectional (to relate individual differences) and auto-regressive (to relate aggregate change across waves). Results suggest that positive emotions spark media use, whereas negative emotions spark political discussions, and both types of communication behavior influence issue knowledge and participation in campaign activities. Furthermore, the theorized structure is found to perform better than an alternative structure where communication variables cause positive and negative emotions. Thus, results provide strong support for the proposed affective citizen communication model. Refinements to the proposed model, connections with existing theories of political communication, such as agenda setting and partisan selective exposure, and directions for future research are also discussed. / text

published_or_final_version / Social Work / Master / Master of Social Sciences

Magistro baigiamajame darbe atskleidžiama dalyvaujamojo biudžeto samprata ir vystymosi eiga, finansiniu aspektu išanalizuoti dalyvaujamojo biudžeto ypatumai. Įvertinta piliečių įtraukimo į biudžeto procesą ir dalyvaujamojo biudžeto esama situacija ir jos tobulinimo galimybes Lietuvos savivaldybėse. Pirmame skyriuje analizuojama demokratijos bei politinio dalyvavimo teorija. Atskleidžiama dalyvaujamojo biudžeto samprata, privalumai, trūkumai. Nagrinėjamas dalyvaujamojo biudžeto metodo susikūrimas ir vystymasis. Antrame skyriuje analizuojamos su dalyvaujamojo biudžeto procesu susiję kaštai, biudžeto pajamos ir išlaidos, pateikiama metodo ekonominė nauda. Trečiame skyriuje pateikiamos tyrimo prielaidos ir ekspertinės apklausos duomenų analizė. / Master's thesis reveals the participatory budget concept and development stages, analyze the financial aspect of the participatory budget features. Estimated situation of Citizen participation in the budget process, participatory budget and development opportunities for Lithuanian municipalities. The first section examines democracy and political participation theory. Analyze the participatory budget concept, advantages and disadvantages. Study the method of participatory budget, how has it emerged and its development. The second chapter analyzes the participatory budget process related costs, revenues and expenses, the economic benefits of the method. The third section presents the research assumptions and expert survey data analysis.

Since its democratic dispensation, South Africa has been striving to find the right economic tool to confront the challenges of poverty, joblessness, widening income gap and lack of job related skills. Numerous methods have been put to trial in an attempt to rescue the rural masses from the scourge of poverty, joblessness and social degradation, but with limited impact. Literature surveys in this regard attest to social intervention programmes failing, due to the absence or little involvement of beneficiary rural communities in the programme establishment. Renewed rural development initiative at Mhlontlo Municipality occurs within this context. The study was then undertaken to evaluate stakeholder participation in the planning, the implementation and the monitoring and evaluation of the pilot programme. This is a study of the rural development pilot programme at Mhlontlo Local Municipality in the Eastern Cape. The statistical population for the study included all institutionalised stakeholder’s organizations, as critical components of engagement to realise the programme setting. The study target participants were 90 adult individuals involve in local stakeholder’s public participation institutions. A self-completed questionnaire was administered to the 90 target participants with 64 returned completely filled. The results were analysed using statistical mean, standard deviation and coefficient of variance and presented as tables and graphs. Findings were that there was more participation in the programme implementation phase, than in the programme planning and monitoring phase. Assessment of programme outputs by respondents was diverse and inconclusive. This was attributed to poor participation by programme stakeholders in programme’s planning. / Thesis (MBA)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, 2012.