This thesis questions whether an adequate understanding of "campaign success" exists in transnational advocacy network (TAN) scholarship. I argue that success has been understood as "influence on state behaviour", but that alternative understandings are possible. These alternatives can be uncovered by bringing in the understandings of activists themselves and considering success through the lens of real experience. I study a well-known global campaign, 16 Days of Activism Against Gender-Based Violence, run by a TAN organised around the issue of violence against women. I use Constructivist Grounded Theory as developed by Kathy Charmaz (2006) to make sense of semi-structured qualitative interviews with activists, and campaign documents. I argue that success in this case means "sustaining an effective and inclusive challenge", and I demonstrate this by bringing together three distinct success stories which activists told about their work: (1) success as changing the discourse and behaviour of power-holders, (2) success as empowering women, and (3) success as building a network. From my empirical argument I then develop three theoretical proposals to move TAN theory towards a fuller, more nuanced account of campaign success. I suggest that scholars should: (1) recognise both public and private spaces as sites of campaign success; (2) treat TANs as constructed, heterogeneous actors within which there are internal power hierarchies and consequent contestations over the meaning of success; and (3) view success as distinct from the achievement of the campaign's overall goal, and tied instead to incremental gains occurring throughout the process of a campaign.

Recent contributions to the study of autonomist parties have examined their development in the context of sub-state governing structures such as devolution in Wales and Scotland. Using this, and other relevant literature, this thesis examines the recent organisational development and governmental experience of Plaid Cymru and the Scottish National Party (SNP), and explores how they have adapted to the opportunity structure that is devolution. The thesis takes a comparative case study approach and deploys mixed methods, using interview, documentary and survey data in the empirical analysis. The thesis finds that whilst the SNP were able to achieve unprecedented electoral success in the 2011 Scottish elections from the position of incumbency, Plaid Cymru suffered electorally due to, in part, organisational vulnerabilities. This led to an internal review of the party's structures and subsequent reforms which mirror, fairly closely, reforms undertaken by the SNP in 2003-2004. Despite the different experiences of government and varying triggers for organisational reform, both parties have adapted to devolution by, essentially, becoming more office-seeking organisations and placing greater emphasis on electoral success as a strategic imperative for the achievement of their primary goals.

This thesis addresses three interrelated problems raised by charity law. The first concerns the conceptual understanding of the practices of charities. Charitable organisations must pursue one or more of a set of designated purposes; and in pursuing those purposes they must provide public benefit. Although these terms may seem clear, their meaning and implications are contested, and there are some authors who even deny that there are two separate tests. The second problem addressed by this thesis concerns the normative principles that might account for the practices of charities. This problem is prompted by the fact that in granting charitable status the state makes a value judgement about certain goods; it tells us that a given set of conceptions are worthy of special provisions, such as tax exemptions, that are not available to the pursuit of other conceptions. In short, there appears to be prima facie conflict between charity law and liberal neutrality. This gives rise to the third problem of what, methodologically, we are to do when considered judgements and theoretical convictions pull in different directions but both with good reason. In seeking to reconcile the practice of charity and liberal neutrality, this thesis takes a reflective equilibrium approach. Having dismissed several accounts of neutrality as either incapable of accounting for the conflict, or entailing unworkable strategies for the practice of charity, this thesis proposes a two-­‐stage argument. The first is a neutral justification for the promotion of altruism in general, and the second draws from neutrality of treatment to explain why all conceptions of the good should have the opportunity to obtain charitable status. This argument contains a proviso for associations to do so, which arises from the conceptual discussion of the two main principles of charity law.

Radical right parties are radical for their opposition to the principle of pluralism in liberal democratic regimes and right for their belief in the existence of natural inequalities among human beings. By employing the fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis research technique, this study analyses for the electoral success of such parties in national parliamentary elections held in seven Central and East European countries (CEECs) during the decade from 2000 to 2010. These countries include Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia. In total, the study examines twenty parliamentary elections. It seeks to understand whether the Europeanization process, defined as the European Union’s political and economic influence on individual countries, increased the electoral strength of the parties. Despite the paramount importance of the EU’s influence on CEECs, this question receives less attention in the literature than it deserves. In addition to three demand-side conditions already examined in the literature, this study seeks to learn whether right wing mainstream parties’ position within the socio-cultural dimension of party competition contributes to electoral success. This question has also not received sufficient attention in terms of CEECs. This study concludes that the presence of a Europhile right-wing mainstream party was a necessary condition for electoral success, though this condition was not omnipresent. The presence of a large ethnic minority population emerged as a context-setting condition. In countries without this condition (Poland and Slovenia), the combination of the presence of a Europhile right-wing mainstream party and the absence of a party following liberal socio-cultural policies appears to have been responsible for the electoral success of radical right parties. In countries with large ethnic minority populations (Bulgaria, Hungary, Romania, and Slovakia), the combination of the presence of a Europhile right wing mainstream party and the presence of a party following liberal socio-cultural policies only partly led to the electoral success of radical right parties. In such countries, a high level of unemployment was also a part of the configuration leading to the electoral success. They were the supply side-conditions that primarily determined electoral success in countries without a large ethnic minority population, whereas demand-side conditions proved as important as supply-side conditions in countries with a large ethnic minority population. Overall, the findings of this QCA not only confirms Mudde’s (2010) ‘pathological normalcy’ but also extend its scope by identifying a configuration leading to electoral success of radical right parties in countries without large ethnic minority groups.

This thesis examines the effects of negotiation context on the performance of member states in intergovernmental negotiations in the European Union. Drawing on the case of the Stability and Growth Pact, this thesis considers the distinction between negotiations that aim to establish original EU-level policy, versus those that aim to reform existing EU-level policy, and the impact this has on the outcome of negotiations vis-à-vis states’ positions. The original, policy-making negotiations are referred to as ‘uploading’ negotiations, and the reform negotiations are referred to as ‘reuploading’ negotiations. The main research question to be answered is: Do differences between ‘uploading’ and ‘reuploading’ negotiations affect member state negotiation performance in each? While the EU literature has tended to reveal a disproportionate level of influence by big member states, there is a lack of consideration given to the context in which negotiations take place, and how that impacts on the potential for states to influence negotiation outcomes, as well as to the specific mechanisms for influence. This project fills that gap, using an in-depth, qualitative study of the performance of Belgium, France, Germany and the Netherlands, in the ‘uploading’ and ‘reuploading’ negotiations over the SGP, in order to draw conclusions regarding the effects of specific bargaining resources on the potential for member states to influence negotiations, as well as the way in which negotiation context mediates the utility of those resources. In so doing, this thesis generates a host of interesting conclusions, and contributes to a wide range of literatures, from empirical, conceptual and theoretical standpoints, ultimately demonstrating that it is essential to consider both bargaining resources and negotiation context, in order to understand negotiation outcomes, and the influence of individual member states, in intergovernmental negotiations over EU policy.

This thesis investigates how the incentives stemming from the electoral arena influence the behaviour of legislators in Brazil. Or, to put it differently, resorting to the now classic expression first popularised by Mayhew, the purpose of this research is to tease out the effects of the electoral connection on Brazilian legislators’ behaviour. Legislative elections in Brazil are held under an open-list proportional representation system. Theoretically, such a set of rules leads to intraparty competition and therefore campaigns heavily centred on individual candidates. A strong electoral connection, then, would come as a consequence. How, though, this electoral connection affects the behaviour of legislators has seldom been tested. The general contention guiding this inquiry consists in considering that the Brazilian OLPR system allows for the creation of several different incentives that impact how legislators behave. Overall, three essential dimensions of the legislative behaviour are studied: the stance towards the executive, policy orientation and interlegislator cooperative relationship. The task of testing this hypothesis is carried out by looking at the Rio de Janeiro City Council (RJCC). The focus, then, is on the local, municipal level – a subject hitherto largely overlooked, in contrast with the Brazilian National Congress, which has been the topic of numerous works in the past two decades. The analysis, based on multiple regressions, covers the fourteen-year period between 1997 and 2010.

International human rights law (IHRL) has traditionally only imposed duties on states. But as multinational corporations (MNCs) and other business entities are perceived as increasingly powerful agents in the global economy, and capable of impacting on many of the interests protected by IHRL, scholars as well as practitioners argue that IHRL should be extended to apply to these entities. My argument in this thesis is twofold. Firstly, I make the normative case that calls for business accountability under IHRL misunderstand the particular role of IHRL, taking the point of IHRL as protecting important human interests against anyone who has the capacity to harm these interests. I argue that the role of IHRL is better understood as holding states accountable for the performance of their special institutional duties. If we were to extend international human rights duties to business entities, many of the core principles of IHRL would need to be changed which in turn would undermine the very identity of this body of law – it would no longer fulfil the distinct function of regulating political authority. I argue that it would impoverish our legal vocabulary if we were no longer able to express the distinction between state violations of human rights and harm done by private actors. And secondly, I argue that there are a number of practical challenges to extending IHRL to business entities, and that the implementation mechanisms of IHRL are currently not well-suited to address many of the concerns that give rise to calls for business-human rights-accountability in the first place. I conclude that an extension of IHRL may therefore not be the straightforward and effective solution that it tends to be made out in the current debate and that alternative approaches to business regulation may be preferable.

The power of finance vis-à-vis state actors is a central concern of this thesis: I ask how ideas lead to particular power relations between hedge fund managers and their British regulator, the Financial Services Authority (now Financial Conduct Authority). Combining constructivist scholarship in International Political Economy (IPE) and socio-legal studies of financial regulation, I argue that ideas give meaning to practices, which in turn instantiate power relations and social facts. I show that ideas turn actors’ possessions into power resources; and I apply insights from IPE to the field of national, everyday regulatory practices. Based on Grounded Theory Method, this thesis uses qualitative text analysis of semi-structured interviews, field observations, policy documents and specialised media articles. Three cases show that collectively produced ideas underlie the current regime and constitute the power relations structuring it: Regarding the institutional set-up, I find that the idea of markets detecting the ‘right’ price establishes the rationale for a technocratic regulator with limited ability to assess the social value of financial market activities. With regards to rule-making, the analysis confirms that regulators and industry members co-produce the threat of industry relocation, limiting the options for tightened regulation. For the aspect of supervision, I show that firms and the regulator share the idea that compliance and supervision fundamentally rely on industry expertise and regulatory judgement, increasing mutual dependence of these actors. Overall, the analyses confirm the importance of ideas for the regulatory regime in Britain: the everyday interactions between firms and the regulator, based on particular shared ideas, instantiate an expertise-based form of regulation that allows for extensive industry influence. It is argued that this leaves little room for engagement of other stakeholders to genuinely counter problems of cultural capture, when the industry gains a disproportionate influence in the process that forms the regulators’ opinion.

This thesis defends a political version of the normative motivational critique of cosmopolitanism (hereafter NMC). It is a shared view by both proponents and critics of cosmopolitanism that this moral theory suffers from a ‘motivational gap’, i.e., the fact that people in general do not seem to be motivated to act in the way cosmopolitan theory prescribes. This thesis aims to answer the following research questions: what, if any, is the normative significance of cosmopolitanism’s motivational gap? Could there be a plausible version of the normative motivational critique, and, if it exists, what will be its implications for cosmopolitan theory? Through framing this discussion in recent methodological debates on the role of facts in normative political theory, and an analytical distinction between the different variations of the NMC, this thesis argues that a robust and plausible NMC is possible. While it rejects the meta-ethical version, which views motivational capabilities of individuals as direct constraints on moral norms, and the ethical version, which maintains that the sacrifices cosmopolitanism will require will be too unreasonably demanding, this thesis argues that a political version of the NMC, which moves away from arguments over the content of individual moral duties to questions of political normativity, and situates its critique of cosmopolitanism on the lack of motivational preconditions of social justice, is a plausible and defensible position.

This thesis asks two questions. Firstly, how do refugees exert political agency in Pakistan? And secondly, does legal citizenship affect the expression of political agency in Pakistan? It examines how Afghans (non-citizens) and Pakistanis (citizens - specifically the urban poor) occupy a shared reality in Pakistan. It pays attention to urban spaces, and it looks at this shared space through a framework of 'dehumanisation' and 'self-humanisation' as informed by the oral narratives and ethnography collected during fieldwork in Karachi and Peshawar. In everyday urban Pakistan differences at the level of political agency between the citizen and the non-citizen are slim. This is because official institutions do not deliver the material and nonmaterial resources to which both groups are legally entitled. In practice, therefore, both Afghans and Pakistanis use a similar repertoire of 'hybrid' formal/informal structures and strategies to redistribute everyday material and non-material goods in their push for a humanised existence. Through these shared experiences of dehumanisation and self-humanisation, an alternative space of 'belonging' occurs, which goes beyond traditional demarcations between 'refugees', 'citizens', and 'non-citizens'. These formal/informal ways of being are tolerated and encouraged by official actors because they represent an alternative way of managing urban populations and maintaining the state. However, specific benefits withstanding, this sphere of formal/informal political agency inadvertently chips away at the Pakistani state, in physical and non-physical ways, creating longterm changes to the city and the political legitimacy of the state. This thesis concludes by showing that 'citizenship' matters only in the domain of state 'security'. The post-2001 climate of (in)security in Pakistan has created deeply penetrative forms of enumeration and surveillance. This combines with negative constructions of the Afghan 'Other' to create an everyday reality of humiliation (police harassment, verbal and physical abuse, and arbitrary detention) which is specifically reserved for Afghan bodies.