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This thesis investigates the nature of participatory democracy offered by the UK’s Conservative-Liberal Democrat Coalition Government between 2010 and 2015. Primary and secondary data are employed to consider citizen participation in Neighbourhood Development Plans (NDPs), a community-led planning initiative introduced under the Localism Act (2011). This explores the nature of participation on offer, and how citizens are simultaneously encountering and creating new democratic spaces, navigating legislative frameworks, managing relationships with governance partners, and seeking to secure their own interests. An interpretive policy analysis methodology is employed, highlighting how the interpretations of core participants play a central role in determining the content and direction of NDPs and the dynamics of local participation. The findings highlight the instrumental approach adopted by many participants in light of their previous experiences with local government, the expectations and norms of the planning system, and on-going uncertainty concerning ‘light touch’ regulation. Participants report rudimentary processes of co-production, however the crucial supporting role of Local Authorities remains uneven and largely unaccountable. The findings pay particular attention to the ways in which the participatory space is structured both implicitly and explicitly by the discursive framing of participation, the regulations, and national policy makers, local government officers and private consultants. Overall a picture of bounded participation is presented - with contestation largely bracketed out, ignored or otherwise managed within participatory spaces. As a result, the post-2010 localist agenda can be seen to be a form of centralism wielded at the local level. Despite this, positive changes are identified at the citizen/state nexus, with some communities seeking to co-opt the process and achieve a vision for their neighbourhood beyond the scope of land use policies, whilst evidence of increased community resilience, nascent collective identities, and enthusiasm concerning local democracy are also identified. The thesis contributes to on-going debates concerning democratic innovations by building on Mouffe’s theory of agonistic pluralism and exploring the extent to which present forms of participatory democracy display signs of agonistic practice. A model of agonistic participation is set out, reorienting the macro level insights of agonistic pluralism, with the empirical data concerning citizen participation at the micro and meso levels. This incorporates practical lessons from deliberative democracy, and seeks to move beyond increasingly well rehearsed debates between the two traditions to promote a positive sum approach that allows citizens to secure their interests and combat hegemonic practices by determining the nature of their own participation.

The claim that the exception has become the norm dominates the discourse of emergency politics. Theories of emergency politics need not rely on norm/exception binary because it closes down possibilities for radical democratic political contestation. Attempts to define a situation as exceptional by powerful political elites are a claim that politics must be foreclosed until they decide that the exigency has been resolved and a ‘normal’ state of affairs has resumed. A theory which conceptualizes space for radical democratic contestation is essential because such contestation is crucial to preserving and enhancing liberal-democratic governance despite claims that they are facing an existential threat. This thesis lays the foundation for such a theory. First, it presents a criticism of the reliance of the norm/exception binary in the discourses of emergency politics. I argue that ‘normal’ and ‘exceptional’ are polemical concepts used to in the defense of particular articulations of hegemonic and political power not liberal-democracy as such. Second, I develop a radical democratic theory of emergency politics. This theory is based on an account of political contingency which conceives of the political realm as being unstable and continually evolving. Thus liberal-democratic regimes never exist in ‘normal’ states because they are constantly engaging with exigencies which that emanate from the political realm. Furthermore, this thesis contends that emergency politics should be inscribed within wider hegemonic practices. What I identify as a paradox of contestation at the heart of liberal-democratic regimes is the terrain on which emergency politics are contested. Liberal-democratic regimes can absorb situations sometimes defined as emergencies. The goal of this thesis is to demonstrate theoretically how liberal-democratic regimes can preserve the possibility of radical democratic politics in the face of claims on the part of powerful political elites that an emergency or exception exists, which must be met with unrestrained violence and by severely reducing the scope of legitimate political contestation.

This thesis is concerned with democracy promotion’s unexpected and often unheralded new role and trajectory. While having retreated from the limelight cast on democracy promotion in the early 1990s, the thesis argues that democracy promotion demonstrated considerable staying power in coming to work silently but vigorously across, and even through, other international policy areas. The thesis traces and conceptualises the trajectory of democracy promotion from an independent policy to its generalisation and resurfacing in conflict management, statebuilding and climate change policy discourses. In its methodological approach this study draws on critical realism and adopts a genealogical ethos for ordering and interpreting the textual and programmatic material. The trajectory and displacement of democracy promotion are analysed and conceptualised by inferring from the work of Michel Foucault and Hannah Arendt. In supplementing Foucault’s work on forms of governing, power and subjectivity with aspects of Arendt’s work on the human condition and politics, the thesis takes a different analytical approach than the common liberal framing. Rather than investigating democracy promotion as part of (neo)liberal governmentality it explores the discourse through the prism of the social. In doing so, the radically reworked meaning of democracy and its role for international policymaking can be captured. The rise of the social and its impact on the understanding of democracy and the modality of its promotion has been largely missed in existing literature and remains under-theorised. This thesis argues that while once democracy promotion was concerned with elections and institutions in the formal political sphere of constituted power, democracy now has a new lease of life in a different sphere of problem-solving and governing: the sphere of the governance of the self. The sphere of self-governance unfolds not in terms of the autonomous human subject but rather emerges as a sphere permeated by relationships into which the human subject is embedded and through which it is enabled to govern itself.

Can artistic and cultural practices play a critical role in societies in which criticisms are reflexively absorbed and immobilised by the prevailing hegemony? And, if yes, what kind of political order can they aspire to, given the ‘post-utopian’ nature of the human condition? How do we approach the tortuous question of the destiny of both the project of modern democracy and that of aesthetic modernity? There is no agreement on this issue. We are told that there is no alternative to the existing liberal democracy and capitalist pluralism without risking yet another dystopia – the dilemma that in the artistic realm is sometimes articulated as the opposition between modernism and postmodernism. What might progressive art look like in such times when the ideas of progress and modernity are viewed with great suspicion? The most popular positions concerning artistic and cultural practices’ critical dimension revolve around the idea that with the post-Fordist transformation and the bankruptcy of the Left, the paradigm of power has really changed. This is reflected in the radical character of contemporary artistic practices, which desperately struggle to constitute subject at the expense of themselves. However, the question is: can these practices be both radical and democratic? This depends on our understanding of emancipatory politics, the nature of aesthetics and post-Fordist transformation. We will examine the different approaches to these subjects influenced by the Frankfurt school and post-Operaist theories to argue that neither Theodor Adorno’s and Max Horkeimer’s analyses based on the Fordist model, nor Antonio Negri’s and Paolo Virno’s post-Fordist appropriation of the significance of art in the new forms of production provide a useful framework with which to grasp the nature of the changes and challenges that face our society. Such novel ideas as ‘immaterial labour’ and ‘spontaneous communism’ or exodus and ‘communism of capital’, despite their new vocabulary, are a dangerous inversion of the Frankfurt school’s idealism and inability to grasp that social reality is hegemonically constructed through the practices of articulation that temporarily and incompletely ‘fix’ the meaning of social institutions. Neither politics nor post-Fordism should be considered through the matrix of culture, but in terms of hegemony. What is at issue is to grasp the nature of the democratic and aesthetical paradoxes and envisage how the two could be applied to contribute to progressive changes in power relations. Judgements must be made – we have to be able to distinguish between who belongs to demos and who does not; however, how we judge, which is the subject of aesthetic critique, is at the core of democratic artistic-political practice. One way in which artistic practices can be critical is a counter-hegemonic intervention that acts against the position of supremacy of any hegemonic order and shows that any fullness exists because there are gaps, but judges this lack in a way that resists the totalisation of the sensible. However, perhaps the way to weaken the centre is not just to expose its flaws, but to pluralise hegemonies. In this way, the idea to pluralise modernism in the era of globalisation could help us to redefine modern democracy in the post-political era and outline the positive vision of the ‘hegemonic trap’. Could the evolution of artistic-political practice be envisaged as the radicalisation of ‘oppositional identities’, which undermine the hegemonic forms of subject articulation into compository or shimmering identities, making such supremacy impossible? Can art become a symbol of emptying ‘democracy’ and thus construct many ‘democracies’, answering our tortuous question by producing plural answers?

Democratization involves many important actors and institutions including vibrant civil society organisations (‘CSOs’), a free press, well organized and competitive political parties and an independent judiciary. Civil Society sector is one pillar that has contributed to the development and the democratization process of scores of countries by delegitimizing authoritarian regimes, generating social capital, empowering communities, building capacity of democratic institutions, and holding government to account. However at present, there is an on-going backlash against CSOs across the globe. The threats noticeably change from obvious direct repressions of CSOs and activists, to more elusive legal or quasi-legal obstacles that restrict the space in which CSOs operate.1 The legal barriers include barriers to entry to discourage or prevent the formation of CSOs; barriers to operation to restrict or ban advocacy and lobbying activities; and barriers to resources to restrict CSOs’ ability to secure fund required to pursue their purposes of formation.2 The thesis examines such legal impediments that restrict CSOs space of operation and their possible impact in the democratization process of a nation. It argues that any committed effort towards democratization demands an enabling legal framework that ensures freedom of association; facilitates CSOs formation and sustained existence; allows CSOs engagement in wider lawful purposes including the promotion of human rights and democracy; broadens CSOs access to resources; and regulates CSOs accountability. This thesis provides the first comprehensive assessment of the Ethiopian legal framework against such ideally enabling legal conditions. It does so in order to appraise the potential impacts of the legal framework on the democratic functions of CSOs operating in Ethiopia, and to suggest reforms so that those functions be better carried out to the advancement of the democratization process of the country.

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Contemporary democratic theory is marked by two politically distinctive but epistemologically similar radicalisms: Deliberative and Platonist. Deliberative democrats seek to enhance the legitimacy and value of democratic outcomes by ensuring deeper, more discursive participation so as to approximate rational consensus around the self-evident public interest or to inculcate the ideal of public reasoning among citizens. Platonist democrats, responding to widespread evidence of public ignorance and irrationality, argue that participation should be limited to those who can do so from a position of expertise. What these radical positions have in common is an implied readiness to reject the fundamental democratic principle of minimal political equality for practically all citizens. In so doing, they risk subverting the desirable consequences of the institutional norms of today’s democracies: stability, anti-experimentalism and assumed non-contestability. Democracy’s main virtue – its tendency toward stability and resistance to revolution – is contingent upon the confidence that is placed in it by its citizens, which itself may be contingent upon the universal franchise. This thesis argues that theories of democracy are best understood in terms of their underlying presuppositions as to the scope – and potential scope – of human knowledge. It offers a new justification of democracy, suggesting specific consequentialist grounds while critiquing instrumental and deontic approaches to the problem. The thesis then turns to a consideration of the evidence for widespread public ignorance, and argues that such evidence cannot form a sound basis for Platonist, epistocratic arguments against the universal franchise. Deliberative democracy is similarly problematic, founded upon either the unattainable ideal of political consensus, or the badly-understood concept of ‘public reason’. Formal, demotic deliberation is intrinsically threatening to the democratic principle of political anonymity, and therefore, due to a host of well-documented social-psychological effects, to the universal franchise as well.

This thesis sets out to move beyond descriptive accounts of the gendered nature of cabinet government to present a more substantive enquiry illuminating the gendered culture and gender power arrangements inherent in this institution. A feminist institutional study, the core focus of the thesis is to assess the influence of gender power arrangements on the potential for generating or resisting institutional change in cabinet government in Ireland. To investigate this question it is necessary to identify the gender culture of cabinet government in Ireland, and pay particular attention to how the male gender norms of cabinet government inform the dynamics of cabinet recruitment, portfolio allocation, ministerial involvement and presence. In so doing it identifies the impact of institutional gendered norms, practices and power arrangements on the political subjectivities of cabinet ministers (specifically women ministers) as well as how conformity to these institutional gender norms inhibits transformational institutional change. Cognisant of the informal dimensions of cabinet government formation and operation, this study is interested in learning about the institution's inner or so-called “hidden life" (Chappell and Waylen, 2013), in particular the gendered norms and the gender power bases at play. Overall the study reveals how gender manifests itself through cabinet government in Ireland, acting as a contributor as well as an attribute of institutional power. The central question of this thesis asks: do gender power arrangements within cabinet government in Ireland insulate against transformative institutional change as a result of women's presence? In addressing this question the thesis firstly examines the gendered nature of cabinet government in Ireland, producing a set of descriptive statistics as well as drawing from semi-structured interviews to illuminate the informal gender norms that guide cabinet recruitment and appointment. Secondly it examines gender performance to outline how women ministers conform to the predominant masculinist norms of cabinet government. Finally it examines the presence of women in cabinet government, focusing on the intersection and interaction of women as gendered beings within the male-gendered domain of cabinet government to uncover a series of gender dynamics that act as (gender) powerful processes inhibiting institutional change.