Amid the 2011 Arab Revolts, and the subsequent worldwide Occupy movement, social movement scholars faced sudden, powerful mass mobilisations without easily identifiable resources, networks, or forms of organisation underlying them. These instances of mobilisation beyond the scope of what we traditionally consider ‘the movement’ have stretched existing theories of social movements to their limits, defying both conventional theoretical frameworks and existing approaches. This work undertakes a novel analysis of mobilisation which accounts for these new, disruptive cases. It advances the concept of Affinity: a predisposition to participate in certain causes based on social or psychological traits. Alongside this concept, it outlines conditions of Convergence: emergent situations, frames and spaces which encourage those with such Affinity to temporarily participate in mass mobilisations. These two concepts are advanced and developed through a study of the 2011 Egyptian Revolt and Occupy Wall Street movement, alongside the classic case of the 1789 French Revolution. These cases are analysed in comparative perspective to develop a powerful analytical tool with which scholars can augment conventional analyses: The Affinity-Convergence Model of Mobilisation.

Policy networks is a body of literature dedicated to modelling state-civil society relationship formats. In this particular relationship, an interest group with privileged (insider) access to the party in power gains advantage in the policy-making process by utilizing party’s ability to make political appointments in the civil service. The parentela (or type 1 parentela) was first discovered by Joseph La Palombara (1964) in 1960s Italy and was documented later again by Greer (1994) in 1920s-1970s Northern Ireland. Still, there has been no parentela research since 1994, save for Yishai (1992), who argued the parentela did not exist in Israel in 1980s. It seems the concept is considered of little utility to the academic community today. At the same time, as a category of policy networks, the parentela is also susceptible to the wider criticism of Thatcher (1997) and Dowding (1995; 2001) that the policy network literature is unable to introduce causal dynamics in its models and distinguish between network features and network independent variables. This study, therefore, addresses both criticisms by studying the party-group-civil service relationship in Bulgaria, for the period 2013-2015, using 26 elite interviews and a number of cases. Results show that this particular policy network is still viable today. They support Yishai (1992) that hegemonic parties have no effect on parentela formation. The study demonstrates that the cooperation between ruling parties, in need of funds, and organised businesses (groups), in need of market advantage, produces the parentela. In a case study on construction tenders, the study demonstrates La Palombara’s parentela, by exposing the process of how ruling parties intervene in the civil service through political appointees to ensure construction projects are granted to their party insider groups. The study also discovers a new parentela dynamic, labelled as type 2 parentela, where the party intervention extends further to the free market by affecting party insider’s market competitors through prejudiced regulatory inspections that disrupt targeted businesses’ operations temporarily or altogether.

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Does banning opposition candidates from ballots increase the risk that they will turn to bullets instead? Globally, since the end of the Cold War, blatant election rigging tactics (such as ballot box stuffing) are being replaced by 'strategic rigging': subtler procedural manipulations aimed at winning while maintaining the guise of legitimacy in the eyes of international observers. In particular, incumbents (in regimes stuck between democracy and authoritarianism) are turning to 'electoral exclusion', neutralizing key rivals by illegitimately banning certain candidates, in turn reducing the need for cruder forms of election day rigging. I used mixed methods - combining insights from an original global dataset with extensive elite interviews conducted in five countries (Madagascar, Thailand, Tunisia, Zambia, and Côte d'Ivoire) - to establish that electoral exclusion is an attractive short-term election strategy for vulnerable incumbents that produces a much higher chance of victory but comes with high costs in the longer-term. Global probit modeling (using electoral exclusion as an independent variable and coups d'état and civil wars as separate dependent variables) suggests that, since the end of the Cold War, excluding opposition candidates from the ballot roughly doubles the risk of a coup d'état or quadruples the risk of civil war onset. In spite of these risks, incumbents fall into this 'exclusion trap' because of the shortened time horizon that frequently accompanies competitive multi-party elections. Vulnerable incumbents worry more about the short-term risk of losing an election than the long-term but ultimately unknown risk that political violence will ensue after the election. Finally, the inverse corollary of these findings is that inclusion of opposition candidates during multi-party elections can be a stabilizing factor. Though it may seem counterintuitive, fragile 'counterfeit democracies' - and so-called 'transitional' regimes - may be able to stave off existential threats to regime survival by extending an olive branch to their fiercest opponents. These findings combine to form the overarching argument of this dissertation: when opposition candidates are excluded from the ballot, they become more likely to turn to bullets by launching coups d'état and civil wars.