Young people's right to participate in public decision making is increasingly being translated into practice in the UK. A large range of organisations and public bodies are working to involve young people in decisions about policies and practices, from day to day project implementation to long term strategic planning. Among the different types of participation projects this thesis is concerned with those where young people are involved in decision making over a period of time. Despite a number of good practice guidelines, the project literature suggests several seemingly intransigent problems in ongoing youth participation. My aim has been to move forward understandings of ongoing youth participation projects through focusing on a single case study: a group of young people who were involved over a number of years in public decision making within a Scottish local authority. Using a flexible and iterative research methodology, my initial questions on constraints, facilitators and divergence of views amongst stakeholders, were refined over the course of the research. I used a mixture of methods, combining and comparing data from thirty-one interviews, notes from participant observations and project documentation. Carrying out data analysis alongside data collection was a key component of the design. The substantive chapters of this thesis deal with the roles and relationships between young people and participation workers, exchanges between young people and decision makers and accounts of the history of the group. Concepts of representation and decision making between adults and young people receive particular attention. I argue that models and ladders of participation fail to adequately characterise decision making in ongoing participation projects in separating decisions from the relationships in which they are embedded. A central theme running through the chapters is how "being young" is constructed, represented and used. It is my contention that being young is of special salience within youth participation projects. Being young is the basis for involvement; yet what young people are capable of and what they need is not self evident or consistent. Throughout the thesis I examine the ways in which being young is interpreted in different ways in various situations by the project participants. I look not only at the context dependent meanings of being young but also at how these meanings are used as a resource through the life of the project. I conclude by returning to common problems identified in the literature and considering how the findings could contribute to new ways of thinking on these issues.

Because representative democracy may be reaching its limits, the EU has turned to participatory democracy. The participatory turn is torn between a moderate and a radical version. The moderate version revitalises the Community Method (CM) by formalising the dialogue of European institutions with organised civil society, while the radical version celebrates its demise as a chance for national governments to coordinate their policies in partnership with civil society through the Open Method of Coordination (OMC). In order to assess the participatory turn, this thesis takes the view that civil society is a pluralist sphere of participation between state and market wherein deliberative democracy realises its full potential. Democratisation proceeds whenever civil society manages to assert influence over state and market without falling prey to their colonising tendencies. This emancipatory process has so far taken place within the context of national welfare states. The fundamental question raised by the turn to civil society is whether multilevel social Europe will be able to continue this trend. Therefrom arise three research questions which this thesis explores in detail. Firstly, does European economic law colonise civil society? Secondly, is social Europe democratic in the sense that it opens European governance to the democratic influence of civil society? And finally, is social Europe effective, that is, able to protect civil society from European economic integration? The first question is essential, for a civil society colonised by markets would be in no position to legitimise social Europe at a time where it more than ever needs its protection. The last two questions require that radical OMC be compared with moderate CM, so as to critically assess whether the former performs better than the latter.

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This research focuses on an under-researched political phenomenon in contemporary China: non-electoral public participation. The thesis specifically investigates the following three mechanisms: consultative meetings, public hearings and the use of surveys and questionnaires. Through individual case studies, I processtrace their emergence and development in Zhejiang Province. The study is informed by interviews with local-level policy-makers, state officials, academics and citizens' representatives. On an empirical level, the study provides information on the normative, legislative and institutional background of these mechanisms, as well as a critical assessment of their achievements and failures. On a theoretical level, I firstly test the hypothesis that non-electoral public participation is a function of the CCP's state building strategy: creating a state apparatus capable of producing effective solutions to governing challenges requires public pm1icipation in the governing process. The study therefore introduces the distinction between access to and exercise of power to capture such context. The pm1icipatory mechanisms addressed in the study engage citizens in the exercise of power within the party-state's strategy to improve its governing capacity and performance. At the same time, the extent to which participation through non-electoral mechanisms enables the public to exert influence on politics is limited by being firmly constrained to the exercise dimension of politics, and placed within such a normative, institutional and regulative framework that gives the party-state's agents leeway to decisively influence the participatory outcomes.

The present dissertation examines variation in state-sponsored repression amongst democratic regimes. The aim of this dissertation is three-fold: concept formation, theory development, and empirical analysis. I first develop a typology that highlights two types of government violence. Centralized repression refers to cases where state authorities order violence against people and state security agents execute that order. By contrast, decentralized repression refers to cases where state security agents deploy violence without orders from government leaders. Building on this typology, I then develop a theory about why some democracies are more repressive than others. The first claim is that shared beliefs and routines from previous autocratic regimes tend to survive among law enforcement actors, and thus newly democratized states with longer authoritarian past are more repressive. The second claim is that increasing public insecurity tends to increase citizens' support for government repression and opens windows of opportunities for non-controlled state agents that deploy repression, even without the orders from government leaders. Using global cross-national statistical analysis and case study research, I find compelling empirical evidence that authoritarian legacies and violent crime increase government repression and human rights violations in democratic regimes. Finally, the third claim is that democratic governments not only deploy repression to enhance order, but also promote welfare to mitigate violence within society. Using a sample of Latin American democracies over the period 1981-2007, the empirical results show that democratic governments respond to violent crime by increasing education spending.

In the past few decades there has been growing scholarship about the nature and approaches of young peoples' engagements with and participation in political and social issues at the local, national and global levels. Research has provided evidence that young people tend to become interested in politics if the issues matter to them and they are drawn into a process of active engagement to address them. Alongside formal citizenship education provided mainly through schools, NGO led programmes are increasingly being introduced to engage young people in these, This study looks into one such model of youth civic engagement practice implemented in Northern Ireland and Palestine, two politically contested and divided societies. It investigates the model as pedagogical practice whether it qualifies as informal civic education and consequently acquire a better understanding of young adult (coach) as informal educator. The findings demonstrated that informal civic education offers a free and safe space for young citizens to lead determined, democratic, inclusive and civic action and embody the possibility of hope to transform realities and conditions in politically contested societies. The research has shown that the educative process provided opportunities for positive change to take place at the individual and group levels. The worker's proposed occupational title of Young Il'\formal Civic Educator for coaches engaged in this particular practice in Northern Ireland and Palestine, is put forth and described alongside 'family of resemblances' compared to other similar' professions. At an interpretative level the study has an added layer of complexity of the politically contested nature of the societies whose influence on practice and worker is also examined. This thesis suggests that the informal civic education approach, and the young informal civic educator could play a crucial role in catalysing and sustaining democratic spaces and processes.

The thesis presents a model of how inner city citizens can effectively engage in the political process to achieve their goals. It is based on two case studies, participant observation, and action research with inner city citizen groups in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada, between 1978 and 1988. A review of the literature on theories of the state, strategy formation and execution, and methods of collective action, is synthesized into a systemic framework of questions to apply to the case studies. These questions are then employed to guide the case study analysis that draws out conclusions and lessons for citizen action. This is placed in the context of the development of the Canadian State. Then the thesis brings the research experience, literature review and case study analysis together into a model for civic engagement by inner city citizen groups. The model has four key components: assessing opportunities and constraints, framing issues and actors, mobilizing opportunity structures, organizations, policy communities and social networks; and taking collective action. Each is elaborated with action guidelines and caveats on the limitations of this approach.

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Human rights norms may have universal application but States have the primary obligation alone and through international and regional co-operation to guarantee their protection and enjoyment. Regional systems for the protection of human rights have become an established part of such mechanisms of international co-operation. Each regional system is uniquely shaped by the States comprised in it, often reflecting both regional contextual characteristics and comparative and historical experience. So far as the African human rights system is concerned, the scope of its overall obligations and institutional elements are somewhat unclear in the context of regional integration arrangements. This thesis therefore sets out to bring clarity to these issues in order to better realise the full potential of the African human rights system in its quest to ensure effective protection of human rights and offer more effective remedies for violations of human rights. The study takes a holistic approach and argues that Africa's regional human rights system includes regional integration arrangements in which human rights are fused on the continent. It investigates and analyses the evolution of regionalism as well as norms and institutions for advancing regional integration and human rights in Africa. Particular attention is paid in this connection to evidence of over-laps, complementarity, and convergence in such norms and institutions. A related objective of this study is to unravel the extent to which Africa's regional intergration systems may be said to be now underpinned by objective political values binding upon its Member States as reflected in the treaties establishing such systems. This is justified on the premise that integration is an imperative response to the contradictory tendencies of globalisation, nationalism, and the potential or actual arbitrary behaviour of individual States, which tend to undermine the objective of the universal protection of human rights. In these circumstances, the continuing sustainability of the promise of human rights in Africa depends significantly on effective international and regional oversight of State conduct. For this purpose, regional integration and human rights mutually reinforce one another in binding legal commitments and .. 11 regional institutions for their implementation. Far from being mutually antagonistic, they are now mutually interdependent and overlap in defining the scope and functions of sovereign territoriality in Afiica. In examining these issues, the thesis deploys the principal sources and methods of intemational law. 111