Information is the essence of democracy and the lynchpin of power-ownership. Possession and control of information allows us to demarcate who controls or influences the political system. Freedom of Information (FOI), rooted in Enlightenment values, contains within it a key principle of democracy that there must be access to information (and knowledge) for all equally. My approach in my 25-year journalistic career has been to use FOI as a means of testing the promise and practice of democracy. It serves here as a ‘canary in the coalmine’ to measure how well citizens can access the political system.

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The aim of my thesis is to investigate the importance of access to information for individuals in developing countries. In the first chapter, I describe an important channel through which improved access to market information could increase the prices that producers receive from middlemen. I develop a theoretical model of trade between a farmer and a middleman which allows for the existence of different types of middlemen and I provide an empirical test of the theory from an original framed field experiment carried out with farmers and middlemen in India. In chapter 2, I investigate the relationship between the decision to produce high-quality goods and two important characteristics of the product: the degree of observability of quality and the level of intermediation in the supply chain. I present a model which demonstrates that if quality is not perfectly observable, there will be a range of values of the price difference between high-quality and low-quality goods for which production of high-quality goods will occur with vertical integration but will not occur if the stages of production are carried out by separate agents. This chapter also presents some case studies of supply chains for various products in a number of developing countries that have characteristics which are consistent with the predictions of the model. In the final chapter, I try to understand how access to information could be improved for individuals in developing countries. I investigate the relationship between rates of mobile phone and Internet use and a number of geographic, institutional and economic variables in a sample of 164 countries from 1990 to 2009. The aim of this chapter is to identify the main characteristics of countries that have had success in adopting these new technologies in order to gain some insight into the barriers which may be faced by those countries that have been less successful.

Over recent years, censorship of the press in Turkey has been under international scrutiny, having been examined on the basis of recent political developments such as the Justice and Development Party’s democratisation promises with the incentive of the EU accession process and the role of the press in Turkey’s democratisation. This research aims to widen the terms of reference by providing a unifying framework for the problems posed by political, historical, and legal agents to press freedom, and analysing their interrelation throughout the history of modern Turkey. It seeks to identify the hindrances encountered by the press, which has its roots in the deep-seated State ideology and institutional framework that prioritises state security over individual rights and freedoms. This thesis therefore sets forth the inextricable link between the political history of Turkey and the current application of the law, and presents an in-depth analysis of Turkish political history in relation to press freedom, legal scholarship, and case-law as evidence to demonstrate this. The analysis of the obstacles to establishing stronger legal protection for the press that would not be affected by political change, is based on doctrinal and socio-legal analysis that investigates the flaws in the Turkish Constitution, Turkish Penal Code and Turkish Anti-Terror Law and questions the judicial approach to the implementation of the right to free expression of the press. The thesis specifies the loopholes in Turkish legislation that allow insufficient legal protection for freedom of the press and the inefficiency of the judiciary to realise the press’s right to free expression. The thesis recommends practical amendments to clarify broadly drawn legal provisions. A reduction in judicial bureaucracy to eliminate political influences on the judiciary. Judicial training for the internalisation of the right to free expression of the press as a human right . All of which would help overcome institutional hindrances based on the perception of a critical press as a threat to state security and national interest.

The enactment of the national Right to Information (RTI) Act in 2005 has been produced, consumed and celebrated as an important event of democratic deepening in India both in terms of the process that led to its enactment (arising from a grassroots movement) as well as its outcome (fundamentally altering the citizen-state relationship). This thesis problematises this narrative and proposes that the explanatory factors underlying this event may be more complex than thus far imagined. First, the leadership of the grassroots movement was embedded within the ruling elite and possessed the necessary resources as well as unparalleled access to spaces of power for the movement to be successful. Second, the democratisation of the higher bureaucracy along with the launch of the economic liberalisation project meant that the urban, educated, high-caste, upper-middle-class elite that provided critical support to the demand for an RTI Act was no longer vested in the state and had moved to the private sector. Mirroring this shift, the framing of the RTI Act during the 1990s saw its ambit reduced to the government, even as there was a concomitant push to privatise public goods and services. Third, the thesis locates the Indian RTI Act within the global explosion of freedom of information laws over the last two decades, and shows how international pressures, embedded within a reimagining of the role of the state vis-à-vis the market, had a direct and causal impact both on its content, as well as the timing of its enactment. Taking the production of the RTI Act as a lens, the thesis finally argues that while there is much to celebrate in the consolidation of procedural democracy in India over the last six decades, existing economic, social and political structures may limit the extent and forms of democratic deepening occurring in the near future.

This dissertation develops a new theory of specific and overall socio-political freedom and discusses its role in normative political theory. The aim is to dissolve some of the conceptual confusions that have often beset previous discussions and to develop a theoretical framework with which to approach questions of public policy. This dissertation consists of three parts. In the first part, I develop a new account that specifies under which conditions a person is specifically free and when she is unfree to do something. It is shown that republican accounts of freedom are unsatisfactory and that a trivalent liberal account that equates freedom with ability is most plausible. A new analysis of unfreedom is defended according to which a person is made unfree (as opposed to merely unable) to do something only if she would have this freedom in a better and available distribution that another person could have foreseeably brought about. In the second part, I discuss how to move from an account of specific freedom and unfreedom to a measure of overall freedom. I develop a new and simple aggregation function and argue that the measurement of overall freedom requires both quantitative and evaluative factors. In the third part, I then discuss what role freedom should play in a theory of distributive justice. Instead of freedom deontologically constraining the reach of distributive justice, freedom should be one of its distribuenda. I will first discuss how best to distribute freedom across a person’s lifetime and how this impacts on discussions of paternalistic policies. It will then be shown that we ought not simply maximise freedom between persons, not aim to give everyone enough freedom nor aim at equal freedom. Instead, distributing freedom requires a principle that combines maximisation with a concern for fairness.

Within the growing field of surveillance studies, national identity cards and related issues have become an important research topic. Most research in this field, however, does not consider the role of media in the development of surveillance. This research examines the history of mediated public debates about identity cards in the U.K. In the U.K, since the Identity Cards Bill 2004, National Identity cards have been widely debated across the British national newspapers once again after several heated historical debates in WWI, WWII, and the 1990s. It is this thesis s purpose to analyze the role of the British national newspapers in generating support and resistance in the development of British national identity cards in the past one hundred years, respectively in 1915, 1919, 1939, 1951, and from 1994 to 2008. This thesis also seeks to find out the continuities and changes in the way British national newspapers influence the repeated introduction and withdrawal of identity cards over time. Specifically, by employing the methods of content and frame analysis, the thesis examines the actors involved in the mediated debate of British national identity cards, their argumentation, the frames underlying the argumentation and the themes appeared in the debates, in order to find out to what extent the British print media supported or opposed the identity cards over time.

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This thesis analyzes the role of the press in five political campaigns in Trinidad and Tobago, over a ten year period, from 2000 to 2010. Using framing theory, it seeks to determine if the level of structural and partisan bias in the three daily newspapers in the country was a major factor in the outcome of general elections. This thesis further examines how press coverage of national elections contributed significantly towards development of a healthy democracy in Trinidad and Tobago and this research on media and politics, especially over a defined period of electoral volatility in the country, is the first of its kind in the Caribbean and will complement existing literature written on this subject worldwide. It is also the only comprehensive study on media bias in electoral coverage of political campaigns in Trinidad and Tobago in a context in which there have been public allegations of media bias by political leaders in the country. The two - pronged methodological approach of content analysis, and interviews with media practitioners allow for both qualitative and quantitative analysis of case studies of electoral campaigns using innovative research tools such as a bias scale and coding template, to minimize the margin of error in the analysis. In this thesis the issue of whether the press did have an influential effect on election outcome is also explored. Based on analysis and findings, this thesis proposes a new model of media and politics for countries like Trinidad and Tobago transitioning from a system of authoritarianism to liberalism called an “emerging liberal democratic model”. The evolution of this model is a work in progress which may have implications for other similar societies.