This thesis provides a comparative systematic analysis of intra-party democracy in Northern Ireland. Despite Northern Ireland's reputation as arguably 'the most heavily researched area on earth' (Whyte, 1990: vii) the internal organisation of its political parties is a sub-topic which has received scant and fleeting attention. The thesis, therefore, has two primary objectives: 1. To explore the nature of intra-party democracy in each of Northern Ireland's five main political parties, through analysis of their internal decision-making procedures: leadership selection, candidate selection and policy selection. 2. To account for instances of organisational change in relation to these procedures over the course of each party's lifetime and situate Northern Ireland's parties in a wider context.

Political parties are ideal subjects for the study of power because they are specific sites in which it is produced and organised, fought over, captured and lost. However, the literature on political parties largely lacks an explicit and systematic theorisation of power as it is exercised and operates in them. As a result, the study of parties has not kept up with developments in theoretical approaches to power and power relations. For example, the failure to recognise how power works through constituting subjects who are empowered as effective agents with appropriate skills and capacities is a major lacuna in the literature. Parties are not only electoral machines or vehicles for personal ambition: they are organisations, complex relations of individuals, rules and rituals. An approach to power in parties should reflect this. To this end, I develop a five-dimensional framework of power which I use to account for political parties in all their complexity. My aim is to introduce some of the more nuanced and sophisticated insights of political theory to the analysis of political parties without dismissing the benefits of some of the more established ways of looking at power. Power is therefore approached as a rich, multi-dimensional concept, derived from diverse intellectual traditions, including behaviouralist, structuralist and Foucauldian accounts. My framework encapsulates individual agency, the strategic mobilisation of rules and norms, rationalisation and bureaucracy, the constitution of subjectivities and the micro-level discipline of bodies. Theory is employed in conjunction with original interview and archive research on the British Labour Party to construct an account of how power operates in party settings. This provides a unique and, I argue, much richer perspective on the exercise and operation of power in political parties than has been offered before.

This thesis argues that party ideologies are made up of a series of issues that vary in the extent of their interconnections. This approach to party programmes builds on Converse's (1964) description of belief systems and on Downs' (1957) understanding of ideologies. The concept of policy interconnections, originally applied to voter preferences, can also be used to understand party ideologies. In fact, parties are likely to exhibit stronger interconnections than voters. The strength, nature and effect of policy interconnections are examined for 23 Western European and English-speaking democracies using two expert surveys and the dataset of the Comparative Manifesto Project. Three distinctions need to be made in order to understand how party policies are interconnected. First, linkages between issues are based either on an inherent logic or on historical and sociological circumstance. Logic-based interconnections are more consistent across contexts than circumstance-based interconnections. Moreover, parties are more likely to alter policy stances on two areas simultaneously if the issues are linked through logic. Second, linkages exist for position and salience, but salience interconnections are weaker than their positional counterparts. This helps explain the strategic attraction of salience manipulation. Finally, positions can be more extreme or more moderate than the overall mean party preferences, a characteristic termed the 'degree of unusualness'. Parties are likely to stress such unusual positions, especially if they are small, niche competitors. The findings of this thesis have important implications for the study of party competition. For example, strategies such as vote-maximization and salience manipulation are directly affected by the impact of policy interconnections. This approach therefore significantly extends existing spatial models of party competition and challenges some of their assumptions. As interconnections influence voter choice and coalition formation, there are also broader implications for political representation.

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Contemporary center right parties in Europe are often known for their ideological focus on 'bread and butter' issues such as the free market economy and law and order, alongside their promotion of traditional institutions and values in society. However, the strategies they use to emphasize the immigration issue are less discussed in academic literature, as are the issue's electoral implications for this party family in different economic contexts across the 21st century. The central research question of this dissertation investigates the electoral success of center right parties and how they are able to prosper electorally from emphasizing immigration in different economic contexts, often at the expense of populist radical right parties. The dissertation focuses on center right parties rather than the center left, as the center right is spatially and ideologically closer to the populist radical right on a number of issues. This dissertation tests an original aggregate level theoretical framework of 'strategic emphasis' that features a dynamic game of party competition. The theory argues that immigration is not an issue 'owned' solely by populist radical right parties, but one that can also help today's center right parties to prosper electorally. This theory proposes a discussion of the relative electoral success of center right parties in two different economic contexts, showing how in certain situation they can perform better electorally than the radical right when they emphasize immigration, as opposed to adopting specific positional stances on immigration. The central story in this dissertation is not about spatial positions in the form of anti-immigrant sentiment driving electoral success for center right parties. Rather, it is about issue salience and the emphasis that center right parties place on immigration in their party strategies that determines their electoral fortunes in the 21st century. This theory is then tested in three separate empirical chapters (Chapters 5, 6 and 7), which draws on the ParlGov dataset on European national parliamentary elections that has been merged with the Whitefield-Rohrschneider expert survey on party positions. The Chapel Hill Expert Survey data is also utilized. Chapter 7 comprises a case study analysis of four research cases derived from the results of the large N comparative analysis in Chapter 5. Chapters 5 and 6 set out an original contribution to knowledge in two different economic contexts, demonstrating through statistical models the electoral success of the center right. The findings show that when they emphasize the immigration issue, center right parties tended to perform better than populist radical right parties in different contexts, in times of economic crisis (2008-13) and particularly in times of economic stability (1999-2007). Drawing on a research design consisting of four case studies (Belgium, the Netherlands, Finland and France), Chapter 7 investigates qualitatively how center right parties' emphasis on immigration affects their electoral success in economic bad times and how in some cases, this strategy allows them to perform better electorally than the populist radical right. However, the case studies show that there are restrictions to center right party electoral success. For example, when center right parties are (i) incumbents and (ii) do not emphasize immigration; this allows the populist radical right to achieve electoral success at their expense. 'Challenger' center right parties (specifically non-incumbents and those in opposition) tended to perform better electorally and further underlined incumbency-punishment patterns in the context of greater voter volatility. The dissertation argues that there may be a 'new electoral winning formula' in the 21st century, whereby specific center right parties profit electorally through strategically emphasizing the immigration issue, rather than on traditional issues such as law and order alongside the free market that the center right tend to be more historically associated with. These findings have implications for contemporary party politics, in showing the potential for center right parties to perform electorally well on the immigration issue and has important implications for the state of contemporary liberal democracy across Europe.

The thesis seeks to explain variation in party agreement on climate change, i.e. why there is cross-party consensus on the issue in some countries whilst there is party polarisation over it in others. The analysis thus provides a bridge between the literatures on comparative climate policy and party politics. The investigation employs a nested research design as a mixed methods strategy, joining the study of the wider universe of political parties and developed countries through large and medium-N analyses with intensive and qualitative case study analysis through a controlled comparison of Australia and Norway. These countries share significant similarities, yet Australia experiences party polarisation over climate change whilst there is strong cross-party consensus in Norway. In explaining this divergence, the thesis finds that parties will polarise over climate change if there is a presence of fossil fuel interests, multiple veto points, pluralist institutions and a majoritarian electoral system in the country. However, fossil fuel interests will not have a polarising effect if combined with few veto points and corporatist institutions. Countries that have few veto points, corporatist institutions and a proportional electoral system experience strong cross-party consensus. These findings challenge the common assumption that consensus will automatically be difficult in states with fossil fuel dependency. Rather, it demonstrates that the institutional context is critical, as it moderates the effects of fossil fuel interests and shapes the behaviour of parties. Although the thesis argues that parties’ ideology and levels of public concern also affect whether or not they embrace the issue and create agreement on it, institutional factors are demonstrated to have a relatively larger impact. Thus the thesis argues that party agreement on climate change is more an outcome of party strategic behaviour within the context of domestic party competition than it is a result of ideology or societal factors.

The electoral success of lower-caste political parties has transformed India’s democratic polity over the past two decades. This thesis is the outcome of extensive ethnographic investigations of the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP), India’s most successful Dalit [ex-Untouchable castes] party, in two cities of the country’s most populous state, Uttar Pradesh (UP). The BSP commanded a majority of seats in the Uttar Pradesh state legislature between 2007 and 2012. The thesis seeks to investigate how the election of a Dalit-led party affected power relations between elite and subaltern social groups in Agra and Ghaziabad. The BSP state government significantly altered power relations in both cities in three ways. Firstly, the BSP inserted its bureaucratic cadre into key offices of government. Secondly, the BSP state government used its state resources to provide considerable welfare gains to core constituencies, through considerable achievements in housing security. Thirdly, the BSP administration established expansive pro-business regimes in both cities. Elite social groups were allowed to corner patronage benefits within the institutions of the party, whilst the party’s middle-class and working-class core voters were compensated with programmatic benefits in the form of police protection, welfare payments, neighbourhood development schemes, and housing security. There is, according to this thesis, considerable convergence between the material interests and the subjective identity perceptions informing caste-based political agency. The political science informing this work derives from the theoretical framework of the “Silent Revolution” (Jaffrelot, 2003). It is based on extensive elite interviews and ethnographic methods.

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