This thesis explores subjective and objective understandings of civic duty, obligation and good citizenship. Despite the importance of these drivers of behaviour, a lack of empirical understanding about what these drivers are and how they are understood has left a significant gap in our understanding of voting behaviour. My research contributes to the field by examining three central themes; Are duty, obligation and good citizenship understood the same? Are one or more of these traits suitable for cross-national research? Can a new conceptual model of civic duty help further the use of civic duty in studies of voting behaviour? In order to do this, this thesis analyses the following issues: (1) objectively exploring duty, obligation and good citizenship (2) analysing subjective understandings of these concepts (3) demonstrating individual level drivers of these concepts (4) demonstrating the impact of institutions, and cross-national differences have upon duty, obligation and good citizenship (5) showing how these concepts relate to voting behaviour (6) by testing and proving that a new approach to measuring civic duty can provide a model that explains not only long term immutable voting habits, but why individuals may vote out of duty sometimes, and abstain at others and (7) finally providing substantial evidence from what is an exploratory study to help in the formation of future representative research and to demonstrate the importance of taking civic duty seriously in forthcoming voting behaviour research. Using the theoretical and philosophical literature, I argue that despite the empirical literature treating obligation, good citizenship and civic duty as the same concept and driver of voting behaviour, that individuals understand these traits uniquely, and that they are all separate motivators, with duty being contingent on external forces (social capital) and obligation being contingent on personal or inward pressures. I argue that given the limited literature on good citizenship, there is no clear idea of what it means and that good citizenship will be contingent on what an individual deems to be "good". Finally, I argue that old models of civic duty are outdated, and that a new conceptual framework of duty needs to be introduced to accurately demonstrate how individuals understand it, and actually demonstrate its impact upon individual level voting behaviour. Using data from a pilot study, with an embedded survey experiment (N=735) collected in the United Kingdom, the United States, New Zealand, Australia and Ireland, I demonstrate that not only are duty, obligation and good citizenship understood differently, but the drivers of the concepts are significantly different. While obligation shows no relationship to voting behaviour within or across countries, good citizenship appears to be a good driver of second order elections while civic duty appears to drive first order and high saliency elections. Duty appears to be contingent upon external factors, while good citizenship appears to be contingent upon the behaviour of politicians, and citizenship education suggesting a social contract type relationship. Institutional factors appear to indirectly impact voting behaviour with a mediating effect on the strengths of duty and good citizenship. Finally, evidence suggests that previous notions of an "immutable" sense of duty are unfounded, and that an individuals’ sense of duty is contingent on a range of internal and external pressures. The first empirical chapter focuses on individual level understandings of duty, obligation and good citizenship, before the second empirical chapter expands this to look at cross-national differences in the understanding of, and drivers of duty obligation and good citizenship. Finally, the third empirical analyses a new model of civic duty and suggests that its previous use has been limited by ineffective measures. While the evidence presented in this thesis is exploratory and not generalisable or representative of any of the countries sampled, the evidence from the sample strongly suggests that future development of the study of civic duty, and further analysis of how duty, obligation and good citizenship are understood in representative samples are needed to confirm the findings presented in this thesis, and build upon what is a successful pilot study. This research finds its limitations in the number of survey items available to build a complete picture of all drivers of individual understandings of duty, obligation and good citizenship.

This thesis explores the role of the media in voting behaviour in Turkey in terms of the 2010 constitutional referendum. The media is a very important tool for both providing information and entertainment for people in Turkey. Thus, it can be claimed that the media are very powerful and have a large influence on audiences. In this study, I seek to explore the media’s power over citizens’ political choices. In other words, this thesis aims to reveal the affect the media content has on voters. To achieve this goal, I have chosen to analyse the 2010 referendum because of its special characteristics, which differentiate it from other referendums and elections in Turkey. Although there are many studies which examine the media effects on voting in the literature, these generally concentrate on developed democracies. Furthermore, general elections and presidential elections are more common in the field. The number of studies searching for the media’s effect on referendum voting in Turkey is very limited. For this reason, I prioritise referendums and the media systems to provide a better understanding of the Turkish case, as a developing democratic country. In addition to this, media content and public opinion constitute the main data for the methodological part of the study. In order to identify the influence of the media in the 2010 referendum, I employ a three-step method including firstly, an analysis of the public opinion survey data to understand voter preferences; secondly, media content analysis to see the media coverage on the referendum issue and the salience of the referendum in the media and; as the third and final step of the analysis, I link the public opinion data and the media content. My contribution to the field is the analysis of the media effects on referendum voting with a systematic and an extensive methodological approach, which is supported by the analysis of the media system in Turkey, as an example of developing country. I expect to contribute a comprehensive analysis of the referendum voting in respect of the media nested with the voter preferences to the literature on politics in Turkey.

The aim of this thesis is to overcome the simplistic idea of homo economicus, by exploring the voting behaviour of heterogeneous agents whose actions are also influenced by their view of social justice and altruism. The thesis consists of four essays which explore the role of non-economic variables in defining individuals preferences. The first essay develops the path-breaking approach initiated by Alesina and Angeletos (2005). It takes in consideration citizens' demand for fairness, and analyses their political choices in a multidimensional scenario. We show how including fairness explains various observed correlations between inequality, redistribution and growth. The second essay analyses the connection between ideology and public schooling. It presents a model in which individuals care about their personal wealth, as well as about the public expenditure, which is allocated by the government between education and the public good. The third essay deepens the analysis of the connection between the ideas of fairness and redistribution and how these evolve over time, and considers a society in which two instruments are available: an income tax and a wealth tax. To avoid double taxation of income, a tax differential is computed, which means that the income tax is subtracted from the wealth tax. The fourth essay analyses the current British Government's "Big Society" plan, which is based on the idea that granting more freedom to local communities and volunteers will compensate for a withdrawal of public agencies and spending. The main conclusion that can be drawn from this thesis is that ideology and altruism deeply influence individuals' preferences and behaviour and can affect political elections and economic fundamentals.

Au croisement d’une histoire sociale du pouvoir local, d’une ethnographie des mobilisations électorales et d’une sociologie des porte-parole, cette thèse se consacre à l’étude des conditions de représentation électorale des habitants des cités dans une ancienne municipalité communiste de la banlieue parisienne. Elle s’intéresse aux processus de production de porte-parole et à leur accès au pouvoir municipal. L’enquête s’appuie sur des entretiens approfondis et croisés avec les différents protagonistes, sur des observations directes, sur l’analyse d’archives ainsi que sur des statistiques descriptives. La thèse montre que la faible représentation des porte-parole de cités parmi les élus n’est pas tant liée à une crise des vocations qu’à une crise des débouchés dans un marché électoral fermé et dans un contexte de dévaluation du militantisme partisan. La première partie rend compte du déclin du modèle ouvriériste de représentation des classes populaires et du creusement de la distance sociale entre les élus de la gauche municipale et les fractions minoritaires des classes populaires. La seconde partie explique comment les métiers « d’éducateurs » deviennent une filière propice au porte-parolat et offrent un modèle alternatif de militantisme, faisant de l’encadrement de la jeunesse populaire, un nouvel enjeu de luttes dans l’espace du pouvoir local. Enfin, la dernière partie envisage les logiques d’importation de ces conflits associatifs et professionnels dans le champ électoral. La mobilisation des éducateurs de cités aux élections se déroule en plusieurs étapes, passant de la recherche d’alliances avec la gauche municipale à des logiques de concurrence partisane, puis d’opposition. / At the intersection of social history of local power, ethnography of electoral canvassing, and sociology of spokespersons, this thesis focuses on the study of the conditions of the electoral representation of the inhabitants of deprived estates in a former communist local council in the suburbs of Paris. It deals with the process of developing spokespeople and their access to the local power. The survey is based on thorough research, which included interviews with people from a wide variety of political backgrounds, direct observations, and the analysis of archives for study of relative statistics. Thisthesis shows that the poor representation of spokespeople from deprived estates among the elected members of the local councils isn’t so much linked to a lack of vocation as to a lack of prospects in a closed electoral market and in a context of devaluation of partisan commitment. The first part of this thesis accounts for the decline in the working class pattern of representation among the popular classes and the widening of the social gap between the elected members of the municipal left and the minority groups from the popular classes. The second part explains how the roles of community workers are becoming a route for spokespeople and providing an alternative pattern for activists, to guide theworking class youth into the new political arena which focuses on the struggles in the area of local power. Finally, the third part considers the process of bringing a range of conflicts into the electoral landscape. The recruitment in the elections of the youth workers from deprived estates goes through several stages, ranging from attempts to form an alliance with the municipal left to a process of partisan competition, then opposition.