No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

This thesis systematically examines vital socio-political factors which are impediments to democracy in Pakistan since 1947. The object is not to reach a single verdict on whether or not the whole regime can legitimately be called democratic, but to determine by empirical observation how democratic it is in its various parts. Democratic audit is a systematic, qualitative assessment of the performance of a regime's many parts against agreed democratic standards.

As media and entertainment products flood across porous national borders around Southeast Asia, wary local elites have been able to sustain their legitimacy, despite rumblings to the contrary. Global industry trends like conglomeration, commodification and celebrification, mean few real challenges to the existing political and economic status quo. Whilst modernization theory assumes that the globalizing communication media would spread liberal, open societies, as this thesis will show, this is not the case in Southeast Asia. Despite the fact that the Asian Financial Crisis undermined the developmental state championed by many of the Region’s illiberal governments, it did not give rise to a liberal alternative, but to something more hybrid and complex which this thesis will reveal. The development of the communication media has had important implications for the nature of politics and political process in the region. However, rather than inspiring democratic ideals in an informed and educated public, it is commercial concerns which have come to dominate its agenda since the Asian Financial Crisis. This results in a churn of generic, even pasteurized media offerings, as media owners seek to woo concerned governments, and further their own business interests. The local media is not immune to these general trends, and tends to be locked in its own battle of competing interests, only very occasionally reflecting the political aspirations of its audience and their somewhat muted call for political change, rarely laying the seed. As a result, although there are interesting local responses to the growth of the media and entertainment industry and the changes being wrought by the Internet and other new technologies, the mass media has developed an ambiguous relationship with the political process. More significantly, local elites have proved resilient in the face of the challenge of the globalized media and, acting against the background of the “war on terror”, have been able to accelerate illiberal media options, maintaining their control strategies albeit, at times, around newly formed coalitions of support. In fact, this thesis demonstrates that the traditional elites have regrouped since the Asian Financial Crisis of 1997, and are restoring their control over the media, where possible by ownership or legal means or, alternatively, where that has proved difficult, they have increasingly taken the sophisticated approach of using the techniques espoused by the perception industries and by public relations consultants to ensure they communicate effectively in an increasingly complex media environment.

Between 1860 and 1940 Aotearoa New Zealand’s economy and economic base was transformed in a number of significant ways, following similar patterns in earlier-established British colonies. The influx of European immigrants drastically altered the demography and contested land – the economic base. Money became increasingly important as medium of exchange and unit of account. Whereas the economy was unregulated or lightly-regulated before 1860, regulation increasingly formalised economic relations and institutions, and work organisation became more impersonal. In urban areas these transformations were substantially complete by 1940. However, in rural areas, where most Mäori and fewer Päkehä lived, economic transformation was more of a hybrid than a complete change from one form to another. The informal economy (unmeasured and unregulated), and particularly the rural informal economy, contributed (and still contributes) quantitatively to the national economy. Whether within Mäori communities, within Päkehä communities or between the two, the more informal rural economy depended on social relations to a large extent. Mäori had choices about how they related to the introduced economic system, ranging from full engagement to rejection and non-involvement, with numerous negotiated positions in between. With the conviction that they could satisfactorily negotiate terms of participation, Mäori had invited Europeans to the far north. The extent of Mäori involvement in all the dominant (formal) economic activities of the far north, 1860-1940, clearly indicates their efforts were integral rather than peripheral to the Päkehä economy. But Mäori economic activity has been relegated to the shadows of economic history. The relationship between the two systems is better understood by recognising the interplay between formal and informal (shadow) economies. The social organisation of work, the kaupapa of the informal economy, the diversity of strategies and tactics, and relationship building (both bonding and bridging), were the strengths from which far northern Mäori relentlessly engaged with the Päkehä economy, while maintaining a degree of autonomy until World War One. In effect they played an invisible hand of cards, invisible, that is, to studies of the formal economy. / Whole document restricted, but available by request, use the feedback form to request access.