This thesis consists of two objectives which divide it into two parts. Thus, part one explores the cyclicity of protest mobilisation in post-Soviet Kazakhstan in the 1992–2009 period and part two investigates the relationship between protest mobilisation and democratisation in the 1990s, a decade marked by early progress in democratisation followed by an abrupt reversal to authoritarianism. Acknowledging the existence of numerous competing explanations of protest cyclicity, the first part of this study utilises four major social movement perspectives – relative deprivation (RD), resource mobilisation (RMT), political opportunity structures (POS) and collective action frames (CAF) – to explain variances in protest mobilisation in Kazakhstan over time and four issue areas. Adopting a small-N case study and process-tracing technique, the thesis’s first research question enquires into which of these four theoretical perspectives has the best fit when seeking to explain protest cyclicity over time. It is hypothesised that the ‘waxing and waning’ of protest activity can best be attributed to the difficulties surrounding the identification and construction of resonant CAFs. However, the study’s findings lead to a rejection of the first hypothesis by deemphasising the role of CAFs in predicting protest cyclicity, and instead support the theoretical predictions of the POS perspective, suggesting the prevalence of structural factors such as the regime’s capacity for repression and shifts in elite alignments. The second research question revolves around variations in protest mobilisation across four issue areas and explores the reasons why socioeconomic grievances mobilised more people to protest than environmental, political and interethnic ones. According to the second hypothesis, people more readily protest around socioeconomic rather than political and other types of grievances due to the lower costs of participation in socioeconomic protests. While the regime’s propensity for repressing political protests could explain the prevalence of socioeconomic protests in the 2000s, the POS perspective’s key explanatory variable failed to account for the prevalence of socioeconomic protests in the early 1990s, resulting in the rejection of the second hypothesis. The second part of the thesis attempts to answer the third research question: How does protest mobilisation account for the stalled transition to democracy in Kazakhstan in the 1990s? Based on the theoretical assumption that instances of extensive protest mobilisation foster democratic transitions, the study’s third research hypothesis posits that transition to democracy in Kazakhstan stalled in the mid-1990s due to the failure of social movement organisations to effectively mobilise the masses for various acts of protest. This assumption receives strong empirical support, suggesting that protest mobilisation is an important facilitative factor in the democratisation process. The thesis is the first to attempt to employ classical social movement theories in the context of post-communist Central Asian societies. Additionally, the study aims to contribute to the large pool of democratisation literature which, until recently (following the colour revolutions), seemed to underplay the role of popular protest mobilisation in advancing transitions to democracy. Finally, the research is based on the author’s primary elite-interview data and content analysis of five weekly independent newspapers.

This thesis provides an institutional explanation for the peaceful solution of the conflict between the Moldovan state and its small Gagauz minority in the period from 1988 to 1995. The central argument is that different institutional arrangements during this time had a direct effect on the Moldovan state’s capacity to bring about autonomy for the Gagauz. I show how Gagauz leaders, conditioned by the territorial-based structures of the Soviet Union, mobilized a political movement to push for the creation of an autonomous republic, and how this preference for autonomy remained the consistent demand of the Gagauz throughout the early years of post-communist transition. This finding supports the contention that Gagauz preferences cannot be used to explain the rich variation in political outcomes during this period. I assert that the critical changes were essentially institutional: new electoral laws; revised parliamentary rules and procedures; and a complete rewriting of Moldova’s constitution. These innovations were crucial in enabling the inclusive-minded majority in the Moldovan parliament to overcome the power of nationalist veto players by increasing the majority’s control of the legislative agenda. The importance of these institutional factors is examined by careful analysis of the different stages of the Moldovan parliament’s accommodation of the Gagauz: from separatism and stalemate to compromise. Furthermore, I reassert the central role of institutional arrangements by discounting the external influence of Turkey as a patron state on the successful negotiations between Moldova and the Gagauz. Using previously unresearched archival material, unstructured interviews with many of the key actors, and local media reporting, this thesis challenges existing accounts of the Gagauz conflict in Moldova. These accounts assert that either the Gagauz reaction to titular nationalism or the shifting preferences of strategic-thinking elites was the key causal factor of the political outcomes observed during this period. In contrast, this thesis shows that institutional design played a decisive role in the resolution of this conflict. The findings of this research offer useful lessons for other ethnically-divided states with mobilized minorities.

This thesis examines the political process of health care reform between 1989 and 1998 in the most advanced sizable political economy in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) – the Czech Republic. Its aim is to explain the political process bringing about post-Communist health policy change and stimulate new debates on welfare state transformation in CEE. The thesis challenges the conventional view that post-Communist health care reform in CEE was designed and implemented to improve the health status of the people, as desired by the people themselves. I suggest that this is a dangerous over-rationalisation, and argue that post-Communist health care reform in the Czech Republic was the by-product of haphazard democratic political struggle between emerging elites for power and economic resources. The thesis employs the analytical narrative method to describe and analyse the actors, institutions, ideas and history behind the health policy change. The analysis is informed by welfare state theory, elite theory, interest group politics theory, the assumptions of methodological individualism and rational choice theory, and Schumpeter’s doctrine of democracy. Its focus is on the interests of health policy actors and how they interacted within an unhinged, but fast-consolidating, institutional framework. The results demonstrate that, while historical legacies and liberal ideas featured prominently in the rhetoric accompanying health policy change, in Realpolitik, these were merely the disposable, instrumental devices of opportunistic, self-interested elites. The resultant explanation of health policy change stresses the primacy of agency over structure and formulates four important mechanisms of health policy change: opportunism, tinkering, enterprise, and elitism. In conclusion, the relevance of major welfare state theories to the given case is assessed and implications for welfare state research in CEE are drawn.

A large part of the study of politics is dedicated to identifying the circumstances under which democracy will flourish. Putnam made a major contribution to this field through his concept of social capital as developed in Making Democracy Work. Putnam found that communities with a high number of civic associations –i.e. social capital- had a better chance of developing an effective style of democratic government. This definition of social capital sparked much subsequent research and policy activity. It is argued here, however, that this work ignored the immediate needs of societies which do not have the required stock of social capital. There is still little guidance available on how effective government can be achieved even if the right societal circumstances are absent. This thesis hopes to find inspiration from government agencies that were successful despite their challenging social capital conditions. It specifically looks at sixteen public utilities on the Caribbean islands of Aruba, Curacao and St. Kitts between 2005 and 2009. The thesis then systematically investigates the relationship between the performance of the agencies and the behaviour of their senior officials. It emerges that in the absence of social capital, governance is in these cases mainly hampered by a deluge of irrelevant data. Successful utilities overcame this flood by constantly upgrading the quality of information, implementing a strict yet inclusive style of governance, and allowing strong leaders the space to translate words into actions. These outcomes suggest that social capital forms an important tool for ordering information, and that, in its absence, there are still alternative strategies available to secure success nonetheless.

This thesis is about the legitimacy of political authority in general and international legal institutions (ILIs) in particular. It is divided into two parts with three chapters corresponding to each part. The first part presents an account of legitimate political authority that is based on Joseph Raz's service conception of authority but also makes some important modifications to it. The central claim of the first part is that the legitimacy of political authorities in general, as measured by the standard of Raz's Normal Justification Thesis, depends in a crucial way on the ability of the subjects to get involved –more so than Raz is prepared to admit– in the activities that are relevant in the political domain. The thesis offers a general account of legitimate political authority, i.e. one that is valid for any type of political authority. The second part, however, examines the implications of this account for the legitimacy of ILIs. These are non-state authorities, such as the World Trade Organisation or the International Criminal Court, that deal with problems of global political relevance. Because of this global approach, the subjects of ILIs (i.e. those whose reasons are to be served by the ILI) are not confined to the boundaries of regions or states, but distributed across the world. ILIs operate by creating, interpreting, and applying public international law. Despite some striking differences between ILIs and other types of political authority (particularly states), I argue that they all ought to be measured by the same standard of legitimacy, namely the Normal Justification Thesis. But I also argue that the requirements for meeting this standard of legitimacy may vary according to the type of political authority (especially with regard to the requirement of democracy).

This dissertation presents a theoretical framework about which voters parties distribute to and with which policies. To develop this full framework of distributive policies, the dissertation proceeds in two stages. First, it analyses which voters parties have more incentives to target distributive policies. Second, it also develops the conditions under which political parties can focus exclusively on these voters or need to combine this strategy with appeals to a broader electorate. The first part of the argument analyses which voters parties have at the centre of their distributive strategies, or, in the words of Cox and McCubbins (1986) to whom parties will give an available extra dollar for distribution. The argument is that core voters provide more efficient conditions for distribution, contradicting Stokes’ (2005) claim that a dollar spent on core voters is a wasted dollar. The explanation is twofold. First, core supporters might not vote for another party, but they can get demobilised. Once we include the effects on turnout, core voters are more responsive. Their party identification makes them especially attentive and reactive to economic benefits provided by their party. Secondly, incumbents cannot individually select who receives a distributive policy, and not all voters are equally reachable with distributive policies. When a party provides a policy, it cannot control if some of those resources go to voters the party is not interested in. Core supporters are more homogenous groups with more definable traits, whereas swing voters are a residual category composed by heterogeneous voters with no shared interests. This makes it easier for incumbents to shape distributive benefits that target core voters more exclusively. These mechanisms define the general distribution hypothesis: parties will focus on core voters, by targeting their distributive strategies to them. The second part of the dissertation develops the conditions under which politicians stick to this distributive strategy or, instead, would provide more universalistic spending to a more undefined set of recipients. The conventional argument explaining this choice relies on the electoral system, arguing that proportional systems give more incentives to provide universalistic policies than majoritarian systems. This dissertation challenges this argument and provides two other contextual conditions that define when parties have a stronger interest in their core supporters or in a more general electorate. First, the geographic distribution of core supporters across districts is a crucial piece of information to know the best distributive strategy. When parties’ core supporters are geographically concentrated, they cannot simply rely on them, as the party will always fall short of districts to win the election. Therefore, parties will have greater incentives to expand their electorate by buying off other voters. This should reduce the predicted differences between electoral systems in the provision of universalistic programmes. Secondly, the policy positions of candidates are a result of strategic considerations that respond to other candidates’ positions. Thus, I argue that parties adapt their distributive strategies to the number of competing parties, independently of the electoral system. In a two-party scenario, parties need broader coalitions of electoral support. In equilibrium, any vote can change the electoral outcome. As more parties compete, the breadth of parties’ electorates is reduced and parties will find narrow distributive policies more profitable. In summary, the main contribution of this dissertation one is to provide a new framework to study distributive politics. This framework makes innovations both on the characterisation of swing and core electoral groups, and the rationale of parties’ distributive strategies, contributing to advance previous theoretical and empirical research.

The electric vehicle (EV) has been regarded as one of the most promising alternative fuel vehicle technologies that could reduce China’s energy reliance on imported oil and transport sector carbon emissions. The success of EVs in China will depend on a series of determinants including their energy consumption and emission reduction potentials, battery performance and costs, charging infrastructure provision, the driving behaviour and the commercialization strategies. Some issues have been intensively investigated by previous research whilst some others gradually receive academic and governmental attentions. Instead of covering all determinants, this thesis focuses on four key aspects of the electric car development in China: the energy consumption and carbon emissions of electric cars based on the country’s energy mix; the expected electric car driving behaviour and its impacts on the power grid; the deployment strategy of charging infrastructure and the business operation models that could reduce the purchase cost of electric cars and accelerate their market diffusion. The research finds that according to the current energy mix and driving behaviour in China, the introduction of electric cars would largely reduce the transport sectors’ oil consumption. However, the carbon emission saving of electric cars requires a synchronized progress in the energy industry and the power grid infrastructure. Without the growing adoption of renewable sources in the electricity generation mix and the high efficient power transmission infrastructure, electric cars could achieve little environmental benefits particularly for carbon emission reduction. This research also finds that the current external costs of carbon emissions from cars are not high enough to justify financial policies that would favour electric vehicles. Moving towards cleaner technologies at present may not be justified on economic terms but it is justified on political and environmental terms. In addition, the performance of current electric cars, the driving range per charge in particular, is still significantly inferior to conventional vehicles running on petroleum fuels, which poses a remarkable challenge for electric cars’ market acceptance and implies the importance of charging infrastructure provision. This research estimates the charging impact of electric cars on the power grid in two case study cities through comparing charging infrastructure deployment strategies integrating three charging methods in both cities. Some innovative business operating models that aim to reduce the high initial purchase costs of electric cars are simulated. It shows all these models require substantial political and financial interventions to stimulate both supply (charging service and infrastructure provision) and demand (consumers purchase) in the early stage of market penetration for electric cars. Finally, the thesis provides recommendations for the policy implementation timing and stresses the importance of the parallel development in the upstream low carbon energy supply and the downstream vehicle (battery) research and development (R&D) in the near term.

In this thesis, I report the results from the first randomized field experiments conducted in collaboration with party-affiliated candidates and campaigns in the United Kingdom. The papers presented as part of this thesis test both the limits and possibilities of campaign influence, in a partisan political environment. During election campaigns parties provide signals to voters, voluntarily or involuntarily imposing a structure, and thereby constraints, on individuals’ electoral decisions. By integrating insights about heuristic and social decision-making into the experimental campaign literature, I formulate testable hypotheses about the direct and indirect effects of party cues on campaign mobilization and persuasion. The first paper, The Heuristic Function of Party Affiliation in Voter Mobilization Campaigns, addresses how the provision of party cues, used during campaign phone calls, affects turnout among party supporters, opponents and unattached voters. The second paper on Household Partisan Composition and Voter Mobilization, explores the spillover effects from the previous experiment, testing whether campaign-induced mobilization between household members is conditioned by the partisan composition of a household, and the partisan intensity of a campaign message. Paper three investigates if candidates who are Reaching Across The Partisan Divide can win over supporters of rival parties. In the fourth paper, I test if Impersonal, But Noticeable methods of voter contact, such as door hangers and text messages, affect the turnout decisions of partisans and unattached voters. The final paper, The National Effects of Subnational Representation, highlights the importance of local party organization for the outcomes of national elections. The results of this thesis show the electoral consequences of direct and indirect interactions between campaigns and voters of different partisanship, and point to strategies that allow constituency campaigns to successfully navigate challenging partisan environments.

This dissertation investigates the emergence and impact of social movements in Chile since the reinstatement of democracy in 1990. Seeking to make an important contribution to the understanding of the reconstruction of collective action in post-transition Chile, I focus on two cases which have been particularly successful in questioning the benefits of market-friendly policies introduced by the military regime (1973-1989) and continued to a great extent by the Concertación governments (1990-2010). The first case is the 2006 Pingüino movement, named after the secondary school students’ penguin-like black and white school uniforms, which forced a substantial discussion on the education system’s segregating effects and its neoliberal underpinnings. The second case is the 2007 Contratista movement, composed of subcontracted workers of CODELCO – Chile’s main state-owned copper-extracting company. The Contratistas repoliticised a long-dormant debate on labour issues and revitalised a trade union movement which had been in decline in previous decades. I draw on the Contentious Politics approach, which stresses social movements’ interaction with the institutional terrain, and explain the emergence of the Pingüinos and Contratistas as the result of three distinct but intertwined processes: the opening up of the structure of political opportunities involved in the rise of President Bachelet; the deeply felt discontent with the education and labour reforms introduced by the military regime and kept largely intact by the Concertación governments; and the movements’ adoption of non-hierarchical organisational forms as a way of reconstructing collective action ‘from below’. In terms of political impact, I show that both the students and the contract workers were successful in introducing issues onto the public agenda that were not there before the emergence of the movements. The extent to which this was translated into bills that reflected the concerns of the movements, however, depended on their capacity to continue to exert pressure on the government and to forge political alliances. In this way, I argue that the impact of the movements was indirect and followed a two-stage process through which first the Pingüinos and Contratistas influenced aspects of their external environment, namely, public opinion and political alliances, and then the latter influenced policy. Overall, my research shows the links between processes at the micro-level (the development of organisational resources and grievance interpretation) and their subsequent impact at the macro-level (agenda-setting and policy impact) – a development that has undoubtedly acquired greater relevance and analytical urgency since the wide range of protests that have taken place around the world since 2011.

Party membership levels in the new democracies of central and east European were predicted to remain universally low, stymied by post-communist legacies, the availability of state funding and the prevalence of mass media communications (van Biezen, 2003; Kopecký, 2007). However, more than two decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall, membership levels vary considerably between countries, and also between individual parties within party systems. Using freshly gathered party membership data, elite surveys and interviews, this thesis explores a number of institutional hypotheses to test whether, as in western democracies, electoral institutions influence how parties organise and campaign. This thesis finds that national electoral systems, municipal electoral rules and business funding regulations have an observable impact on how parties use their members. In particular, 'decentralised' electoral systems encourage greater involvement of members in voter contacting and other small campaign tasks. This thesis concludes that, contrary to the dominant literature, the availability of state funding has little impact on party membership recruitment. Instead, central and east European parties' attitudes to members are shaped by a complex interaction of institutional, cultural, ideological and strategic factors.