Deliberative democratic theory proposes an active citizenry that becomes empowered by discussing and taking and active part in politics. There is a large gap between theory and practice in the deliberative democratic literature. Namely, while many scholars have theorized why deliberative democracy can be considered normatively desirable, fewer studies have measured whether the benefits gained from deliberation are plausible. Almost all of the major empirical studies in the literature involve either quasi-experimental designs or fieldwork. As such, it becomes difficult to tell whether or not deliberation does produce benefits for individuals, and if so, how durable these gains are. This doctoral dissertation project explores the individual benefits of deliberation by defining, describing and defending the desirability of the more commonly cited benefits. This is followed by a full experimental set-up that includes one control group and three different treatment groups that participate in different forms of deliberation. The treatment groups include: a group that only watches deliberation, a group that participates in a non-hierarchical and informal discussion, and a group that participates in a rigorously-moderated and highly structured deliberation. The hypotheses indicate that different treatment conditions will have different effects on the existence and magnitude of the two types of individual benefits: civic and educative.

This dissertation uses the history of political thought to shed light on the disconnect between the prominent place of judgments about the character in American democratic life, and the marginalized place of those judgments in contemporary democratic theory. By tracing the origins of that disconnect back into the history of political philosophy, and by locating an alternative approach to questions of character in the political and ethical writings of Aristotle, the dissertation brings out important connections between contemporary democratic theory and key developments in the history of ideas, and it recovers an ancient account of character that turns out still to be relevant to the dynamics of modern citizenship. The dissertation begins by showing how character is key to Aristotle‘s distinction between "correct" and "deviant" regimes in the Politics: not only are correct regimes distinguished by the character of those who rule, but the distinguishing feature of citizen-rulers in more correct regimes turns out to be their ability to appreciate what is excellent in the character of their fellow citizens. I then trace the decline of Aristotle‘s approach in the work of Machiavelli, Hobbes, Rousseau, and Kant, showing how Machiavelli‘s famously unsettling account of the relationship between moral goodness, political leadership, and popular government made its way into the foundations of later democratic theory. Finally, I return to Aristotle, showing how his treatment of philia or "friendship" in his ethical writings provides an important prelude to the ideas from the Politics we will already have considered. By taking into account both the high and often noble aspirations that inform considerations of character but also their potential to derail into disenchantment or dangerous ill-will, Aristotle‘s approach offers a theory capable of engaging directly with both the promise and the pitfalls of character judgments in democratic life. / Government

This thesis explores the tensions between constitutional forms of democracy and the practice-based understanding of democracy found among ancient Greek and recent post-structural theorists. In drawing from Plato’s discussion of the constitutions of varying political regimes, this thesis hones in on his assertion that the democratic city does not have a single constitution due to the freedom of its citizens. Contemporary understandings of democracy, such as deliberative democratic theory, have largely overlooked the kind of power embodied in democracy by focusing attention on deepening the forms of participation in existing practices of government. By drawing from a practice-based understanding of democracy, this thesis responds to the problems of exclusion produced by statist accounts of democracy. Taking the example of First Nations in Canada, the thesis asks whether new forms of protest, such as Idle No More, embody the spirit of democratic practice outlined by the ancient Greeks. / Graduate

<p>My dissertation seeks to clarify the stakes of recent calls to increase civic friendship in our communities by initiating a conversation between contemporary and historical theoretical work about the requirements and consequences of using friendship as a model for social and political relationships between citizens. Friends’ lives are bound together by shared activity and by mutual concern and support; in what ways do relations between citizens, who often begin as strangers, take up these attitudes and behaviors? What kinds of civic friendship are possible in our contemporary democratic communities? How are they cultivated? And what are their political advantages and disadvantages? These questions guide the project as a whole. </p><p>I begin by canvassing some recent and popular work by Robert Bellah et al., Robert Putnam, and Danielle Allen in order to clarify the claims they make about different forms of civic friendship. The chapters that follow focus on the work of Aristotle, Tocqueville, and Adam Smith respectively in order to respond to various gaps I find in the contemporary accounts. I assess what each thinker, contemporary and canonical, can offer us today as we continue to think about the most sustainable and fair ways in which citizens can relate to one another in vast and diverse contemporary democracies. Along the way I address several important over-arching issues: the relationship between self-interest and care for others; the relationship between different sorts of equality and civic friendship; and the different roles that reason, emotions, habits, and institutions play in the cultivation of various kinds of civic friendship. I conclude that equality and justice ought to be both prerequisites and consequences of civic friendship, that self-interest is not a sufficient source for robust civic friendship and that instead some kind of imaginative and emotional motivation is needed, and that civic friendship must be understood as both a moral and a political phenomenon.</p> / Dissertation

What determines governance quality in authoritarian settings? The existing literature on governance concentrates on democratic governance and provides no ready answer. By focusing on the world’s largest authoritarian country, China, this study delineates an authoritarian model of governance quality. In the model, I argue that in order for good governance to occur, an authoritarian government must have both the ability and the desire to govern well, and the current authoritarian government in China has both. Specifically, its ability to govern well comes from 1) its sovereignty within the territory, 2) its fiscal resources, and 3) its party-state structure blended with decentralization, term and age limits, and performance-based promotion. Its desire to govern well comes from 1) the regime’s need for political legitimacy; 2) good governance as an important source of political legitimacy; 3) the decay of alternative sources of legitimacy; 4) the double uncertainty of authoritarian politics that compels leaders to highly active in delivering good governance. I formulate key hypotheses and test them with a variety of original datasets. The Chinese County Governance Data are collected from county government websites. The data on county-level public opinion are constructed through Multilevel Regression and Poststratification (MRP) based on the 2010 Chinese General Social Survey and the 2000 national census data. County leader characteristics are collected from Database of Local Officials. The empirical analysis general supports the model. My study reveals an authoritarian logic of governance which centers on the party state’s top-down control and the regime’s insecurity about political legitimacy. My study also demonstrates that China’s model of governance is not shared by most authoritarian countries today.

The thesis analyses Turkey's and Russia's foreign relations with each other based on the theoretical premise that democratic peace can explain similar behaviour among authoritarian regimes as well. The thesis explores Russia's and Turkey's distinct forms or authoritarianism, before employing a detailed qualitative content analysis on official documents from Russia's and Turkey's presidents and foreign ministries. The readers will attain a broader understanding of democratic theory and the link between political regimes and peaceful relations. Keywords Democratic Theory; Russia; Turkey; Political Regime; Qualitative Content Analysis; MAXQDA

Over the past five years, Sovereign Wealth Funds (SWFs) have become a prominent phenomenon in contemporary capitalism. Described as government investment vehicles that invest state wealth in financial markets, the majority of the world's 60-plus funds have been established since the year 2000. Despite extensive treatments of SWFs' geopolitical and international significance, ethical and domestic level analyses are sparse. In response, this thesis interrogates three key normative questions raised by the funds for the domestic citizen-state relationship: (1) How (and by whom) should sovereign funds be managed? (2) How should sovereign wealth be invested? (3) How should the earnings of sovereign fund investment be distributed? In answering these questions, this thesis aims to dispel ambiguity over the ownership status of sovereign funds, evident in popular and academic discourse and within communities that establish these entities. For this task, it draws on recently revived fiduciary theory of the citizen-state relationship to argue that the rightful owner of these funds is the citizenry - not states or governments who enjoy physical and legal possession of SWFs. It goes on to examine the implications of this fiduciary state conception of SWF ownership, asking how citizen-owners should enjoy control over and benefit from the distinct constituent parts of their SWF property: the institution of the fund, the underlying sovereign wealth and the financial returns earned on the investment of its assets. The model of citizen ownership defended demands substantially increased popular control over SWF management and the investment of sovereign wealth, as well as direct benefit rights for citizen-owners to fund income through individualised distribution of investment returns. Examination of existing practice among SWFs demonstrates that this normative ideal is far, although not impossibly distant from current institutional practice.

This thesis identifies and analyses the major patterns of class-based structural violence (based on the differential access to class power) in some of the main areas of social organisation in Britain in the period from 1979 to 2010 (the period of neoliberal consolidation in Britain). It does this by pioneering the empirical operationalisation of a neo-Galtungian concept and typology of structural violence. Additionally, the thesis refines the theoretical lens on structural violence for the primary purpose of improving its ability to reach new insights in the process of the empirical analysis of class-based structural violence. These improvements are to a large extent based on a theoretical and typological synthesis of Galtung’s theory of structural violence with Amartya Sen’s conceptualisation of instrumental freedoms. To avoid a static examination of social structures, my work analyses the dynamics of various forms of structural violence in the analysed period understood as the dialectical interplay of structural and subjective agential factors. The extensive and sustained employment of the concept of class-based structural violence in this thesis through a number of specific case studies contributes to a more integrated understanding of the research problem and verifies the hypothesis about the existence of extensive and systemic class-based structural violence in Britain across several main dimensions of social life. My study also elucidates the character of this structural violence and some of the most prominent causal mechanisms by which it is reproduced. This initial cartography of class-based structural violence in Britain also identifies a number of new research questions in relation to the analysed topic.

This thesis explores the changing prerequisites for accountability in terms of Swedish arms export. The study aims to uncover what has happened with the conditions for accountability in Sweden since the responsibility for export control was transferred from the government to the public administration. By investigating how the term “accountability” has been used in the literature of democratic theory, an abstract ideal model is being created.  Comparing the changed structural arrangements, with each other and the ideal model, it is concluded that the prerequisites for accountability now seems to be in a worse state than they were before.

<p>In this dissertation, I advance a new interpretation of the meaning and political implications of Isaiah Berlin's theory of value pluralism. My argument focuses on two puzzles within the literature on value pluralism: first, value pluralist political theorists advance a variety of differing political views on an ostensibly value pluralist basis; second, and more deeply, their writings betray significant ambiguity on what value pluralism means in the first place. I identify two central sources of these problems. First, two distinct sets of ideas in Berlin's work, which I label the "moral-practical" and "societal groupings" versions of value pluralism, are persistently conflated by both Berlin and more recent value pluralist theorists. Second, attempts to justify a political view on the basis of value pluralism run aground on a "priority problem" stemming from the central value pluralist concept of incommensurability. In my approach, I maintain the distinction between the moral-practical and societal groupings theories, focusing on the moral-practical version as a more original and less well-understood contribution of Berlin's thought. I also develop a strategy, which I call "giving incommensurability its due," that avoids the priority problem by focusing on metaethical (or second-order), epistemic, and procedural considerations. This strategy supports two major sets of political implications: a liberal-constitutional framework of basic rights and liberties, and a robust, vibrant form of participatory and deliberative democratic politics. This turn to democracy constitutes an important shift vis-à-vis the current literature, which has, up to now, been preoccupied with value pluralism's relationship to liberalism.</p> / Dissertation