This thesis examines the development of mental health activism in the women’s movement in England from the establishment of the Women’s Liberation Movement (WLM) in 1968 until the end of the first nationwide charity campaign to focus on women and mental health, MIND’s Stress on Women, in 1994. Constructing in-depth case studies, this thesis assesses the assumption in the late 1960s and early 1970s that consciousness-raising facilitated women’s positive mental health, examines the formation of the London Women’s Liberation Workshop Psychology Group, traces the development of the Women’s Therapy Centre in London, and explores how the mental health charity MIND increasingly utilised and popularised women’s movement ideas and approaches across the 1980s and 1990s. In doing so, it explores how women’s movement mental health activists increasingly aligned feminist critiques of psychiatry and psychology, with the positive promotion of psychotherapy. Existing accounts of women’s movement mental health activism focus on the rejection of psychology and psychotherapy by its members. This thesis highlights how women’s movement members established community-based organisations and grassroots self-help groups to bolster their understandings of themselves and their political affiliations, and to support women experiencing mental health concerns and emotional distress. It therefore produces a more expansive understanding of the development of the personal politics integral to the women’s movement, challenges the popular narrative that women’s movement organisations became depoliticised in the 1980s, and documents the previously unexplored contribution of the women’s movement to the development of radical therapy networks and community-based mental health care in late twentieth-century England.

This thesis builds on quantitative British politics scholarship with four papers unified by a strong emphasis on positivist theory, research design and cutting edge statistical methodology. I examine political behaviour among representatives in the UK's House of Commons and voting behaviour in the 2016 EU Referendum. I show that the UK parliamentary system's reliance on strong party discipline has important adverse consequences for public approval. Firstly, I show how high-salience debates such Prime Minister's Questions bring out the worst behaviours in MPs. As parties' access to the floor (ability to make speeches) is reduced, MP behaviour becomes more aggressive. Secondly, with co-authors, I examine the conditions under which ideologically extreme MPs are more likely to vote against their party. We find that the impact of such behaviour affects party unity more often when in government, meaning that parties are more likely to appear united until they elected, at which point party divides become more apparent once again. Thirdly, I show that career progression in the House of Commons rewards 'insider' behaviour such as increased attendance and participation in House of Commons debate and a focus on national rather than local issues. The power political parties have over the future of political leadership tends to centralise power and reward party politicians to whom the general public feels no strong affinity. In the final paper, we analyse voting behaviour during the 2016 EU Referendum assessing the potential effect of rainfall on the referendum result. We find that if the referendum had occurred on a sunny day, the likely result would have widened the margin of victory for Vote Leave. In the most comprehensive statistical analysis of the referendum to date, we concur with earlier analyses that that the surprise result was driven by strong Brexit support in districts of economic and social deprivation, particularly in rural and suburban locations.

This thesis is an examination of several local families and their role shaping the palatinate of Durham’s position within the early Tudor state. Histories of the late medieval and early Tudor bishopric have tended to treat the palatinate as either an intractable obstacle to the consolidation of the English state, or as a highly distinctive and autonomous seat of power in the North-East, free from any meaningful encroachment by the crown. This thesis reframes Durham within the wider context of advancements in the early Tudor state and, particularly, more recent discussions on the nature and efficacy of patron-client or patronage networks. The central themes of this thesis are threefold. First, rather than see the history of Durham, its bishops, and landowners as a pitched battle against crown intervention, this thesis posits a new interpretation, one which foregrounds cooperation and mutual benefit. Early Tudor attitudes towards Durham were, for the most part, not grounded on a desire to abolish or undermine the bishopric and its political and administrative infrastructure. Where Durham’s resources could be applied for the betterment of the national polity, successive governments sought to work with, not against, the region’s landowners and officers, who in turn realised the benefits to be had from forging contacts with the court and other senior royal officials. Second, this increasingly pragmatic stance was nurtured through the formation and consolidation of patronage networks. It was through these symbiotic networks that both the crown and local landowners changed the nature of the bishopric’s role within the national polity; much like neighbouring Yorkshire, patron-client networks had the effect of bringing Durham more closely into line with central government, but not necessarily to the detriment of local customs and ideas of government. Finally, by examining the role of local landowners from outside the bishopric, in conjunction with Durham’s leading families and the bishops’ episcopal households, this thesis argues that the palatinate formed part of what was a highly effective regional community.

The last two decades have seen major interventions in naturalisation legislation across much of the ‘industrialised’ world, with successive UK administrations introducing and refining citizenship tests, language proficiency requirements, and ceremonial performances in an explicit bid to elevate the acquisition of citizen-status from a ‘right’ to a ‘privilege’ (Home Office, 2013a). In this thesis, I draw on theorisations of the border as a geopolitical, a biopolitical, and a ‘neuropolitical’ (Isin, 2004) phenomenon, and thus conceptualise these newly-instituted ‘citizenisation’ (Fortier, 2017) processes as a political project, as part of an assemblage of bordering practices through which to heighten and manage the anxieties of the neurotic subject within the securitised state, and to realise the nation state in domopolitical terms as a home (Walters, 2004). While discourse researchers have certainly provided much important empirical insight into the strategies employed in contemporary citizenship documentation, and in the broader discursive contexts in which these citizenship regimes are situated (e.g. Wodak et al, 2009; Löwenheim and Gazit, 2009), I argue that the citizenship regime cannot be understood as wholly constituted through the linguistic practices of élite policy and media actors, but should instead be conceptualised more broadly as discursive practice: as a complex set of linguistic, material, and symbolic practices. From this premise, I situate my research within a particular local context, drawing together a data set which takes into account policy documents and testing materials, observations of testing and ceremonial rituals, and interviews with twenty actors involved in the production of the citizenship regime, including citizenship officials and recent and prospective citizens. Articulating themes across the data set, I look to the ways in which both the state and the Good citizen-subject are performed and secured within this discursive landscape, and find important moments of disruption and contestation to this dominant discursive formation.

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This thesis is an intellectual history of James Mill's political thought, which focuses on four specific topics: his ideas on parliamentary reform; on libel law, or the freedom of the press; education, or man's ability to utilise his reason; and on established religion, primarily in the form of Mill's attitude towards the Church of England. At face-value, the thesis' main aim is to contextualize in detail Mill's published writings on these four subjects (which comprise its four chapters) by virtue of comparing them with unpublished manuscript material present in his common place books, which were transcribed as part of this PhD project. Although the chapters are developed in such a way that they can be seen as independent studies of Mill's thought, there are of course more general themes which run through the thesis as a whole, as well as specific links between particular topics. One notable example is the notion that Mill employed ‘dissimulation' in his published writings, that is to say that he did not necessarily express in public the full extent of his ideas, because of a fear that their radical extent would attract intrigue or prosecution from the reactionary governmental or religious authorities in Britain. It is also prudent to note how Mill's well-documented intellectual influences are incorporated into the thesis. By this we are referring to the importance of the Scottish Enlightenment background to Mill's own education and upbringing near Aberdeen and in Edinburgh, and also the doctrine of Utilitarianism he adopted from Jeremy Bentham once in London. The particular nature of the material found in the common place books warrants a full re-evaluation of these influences, as well as an exploration of the possibility that additional influences beyond these two contexts have thus far been understated in studies of Mill. This suggests the value of the study to current Mill scholarship.

That the public distrusts politicians is prevalent in both polling and academic literature (Uberoi & Apostolova, 2017; van der Meer, 2017; YouGov, 2017a, 2017b). Whether it's true that politicians cannot actually be trusted is really immaterial. If McCombs (2004) and Lippman (1922) are correct, and the media has an enormous impact on public opinion simply by establishing this dire narrative, then the perception of mistrust has become fact. Citizens are disengaged, misinformed, and weary. Politicians issue statements to meet political expediencies. Trust is a critical component of democracy, and only by behaving in a substantively new manner can politicians restore it. The irony is that this image cannot be artificially constructed; they must behave naturally and re-introduce themselves to a public sceptical of media training and spin. To restore trust they must present themselves as they truly are. They must behave authentically. This thesis examines the tweets made by UK MPs during 2011 and 2012 (n=774,467) for evidence of authenticity and establishes behavioural models that identify authentic talk in large Twitter datasets. The analytical .framework that defines authenticity and informs the content analysis is broadly based on the prior work examining authentic behaviour in reality TV conducted by Coleman (2006) that reveals performative characteristics that audiences are drawn to; Hall's (2009) examination of the good and bad effects of mediated communication on reality TV audiences; Liebes's (2001) examination of sincerity and humility in the performance of authenticity by politicians; Montgomery's (2001b) work examining the presence of authenticity in the press behaviour of UK MPs and his examination of Goffman's relevance to mediated communication (Montgomery, 2001a). This study also challenges Goffman's Dramaturgical theory which positions public communication either on stage or backstage by suggesting that the backstage is now performed onstage (Goffman, 1959, 1981). Additionally, this content analysis is informed by Henneberg and Scammell's examination of how competing perceptions of democratic theory can be used to evaluate a politician's political marketing techniques (Henneberg, Scammell, & O'Shaughnessy, 2009) and positions the behavioural models within these techniques. It is also important to note that the 774,467 tweets subjected to a quantitative and qualitative content analysis, as far as can be established, is the only large-scale longitudinal study of parliamentary Twitter behaviour.

This research contributes to the growing subfield of ideational political economy, by developing a theory of narrative in economic policymaking. Economic policymakers operate under conditions of perpetual uncertainty, but must achieve and project certitude in order to support confidence, and as a basis for policy. This dilemma is principally resolved through the construction of economic narratives: causal stories that mobilise a set of economic ideas in order to define the economy, its relationship to policy, and its expected future trajectory. Such narratives should be understood as social constructions, not as projections of, or diversions from, the material facts. However they are vulnerable to events that fall outside their account of the economy, a vulnerability which tends to increase with time. Constructivist political economy has historically been oriented more to the explanation of change than continuity. The resilience of neoliberal policy frameworks through the crisis of 2008 has therefore posed challenges for a subfield that has tended to treat ideas and discourse as a source of creative political agency, and a counterweight to the conservatism of interests and institutions. The thesis presents a case study of the New Labour government of the UK (1997-2010) in which ideas and narrative are shown to be largely changeresistant, generating political, and to some extent policy, continuity through crisis. The case study disaggregates two properties of economic policy narratives: internal validity, which is concerned with consistency and coherence, and external validity, which relates to the perceived external conditions. By tracing the evolution of the two validities across the lifetime of an economic narrative, we see that rhetorics which begin as the expression of political agency evolve, over time, into structural conditions that impose powerful cognitive and ideological constraints on their narrators. A theory of the life-cycle of economic policy narratives is proposed, comprised of four evolutionary phases: construction, reinforcement, crisis and fragmentation.

This inter-disciplinary thesis addresses the authenticity and social context of surviving portraits of Scottish monarchs between 1530 and c.1590, bringing the study of the Scottish portraits closer to the standard undertaken upon surviving English works. This research focuses upon key questions to begin to reveal the nature of commission and execution of sixteenth-century portraits in Scotland, focusing upon a pair of double portraits from Blair Castle, Pitlochery, Perthshire. The two paintings will form the key case-studies for this research, and the central question to the thesis is whether they are authentic, sixteenth-century Scottish-made images. The thesis will address questions such as: How do they fit into the contemporaneous culture of court portraiture production in Northern Europe and across the border in England? Does the physical evidence support the notion of Netherlandish influence? Surviving documentary evidence of the painterly aspects of the courts of King James V and his grandson King James VI is presented, and the results of interdisciplinary technical analysis used to explore whether the materials and techniques of the Blair portraits and their surviving counterparts demonstrate enough Netherlandish influence to present the existence of a Scoto-Netherlandish school of painting. The National Portrait Gallery’s research project Making Art in Tudor Britain (2007-2014) 2010 conference Tudor and Jacobean Painting: Production, Influences and Patronage raised the issue of the need for a parallel project for Scotland, tracing the highly-developed use of portraiture by the later Stewart dynasty to its fifteenth-century Scottish beginnings. This thesis argues that far from being culturally backwards in terms of portraiture, the Scottish court employed fashionable Netherlandish techniques from an early date, with a strong understanding of the impact of the arts dating from the earliest Stewarts. Most importantly, this research is the first to undertake a full technical examination of the Blair Castle portraits, placing these works within a comprehensive material context. Such examination of the visual arts commissioned at this time can only further our understanding of the wider context of production in Scotland at this time. Additionally, understanding the nature of the commission of royal portraits by those in noble families makes clearer the use of the visual arts to enhance careers and reputation, as well as social identity. In focusing the discussion purely upon Scottish portraits in native collections, this research unites works which have not been comprehensively studied as a whole. The study of the sixteenth-century Scottish court has advanced considerably in recent years, but without an in-depth examination of the artworks produced as visual representation of these courts, a complete understanding cannot be achieved. This thesis demonstrates that much of the production of royal portraits was based upon the copying of copies. It is thus not the aesthetic quality which should be the focus, but the circumstances of their existence and material composition which is most revealing about the place Scotland holds within the study of early modern European art.

According to key figures within New Labour, the advent of the knowledge-based economy has ended the “sterile” battle between social justice and economic competitiveness; this now means that it is only through the provision of opportunities for all, achieved through high quality education, that the demands of the two goals can be fulfilled. I investigate the claims made by Blair, Brown and the Education Ministers that social objectives are being reconciled with economic considerations in the Party's approach to education and, in doing so, explore the existence and content of a putative 'New Labour' discourse on education. I highlight the limitations of the existing literature in dealing with issues of discourse, agency and time. I contend that in overlooking questions of discourse and ignoring the potential for differences over time and between actors, the current literature fails to capture the dynamism and complexity of the Government's discourse leading it to reach two inaccurate conclusions about New Labour as well as prohibiting us from gaining a proper sense of whether the Party has been coherent in its discussions of education. Conversely, I set out an alternative view of coherence, proposing discourse as an equivalent unit of analysis to policy and demonstrating sensitivity to differences both over time and between agents. I show that there is not one coherent 'New Labour' discourse on education, but a shared conception that is underpinned by three discourses that appeal to arguments about the knowledge-based economy, opportunity and responsibility. Within this however, are eighteen different arguments the use, meaning and significance of which varies between Blair, Brown and the Education Ministers and, over the three terms between 1997 and 2007.