At present, progressive theory‐building in the area of political party organisation is being hampered by the controversy over how much freedom of choice decision‐makers within a party enjoy in relation to their environment. This piece of research will therefore develop an analytical framework that transcends this debate by acknowledging the causal effects of both structures and party leadership. Based on the ideas of historical institutionalism, it will argue that party organisation is the product of strategic decisions made in a strategically selective context. The framework is then applied to political parties in the newer democracies of South Korea, Taiwan, the Philippines and Indonesia. The selection of cases is motivated by the fact that East Asia has so far been largely ignored by systematic studies of political party organisation. As will be seen, post‐autocratic environments in the region strongly favour political parties that are mere façades for informal patron‐client networks. However, we can also find parties characterised by a higher level of formal organisational strength, including parties that share many similarities with the classical mass party. These parties thus demonstrate that political actors are able to develop alternative organisational responses to the same structural context.

The ranging course of terrorism banishing peace and security prospects of today’s Pakistan is seen as a domestic effluent of its own flawed policies, bad governance, and lack of social justice and rule of law in society and widening gulf of trust between the rulers and the ruled. The study focused on policies and performance of the Musharraf government since assuming the mantle of front ranking ally of the United States in its so called ‘war on terror’. The causes of reversal of pre nine-eleven position on Afghanistan and support of its Taliban’s rulers are examined in the light of the geo-strategic compulsions of that crucial time and the structural weakness of military rule that needed external props for legitimacy. The flaws of the response to the terrorist challenges are traced to its total dependence on the hard option to the total neglect of the human factor from which the thesis develops its argument for a holistic approach to security in which the people occupy a central position. Thesis approach is also shown to hold the solutions for eliminating the causes of extremism on which terrorism feeds and grows. In sum the study deconstructs Musharraf’s regime’s response to terrorism by examining the conceptual mould of the strategic players in the country and postulates a holistic and integrated security framework to deal with terrorism on a pro-active and sustainable basis. An approach such as this would logically entail the redefining of the role of the state vis-à-vis its people as the fulcrum and medium of ensuring traditional and non traditional security of the country.

This project aims at illuminating that agents’ ideas/perceptions on their (social)surrounding affect their deliberative actions to improve their regional security. The engaging/networking agents’ main attempt is to enlarge the scope of traditional security to accommodate more comprehensive aspects by using regional economic concerns as a spearhead before extending to other fields. Familiarity and socialising process through conferences and workshops are both positive outcomes and structure for agents’ ideas/perceptions on engaging/networking activities. Yet, agents’(socially) collective identity has not commonly perceived as expected by a set-up framework. This project is conducted in a circular style which is open for revising a set-up framework employed here for narrating the results in a chronological fashion. The framework is constructed from related concepts and theories. Main concepts are ‘active agents’, ‘intellectuals’, and ‘networks’. Main sources of theories are drawn mainly from constructivism, epistemic community, advocacy coalition framework, and Jürgen Habermas’s theory of communicative action (TCA). The TCA provides a useful path to fill in the gap left by the earlier theories whose concerns are grounded on agents’ outward-looking aspects of cooperation. Trust is a presupposition from all theories. Although there is a trend towards it, the research result can not apparently express it.

Across the European Union (EU) persistently high levels of unemployment amongst young citizens risk the creation of a 'lost generation' of individuals. In response, the European Commission has launched a number of measures aimed at fostering strong levels of youth employment, including the Youth Employment Package (YEP) and the Young Employment Initiative (YEI). Their ultimate delivery however, depends heavily on the aspirations and capacity of the member states, both at the national-level, and crucially, at the local level. This thesis investigates the extent to which the concept of multi-level governance (MLG) can help us to understand policy-making and implementation in the field of EU youth employment policy. It focusses specifically on the distinct national and subnational experiences of two highly unitary EU member states, the UK (England) and France. Unitary states, often overlooked within the MLG scholarship in favour of decentralised and federal states, offer a valuable opportunity to identify the specific internal and external factors that serve to enable, support, hinder or block instances of multi-level governance- which may be missed in more conducive settings. Indeed, at first glance, this thesis finds that national state-executives dominate the policy-making and implementation processes around EU youth employment policy. Critically, however, a deeper investigation discovers that they are unable to monopolise these processes. Instead, the picture painted in this thesis is one of contestation, rivalry, and conflicting interests between the supranational, national and subnational tiers. The thesis consequently reveals important implications for the MLG literature.

Chapter 1 shows how an elite can turn an institution from being inclusive to extractive, in the context of the European Union’s free movement of persons (FMP). In an international labour market, integrated by FMP across a number of member countries, we consider expansion of the market through the addition of new members. Each member government can control only immigration from non-members. The main result is that if new members are decreasing in total factor productivity, then expansion at first benefits but later hurts workers, while first hurting but later benefiting an economic elite, and benefiting a political elite throughout. Chapter 2 shows how a government sets immigration policy in the presence of entrepreneurs who undertake investment. The government and the entrepreneurs negotiate to determine the quota of immigration and the amount of contribution to be paid to the government. We also show how a government may be willing to tie its hands to an institution that constrains the immigration policy it can set. We identify conditions such that by tying its hands to such an institution, the government can increase investment in the economy. Chapter 3 analyses the effect of public good provision on the location choice of immigrants in the UK. In particular, we investigate the impact of a change in the number of schools on the location choice of immigrants by exploiting an exogenous shock provided by the Academies Act of 2010. We first employ a difference-in-difference strategy to analyse the effect of the Academies Act on immigration levels by comparing North West England and Wales, since the act was only applicable to England. In a separate analysis, we estimate a discrete choice model to examine the location choice of immigrants using a panel data of London boroughs. This model reports that a 1% increase in the number of schools in a London borough increases the number of immigrants by 1.4%, on average.

Thesis. 1979. M.S.--Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Political Science. / MICROFICHE COPY AVAILABLE IN ARCHIVES AND DEWEY. / Bibliography: leaves 117-120. / M.S.

Although the new architecture of experimentalist governance has been influential in academic scholarship as well as in policy debates over the last two decades, its actual impact on policymaking is still largely unclear. Specifically, questions about whether, under what conditions and how it influences policymaking processes remain largely unsolved. Without an adequate analysis of experimentalist policymaking, the current scholarship confines our understanding to the diffusion of experimentalist architectures, ultimately resulting in a poor understanding of their effects on policymaking processes. Thus, this thesis seeks to contribute to closing the knowledge gap by identifying conditions in which the Commission engages in experimentalist policymaking. To this end, it makes a number of inductive claims by further developing arguments found in experimentalist and shadow of hierarchy theories and using empirical analysis to follow them through. It studies the case of European Union energy regulation from the beginning of its liberalization and re-regulation in the late 1990s to the present day. The central argument of the thesis is that, when the Commission finds itself in conditions of greater uncertainty, even though the shadow of hierarchy is weaker or the distribution of power is less polyarchic, it engages in experimentalist policymaking by granting discretion to Member States and/or regulated companies to pursue common goals through distinct means, stimulating the comparison of their approaches and providing a basis for agreements on reforms to be developed with high stakeholder participation. Besides extending empirical research on EU energy regulation and contributing to the literature on modes of regulation, this thesis contributes to advancing the study of experimentalist governance in a number of respects. First, it clearly distinguishes experimentalist and hierarchical institutional architectures from policymaking processes by developing a set of indicators which are widely applicable. Second, by identifying patterns of policymaking that are not based on polyarchy, shadow of hierarchy, time or sector, but rather, are consistent with uncertainty, it suggests that uncertainty is an individually sufficient condition for experimentalist policymaking. More broadly, by identifying patterns of policymaking that are not based on specific institutional architectures, it shows that the type of policymaking can vary even if institutional architectures do not change, and hence warns scholars of the need to look beyond institutional design to the ways in which decision-making actually occurs.

This thesis provides a theoretically driven investigation with empirical evidence on the contexts in which judicial and political institutions promote human rights. In the first chapter I argue that judicial independence is not enough for courts to protect human rights. I found the empirical evidence supports my hypothesis, both judicial independence and judicial enforcement are necessary for courts to have a positive impact on human rights. The second chapter offers a deeper look at how courts function in autocracies. I argue that even with the best judicial institutions, courts in autocracies will not perform as well as in democracies to protect human rights. The dictator designs independent courts and enforces the decisions, to attract foreign investment (mainly), and not to limit his own capacity to repress. I found the empirical evidence to be broadly supportive of my hypotheses. Whereas judicial constraints in democracies promote the respect of all the types human rights surveyed (expect for extrajudicial killings because of the ceiling effect), in autocracies judicial constraints promote only private property rights (and unexpectedly reduces the number of extrajudicial killings). In the third chapter I revisited the impact of political institutions in autocracies on physical integrity rights. In the literature there seems to be contradictory claims of what that impact would be, based on divergent interpretation of why political institutions emerge in autocracies in the first place. I found that after correctly specifying the model estimation, political institutions are not significantly correlated with worse physical integrity rights. Furthermore, the evidence shows that political liberalization (the positive change towards more political institutions) is not significantly correlated with either physical integrity rights, or civil and political rights.

The EU has widened and deepened the single market over time according to a transactionalist discourse of common-interests in integration. This rationale holds that as amounts of cross-border movement increase, Member State populations should perceive the single market as beneficial, thus leading to the creation of an affective European identity. Instead, as consequences of integration have become more visible, resistance to the EU has become more pronounced, especially with relation to the Union's right of free movement of persons. This thesis argues that interest-based theories of integration ignore prospects for resilient national identities to influence the accordance of solidarity ties, so as to color interest perceptions within national public spheres. Combining the literature on European identity, moral panic and communication studies on news framing, it maintains that the popular news media provide a conduit through which these interest perceptions can be taken up through the tendency of news outlets to report events that deviantly threaten underlying identity conceptions. Through content analysis of 'popular' press in the UK, Spain and Poland, it seeks to show how the inane tendency of news to report events in terms of an identity-based narrative can serve to foment moral panic within national publics. Contrary to interest based theories of integration, the EU's discourse clashes with national identity. Disintegration may be posited as the 'proper stance' to be supported on the part of the public in news narrative, if threatening deviance caused by EU migration is to be resolved.

In the context of international agendas to transform African States from a state of corruption to good governance, Oyo State’s transformation in 2011 provides an apparent fairy tale case study. For eight years, the state was synonymous with violence and ‘godfatherism’, but Governor Abiola Ajimobi’s election in 2011 brought the promise of transformation, in line with the Lagos Model, based on the highly celebrated example of nearby Lagos State. This thesis draws on six months of in-depth qualitative fieldwork in Ibadan, the capital of Oyo State, to show how the Lagos Model in Oyo State leveraged international conceptions of good governance to pursue a political strategy of autonomy from central government, whilst building on long-held progressive political ideas in Yorubaland. However, the Lagos Model faced competition from populist opposition, who drew on the failings of the Lagos Model to meet popular conceptions of good governance. Key themes in popular conceptions of good governance are: progress, legitimate leadership and economic benefits. This thesis analyses the tensions within the Lagos Model’s response to these themes and uses empirical material to reveal how these tensions play out in practice. The ways in which Ajimobi was required to respond to numerous competing conceptions of good governance complicates the initial theoretical framing of a binary between corruption and good governance.