This thesis offers the first systematic critical examination of the political thought of Bernard Williams; explains the relation between his political realism and his critical assessment of much modern moral philosophy, and discusses how his work illuminates the debates about the nature and purpose of political theory. I defend Williams’s fundamental claim that the central questions of political morality arise within politics and argue accordingly that political theory should not, contrary to the position implicit in much contemporary political theory, in the first instance be seen as an exercise in applying a set of external moral principles to politics. I argue that although Williams’s critique of contemporary political theory is mistaken in its claim that contemporary political theorists conventionally endorse a monolithic form of moralism, he convincingly shows that political theory should begin with an understanding of the distinctive character of politics, as this enables us to understand the goods that are internal to it. In this regard, Williams’s realism is best read as an attempt to make ethical sense of politics, and as an attempt to explain how we can continue to affirm a kind of liberalism, without recourse to the moralised presuppositions that he insists we must jettison. I go on to argue that by developing the insights of Williams’s late work we can articulate a defence of liberalism that has marked advantages over the ‘high liberalism’ that most contemporary liberal theorists defend. This latter argument illustrates the distinctiveness of Williams’s contribution to contemporary debates about realism in political theory as most of the realist thinkers with whom he is grouped endorse a form of realism in order to impugn liberalism.

This thesis examines conflicts and congruities between memories of past political violence, and the implications these have for attempts to enable ‘justice’ and ‘reconciliation’ in Cambodia. The project takes the establishment of the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC) as a starting point that seeks to stabilise a narrow account of past political violence. The ECCC is important as a point of departure because it is the main institutional site through which Cambodia is confronting past political violence. Tasked with prosecuting crimes perpetrated by Khmer Rouge between 1975 and 1979, the ECCC promotes a restricted reading of political violence in Cambodia, attempting to silence some pasts whilst calling attention to others. At the same time, the work of the ECCC situates the past as a field of intervention that can yield particular ameliorative social and political outcomes: providing a sense of justice, establishing the truth of political violence in Cambodia, deterring the future perpetration of atrocity, and enabling reconciliation. Memory is integral to these ends as the key target of civic renewal. Based on eight months of fieldwork in 2008/9 conducted at multiple sites in Cambodia, the project critically reflects on the ECCC’s attempt to generate a unified and consensual account of political violence in Cambodia. Three key findings are evidenced. Firstly, whilst the ECCC attempts to frame and stabilise a preferred account of political violence through a judicial process that reconstructs memory through disclosure and concealment, this process itself is contested by the subjects it animates (its ‘victims’ and ‘perpetrators’). Moreover, I argue that the work of the ECCC actually catalyses multiple, often conflicted claims over what justice and reconciliation mean as socio-political strategies. The ECCC continues to generate unintended and unexpected results in the way that it platforms, recues and generates demands of the past. Secondly, the research findings evidence diverse and competing regimes of memory in Cambodia that call into question the possibilities of the ECCC in reconstructing a unified, shared public memory of political violence in Cambodia, and providing a sense of justice and reconciliation on that basis. These are frequently encountered exactly at the propagation of the ECCC preferred reading of past political violence, gesturing to the way that conflicting memory occurs – or is foregrounded – in resistance to power. Thirdly, the research findings evidence competing rationales for remembering and forgetting political violence in varied ways (for example, material priorities, tourism, and attendant commercial interests). Moreover, the thesis documents ambivalence among some Cambodians toward memorials and museums and the pasts that they call attention to. In this sense, the project shows how these ambivalences are dislocated from and eschew the moral authority of the rationales grounding the ECCC’s work (providing a sense of justice and facilitating reconciliation in the name of continued memories of political violence).

This thesis investigates empirically the way in which agents in political bodies can influence their peers, as well as the ways in which voters respond to the behavior of legislators in their electoral choices. These relationships are fundamental in trying to comprehend the way in which political decisions are made. Economists should take particular interest in these topics, given their importance in understanding the incentives faced by legislators. Questions as to the possibility of peer effects between political agents are of huge importance in democratic governments. Political debates play a central role in many legislative bodies, where the assumption is implicitly made that opinions can be influenced by the other debate participants. This fundamental assumption is tested in Chapter 1, which is the first to measure the extent of peer influence regarding reported political opinions in an explicitly political environment. This has previously not been possible, given that discussions and debates in legislative chambers take place between participants with particular characteristics and political interests, making it hard to separate the role of peer effects in determining their preferences. This thesis makes use of experimental data, which offers a unique opportunity to distinguish these effects and quantify the degree to which peer effects can influence political preferences. In particular, Chapter 1 uses data from an experiment conducted in Australia in 2009 to consider whether participants showed evidence of having influenced one-another during political discussions. Each of the models used exploits the fact that table allocations were randomized in this experiment and controls for agents’ characteristics, which were also recorded. The key finding of this chapter is that when asked to assign weights to eleven criteria for an effective political system, agents who sat on the same table during the experiment reported preferences that were more similar than those who did not share a table. The effect is small at 4.8% of a standard deviation but is statistically significant and of larger magnitude than other pairing characteristics which could have been expected to influence the differences between weighting choices, such as whether the two players were of the same gender. One year after the Citizens’ Parliament, participants were asked to report their political positioning on the ‘left-right’ scale. It is not found to be the case that the table allocations influenced these reported positions. Having demonstrated that participants in legislative bodies can influence one-another’s reported political preferences, this thesis goes on to analyze the relationship between legislators and the constituents they represent, by considering the question of whether politicians who are more active in parliament are rewarded with a higher probability of being reelected. The particular parliamentary behavior analyzed is the asking of parliamentary questions. The UK House of Commons uses a ballot system to determine which members are selected to ask a question from those who expressed an interest in doing so. This chapter is the first in the literature to exploit this randomization to show that the asking of such questions increases a member’s chances of being reelected by their constituents. It is shown that while the ordering of parliamentary questions is determined at random, the practicalities of conducting debates introduce a potentially endogenous element to the determination of which questions receive oral answers (particularly the speed at which questions are answered). This chapter uses a matched sampling approach to cope with such non-random cases, but also includes alternative results, to show that the findings are not reliant on the use of this technique. Chapter 2 exploits a natural experiment to show that Members of Parliament who are selected to ask parliamentary questions are more likely to be reelected in forthcoming elections. It was necessary in this study, however, to drop certain observations as a result of the fact that the Speaker in the House of Commons, who chairs debates, has some influence over the number of questions reached in each debate, which could undermine the randomization in these cases. Chapter 3 of this thesis goes on to consider this process in more detail. This chapter shows that in fact questions posed by older and more experienced members, as well as those from opposition parties, are more likely to receive oral answers than should be expected under a true randomization. Chapter 3 offers the first opportunity to consider the Speaker’s role in parliamentary debates under the conditions of a ‘natural experiment’. Results presented here point to the role of the Speaker in controlling the speed at which debates progress as contributing significantly to the findings listed above, for example by acquiescing to pressure from more senior members by allowing them to ask their questions in debates where time constraints would otherwise prevent them from doing so. The finding is also an important consideration for future studies which aim to exploit such randomizations as natural experiments relating to parliamentary activity. Such a finding is potentially significant in the context of the UK political system, where the ballot system is in place precisely to ensure that all members of the House of Commons have an equal opportunity to ask questions, regardless of their levels of seniority. The final chapter of this thesis continues to examine the link between legislators and the citizens they represent. In particular, Chapter 4 makes use of the large Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS) dataset from the USA. While this dataset has been extensively used to study health outcomes, this chapter represents the first attempt to use the dataset to study the link between political outcomes and the economic prosperity of constituents. This is achieved by matching survey respondents to their representatives in Congress and restricting attention to cases where members of the lower house seek election to the upper house. Members of the US Senate (the ‘upper house’ in Congress) are elected to serve a state as a whole, whereas members of the House of Representatives (the ‘lower house’) serve a district within one of those states. This chapter shows that members of the House of Representatives who seek election to the Senate (without necessarily being successful) tend to have previously served in districts with permanently higher incomes. Furthermore, incomes are found to be temporarily higher in districts where the representatives are successfully elected to the Senate than those where the representatives were unsuccessful in their attempt to be elected. This is interpreted as showing that in Senate elections, voters reward legislators who served districts where average incomes were seen to increase under their tenure. These chapters use a diverse range of datasets to consider the impacts of political behavior. It is shown that the behavior of agents in political environments not only influences their peers, but is also recognized and rewarded by the voters they represent. Voters are found to respond to political behavior by both reelecting legislators who are more active (by asking more parliamentary questions) and by electing those legislators who have previously served districts where average incomes increased under their tenure.

Within the field of Nationalism Studies, the relationship between “National Identity” and “ethnicity” has been widely studied. Likewise, the relationship between “National Identity”, “elite interests” and “ethnic conflicts” has also been investigated. In fact, there is a considerable amount of studies focused on the “inter-state” aspects of “National Identity”, “ethnicity” and “elite interests”, however, such studies tend to highlight the “elite” of the “homeland” as the political and social leaders of their ethnicity; seeing themselves responsible for defending the political interests of their ethnic relatives in transnational borders, or liberating them from other states via “secessionist” or “irredentist” policies. Nevertheless, an example of elite of “ethnic kin”, who dominates another state outside its “homeland”, has not yet been widely theorized academically, with a focus on “National Identity” and “elite interests”. This study aims to fill that gap within the literature through the example of President Makarios and Greek Cypriot nationalism. While Cyprus was a British colony, the Greek Cypriot community was mobilized to unify Cyprus with their “homeland” Greece. However, the result of such mobilization was the foundation of a Cypriot state, based on power-sharing between the Greek Cypriot majority and Turkish Cypriot minority. In the post-Independence era, particularly with the consolidation of the military dictatorship in Greece (1967), President Makarios abandoned the Enosis (unification of Cyprus with Greece) policies and made attempts to reconstruct the Greek Cypriot National Identity in favour of a Greek Cypriot-ruled independent Cypriot state. President Makarios also ignored Greek Junta's manipulations about the Cypriot politics. The subsequent struggle continued until the Athens-led coup d'état that overthrew the President (1974). This thesis shall follow Brass’ “Instrumentalist” theory and shall analyze the reconstruction of the Greek Cypriot National Identity. The thesis will also investigate the role played by the interests of both the President and the Greek Cypriots in constructing this new National Identity.

The main goal of this thesis is to comprehend some of the factors explaining cross- temporal and cross-national variations in citizens’ feelings of influence upon the political process, namely, political efficacy. For that purpose, this work is structured in three main parts which aim to explain how contextual factors can affect feelings of efficacy and, the sources of cross-national commonalities and differences. The first part, `Electoral Outcomes, Expectations and the (de)Mobilisation of Political Efficacy' contributes to the winner-loser gap literature by assessing the effect of elections, electoral outcomes and electoral expectations on political efficacy in the United Kingdom (UK) 2005 and 2010 general elections. This papers shows that not only electoral outcomes enhance or depress feelings of efficacy but also that electoral expectations have a major impact. The second part of this dissertation, `Does the Concept of Political Efficacy Travel across National Borders?', studies the cross-national comparability of a standard measure of political efficacy used in the European Social Survey (ESS). This paper employs Multigroup Confirmatory Factor Analysis (MGCFA) and shows that the meaning of political efficacy is not equivalent across the European continent but rather, among subsets of countries with a shared background. The third paper of this dissertation, `Valid Measures of Political Efficacy and their Correlates in the US and UK', uses the most recent advances in MGCFA applied to ordinal data to assess the cross-temporal and cross-national validity of a pilot battery of questions of political efficacy in the US and UK. The empirical results show that efficacy is equivalent across both countries only when significant differences in average levels of political efficacy are accounted for.

No description available.

The latter part of 1976 witnessed the initial deployment of a new Soviet missile which was codenamed "SS-20" by the United States. The SS-20 was an intermediate-range ballistic missile which could deliver each of its three nuclear warheads to within 400 metres of their designated targets throughout Western Europe from launch sites deep within Soviet territory. In addition the S8-20 was a fully mobile system which reduced significantly the likelihood of its detection and destruction by enemy forces. This, in conjunction with its accuracy and reliability, ensured that the SS-20 added a significant new dimension to Soviet nuclear forces within the European theatre. The Soviet Union's deployment of this new weapon system presaged a new era of uncertainty and tensions in East-West relations. Its initial service history coincided with the beginning of the end of detente and within a few years it had come to hold a position of pre-eminence as a focal point for superpower competition. Along with its Western counterparts - Cruise and Pershing II - the SS-20 became a name familiar to the wider public and served as an effective litmus test of superpower relations. Throughout the Cold War era a host of analytical models were promulgated with the stated aim of rationalising, explaining and, ultimately, predicting the nature of state weaponry procurement policy. Such models displayed a marked diversity of character and were the cause of conjecture and debate among their various proponents. The Action-Reaction model sought to explain weaponry procurement as a response to the activities of a potential adversary. By contrast both the National Leadership and Interest Group models stressed the importance of studying internal political factors in the pursuit of an explanation of such activities. A further alternative - the Military Mission model - contended that weaponry production was predicated upon the operational demands of specific and predetermined defence requirements. A variant which was applied with increasing frequency during the period of the SS-20's deployment was the Military Superiority model. It interpreted the development of the Soviet nuclear arsenal as evidence of her desire to establish political dominance through military power. Given both its undoubted military significance and the political symbolism it came to hold it is surprising that the development and deployment of the SS-20 was never employed as a case study through which to test the veracity and applicability of the hypotheses. New evidence gleaned during the course of this study from interviews with former high-ranking Soviet officers and officials and from restricted-access sources has necessitated a significant revision of the history of the SS-20's development and deployment. Consequently evolving Soviet theatre strategy and the United States' persistent refusal to include Forward Based Systems - medium-range aircraft and missiles capable of carrying nuclear ordnance - within the constraints of the SALT treaties are both reaffirmed as factors which did incline the Soviet Union towards the pursuit of a new missile system for the European theatre of operations. Significantly however neither factor seems to have possessed the overt influence upon the development of the SS-20 that so many past analyses have accorded them. The accepted course of the SS-20's technical development, its institutional origins and its links with other ballistic missile systems are now subject to radical re-evaluation in the light of the evidence which has emerged. Similarly the course and nature of this weaponry system's development is shown to have been subject to the vagaries and complexities of inter-elite relations to an extent previously unsuspected by all but a handful of analysts. The predominance of such bureaucratic interaction was a recurring theme in Soviet weaponry procurement throughout the period of the SS-20's developmental cycle. Analysts face considerable challenges when seeking to model a policy which was so heavily reliant upon the complexities of personal relationships and bureaucratic rivalries.

This submission reviews and examines the responsibility and role of non-executive directors in reinforcing the self-governance systems for non-government organisations (NGO). Corporate governance is an issue of great concern at Government and commercial levels and a prime topic in the media due to scandals at Enron, WorldCom, the British Museum, Tyco, and at a host of smaller organisations. This research explored the contributory systems and processes towards enterprise governance and provided new insight into how the boards of directors of NGOs can develop and be in a position to amend the parameters for their own information systems for self-governance. Unless these NGOs can govern themselves properly, their boards may eventually lose their mandate. The governance of NGOs is difficult because of the voluntary and part-time nature of directorship, a lack of information support system, and a comparatively lower level of transparency. Schools, hospitals, productivity councils, universities, social welfare institutions would be representatives of such NGOs. The research has used Hong Kong as the test base at a time when NGOs are given more authority and ownership for self-governance. A series of action-based case studies undertaken are summarised and 'used to identify the control components and processes leading to higher levels of self governance. These together with an extensive literature survey on corporate governance and on the development of governance information systems (GOVIS) were used to develop a new' process methodology for designing and developing governance information system for NGOs. Known as GISDER, the methodology links Rochart's Critical Success Factors (Rochart, 1979), cybernetics (Capra, 1997), systems thinking (Beer, 1985; Jackson, 2000), and adult learning (Ackof, 1999) concepts with control components unique to the organisation under review. The relevant control components for a particular NGO are identified from fifteen base components. Elements of the process methodology have been further tested in some NGOs. A thorough evaluation discussion and thoughts on the applicability of the derived methodology for other types of organisations have been provided. It is concluded that self-governance for NGO boards cannot be assumed and that the components for a GO VIS for self-governance can best be developed and evaluated through the GISDER methodology. The methodology is now at the core of a consultancy offering for NGOs in the Greater China region.

This project investigates the likelihood of a distinctive ideology emerging from what are known as ‘horizontal’ political movements – those which, in brief, aim to operate non-hierarchically guided by principles such as affinity – and furthermore to identify the potential components of such an ideology. The methodology is broadly based on that developed by Freeden, namely an analysis of the conceptual morphology of the ideas put out by horizontal movements. The sources used derive largely from the output of the movements themselves in various forms. I conclude that horizontal politics does have a recognisable ideological configuration, and that this is distinctive from other related ideologies such as anarchism.

Therefore this thesis is an appraisal of Caudwell as a committed revolutionary thinker, a Marxist aesthetician and a scientifically-oriented dialectical materialist; a man deeply influenced by the great theorists of Marxism, especially Engels and Lenin, but also Freud, Jung and Jane Harrison and F.M. Cornford of the 'Cambridge School' of Anthropology and others not within the Marxist canon, giving strength to his exploration into the human condition and his quest for a unified Weltanshauung