This thesis is a study of six mixed-sex political partnerships, all of which functioned within the context of heterosexual marriage. It considers these partnerships involvement in, and attitudes toward, the campaigns for women' s enfranchisement over a fifty year period from 1880 - 1930. The aim of this study is to contribute to our understanding of the gendered nature of political activity and identity through an examination of the women' s suffrage campaigns, in particular the still under-researched, yet extremely important question of men's support for women' s suffrage. This thesis takes as its point of departure historical studies of gender, that is, a critical examination of the constructions of masculinity and femininity; ideas which have been informed and developed by women's history. It will consider the extent to which developments within the suffrage movement both challenged and reinforced gendered political identities and influenced attitudes toward the parts that men and women had to play in both the public and private spheres. The partnerships studied demonstrate not only the diversity of opinion within the women's suffrage movement but also how this single issue affected familial politics at a variety of levels. Each chapter focuses on one political partnership and charts its involvement - whatever form it took - during one of the most dynamic periods in modern British history. The partnerships included in this thesis are diverse and are comprised of Emmeline and Richard Pankhurst, James and Marion Bryce, John and Katharine Bruce Glasier, Emmeline and Frederick Pethick-Li1wrence, Annot and Sam Robinson, and Elsie Duval and Hugh Franklin. This thesis is, therefore, a contribution to both suffrage history and to the study of political partnerships in relation to changes in British political culture during a period of intense debates about the symbolic and actual representation of women.

This thesis examines the development of state-narco networks in post-transition Bolivia. Mainstream discourses of drugs tend to undertheorise such relationships, holding illicit economies, weak states and violence as synergistic phenomena. Such assumptions fail to capture the nuanced relations that emerge between the state and the drug trade in different contexts, their underlying logics and diverse effects. As an understudied case, Bolivia offers novel insights into these dynamics. Bolivian military authoritarian governments (1964-1982), for example, integrated drug rents into clientelistic systems of governance, helping to establish factional coalitions and reinforce regime authority. Following democratic transition in 1982 and the escalation of US counterdrug efforts, these stable modes of exchange between the state and the coca-cocaine economy fragmented. Bolivia, though, continued to experience lower levels of drug-related violence than its Andean neighbours, and sustained democratisation despite being a major drug producer. Focusing on the introduction of the Andean Initiative (1989-1993), I explore state-narco interactions during this period of flux: from authoritarianism to (formal) democracy, and from Cold War to Drug War. As such, the thesis transcends the conventional analyses of the drugs literature and orthodox readings of Latin American narco-violence, providing insights into the relationship between illicit economies and democratic transition, the regional role of the US, and the (unintended) consequences of drug policy interventions. I utilise a mixed methods approach to offer discrete perspectives on the object of study. Drawing on documentary and secondary sources, I argue that state-narco networks were interwoven with Bolivia’s post-transition political settlement. Uneven democratisation ensured pockets of informalism, as clientelistic and authoritarian practices continued. This included police and military autonomy, and tolerance of drug corruption within both institutions. Non-enforcement of democratic norms of accountability and transparency was linked to the maintenance of fragile political equilibrium. Interviews with key US and Bolivian elite actors also revealed differing interpretations of state-narco interactions. These exposed competing agendas, and were folded into alternative paradigms and narratives of the ‘war on drugs’. The extension of US Drug War goals and the targeting of ‘corrupt’ local power structures, clashed with local ambivalence towards the drug trade, opposition to destabilising, ‘Colombianised’ policies and the claimed ‘democratising mission’ of the Bolivian government. In contrasting these US and Bolivian accounts, the thesis shows how real and perceived state-narco webs were understood and navigated by different actors in distinct ways. ‘Drug corruption’ held significance beyond simple economic transaction or institutional failure. Contestation around state-narco interactions was enmeshed in US-Bolivian relations of power and control.

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This thesis explores the factors behind national CO2 emissions trends. It highlights four instrumental – economic, social, political and environmental - explanations that scholars have posited to account for emissions behaviour and subsequently demonstrates that the artificial segregation of these approaches in the literature poses a major problem for the field. Since all of these factors matter some of the time, it argues that the research program needs to identify when each factor matters more than others and why. This thesis proposes that ideas play a key role in bringing instrumental factors to bare on climate policy. Fusing together social constructivism and the concepts of worldviews and problem representations from cognitive psychology, it proposes that instrumental factors will only have their alleged effects on emissions when a country, or the policymakers who act on its behalf, believes that the factor is of importance to world politics more broadly. Drawing on three of the leading schools of international thought, it proposes three ideal worldviews and problem representations, each of which envisages a different set of instrumentalist drivers and strategic response to climate change. Specifically, the neo-realist worldview upholds that emissions policy should maximise the gains of the state relative to others. The neo-liberal worldview, on the other hand, suggests that a state should design climate policy to minimise the domestic cost-benefit ratio of emissions behaviour. Painting a very different picture, the structuralist worldview prescribes that emissions policy should serve a state’s transnational class interests. The thesis tests these explanatory approaches by conducting a large-N study of 3,381 country-years, spanning eight supranational regions and 147 countries from 1990 to 2012. It builds a three-level model that accounts for (country and regional) clustering in emissions behaviour, thus reducing the potential for type I errors. The findings confirm that instrumental factors are indeed significant drivers of emissions trends. However, unlike previous quantitative work in the field, the results of the multilevel analyses suggest that most of these factors have heterogeneous effects between countries. The findings also suggest that worldviews play a critical role in determining what these effects are in two of the cases examined in the thesis: (i) democratization has a positive effect on emissions reduction in countries that subscribe to the neo-liberal worldview while (unexpectedly) inhibiting emissions reduction in countries that do not and (ii) a structuralist mind-set makes countries prioritise economic growth over a clean climate, thereby inhibiting emissions reduction.

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This thesis constitutes a new approach to the study of labour movement opposition and resistance to Conservative Government policy and practice toward local government in the 1980s. In contrast to previous analyses, for example, this exploration of labour movement activity considers trade union involvement, does not use artificial frameworks, such as New Urban Left, or evaluate subject matter against a priori standards. Examination of the campaigns studied is undertaken within the framework of society as a whole, so that the development of campaign practices and conceptual principles, identified in relation to campaign aims of defending local government services, jobs, and local democracy, are subjected to reciprocal processes of interrogation. This is achieved by examining events within an historical context, that begins with the expansion of local service provision and employment in the 1960s, includes retrenchment of the late 1970s and early 1980s, and concludes with labour movement campaigns against rate capping in the mid-1980s. This period also includes: changes in local democratic practice, in both constitutional and labour movement terms; developments in the composition, organisation, and outlook of constitutive labour movement bodies; and, labour movement responses to attempts to reduce public expenditure, local government service provision, and local government employment. The interrelations between these factors, changing socio-economic developments, conceptual principles and practice within the labour movement, and government policy and practice are all identified and explored as part of this thesis. Similarly, an integral part of this process involves the consideration afforded to interrelations between labour movement officers, leaders, activists, members, and the broader populace; in terms of conceptual principles, the use and development of labour movement structures, and democratic practice. Thus, by exploring the interrelations between the areas identified, as opposed to imposing dichotomous or causalistic interpretations, the fate of the campaigns against rate capping are explained.

Since the early 2000s, a largely Internet-based network of independent news operations has emerged focused on small geographic areas in the UK, often run by non-professional journalists. ‘Hyperlocal’ journalism seems to have captured the imagination of academics and policy-makers, with some arguing that it has the potential to fill the democratic deficit caused by the decline of mainstream local newspapers. Attention has largely focused on the journalistic values of these websites rather than their wider cultural value, with relatively little recourse to primary research in the UK context. This thesis addresses both of those aspects by drawing on a range of data: a large-scale overview of the sector, three case study accounts of hyperlocal news operations, and an analysis of interviews with practitioners. The research finds that hyperlocal news operations are spread across the UK and collectively produce an impressive number of news stories. In that sense, they play a useful role in local news ecologies and their independence marks them out as an alternative to an increasingly consolidated mainstream local news sector. Hyperlocal news operations are gaining legitimacy through engagement with audiences on social media and through recognition by other news media. The thesis also finds that the hyperlocal journalist is often motivated by a desire to redress mainstream media’s representation of their locality or by a single campaign issue. Hyperlocal journalists traverse both the digital ‘beat’ and the real-world ‘beat’, using reciprocal journalism practices in order to build a community around their service. However, many services are precariously placed as the journalists exploit their own labour and avoid engaging fully with issues of economic sustainability. Taking a case study approach, the thesis explores the working practices and environments of three hyperlocal news operations in detail, including looking at audience engagement. It finds further evidence of these issues of precarity, making the potential of sustaining hyperlocal operations difficult. However, the case study accounts also highlight the value of focusing on everyday aspects of community life and how that can help build audiences and enable citizens to become participants in content creation and distribution. Finally, the thesis argues that hyperlocal can play a more vital role in the UK’s local news landscape should the right conditions be created by policy-makers to create a more level regulatory playing-field.

This thesis focuses on the politics of electoral reform. It examines dynamics operating at both the public and political elite levels. The first paper looks at the place of electoral reform in British politics, in particular the place of the Alternative Vote (AV), and demonstrates a positive relationship between disproportionality and interest in electoral reform. The second paper focuses on the tension between representative democracy and direct democracy and considers why the referendum became the pathway to decide on the issue. The third paper analyses the voting behaviour in the UK’s 2011 AV referendum and demonstrates that voters cast their votes based on cues and in harmony with the positions taken by the party leaders they trusted. Agreement with campaign statements was also indicative of an individual’s vote mediating the impact of partisanship. Direct contact by campaigns did not have much significant effect on a typical individual’s vote except for those individuals contacted by the Liberal Democrats. Contact by the Liberal Democrats, contrary to the expectations had an impact in the negative direction of the position endorsed by the Party.

Political parties are the cornerstone of modern democracies and the decisions they make can have important consequences for citizens' well-being. This dissertation studies two different types of party behaviour. The first is coalition building and how social-identity concerns can help predict which parties form alliances. The second is the decision of potential new parties to enter electoral competition. The effect of social-identity on coalition formation is tested using an experiment on the 'pure effect' of gender, race and political ideology on who is selected as a coalition partner. The findings showed that gender and race did not affect participants' decisions. By contrast, ideology had a strong effect. Substantively, the results provide evidence that a preference for similar coalition partners can help predict which coalitions form, even when there are no policy benefits from this alliance to be gained. Party entry behaviour is analysed through two incentive structures. The first paper measures the impact of public subsidies on new-party presidential candidates in Latin America. The results show that campaign subsidies can increase the relative costs of a campaign and create a barrier for new-party candidate entry. On the other hand, campaign funding for everyday party activities has the opposite effect. This study contributes to the understanding of the cost-benefit incentives for new party entry and the consequences of party finance regulations. The second paper on new parties addresses the dynamic process of party exit and entry into politics. The study argues that the collapse of a political party opens policy space that can lead to the successful entrance of new parties. The results provide robust evidence that the size of the collapsed party has a positive effect on the vote shares for new parties. However, this is moderated by the permissibility of the electoral formula.

National minorities, who claim autonomy and self-government rights, have always been a controversial problem in the fields of international law, political theory and nationalism. Multiculturalism and egalitarianism are two approaches that have long been discussed in all of these fields and implemented in various contexts. The success of policies that seem to be associated with these two approaches, however, has varied from one case to another. This study asks if failures of these approaches have anything to do with the contexts in which they take place. If so, what is the context in which these approaches prove to be futile? Theorists themselves explain aspects of an ideal context under which their theories can become fruitful. These ideal contexts and circumstances are, however, unrealistic; and their assumptions about the nature of social relationships do not always correspond with the reality. This study aims to find a more reliable criterion to assess the applicability of multiculturalism and egalitarianism. The thesis explains the relationship between national minorities and the state through a phenomenological paradigm. In this paradigm national minorities, the thesis argues, vary according to the state nationalisms they have experienced in the past. The thesis analyses the relational nature of minority and state nationalisms from this inter-subjective perspective. Within this framework, this study posits the hypothesis that multiculturalism and egalitarianism cannot produce viable solutions to the problems of national minorities who were persistently exposed to the policies of forced assimilation and civic state nationalism. The study reveals that a certain strand of multiculturalism that is ethnocentric cannot come to terms with such national minorities under the integrationist civic state nationalism because, from an inter-subjective perspective, the boundaries between the majority and the minority communities in this context are more fluid and diverse than they would otherwise have been. In such cases, resorting to ethno-centric multiculturalism and promoting the ‘authentic’ ethnic identities hampers the very diversity it seeks to promote. The thesis suggests that differenceblind egalitarianism is equally problematic in such cases because it cannot come to terms with the systematic injustice and the concomitant conflict that the policies of forced assimilation have created. As such its implementation weakens the very equality it seeks to promote. In order to explore and test this hypothesis, the dissertation makes use of a single in-depth case study of Turkey. In the period of candidacy for accession to the EU, Turkey is currently experimenting with ethnocentric multiculturalism to accommodate its Kurdish population more equitably. In Turkey, however, neither the contemporary discourse of ethno-centric multiculturalism nor the historical implementation of difference-blind egalitarianism seems to be a viable option from a liberal perspective. Observing the reasons for this failure enables the reader to develop a new insight to identify the cases where those theoretical perspectives could be more successful. Mindful of the fact that generalizing from a single case study is difficult, the case of Turkey will also be situated within a study of comparative cases to test the consistency of the hypothesis in this dissertation.