This dissertation explores the nature of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) as a governance organisation in the context of international regime theory. It examines the hypothesis that ICANN represents a new type of hybrid political entity, one that both challenges established concepts in IR theory, and that may be representative of emerging trends in other areas of global issue management. The concept of international regimes, initially defined in the early 1980s by Stephen Krasner, has become one of the key elements of contemporary International Relations theory. Despite ongoing debates between proponents of various theoretical paradigms over some key questions, such as how and why regimes form and are sustained, the basic concept of the international regime has remained fairly clearly defined. ICANN, however, has been widely interpreted as a new approach to global governance in an emerging issue-area, one based upon ‘multistakeholder’ decisionmaking involving a range of interested actor types, as opposed to the traditional model of a predominantly state-based ‘inter-national’ organisation. This dissertation seeks to examine the extent to which concepts drawn from existing regime theories remain useful as analytical tools for interpreting the types of emerging global governance arrangements represented by the ICANN system. The dissertation begins with a review of ICANN’s history and organisational structure, followed by a literature review exploring some competing interpretations of ICANN. It then utilises three case studies of the ICANN policy development process in action, in an effort to explore how ICANN policy is made in practice and which types of actors and interests appear to have most influence within the regime. The analysis reveals certain commercial interests, together with governments, to be the predominant actors within the ICANN system. Subsequent chapters draw upon these findings to explore how ontological models drawn from various paradigms on regime theory, including realist, neoliberal institutionalist, neo-Marxist and social constructivist approaches, might be applied to the ICANN regime. The study demonstrates that concepts drawn from each of these paradigms, and particularly vi neoliberal institutionalism and social constructivism, are readily applicable to the ICANN case. The dissertation concludes that ICANN can be usefully interpreted as a regime using a definition based on Krasner’s, albeit of a modified type better described as a ‘global governance’ rather than an ‘inter-national’ regime. Finally, it attempts to evaluate the extent to which lessons from the ICANN case may be applicable to emerging trends in other issue-areas of international politics.

This work has three core aims; to quantify the extent to which women stood as council candidates and were elected between 1918 and 1938; to assess the influences on the backgrounds of women seeking election in that period; and to examine a sample of women elected to determine how far they retained separate spheres reflecting gendered interests or were able to join male colleagues in wider council roles. The findings show patchy progress with far slower growth on county councils than in London and only one or two women councillors present at any one time on some important councils. Council culture and political geography were causes of low representation. Women increasingly needed access to political parties to be candidates, but the presence of a political battleground and the nature of local social leadership were equally important. London women needed to be politically driven from the outset whereas some towns elected women recognised as community leaders rather than politicians. Women councillors had experience of suffrage activism, voluntary work, as Poor Law guardians and of committee co-option. They could remain in office for decades. Women were concentrated on committees of domestic interest, but their activities changed as state intervention increasingly influenced family life. By addressing topics such as birth control, the special interest of women councillors became a very public discussion of a previously private domestic matter. Women also took on public roles as committee chairman or mayors. This blurring between public and private spheres is of relevance to wider discussion about women’s activism as they gained in citizenship. Despite slow progress over 1,400 women contributed as councillors in this period with a very practical style and determined tenacity. This overview of their distribution, origins and activities shows an uneven spread of women councillors with divided political views, but unity in seeking improvement in family life.

Political power has been much contested and debated, culminating in the development and measurement of many distinct and narrow facets of power. This thesis makes an original contribution to knowledge by providing a conceptual and operational framework for researching power in a political system in a relevant, observable, comprehensive and meaningful way. Using this framework to consider the power of the Labour Party in local government, as perceived by practitioners, has provided new insights into existing understandings of power in both theory and practice. Many different facets of power are relevant to researching the power of the Labour Party in local government. These were brought together using an abstract model of a political system to provide a comprehensive and meaningful framework for researching power. The framework makes it possible to operationalise power by identifying three principal dimensions that are observable - capacity, decision making and power – and connect the different facets together. This framework makes clear the distinction between conceptions of power at micro-level, which concern the capacity to influence others, and macro-level, which concern the capacity to influence outcomes; and the significance of applying the appropriate conception to the research context. The conceptual and operational framework was used to research the power of the Labour Party in local government through a case study of Kirklees Council. The research was conducted between October 2012 and August 2013 and used a mixed methods approach incorporating a survey of Labour Party councillors, interviews with Labour Party members, and observation of various meetings, this research explores each facet of power. This case study shows that central government controls the capacity of Kirklees Council, but the Labour Party has the potential to influence local political outcomes well beyond the sphere of the Council. In terms of decision making, the Leader dominates the Labour Party, but due to the professional expertise of officers and bargaining power of other political parties has less control over Kirklees Council. Regarding outcomes, the activities of the Labour Party in local government makes marginal differences to the electorate and policies of Kirklees Council, but a significant difference to the Labour Party itself. So, even though political parties dominate the governance of local authorities, this case study shows that local party politics in practice makes only marginald differences in the locality.

The three chapters in this thesis consider the role macroprudential policy can play in economic booms and busts. The first two chapters concern the recent housing boom in the United States. Whilst it is popularly thought that a significant easing of credit standards caused the boom, the econometric attempts to establish this are largely inconclusive. The fall in real interest rates also fail to account for the magnitude of the boom, suggesting buyers' irrational exuberance. I approach this problem in a new way using tiered housing data that separately covers the price movements of cheap and expensive houses. During the US boom, the cheapest houses had the largest relative price gains in 51 of 52 metro areas studied. In the first chapter I use a simple model to show that this pattern could not have occurred without an easing of credit standards: without this, buyer exuberance or a fall in interest rates would produce the opposite pattern. Chapter two examines alternative explanations for the tiered pattern, including changes in housing supply, speculation and differential income growth. I show that these variables are not responsible for the pattern, but that, in keeping the theory, there is a statistically and economically significant relationship between credit easing and the relative performance of low and high tier house prices. Taken together, the two chapters conclude that the housing boom would have significantly smaller if policy had prevented credit standards from easing. The third chapter considers credit traps; a situation in which a severe financial crisis gives rise to a prolonged period of low lending to, and stagnation of, the real economy. We introduce a model in which credit traps are possible, then consider what macroprudential policy can do to help the economy escape from a trap, and to reduce the chances of falling into one.

This study aims to comparatively explore how the politicisation of criminal justice would appear in several new democracies with the institutional combination of presidentialism and a civil-law prosecution system, by focusing on the strategic interaction between an incumbent president and prosecutors, in South Korea and Russia, in the new institutionalist perspective. Civil-law prosecutors could damage particular politicians’ moral foundations with specific timing and extent, manipulating criminal proceedings through their broad power within the centralised criminal procedure. This is why they must be cautiously checked by any other body of government, contrary to their common-law counterparts who exercise a limited power due to the decentralised criminal procedure. Fortunately, in most civil-law countries, prosecutors are accountable to democratic bodies, in spite of the global tendency of judicial independence. Also in practice, civil-law prosecutors have not often been involved in the politicisation of criminal justice, despite their extensive influence over criminal procedure, in the continental European countries wherein the tradition of parliamentary supremacy is strong. By contrast, in new democracies with the institutional combination between a civil-law prosecution system and presidentialism, prosecutors have often taken partisan behaviour in favour of or against an incumbent president. For instance, two South Korean Presidents, Young-sam Kim and Dae-jung Kim, and Russian President Boris Yel’tsin, had exploited civil-law prosecutors for the politicisation of criminal justice, but were faced with their defection immediately before their retirement. Unusually, only Vladimir Putin could avoid this unfortunate fate, even at the last phase of his tenure, among the South Korean and Russian Presidents after democratisation. According to this study, high-ranking prosecutors generally pursued their own career advancement, and consequently the prosecution service was loyal to an incumbent president during most of his tenure, but betray him in his last phase, during South Korean President Young-sam Kim’s and Dae-jung Kim’s periods, and in Russian President Yel’tsin’s period. Only in the Russian President Putin period in the two countries after democratisation, prosecutors unusually continued to serve the president even when he left the presidency. This could be because they had no incentive to betray the outgoing president in order to further their career development under the next presidency, given that Putin would undoubtedly maintain a strong political influence over their careers, even after his retirement, according to this research. On the other hand, South Korean President Moo-hyun Roh frequently came into conflict with prosecutors, and had his close allies investigated or even indicted by them, during his entire period, while repeatedly attempting major reform against the civil-law prosecution service, which President Young-sam Kim and Dae-jung Kim had abandoned, in order to maintain the alliance with the power apparatus. According to this study, prosecutors made their organisational resistance based on their far-reaching power over criminal procedure, against President Moo-hyun Roh, for protecting their great prerogative, and therefore he failed in the reform. By contrast, Russian President Putin was exceptionally successful in large-scale reform against civil-law prosecutors, which not only President Yel’tsin but Putin himself in his first term had also suspended, by establishing the new ‘investigative committee’ in June 2007. According to this research, this outcome was possible because the prosecutors could no longer enjoy the political opportunity structure enabling them to effectively defeat the president’s reform against their collective interests, and consequently President Putin could circumvent their organisational resistance, in the absence of political competition under his electoral authoritarian regime. This study provides three important academic implications. Firstly, under the institutional combination of presidentialism and a civil-law prosecution system, prosecutors are not likely to preserve political neutrality, but to display a partisan behaviour either in favour of or against an incumbent government. That is, the institutional factor of combination of a civil-law prosecution system and presidentialism tends to induce the prosecution service, as a judicial body, to behave differently from the expectations of both the democrats and the liberals. Secondly, the variation of political competition can seldom influence judicial officers, who are responsible to the other branches of government, to behave independently of politicians, but can influence them, especially the top rankers, to betray an incumbent government in the last phase of its tenure on specific institutional and political conditions. Thirdly, and most importantly, the variation of political competition can influence judicial officers to take collective action for protecting their collective interests. In particular, if the judicial officers could exercise far-reaching power over criminal procedure, as civil-law prosecutors, their organisational resistance against an incumbent government which pushes for reform encroaching on their collective interests, such as prerogative powers, would be threatening enough to make the incumbent abandon the reform plan.

As a mode of global sustainability regulation, private participatory governance first emerged in the forestry sector in the early 1990s and from there spread rapidly and widely in the global economy. The literature on the topic points to a good fit with democratic norms, neoliberal norms, social movement pressure, and the entrepreneurial activities of civil society actors and progressive firms as the main drivers behind this process of institutional diffusion. Today, multi-stakeholder initiatives operate in many industry sectors, ranging from apparel manufacturing and diamond mining to aquaculture production and soybean farming. Drawing on new developments in the philosophy of democracy, some see these arrangements as part of a ‘deliberative turn’ in sustainability politics with the potential to democratise global governance institutions. However, the legitimacy of multi-stakeholder initiatives remains contested, and there is evidence to suggest that the diffusion of private participatory governance in the global economy has introduced variation in a key dimension of institutional design: whereas some schemes involve a wide range of actors in their governance and standard-setting activities, others are significantly less inclusive. In order to explore this puzzle, this dissertation unpacks the process of institutional diffusion. It develops an analytical framework that distinguishes three stages in the diffusion process: source selection, transmission, and adoption. For the different stages, hypotheses are formulated about the factors that “intervene” in the diffusion process, leading to more or less inclusive institutional outcomes. This framework is put to work in three case study chapters, examining the diffusion of private participatory governance in the biofuels, soy, and sugarcane sectors. A major finding of this study is that varying levels of coercive institutional pressures influenced the diffusion outcome in the cases studied. In environments characterised by strong coercive pressures (biofuels and soy), adopting a more inclusive approach served institutional designers as a strategy to gain political authority – that is, legitimate decision-making power – in these arenas. In comparison, in the low conflict environment of the sugarcane sector, no comparable process of ‘institutional fitting’ could be observed. Furthermore, this dissertation shows that ideas about private participatory governance are far from set in stone. While multi-stakeholder institutions diffuse in the global economy, late adopters learn from the experiences of prior adopters. Based on these experiences and the lessons they draw from them, they interpret, innovate, and de- and recontextualise the model, giving rise to institutional variation.

This thesis examines the planter class in Jamaica in the period before the end of slavery in 1834 and considers the relations of the planters with local free society and the metropole. In spite of the large body of scholarly work on Jamaica during the slavery period, we lack a modern study of the planters. Based on archival research conducted in Britain and Jamaica, this research tackles the related issues of how locally resident planters sustained slavery in Jamaica and sought to control local society, how they related to other local groups and to the metropole, and how they identified themselves as British slaveholders in an age in which slavery was coming under increasing criticism in Britain. The study looks at the composition of the planter class and at the relations between the planter elite, non-elite white men, free non-whites and enslaved people. It also examines the way that the planters and their allies responded to criticisms directed against them and their local practices. The main conclusions of the thesis are that, to maintain the creole institution of slavery, the planters depended heavily on the support of other white men, who enjoyed a range of privileges and opportunities. This assuaged class tensions within white society and led to a distinctively local social order based on ideas of racial difference. However, in the period before emancipation, the rising population of free coloureds and free blacks, along with the increased influence of non-conformist missionaries, meant that the planters struggled to sustain local support across free society. Furthermore, their cultural and practical reliance on the metropole weakened their position as anti-slavery came to dominate British public opinion. Therefore, shifting circumstances in both Jamaica and Britain helped to make the planters' continued defence of slavery impractical and contributed to the emancipation of enslaved people in the 1830s.

This thesis contributes to an understanding of the changes in prominence in EU energy policy since the 1990s. It does so by analysing struggles over energy poli-cy developments, as well as focusing on a new way of looking at EU politics, in particular, at the role of the EU Commission in the development of energy policy. Realist and liberal oriented perspectives, and constructivist and discourse ap-proaches, offer competing theoretical frameworks through which to view EU politics, and furnish us with many useful insights. However, they also suffer from some prob-lematic features, such as state-centrism, automatism, determinism, and cultural relativism. Drawing on the neo-Gramscian approach, informed by a historical institution-alist perspective, and certain elements of the post-structuralist account, I provide a more convincing and thorough explanation of several considerable shifts in EU energy policy, beginning with competitiveness in the 1990s, then turning towards energy security as well as climate change in the 2000s, and again competitiveness at the end of the 2000s. In addition, I illuminate the proactive role of the Commission in continuous hegemonic struggles over EU energy policy development. First, using historical institutionalism, I argue that the EU Commission acts as a political entrepreneur, promoting a long-term pro-growth orientation that stems from its organizational DNA, i.e. its historical make-up. Moreover, other state and non-state players often contest the Commission’s forward-looking position. The neo-Gramscian account of hegemony provides a comprehensive and detailed framework that reveals how the Commission, and other players, were actively involved in hegemonic struggles sur-rounding the EU energy policy domain. Furthermore, due to the lack of analytical mechanisms in the neo-Gramscian tradition to explore dynamic struggles and changes at the discursive level, I use the post-structuralist political logics of equivalence and difference, together with various rhetorical instruments that serve as descriptive framing devices.

The thesis comprehends four chapters: the first chapter concerns with the positive correlation between cross-country price level and per-capita income, which is generally regarded as a stylized fact renowned as the Penn-Balassa-Samuelson effect. The chapter provides evidence that the price-income relationship is actually non-linear and that it turns negative in low income countries. The result is robust along both cross-section and panel dimensions. The main contribution of this chapter is to uncover a new empirical regularity such that the price level firstly decreases and then increases along the development process. The second chapter argues that, in order to capture the non-monotonicity of the price-income relationship, we need a modified Balassa-Samuelson framework that accounts for the fact that low-income and high-income countries have very different economic structures and are at different stages of development. Particular emphasis needs to be put on the relevance of the agricultural sector in poor countries and for . The contribution of this chapter is to show that a model linking the price level to the process of structural transformation captures the non-monotonic pattern of the data. The third chapter departs from the Balassa-Samuleson framework and analyses the price-income relationship in a multisector Eaton-Kortum model of trade. The chapter shows that also within this framework a negative-price income relationship emerges. This provides further support to the empirical result shown in the first chapter and additional insights on the determinants of such relationship. The fourth chapter focuses on the relationship between foreign capital flows and income inequality in emerging countries. Developing countries experience a prolonged period of real exchange rate overvaluation after they have opened their capital and current account. This real exchange rate overvaluation is associated with rising income inequality within a country. The chapter provides evidence of a significant positive correlation between net capital flows and the Gini coefficient. The chapter presents also a model connecting the dynamics of the balance of payments with a search and matching model of the labor market. This provides a useful analytical framework to disentangle the mechanisms that can link foreign capital flows to income inequality through the impact of real exchange rate adjustment on the price of labor and quantity of employment.

This thesis examines the process of mass communication from media strategies to audience belief in relation to the conflict in Ireland. It documents the media strategies used by the various actors and participants in the conflict, from the Northern Ireland Office, Royal Ulster Constabulary, Foreign Office and Army to Sinn Fén and the Irish Republican Army, via the Ulster Defence Association, other political parties, Civil liberties and human rights organisations and many others. It reveals the continuing disinformation efforts of the British government, examines how source organisations interact with journalistsw, how journalists and their editors operate and looks at the outcome of their endeavours by analysing international coverage of the Northern Ireland conflict. Finally, the research examines the reception of media information amongst people living in Northern Ireland and Britain. Key questions here included the extent to which `violence' acted as a key organising category in British perceptions of the conflict and the effectiveness of propaganda in structuring public (mis)understandings.