The thesis provides a full assessment of the moral permissibility of a set of new belief and behaviour modification techniques, now commonly known as “nudges”, which are grounded in and justified by reference to our new insights into human psychology. It asks what forms of nudging are permissible in light of the state’s new understanding of its capacity to modify behaviour using these insights; and it develops an ethico-political account of living well that directs this normative investigation. There are two main strands to this analysis of public nudging, one relating to behaviour change policies designed for the sake of the target and the other relating to those designed for the sake of others. Across both strands, it is argued that the kinds of interventions that are permissible share a similar character: specifically, they are compatible with creating and sustaining the conditions for living well, on account of their playing an ecological-educative role in supporting citizens’ personal autonomy and practical reasoning. The thesis uses its in-depth normative analysis as the basis for engaging with current practices in behavioural policymaking and for setting out an ethically-sensitive policy framework to guide the design of nudge interventions in practice. The extended argument presented in these pages offers a distinctive and timely contribution to this debate, setting out arguably the most sustained and complete philosophical assessment of the ethics of nudging in the literature to date.

The purpose of this thesis is to lay the empirical foundations for exploring the dynamics of democracy, inequality, and redistribution in advanced countries. The thesis consists of three main essays: The first essay provides a new measure of democracy that captures the dynamics of democracy in developed countries, and the second and third essays focus on the dynamic relation between inequality and redistribution. The first paper shows that developed democracies are not uniformly democratic across different dimensions by constructing the Democratic Performance Index (DPI). The DPI, which has eight distinct dimensions of democratic performance, is the result of a conceptual and empirical critique of the existing measures of democracy under a middle-range conception of democracy. The second and third papers are closely intertwined to address a long-standing puzzle of whether more economic inequality leads to more redistribution. The second paper investigates the relationship between economic inequality and redistribution at the country level. The paper introduces redistributive preferences as an intervening factor in the relationship and presents the Gini coefficient of perceived social position (perceived Gini) as a country-level measure of perceived inequality. The evidence shows that perceived inequality, not actual inequality, is significantly associated with redistributive preferences, while preferences for redistribution do not translate into redistribution. The third paper examines the role of both individuals’ objective or subjective social status and their perceptions of inequality in shaping preferences for redistribution. The paper provides new measures of perceived actual inequality, personal norms of inequality, and perceived injustice. The findings demonstrate that subjective social position has a stronger impact on redistributive preferences than objective social position and that individuals’ inequality norms play a more crucial role in preference formation than does their perception of actual inequality. The concluding section summarises and discusses the findings, highlights policy implications, and suggests future areas of inquiry.

Ethnic identities in South Africa have had a particularly contrived history, set within the constraints and motivations of population classification by race. A more democratic political environment emerged with the dismantling of apartheid, bringing with it a multitude of issues including the design and character of the country’s political institutions and framework. This thesis will address two principal questions. The first and primary one investigates what lies behind the initiation and development of ethnic bonds. The second concerns the political implications and management of ethnic expressions in a democratic South Africa. An analysis of Zulu ethnic nationalism will be undertaken, because it constituted the most prominent case of assertive communal interests during democratic transitional negotiations. This thesis argues that circumstantial and instrumental factors (based on conditions, and the actions of individuals and organizations respectively), have been predominately responsible for the initiation and formation of ethnic bonds, especially amongst those who identify with a Zulu identity. The “conditions” describe the increasingly segregationist direction in which successive South African government authorities were moving, especially after the 1948 election victory of the National Party and the subsequent introduction of apartheid. Secondly, the “actions” denote the motivations of both Zulu actors and governments in generating and elaborating an ethnic discourse where their desired interests could be more effectively supported and assured. It will also be argued that because of the instrumental and selective use of ethnicity, as well as the narrow interests being served by its popular and community-centred expressions, a developing South African democratic culture should seek to protect ethnic diversity rather than promote ethnic interests. To do so would be to deny the perpetuation of ethnic cleavages and the violence and instability perpetrated in its name in recent years. The “protection” of cultural diversity is consistent with a constitution that seeks non-discrimination among all South African identities. Finally, it is believed that an emphasis on the individual as individual, as well as member of a cultural group, will break from subordinating the individual to an ascribed racial and ethnic identity as in the past, and assist in reconstituting the state as equally reflective of all South Africans.

The field of socialist law generally has incorporated two paradigms of study. The first focuses on the former Soviet Union, China and other "communist" nations and analyses how legal systems have developed in these nations and why they differ from Western ones. The second rejects the classification of the former U.S.S.R. (China, etc.) as representatives of the socialism envisioned by Marx and Engels and concentrates on a Marxist exploration of legal phenomena in capitalism. The first approach ignores he divergence between the socialism expatiated upon by Marx and the socialism which was (and is) functioning in these nations; the second disregards the problem of a regulatory system in post-capitalist society. Arguments that do address the regulatory problem in socialism often call for a re-definition of law (usually rights-based) which embodies socialist principles. Such a demand, however, is in conflict with Marx's original position (one that was expanded by E.B. Pashukanis) that law become unnecessary in such a society. The purpose of this thesis is to construct theoretically a regulatory system based on the writings of a selection of Marxist legal theorists (Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stuchka, Reisner and Pashukanis), ascertain whether such a system might be considered law, and determine whether or not there is a legitimate claim for a "socialist jurisprudence". Both theoretical constructs and historical examples are used during the course of discussion. In addressing the lacuna in the two paradigms of this field, the results of the thesis indicate that there is a viable alternative to law which does not ignore the regulatory needs of society and is compatible with the Marxist critique of the legal order.

This thesis explores how political preferences are shaped by institutions, economic conditions, and personality. Each chapter is a distinct contribution and provides a different perspective on the formation of political preferences and, ultimately, voting behaviour. These different approaches relate to the fields of comparative political economy, behavioural economics, and political psychology. Methodologically, this thesis is empirically applied and the results of these separate enquiries into political preferences are grounded in statistical analysis. A first substantive chapter introduces a median voter data set that provides insight into the ideological position of the electoral centre in over 50 democracies. A second chapter uses this new data and studies cross-national voting behaviour in 18 Western democracies over 1960-2003. It is found that electoral behaviour is closely related to the salience of the following economic institutions: labour organization, skill specificity, and public sector employment. This research shows that political preferences are endogenous to economic institutions and implies the existence of institutional advantages to partisan politics. A third substantive chapter focuses on ideological change in the United States and tests the proposition that voters advance a more liberal agenda in prosperous times and shift towards being more conservative in dire economic times. A reference-dependent utility model relates income growth to political preferences by way of the demand for public goods and the optimal tax rate. This work thus links voting behaviour to economic business cycles and shows that ideological change is endogenous to income growth rates. Finally, a fourth chapter presents the largest study to date of the influence of the big five personality traits on political ideology. In line with prior research in political psychology, it is found that openness to experience strongly predicts liberal ideology and that conscientiousness strongly predicts conservative ideology. A variety of childhood experiences are also studied that may have a differential effect on political ideology based on an individual's personality profile. The findings of this final chapter provide new evidence for the idea that differences in political preferences are deeply intertwined with variation in the nature and nurture of individual personalities. Generally, this thesis provides some new insights into the complex world of political preference formation and does so by exploring the influential role of institutions, economic conditions, and personality.

Due to its competitive political system and strong non-oil export capacity, Mexico is not considered an oil Rentier State. Yet, the consistent and intensive use of crude oil has fundamentally altered the trajectory of its political economy. State institutions, which had consistently relied on oil rents to finance their operations, tend to preserve social stability and political consensus rather than promote development. The central bureaucracy’s need to control oil rent strengthens and reinforces the role of budgetary institutions within politics and administration. Budget institutions provide the government with an inordinate degree of discretion to allocate the budget, a capacity that supports the State’s political legitimation and helps to overcome economic turmoil. Paradoxically, oil produces a policy curse that reinforces the State’s socio-political embeddedness at the expense of its economic leverage. Thus, undermining the incentives for public officials to tax and deliver expenditure quality, thereby deepening the State’s detachment from normal economic behaviour. Oil rent maximization serves to increase the size and cost of public employment and the magnitude of transfers and subsidies at the expense of gross fixed public investment, the maturation of a merit-based bureaucracy, and the Legislature’s role in controlling the Executive. In addition, rents short-term logic is inimical to the country’s long-term strategic planning because they do not provide public and sectoral policies with a sound financial basis. Rentier behaviour is enforced within the State apparatus by a structure of incentives where budgeteers and elected officials are largely exempted, given budgetary secrecy and discretion, to make enforceable and accountable commitments. In order to provide for valid causal inferences and increase explanatory leverage, research findings are supported by a comprehensive use of quantitative and qualitative primary sources (period 1970-2010) as well as pertinent comparative observations from other oil endowed States. Finally, by considering Mexico an outlier, this research refines some of the theoretical and methodological insights of the available literature on rentier States.

This thesis addresses the mechanisms by which groups of agents can track the truth, particularly in political situations. I argue that the mechanisms which allow groups of agents to track the truth operate in two stages: firstly, there are search procedures; and secondly, there are aggregation procedures. Search procedures and aggregation procedures work in concert. The search procedures allow agents to extract information from the environment. At the conclusion of a search procedure the information will be dispersed among different agents in the group. Aggregation procedures, such as majority rule, expert dictatorship and negative reliability unanimity rule, then pool these pieces of information into a social choice. The institutional features of both search procedures and aggregation procedures account for the ability of groups to track the truth and amount to social epistemic mechanisms. Large numbers of agents are crucial for the epistemic capacities of both search procedures and aggregation procedures. This thesis makes two main contributions to the literature on social epistemology and epistemic democracy. Firstly, most current accounts focus on the Condorcet Jury Theorem and its extensions as the relevant epistemic mechanism that can operate in groups of political agents. The introduction of search procedures to epistemic democracy is (mostly) new. Secondly, the thesis introduces a two-stage framework to the process of group truth-tracking. In 4 addition to showing how the two procedures of search and aggregation can operate in concert, the framework highlights the complexity of social choice situations. Careful consideration of different types of social choice situation shows that different aggregation procedures will be optimal truth-trackers in different situations. Importantly, there will be some situations in which aggregation procedures other than majority rule will be best at tracking the truth.

This PhD thesis accounts for the legitimacy challenges faced by the state that are specifically created by organized industrial workers through their anti-state unrest. It also relates such legitimacy challenges to recurring regime breakdown in unconsolidated democracies. I thus answer the question: how can we more fully account for labour-led legitimacy challenges to the state that at key times contribute to regime breakdown in unconsolidated democracies? I build on the dominant elite-driven explanations that are already emphasized in the existing theoretical literature by highlighting bottom-up labour mobilization that has not been given sufficient consideration. Moreover, I have uniquely framed such bottom-up mobilization in terms of “shared norms” in a very particular “moral economy” centred around development policy. These norms were in part created by the state as part of its informal “legitimation project” with labour. Key to the state-labour relationship within this moral economy is workers’ expectation of certain subsistence provision from the ruling regime in return for its role in state-led industrial production and national development. Such expectation of specific subsistence provision was partly built up by the state itself through its own rhetoric and policies; but this also set up the state to frequently lose legitimacy when such provision could not be delivered or maintained.

This work measures whether MPs are held individually accountable for their actions through a novel analysis of the 1997 and 2010 UK general elections. Previous research suggests that MPs’ behaviour has little effect on their careers; however, developments in the media’s aggressive reporting style, the rise of personality politics and decline in traditional voting patterns indicate that this is an opportune time to examine the effect of political controversies (including scandals) on MPs’ careers. This analysis focuses on three crucial stages that form a chain of accountability: (1) exposure: the media publicises the controversy and a perception is formed; (2) internal sanction: an MP retires before an election; (3) electoral sanction: voters punish MPs at the polls. Data on MP-specific controversies between the 1992 and 1997 and the 2005 and 2010 elections was sourced from The Times, The Guardian, The Daily Telegraph and their respective Sunday editions. This work also contains an original analysis of the 2009–2010 MP expenses scandal that utilises British Election Study panel survey data to examine how information on MP malfeasance affects voters’ perceptions of MPs. The findings indicate that political controversy is linked to whether an MP retires, with those MPs from the governing party driving the result in both the 1997 and 2010 elections. Overall, voters do not hold MPs responsible for their actions at the polls. Analysis of the expenses scandal supports these general findings: constituent perceptions of their MPs’ expenses behaviour respond to public information, but do not translate into election results. Internal sanction is shown to be the most powerful form of political accountability in the chain. While identifying any individual MP accountability is novel, the overall results are in line with traditional analyses of the strength of party politics, and indicate the importance of electoral system design for accountability.

This thesis consists of four papers, each of which helps to understand certain dynamics surrounding political dynasties. The first paper focuses on the role of ‘dynastic identity’ in influencing the behaviour of legislators from the political class of Bangladesh. In particular, it analyses whether dynastic legislators behave differently in comparison to non-dynastic legislators by examining their parliamentary attendance level and the likelihood of them having a criminal profile. The findings from the analysis suggest that ‘dynastic identity’ may influence a legislator’s behaviour. The second paper investigates if there is a systematic relationship between dynasty-politics and corruption in a cross-country empirical analysis. In doing so, the paper produces multiple dynasty indices that try to capture the variation in dynasty- politics across countries. The key findings from this scrutiny are indicative that countries with greater prevalence of dynasty-politics are associated with higher levels of corruption. In the third paper, I study the role of political assassination in facilitating the rise of political dynasties in Bangladesh. More specifically, I construct a data set of political leaders from Bangladesh who faced at least one assassination attempt to exploit the randomness in the success or failure of assassination attempts to identify assassination’s effect on the probability that a leader will start a political dynasty. The results point out that successful assassination increases the likelihood that a political leader will have a posterior relative in office. Lastly, the fourth paper examines if political assassinations have facilitated the rise of political dynasties across countries. To this end, the paper builds on the data used in Jones and Olken (2009), which has information on leaders with at least one assassination attempt. Thus, by comparing national leaders who barely survived an assassination attempt with those who died, the effects of political assassinations on dynasty formation are studied.