My thesis engages with the question about what it means to treat each other as equals, as this has been approached by luck and social egalitarians. Luck egalitarians maintain that luck inequalities should be equalized, while inequalities that are due to people’s choices should be left as they stand. This further implies that the scope of egalitarian justice is universal. Social egalitarians criticize luck egalitarianism for failing to provide a proper understanding of the value of equality. Equality is a relational ideal regarding how people should relate to each other as social and political equals, which properly understood requires that they relate to each other in a nondominating way. Given this, they argue, first, that luck egalitarian principles of justice violate the requirements of non-domination, since responsibility may conflict with the latter; and secondly, that strongly egalitarian duties are generated in virtue of morally significant forms of existing relationships, thus the scope of egalitarian justice is not universal. In my dissertation, I argue that Dworkin—who has traditionally been considered to be a luck egalitarian—shares the two social egalitarian commitments, namely that equality is a relational value and that strong egalitarian duties are generated in virtue of morally significant forms of existing relationships. Given this I defend two theses, both of which constitute an original contribution to our better understanding of the demands of social and political equality: a) Dworkin’s theory of equality properly understood is not only attentive to the social egalitarian requirement of non-domination, but it provides a better understanding of it precisely because it builds upon a conception of personal and consequential responsibility that is constitutive of non-domination. b) I challenge both Dworkin’s and social egalitarians’ view of the scope of egalitarian justice by arguing that properly understood the ideal of social and political equality tells us that we should relate to each other as equals, not that existing relationships are necessary for justice-based duties to be triggered.

Two interpretive trends have driven the recent revival of Kant’s political philosophy. On the one hand, a focus on his cosmopolitanism as providing a normative agenda for a global political order. On the other hand, a turn to Kant as a theorist of a distinctly state-centred political morality, based on his much debated property argument. This thesis argues that these interpretive trends have sidetracked us from Kant’s most sustained, systematic and original cosmopolitan vision as it is laid out in the Doctrine of Right. I develop this framework through the notion of a global standpoint as a distinctly first-person perspective from which agents reflexively recognise their systematic interdependence in a world of limited space. The global standpoint binds what I call ‘earth dwellers’ – corporeal agents who concurrently coexist on the earth’s spherical surface – to a certain kind of comportment towards distant strangers. It is a standpoint from which we must interact with others with the aim of finding shared terms of coexistence. What is particularly fascinating about this cosmopolitan vision and of continuing relevance is the way in which Kant folds it into his account of juridical statehood. The global standpoint is not only predicated on the existences of states. Despite being concerned with our comportment beyond borders, the ensuing obligations are also to be implemented within the state context. Kant’s cosmopolitanism as conceived from the global standpoint is not directed at a global institutional order, but a world of distinctly outwardlooking states that bind themselves (and their citizens) to rightful comportment towards other states and non-state peoples of their own accord. We take up the global standpoint from within states by transforming them into cosmopolitan agents.

In this thesis I attempt to clarify and evaluate G. A. Cohen’s positive contribution to the question of what type of society we ought to seek, following his turn from Marxism to normative political philosophy. I specifically focus on clarifying and evaluating certain views that appear in his critical engagement with Ronald Dworkin and John Rawls, and in his positive vision of society as set out in Why Not Socialism? I interpret Cohen as holding that, in principle, we ought to seek a society that reflects equal access to advantage (or some other luck egalitarian principle of equality of opportunity), Pareto-efficiency, freedom of occupational choice, and a principle of community that, by means of voluntary non-state agency, significantly tempers inequalities consistent with luck egalitarianism. With respect to evaluative matters, I argue: (i) that we ought not to embrace equal access to advantage but rather an alternative luck egalitarian principle of equality of opportunity where opportunities are specified in terms of resources; (ii) that although equality of opportunity, Pareto-efficiency and freedom of occupational choice might be co-obtainable in principle, they are not coobtainable in practice; and (iii) that in practice equality of opportunity ought to be constrained by a sufficiency qualification rather than by Cohen’s community principle. In addition, I interpret a concession from Cohen about Paretoefficiency often trumping equality of opportunity, in practice, in terms of a pluralist distributive ethic that combines telic egalitarian and telic prioritarian beliefs. I defend the plausibility of this ethic to some extent, but ultimately come to embrace a sufficiency-constrained luck egalitarianism that secures a decent life for all by means of state coercion, and which minimizes the unfairness of the prudent having to bear the costs of other’s imprudence.

Democracy substitutes election by the incompetent many for appointment by the corrupt few. —George Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman (1903) This thesis consists of three essays in the field of empirical political economy. The topics addressed in these essays are very diverse, as are the historico-institutional settings. What they share is the quantitative analysis of election results and – at least in the author’s opinion – the inquiry of relevant research questions about political attitudes and institutions. This gives the dissertation its title “No Ordinary Elections”. Chapter one looks at the effect of war service on political attitudes. I analyse the impact of WWI veterans on changes in electoral support for Germany’s antidemocratic right after 1918. In order to quantify the effect, I construct the first disaggregate estimates of German WWI veterans since official army records were destroyed. I combine this data with a new panel of voting results from 1881 to 1933. Differences-in-Differences estimates show that war participation had a strong positive effect on support for the right-wing at the expense of socialist parties. A one standard deviation increase in veteran inflow shifted voting patterns to the right by more than 2%. My findings are robust to a number of checks including an IV identification strategy based on draft exemption rules. The effect of veterans on voting is highly persistent and strongest in working class areas. Gains for the right-wing, however, are only observed after a time period of communist insurgencies. I argue that veterans’ impact is consistent with the spread of a popular anti-communist conspiracy theory, the stab-in-the-back myth. I provide suggestive evidence that veterans must have picked this idea up during wartime, injected it into the working class and facilitated the rise of right-wing parties. The second chapter documents evidence on how election fraud in authoritarian regimes can be used by lower-tier officials to cast signals about their loyalty or competence to the central government. I exploit a radical policy change in Russia in 2004 which allowed the president to replace governors of the country’s 89 regions at his own will. As a result, federal elections after 2004 were organised by two types of governors: one was handpicked by the president, the other one elected before the law change and re-appointed. Even though both types faced removal in case of bad results, the need to signal loyalty was much lower for the first type. In order to estimate the effect of handpicked governors on electoral fraud, I use a diff-in-diff framework over 7 federal elections between 2000 and 2012. For this time period, I construct a new indicator of suspicious votes for each region which correlates strongly with incidents of reported fraud. My baseline estimates show that in territories with a handpicked governor the share of suspicious votes decreased by more than 10% on average and dropped even further if the region’s economy had done well over the past legislature. These findings suggest that officials have less need to use rigging as a signal once loyalty is assured unless faced circumstances raising doubts about their competence. Finally, chapter three studies the Chernobyl nuclear disaster of April 1986 and voters’ response in West Germany. The analysis uses a diff-in-diff estimation which exploits variation in proximity to the nearest nuclear power plant (NPP) across 301 counties. Proximity is used as proxy for the shock from perceived risk of a nuclear accident. Using data over a time period of almost 40 years and 11 elections, my results indicate that living closer to an NPP increased polarisation and benefited anti- but even more pro-nuclear parties. While gains of Greens are shown to be similar across social groups and therefore in line with home-voter effects, the increase of conservatives runs counter to most expectations. Heterogeneity analysis shows that the effect on conservatives is far stronger in areas with an above-median share of adolescents in their impressionable years and of higher average education. I argue that this can be explained by differences in assessing the economic losses from exiting nuclear power over the risk of a nuclear accident after the disaster. Using variation in the scheduling of state elections, I can also show that the pro-nuclear response was stronger in counties which did not vote in the immediate aftermath of Chernobyl leaving more time for a rational electoral choice.

This thesis aims to draw a comparison on Britain and Japan on issues of citizenship and nationality for the former empire subjects. In multi-national state Britain, those of New Commonwealth immigration issue is mainly conceptualised as ‘racial' topics, while in nation-state Japan, Koreans and Taiwanese or aliens’ issue is mainly conceptualised as legal ‘nationality' topics. The framework is set from the Japanese ‘nationality’ perspective, in order to point out what are missed in the 'race' framework, in particular, when they are applied to the Japanese context. Discussion of formal rights in Japan is divided in two as rights with regard to residence, and their right for citizenship status. In chapter 2, I discuss that the former is similar to denizenship discussion while the latter is similar to patriality topic. The methodology section explores what is the best way to conduct a comparison between Britain and Japan on these citizenship and nationality issue, as well as considering what are the main factors in each country to make some impact on public policy of the government. I consider court cases are important tool for minorities in Japan, while in Britain, pressure through the parliament seems much more influential. The research chapters explore the topics of denizenship and patriality of each country, the British chapters examine the impact of the 1971 Immigration Act, while the Japanese chapters examine the impact of the 1952 San Francisco Peace Treaty and the following circular, and see whether minorities formal rights has been changed after since or not. The conclusion examines whether the withdrawal from empire had some significant impact of citizenship and nationality legislation as well as the concepts in Britain and Japan. It argues that the impact of the former empire subjects on legislation has been slow and continuous in Britain, while in Japan there was a major change once for all, but the results are continuous. The two concepts are slowly converging in Britain, while in Japan, they are gradually diverging.

This thesis examines Hannah Arendt’s argument for a council democracy and its relevance for contemporary democratic practices. References to the councils in Arendt’s work are often ignored or dismissed by her interpreters as a utopian commitment. Against the tendency to neglect this aspect of her thought, I argue that the councils play a crucial role in her work as the institutional embodiment of her principle of political freedom. Tracing the development of the council concept in Arendt’s thought, I offer a significant reinterpretation of her political theory as situated within the radical democratic tradition of Rosa Luxemburg. I contend that Arendt’s key contribution to democratic theory is her championing of a federal system of participatory and empowered councils as the central political institutions of a council republic. Arendt’s argument for a council democracy draws from historical examples of councils from the French Revolution to the 1956 Hungarian Revolution. However, Arendt mischaracterises the nature of the councils and the intentions of council delegates. She inserts them in the framework of her own political categories and disregards the delegates’ socialist ideology and socio-economic concerns. Arendt’s distortion of the councils gives rise to the need for a historical re-examination of their political practices. I return to the political struggles of the post-First World War council movements in Germany and Russia in order to place the councils in historical perspective and challenge the biases of Arendt’s account. My analysis reveals that the councils were concerned with both political and economic affairs. I revise Arendt’s depiction in arguing that the councils were transformative organs of democratisation that sought to introduce democratic conditions into all spheres of social organisation. Situating the councils in relation to contemporary democratic practices, my principal argument is that they offer a critical perspective on the limits of current liberal democratic regimes. Although the councils do not present a model that could be replicated today, council delegates engaged in significant political practices that are instructive for current attempts at political transformation. In particular, they reveal the insufficiencies of electoral institutions for enabling widespread political participation and holding elites accountable. I argue that the historical significance of the councils is their exemplary role as institutions through which working-class forces organised to restrain elites, dismantle hierarchical systems and equalise power between citizens.

Nations are not becoming conflict-free zones as once envisioned. They remain zones of conflict and of competition. It has been argued that competition over the memory of foundational events or of national identity can strengthen national identities. In some cases, however, competition brings more competition, leading only to fragmentation. When such competition continues without producing a definite outcome, the question remains: why is there continuous competition? This thesis answers this question through a case study, that of Dersim in the Turkish Republic. Despite appearing from the outside to be a unified zone of insurgent conflict against the Turkish state, Dersim is, in fact, a contested ground and a zone of conflict where multiple insurgent movements struggle not only against the state but also against each other. Why is it that Dersim remains a conflict zone in which the number of conflicting groups simply increases? Why do we not see a victorious or dominant movement but, rather, continuous competition that does not strengthen the nation but engenders new, ‘sub-nation(alism)s’? This thesis does two things. Firstly, it explains why there is this incessant competition. Secondly, it maps out the arenas in which this competition takes place, tracing its origins further back than the 1990s. I argue that competition continues because nationalist movements impose concepts of ethnicity and nationalism on the region in order to homogenise what remains a heterogeneous community. The outcome of this competition may not be ‘nation-building’ nor ‘strong collective identity,’ but neither does Dersim totally fragment. On the one hand, Dersimlis have been torn apart particularly by ethno-linguistic definitions of their collective identity that are unsuitable for the type of community it is. On the other, such is the tradition of resistance to the central authority in Ankara, that Dersimlis exhibit the same degree of solidarity that one finds in more cohesive nationalist movements.

Political parties serve a number of vital functions in representative democracies. Connecting citizens to government is perhaps the most important one. This is how parties were traditionally conceived, and it continues to be the main standard according to which their legitimacy as representative institutions is evaluated. In recent times, observers have noted a growing disconnect between citizens and parties. Parties have gradually transformed from agents that mediate between state and civil society to agents of the state. This sits uncomfortably with the ideal of parties as connectors of citizens and government. How can their capacity to perform this function be restored? This thesis seeks to offer a new answer to this question. Its main argument is that to revitalise their capacity to connect citizens and government, parties need to become more internally democratic, and that they need to become more internally democratic in a particular way, namely more internally deliberative. By this is meant that parties need to strengthen channels of communication from the bottom up and avail themselves of their internal deliberative resources: of the partisans on the ground, who deliberate over the demands of their community in local party branches. The theoretical part of the thesis proposes a model—called a “deliberative model of intraparty democracy”—showing how these traditional sites of partisanship can be empowered. The empirical part of the thesis then asks whether such a model can be realised in real-world parties. The main focus is here on the deliberative capacity of organised party members, which is likely the first target of scepticism. I examine three questions, drawing on the findings of a small-scale study of deliberation in party branches in Social Democratic parties in Germany and Austria: (1) Do party branches provide favourable preconditions for deliberation? (2) Are the political discussions in the branches “deliberative”, in the sense that they are marked by respectful exchanges of reasons? (3) When does intra-party deliberation fail? Though mainly indicative, the analysis of the empirical material suggests that party members do possess the deliberative capacity required to realise a deliberative model of intra-party democracy, and that possible deliberative deficiencies can be countervailed using simple institutional fixes. In light of this, the thesis concludes that making parties more internally deliberative in order to reconnect citizens with government is well within reach.

The essays in this thesis explore the effects of legislative leaders on the behaviour of parliamentarians in the European Parliament and the UK House of Commons, and the consequences of this relationship for parliamentary outcomes. The first paper argues that when party leaders are motivated to maintain the voting cohesion of their legislative contingents, and when disciplinary resources are in short supply, leaders may block policy proposals that threaten to divide their members. Accordingly, as the preferences of party members become more diffuse, agenda setting party leaders will be able to maintain cohesion but the actions they take to do so may contribute to the overall level of gridlock in the legislature. I introduce new data and methods to evaluate these relationships in the European Parliament, where agenda control and ‘carrot and stick’ disciplinary powers are held by different sets of parliamentary actors. The second paper argues that by making the status quo less attractive and by increasing legislators’ tolerance to new policies, external crises empower leaders who have the ability to propose legislation. In the context of the European Union’s response to the 2008 financial crisis, I combine topic modelling with a two-stage least squares procedure to show that voting coalitions in the European Parliament changed after the crisis in ways consistent with the theoretical model. The implication of the analysis is that prointegration agenda-setters were able to pass legislation in the post-crisis period that would have been impossible to pass in the absence of the crisis. In the third paper, I argue that when members of previously under-represented groups are appointed to positions of high office within the legislature, they can serve as role models to their fellow group members. Using a difference-in-differences design, I demonstrate that the appointment of a female cabinet minister in the UK House of Commons leads to an increase in the participation of other female members of parliament in legislative debates. Furthermore, I develop a novel approach for measuring the influence of legislators in debate, and use this to show that female members of parliament also become more influential following the appointment of a female minister. In exploring the mechanisms that underpin this role-model effect, I introduce an additional quantitative measure which reveals that female ministers are more responsive to the speeches made by female legislators than are male ministers. Taken together, these papers provide important theoretical arguments and empirical evidence concerning the central role that leaders play in the legislative process.

This thesis investigates the Convention on Access to Information, Public Participation in Decisionmaking and Access to Justice in Environmental Matters (Aarhus). It assesses its normative contribution to International Environmental Politics (IEP). Via English School (ES) lenses, it gauges the degree of pluralism and solidarism in the Convention. More specifically, it evaluates Aarhus’ role as a green human rights regime; scrutinises the contribution of Aarhus’ trinity of procedural rights; offers a regime analysis; and asks (a) what Aarhus’ association with democratisation is and (b) whether its success depends on Parties’ political cultures. Three originality claims are made. First, this project offers a particular investigation into an under-researched, quite elusive Multilateral Environmental Agreement (MEA). Second, it applies pluralism and solidarism to a tangible research object. Third, it addresses the overlooked issue of cosmopolitanisation in IEP. Three key findings are drawn. First, Aarhus demonstrates the presence of, and contributes to, a greener European international society. Second, Aarhus has considerable solidarist potential, offering tools for cosmopolitan human empowerment in IEP. Third, pluralist realities retain distinct influence. Cosmopolitan empowerment may be emerging, but it is still nascent. Sovereignty remains, and this is welcomed. Tentative cosmopolitanisation of political orthodoxies is morally desirable and practically feasible. Evolutionary reform of the statist status quo is more agreeable than revolutionary change. World society values, of the sort enacted by Aarhus, help render IEP more ethically ambitious and human-oriented. But they will not emerge without a stable political framework in which states can institutionalise them. Aarhus demonstrates that whilst IEP remains International, it can still be enriched by humanity, which states must accommodate if they are to be legitimate international citizens, exercising responsible sovereignty, in the twenty-first century.