This dissertation develops a method for the analysis of political discourse from the work of Foucault which it uses to construct the Labour Party in the 1930s, in a specific relation to the issues of antisemitism and Indian independence. These issues are chosen because they are some of the issues in which a conception of race is posed in the implicit and explicit discourse. The central thrust of the investigation is to establish the ways in which the notion of political community is constructed in these particular discourses, and then assess the extent to which this informs constructions of race. It has been possible to develop a method for 'reading' political statements which asks how a particular position was arrived at, its conditions of formation. Two of the key mechanisms in this are constraint and structuring mechanism. This is a way of designating the factors which limit the range of political possibilities in the issue of statements. Through this method of reading it has been possible to construct the Labour Party as a discoursing institution from the variety of positions offered to it as definitions of particular issues. It. has been possible to determine which positions it chose to sanction as official and which it chose to reject. A close examination of official and unofficial statements facilitates a number of comments on the ideological nature of the positions which the Labour Party chose to sanction and those which were unacceptable to it. The Labour Party's definitions of Indian independence reveal its conceptions of commonwealth. As a key institution in defining the British commonwealth it awarded India second class status as a political community, through an independence constitution which did not enfranchise the majority of its population. On the issue of anti semitism the Labour Party revealed itself to be unable to countenance a multi racial political community by posing Fascism and anti semitism as separate issues, the former to be challenged by the Labour movement, the latter to be eased by Zionism. The conclusions consider the extent to which constructions of race have changed and then what might be the contemporary relevance of these historical debates in the study of race.

The subject of this dissertation is presidential term limits in Latin America (1990 - 2010). In contemporary presidential democracies there is a wide variation in how many times a president can run for reelection. In some countries presidents can be reelected for an unlimited number of terms; others allow presidents to be reelected for up to two consecutive terms; others establish that presidents must wait at least one or two terms before competing again for the presidential post; and others establish that presidents can be in office only for one term -- i.e. reelection is prohibited. The three papers comprising this dissertation seek to explore the relationship between these different presidential term limits provisions and political and economic outcomes in Latin America.

Institutional factors affecting implementation of policies are a reflection of the larger political context and setting of money in education. This has an impact on implementing accommodations for English Language Learners in standardized testing under No Child Left Behind. To see if this is true, four states: Indiana, New York, Tennessee and Wisconsin were chosen as examples of state policy adoption and their test contracts were collected from a test company. State accommodations for ELL in testing policy and state costs for standardized tests were analyzed in a comparative review. The diversity of methods in accommodation and lack of correlation between state standardized test costs to product illustrates institutional factors affecting NCLB implementation. Therefore it becomes essential for professional development to support states in implementing NCLB within an institutional context. Addressing these factors will lead to greater educational progress in U.S. federal policies.

This study focusses on the relationship between social assistance and personal social services on the one hand and various forms of social insurance on the other hand. During the period the expressed objective was in both nations to replace the Poor Law with insurance, leaving only a small last resort assistance scheme. While Norway continued the pre-war practice of breaking down the Poor Law "from without" through the gradual extension of insurance, Britain attempted a more immediate transition through the creation of a universal National Insurance and a National Assistance freed from the cash-care multifunctional nature of the Poor Law. The comparison of the ensuing development rests on two postulates. First, Norwegian social insurance will be seen to have experienced a more favourable development in terms of coverage and levels of benefits. Second, in the case of assistance the Norwegian scheme covered a decreasing proportion of the population with a service bearing strong resemblance to those of the Poor Law. Britain, by contrast, experienced a growth in the number covered by assistance, in terms of numbers as well as need categories. The services obtained bear, however, less resemblance to the Poor Law compared to their Norwegian counterpart. For both nations it will be hypothesised that the scope and nature of assistance can be largely explained by the development of social insurance. The findings will be discussed in relation to Titmuss' models of welfare. The hypothesis is that while Norway on the whole has reached an income maintenance closer to the institutional model compared to Britain, a paradox emerges when we see that Norway also features a more residual assistance in comparison to services offered to equivalent groups in the UK. These findings are also discussed in relation to theories about the social division of welfare as well as different interpretations of determinants of welfare. The study is in two parts: Institutional and residual welfare. In the first we analyse first the emergence of the models of insurance in the two countries and, second, the 1946-1966 development of old age and disability pensions. The second part focusses on assistance and the changing nature of social work in the local authority personal social services.

This thesis studies the interrelationship between government and the shipbuilding industry in the United Kingdom during the so-called ‘Golden Age’ of economic growth between 1945 and 1973. It argues that actions of government in the 1960s and 70s aimed at arresting the decline of shipbuilding as an industry instead acted first as a brake on the industry’s development and second as one of the principal agents of its decline. It does this by demonstrating that the constant government led introspection into the shipbuilding industry between 1960 and 1966 delayed investment decisions by companies that were uncertain about which direction the government would take or whether it would provide funding. This thesis also demonstrates that the Wilson Labour governments’ instruments of modernisation and change, the Shipbuilding Inquiry Committee and the Shipbuilding Industry Board, chose and imposed technical and organisational solutions on the industry that did not reflect the prevailing orthodoxy of shipbuilding in competitor nations such as Japan and Sweden. This fatally damaged the industry during a time of demand for newly constructed vessels; the cheap price of crude oil in the 1960s led to a very high demand for very large crude carriers, supertankers, capable of transporting between one quarter and one half a million tons of crude oil from the Middle East to the industrial nations of North American and Europe. However, as the case studies of the Harland and Wolff and Scott Lithgow companies in this thesis demonstrates, British shipyards were ill equipped and poorly prepared to take advantage of this situation and when finally the shipyards were positioned to take advantage of the situation, the 1973 Yom Kippur War and subsequent OPEC oil embargo took away the demand for supertankers. This was when the British government dealt the now nationalised shipbuilding industry a fatal blow, subsidising supertankers no longer in demand for purchase at a heavily subsidised price by shipping lines that would place the vessels into immediate and long-term storage. In short, this thesis illuminates the complex relationship between government and industry that led to the demise of the British shipbuilding industry.

Successful delivery of public service depends on how the relationships are forged by the actors (organizations) involved in service provision in a given socioeconomic and political context. By applying Agency Theory to the accountability features of service transaction and Activity Theory as a tool to define relationships, I have demonstrated that the public sector (District Governments) exhibits a more liberal attitude towards relationships with community based organizations (Water Users' Committees) in the provision of rural drinking water, while being more formal in relationships with the technical service providers (NGOs). The resolution of the dilemma regarding whether to choose trust-based or more formal contractual relationships with community and service providers in service provision, depends on how effectively the public sector builds their capacity to monitor, supervise and enforce the terms of the service provision relationship. The study of the application of accountability features in the service delivery transaction helps us to understand how a government organization structures its relationships with community organizations and with others, by using either a social or a market approach. The research also reveals that it is difficult to assign accountability in the collaborative network type of service provision, particularly for the provision of public goods and services, which demands a greater level of formal accountability to legitimize the functioning of the government.

Set in the context of the evolving political tapestry of the Caspian region, encompassing the five riparian states of Azerbaijan, Iran, Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan and Russia, and their immediate neighbours in the South Caucasus (Armenia and Georgia) and Central Asia (Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan) this PhD presents an analysis of Iranian foreign policy in the first six years following the Soviet break-up (1991-1997), an era that overlapped with the administration of President Ali Akbar Hashemi-Rafsanjani (1989-1997). This thesis aims to build upon two distinct areas of current scholarship creating linkages between Tehran’s domestic and external environment between 1988 and 1991 which resulted in the comprehensive pragmatist alliance and the emergence of opportunities in the Caspian after the Cold War. The crux is that Rafsanjani’s material interests were aligned with the changing geopolitics of its northern region, inducing an Iranian policy driven by a pragmatic construction of strategic concerns.

In the contemporary political world order that continues to be structured by the principle of national sovereignty, states remain the most important instrument for the delivery of rights. If we want to understand how human rights can be realized in practice, we therefore have to study the conditions and processes of their institutionalization on the state level. While the United Kingdom was relatively slow, compared to other western European democracies, in the domestic institutionalization of international human rights norms and standards, governments in Britain have between 1998 and 2008 created a complex human rights regime that still awaits a comprehensive analysis and assessment. This thesis fills that gap. Focusing on the Human Rights Act as the legal centerpiece, the Joint Committee on Human Rights as the parliamentary scrutiny body, and the Equality and Human Rights Commission for Great Britain as the largest human rights commission, this thesis examines the extent to which the British Human Rights Regime has contributed to the institutionalization of human rights in the UK. To that end, it develops and deploys the sociological ideal type of the human rights state as a qualitative analytical framework and as an external benchmark that is able to integrate the legal, political, and wider societal dimensions of effective human rights institutionalization. Based on the thematic analysis of case law, official documents and elite interviews with public officials, this thesis argues that the Human Rights Act, the Joint Committee on Human Rights and the Equality and Human Rights Commission have contributed to a significant institutional change in the domestic recognition and protection of human rights. They have introduced new rights norms and safeguards into British law, established new mechanisms for judicial and political rights review, and brought about important legislative and policy changes. Yet, their efficacy suffers from structural limitations that have been imposed so as not to fundamentally disturb the concentration of political power in the executive which is preserved by the constitutional doctrine of parliamentary sovereignty. In the Westminster system of parliamentary government, this doctrine continues to allow the executive to dominate the legislative process without strong constitutional human rights safeguards that would be domestically enforceable against primary legislation. While the preservation of parliamentary sovereignty was a key political requirement that enabled progress to the present state of domestic human rights institutionalization, it also prevents the sustainable entrenchment of human rights as fundamental and universally binding norms for the legitimate exercise of all juridical, legislative and executive state power, thereby leaving the British Human Rights Regime at permanent risk of abolishment or degradation.

The aim of this project is to find whether the national system of performance measurement in the Russian public sector is affected by deliberate data manipulation. Using mixed methods I demonstrate that locally generated data are more likely to be manipulated than data reported by external agencies. Instead of improving managerial decisions, performance indicators have become a tool of symbolic bureaucratic accountability not linked to real managerial activities. 25 current and former civil servants from three regional governments in Russia were interviewed (including three ministers of economic development); quantitative data were obtained from a publicly available performance dataset covering the period of 2007-2011 (with data for a unified list of over 300 indicators from 83 regional governments). Two strategies of data manipulation were identified: a “prudent bureaucrat” strategy consisted in minimizing long-term risks by reporting “more-normal-than-real” figures; a more ambitions “reckless bureaucrat” strategy aimed at inflating figures to maximise credit. Systematic application of these two strategies has produced a detectable bias in the overall performance data with “prudent bureaucrat” strategy dominating. Performance reporting creates a “bureaucratic panopticon” and resulting behaviour may be understood using Michel Foucault’s notion of normalisation.

This thesis combines two burgeoning fields – New Institutionalism and migration studies – to explain the process of institutional change. It tests six hypotheses drawn from a hybrid theoretical framework drawn from Historical Institutionalism, Rational Choice Institutionalism, and Sociological Institutionalism, identifying concrete mechanisms of reproduction and sources of endogenous and exogenous change. It applies this framework to changes in access to citizenship in the form of citizenship and naturalisation policy in the United Kingdom and Germany between 2000 and 2010. Its greatest contributions lie in a more comprehensive explanation of endogenous factors and incremental changes, two aspects of institutional change that have received inadequate theoretical attention and empirical investigation. Testing economic, power-based, and ideational explanations for change, it concludes that each of the New Institutionalisms makes an important contribution to a complete understanding of the process of change and the dynamics of this policy area in two very different European countries.