Hungary's political transformation of 1989 has been generally regarded as a peaceful revolution negotiated between the ruling Communists and the opposition. During the National Roundtable Negotiations, the fundamental framework of governance - including the amendment of the Constitution - was decided by members of Hungary's political elite. Hungary's mode of transition to democracy was an elite-led transformation and this was distinct from Czechoslovakia and Poland where the interests of society had been represented - to a large degree - by the likes of Vaclav Havel and Lech Walesa. In view of this, some critics argued that compared to Poland and Czechoslovakia, Hungary had no equivalent high-profile figure who could break with the Communist past and claim the ideas of a new democracy. Hungary, however, had its own figure with democratic credentials. Árpád Göncz, who came to prominence during the inter-war period has been one time or another, a student resistance leader during Nazi occupation in Hungary, a steelworker, an agriculturalist, a literary translator and, he subsequently became the first post-Communist President of Hungary. He experienced the major events of Hungarian history first hand, including the 1956 Hungarian Revolution. During this pivotal time, Göncz undertook a significant role in the resistance that followed the suppression of the Revolution; he was sentenced to life imprisonment as a result. His democratic activities were widely acknowledged by political elites and the general public alike. This, in turn, contributed to his election to the Presidency. Significantly, however, much of the existing literature on Hungary's post-Soviet political development has not attached a high degree of importance to Göncz's role in Hungarian history or his political achievements. At present, there are no biographies of Göncz either in English or Hungarian. Thus this thesis, as the first English language scholarly biography, addresses a gap in the literature through the narration of the story of Göncz's life; an expansive account of Göncz's life is situated within a framework of the wider historical, political and social concerns of his generation. Specifically, the following questions are addressed: how were Göncz's political beliefs developed and how did these beliefs later inform his term as the first post-Communist President of Hungary? Narrative analysis and elite interviewing are employed as the main research methods in order to explore the development of Göncz's political beliefs and their significance for the understanding of Hungarian politics. It is argued that as a whole, Göncz made important contributions to the development of Hungarian democracy. Though not born into a political family and constrained by external forces beyond his control, Göncz attempted to address some of the key social and political problems of the age. It is also argued that the decade of Göncz's Presidency was crucial for the shaping of the basic institutional tenets of governance in post-Soviet Hungary. Despite his lack of experience of governance, Göncz created a template for the role of President and significantly affected the demarcation of powers between president and government in the ever-evolving context of the process of political transformation. While his interpretation of the presidential powers and responsibility was not, and could not be regarded as positive in all respects, Göncz's Presidency was imbuded by his liberal and democratic values.

This thesis offers new insights into the challenges and opportunities brought by European Union (EU) integration policies by taking as a case study the process of accessing EU funding in Romania and its impact on the performance and reproduction of contemporary entrepreneurial identities. It is based on 16 months of ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Romania between June 2007 and September 2008. The thesis argues that EU funding - as an economic process shaped by EU anticorruption practices, policies and assumptions – configures new political and economic subjects through intertwined vocabularies of corruption and crime, a mix of formal and informal entrepreneurial practices and the commodification of finance. This dynamic process concomitantly enables Romania’s top-down integration into the EU through the adoption of transnational regulations, institutions and anxieties and Romania’s bottom-up integration into the EU through the assimilation of the EU funding regulations into the vernacular practices of doing business.

This dissertation addresses the question of to what extent growing numbers of older people who might have similar preferences regarding public intergenerational transfers (family and pension policies) will limit the scope of future social policy reforms in Germany. We are interested in to what extent the shift in the country's demography will trigger a so-called "gerontocracy." As a theoretical framework, we combine Mannheim's concept of political generations with a demographic life-course approach. According to Mannheim, growing numbers of a societal group, combine with unified preferences within the group, enhance the group's political power. To empirically test this hypothesis, we use three analytical steps: First, we analyse the future age composition of the German population, including familial characteristics, using a micro-simulation approach. The results suggest that the number of older people will grow substantially over the coming decades, particularly the share of older people who will remain childless and who will not be married. Second, we analyse preferences regarding redistributive social policies according to age, parity, and marital status, based on recent survey data. Generalised Linear Models and Generalised Additive Models are applied to examine what the effects of fdemographic indicators are on these preferences. Results show that older people are less in favour of transfers ot the younger generation than their younger counterparts. This is particularly true of childless interviewees. Third, we explore the extent to which these developments are likely to have an impact on the political sphere. How do policy makers perceive ageing and the preferences structures found? How do elderly interest groups define their roles in light of these results? In-depth interviews with these stakeholders provide a mixed picture: whereas most interviewees are convinced that older people have gained more power due to their bigger population share, there is little awareness of differences in policy preferences between various demographic groups. The biggest challenge for social policy makers is, therefore, to find ways to mediate between these two interesrs. if they fail to do so, a conflict of generations might become a realistic scenario for Germany.

Consumer choice has become a key reform trend in the provision of public services in Western European welfare states. Research on the welfare effects of choice reforms – including greater provider choice for the individual and competition between providers – has largely focused on economic evaluations of the extrinsic (outcome) effects of choice, thereby leaving its intrinsic, or procedural, value unexplored. The overarching objective of this thesis is to investigate the welfare effects of choice in the provision of health and long-term care (LTC) and their implications for equity. The thesis utilises the subjective well-being approach – incorporating both procedural and outcome utility from choice – to measure welfare effects based on quantitative analysis of survey data. Welfare effects and equity implications are examined in relation to: competition in health care in the English National Health System (NHS); choice of care package in the German long-term care system; and individual preferences and views of choice as a priority in the provision of health care in three NHS countries. The thesis argues that both service characteristics – extent of competition, information availability, technical complexity – and individual capabilities – ability to process information, capacity to manage transaction costs, availability of private support – influence the benefits that individuals derive from choice. Results suggest that choice policies have an overall positive welfare effect in both health and long-term care. However, while direct evidence of outcome improvements is found, the empirical analysis only finds indirect evidence of procedural utility. Middle class characteristics, primarily income and education, are found to have a positive influence on the benefits of choice, amounting to evidence of inequitable facets of choice policies. The middle class further exhibits preferences for choice over and above other characteristics of health care systems. Overall, this thesis advocates a holistic approach to the analysis of choice, incorporating its procedural value and paying particular attention to the equity implications of the choice situation, information processing and differences in available options as well as preferences for choice.

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.

This thesis analyses institutional and organisational reform in the Former Soviet Union and Russia in order to examine the effects and existence of path dependency and institutional competition in the development of the Russian oil industry. Based on a New Institutional Economics and Transaction Costs Economics framework the thesis establishes a link between the evolution of the oil industry and the institutional matrix associate with the structure of state power. In the post-Soviet setting path dependency is created by the state's continued reliance on a patrimonial structure of state power. Resource and time pressure and the lack of a popular reform consensus resulted in the domination of the former mode of state power over the constitutional-bureaucratic system favoured by the International Financial Institutions. The transaction cost premium associated with the constitutional-bureaucratic structure and the appropriation of income and resources created a bias towards the historic structure of state power. Thus state survival was an important factor in creating path dependency. However, the thesis reveals that due to the less ideologically based political foundation there is greater room for institutional competition. While such competition has remained low at the state administrative level the thesis finds there is some evidence of institutional competition at the industry level. Two corporate strategies (the Soviet Styled Company and the Western Styled Company) have emerged from the original Holding Type Company. These two strategies display different approaches to income extraction, development strategy and ownership structure. The two strategies constitute the basis from which potential institutional competition in the oil industry may develop.

The common research interest of this thesis’s chapters is the dynamics of policy change in the context of the Italian governmental system. The collection of three published papers each included as a chapter in the core of the thesis is preceded by an introduction explaining the theoretical approach and research strategy. The chapters are consistent in following a middle-range processual theory of the politics of public policy decisions in a country case, an event-centric approach to explaining policy choice and an elite-interviewing approach to data collection. The first two chapters, respectively entitled “Government Innovation Policy in Italy (1993-2002): Understanding the Invention and Persistence of a Public Management Reform” and “Dynamics of Electronic Government Policies: The case of Italy (1992-2003)”, examine the dynamics of public management policy change in Italy over the period of a decade, employing the case of the Policy for Government Innovation and the case of the Electronic-Government Policy. The analysis of these two newly reported cases of enduring public management reform is suited to question the argument set by previous literature; that the country’s legalistic administrative culture inevitably suppresses meaningful reform. In particular, the chapters set forth two significant reservations about this argument, namely that the outcomes of public management reform initiatives are more varied than the current literature shows and the theoretical approach in the established literature attributes exagerate causal influence to the governmental system’s legalistic traditions. The third chapter, entitled “Explaining the Unexpected Success of the Smoking Ban in Italy: Political Strategy and Transition to Practice”, analyzes the episode that unfolds in a domain that addresses a general interest reform, very visible to public opinion, unlike public management reform. The chapter follows the issue beyond the pre-decisional stage, uncovering the dynamics of transition to practice: a phase between the formal passage and the full application of a law. A concluding section compares the three chapters, explores the interactions between analytically significant features of the Italian context and the policy cycle, and distils analytical refinements to the notion of policy entrepreneurship.

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.

This thesis analyses the impact that the European Community had on table wine growers in the Midi region of France in the 1970s. This work is divided into the following parts: the negotiations leading to the creation of the Common Wine Policy (CWP) in 1970, its operation in the early 1970s until its first major crisis in 1975-1976, its drastic transformation from liberal policy to one of restrictive control in the late 1970s, the reaction of table wine producers in Languedoc-Roussillon to these changes over the decade, and the change in political relationships and governance at three levels - Brussels, Paris, and Languedoc-Roussillon - as a result of this process. It argues that the first decade of the CWP changed relationships between different groups at the European, national, and local level in two major ways: first, national French government institutions voluntarily decreased their power over a key national industry – this was the most marked feature in the French wine industry of this time period. Second, the CWP helped facilitate the rise of sub-national and non-state actors in policy circles from which they were previously excluded. Empowered by the new responsibilities given to them by the French government, particularly via a newly-created national office of wine, French vignerons began attempting to bypass the national French bottleneck to the Community and directly lobby European-level institutions, either via their own organisations or as part of transnational endeavours. Given the French government’s particularly adamant control of who represented the country at the Brussels levels in the 1960s, this change in only a decade was a significant shift. In analysing this process, this thesis also makes broader comments on the integration process as a whole, adding particularly to the literature on the Community’s agricultural integration, and is the first comprehensive review of the history of the Common Wine Policy, and the first to make an extensive assessment of the impact on local farmers in the Midi during this time in relation to the European Community’s policies.

Despite their explicit intent to speak with a single voice in foreign affairs, EU member states manage to do so only some of the time. Which are the factors that determine whether or not the EU member states successfully coordinate their positions in the international arena? To find out, I propose to examine the voting behaviour of the EU member states inside the United Nations General Assembly; a forum in which, notwithstanding heterogeneous policy preferences, they intend to coordinate their votes and are thus subject to coordination pressures. This means that for divisive resolutions, each member state must try to reconcile its national policy preference with the objective of casting a unified vote. I hypothesise that the balance a member state strikes generally depends on how important it views the issue at hand, how powerful it is, what type of relationship it maintains with the EU and under certain conditions, what type of relationship it maintains with US. I further argue that the balance is expected to tip in favour of EU unity when increasing the collective bargaining power by working together becomes a tangible objective. By adopting a multi-method approach, the thesis shows that the EU member states make a genuine and continuous effort to coordinate their votes inside the General Assembly. Significantly, the thesis illustrates that member states, at times, are able to override their heterogeneous national policy preference in order to stand united. I conclude by connecting the findings with the constructivist/rationalist debate, which juxtaposes foreign policy cooperation according to the logic of appropriateness with the logic of consequence. The results obtained have implications not only for the study of EU voting behaviour in the United Nations, but also for theoretical debate underlying it.