The aim of the thesis is contribute to the growing comparative literature on regionalist parties in Western Europe, focusing on strategy and ideology. The research questions correspond to the three ideological dimensions/domains which are taken into consideration (centre-periphery, leftright and European integration), as well as to the links amongst such dimensions/domains: why are some regionalist parties more moderate (i.e. autonomists) while other are more radical (i.e. secessionists)?; why do some regionalist parties position themselves to the left, while others position themselves to the right?; why are some regionalist parties pro-integration, while others are against?; are there relationships between regionalist parties‟ positions across the diverse ideological dimensions? The analytical framework brings together sociological theories of political alignments with theories of party competition and theories of party change. The empirical section is made up of a comparison of four case studies (LN, PC, SVP and SNP), which are analysed in depth, plus a final chapter that includes the most important regionalist parties in Western Europe. Data are gathered through interviews with prominent party members, party documents (primarily manifestos), election studies and secondary sources. In brief, in the conclusions it is argued that: regions that have been independent states in the past and regions with concentrated ethno-linguistic minorities tend to produce more radical parties on the centre-periphery dimension. Competition between regionalist parties acting in the same region also increases radicalism; 'working class' regions tend to produce leftist regionalist parties, while 'bourgeois' regions tend to produce rightist regionalist parties; positioning on European integration depends mainly on the compatibility of the selfgovernment project with the process of European integration and on parties‟ satisfaction with the policy output of the state vis a vis that of the EU; only weak relationships can be discerned between centre-periphery and left-right positioning, and between centre-periphery and European integration. A stronger relationship is apparent between left-right and European integration positioning.

This thesis advances several core arguments surrounding the need for a dynamic and nuanced conceptualisation and multi-dimensional framework to position parties towards European integration; that Europe does play a more important role in European elections than previously thought; that ideology is the strongest predictor of party positions; and finally that the quantitative study of party manifestos produces valid and reliable data for positioning political parties. The study finds that the European issue is the most important in European election manifestos and that parties do exhibit similar behaviour in both national and European elections. Furthermore, it finds that ideology remains an important and strong predictive factor, but its explanatory power diminishes in the analyses towards the newer dimensions of integration (social, cultural, and foreign policy). With the in-depth examination of party positions, it is possible to identify a significantly greater number of Eurosceptic parties using the new definition, that Euroscepticism is now found in all political party families, and that there remains a strong ideological component in the content of their positions towards integration. However, ideology is a stronger predictive factor for the left-wing parties, with those on the right being more fragmented and heterogeneous

This is a thesis about legislative package deals in the European Union and their effects on EU policy outcomes. It analyzes inter-chamber legislative exchange between the Council of Ministers and the European Parliament. The key argument is that package deals increase the legislative influence of the European Parliament across legislative procedures and policy areas. Package deals allow Member States to establish control over the financial aspects of legislation and to ensure its adoption without delay. In exchange, the European Parliament gains further institutional powers and access to some of the EU's most salient policy areas. Legislative bargaining between the Council of Ministers and the European Parliament is analyzed across all EU legislation, completed in the period 1 May 1999 - 30 April 2007. The argument is tested empirically through the quantitative analysis of 1465 co-decision and consultation proposals, 19 policy areas and 8 years. Five in-depth case studies complement the findings. The results indicate that the use of package deals in the EU is conditional on the distributive nature of legislative proposals, and their urgency. In turn, package deals and urgency affect legislative outcomes. Package deals and delay increase the EP's legislative influence in the consultation procedure. Package deals and Council impatience increase the EP's legislative influence in the co-decision procedure. Overall, package deals extend the EP's legislative influence in distributive policy areas and increase its institutional powers.

Turkey’s European Union (EU) membership aspirations form a critical junction on the road to further European integration. During the past decade, the role of nongovernmental organisations (NGOs) as facilitators of the accession process has grown exponentially in relevance. In Turkey’s case, specific policies have emerged to support this element of the pre-accession process. By targeting NGOs, these policies aim to Europeanise and democratise Turkish civil society and in so doing prepare Turkey for eventual EU accession. This logic draws on the liberal democratic tradition that anticipates democratisation to be a key outcome of NGO support. The thesis questions the appropriateness of such assumptions, since Turkish NGOs respond to EU policy in a variety of locally meaningful ways that may circumvent the stated policy outcomes. The wider the gap between policy and reality, the more space there is for NGOs to exercise their agency, and more uncertain the Europeanisation processes become. The thesis starts out by juxtaposing the European and Turkish perspectives in turn. The EU approach suggests that NGOs behave similarly across different cultural contexts and can be called upon to perform a variety of roles deemed useful for the overall policy process. However, civil society in Turkey has developed along a different trajectory, fostering NGOs that are highly politicised in their activities and cultivating social debates that are essentialist rather than compromising in nature. The latter part of the thesis explores different aspects of this disconnect. The relationships NGOs construct with each other and with governmental bodies are politicised and lack the culture of cooperation expected by EU policy. NGOs exhibit different reactions to EU funding: some embrace it while others pursue it unsuccessfully and grow resentful, or even reject any external funding outright. These differences lead NGOs to generate a variety of survival strategies that minimise the impact of EU policy on changing NGO behaviour where the change is unwelcome by the NGO, or maximise the impact where NGO and EU interests are mutually advanced. The thesis examines how the Europeanisation of Turkish civil society unfolds through a policy process that both affects and is shaped by NGO actors, where the eventual outcomes of EU policy remain uncertain.

This thesis explores the European Parliament's construction of European identity in enlargement discourse between 1962 and 2004. It focuses on the idea of "Europe" a constructed by the European Parliament over the past 50 years, analysing both the way which MEPs discuss the idea of Europe and European identity and also looking through the lens at the development of what has so far been a largely neglected institution in the historiography of European integration. The European Parliament is a common subject of political science studies, which often focus on the dynamics of party politics and elections. European identity is also a ubiquitous subject of many political science, sociological, and historical works. Historians of European integration, however, have dedicated little attention to either. This work thus places itself at the intersection of the literature on the idea of European identity, the European Parliament, and European enlargement. The thesis makes a contribution to the understanding of the historical development of a European identity discourse with the enlargement context, showing how one amongst the Community institutions attempted to legitimise the expansion and continuation of the process of European integration through the discursive construction of a European idea. It traces the main themes that emerge over the years out of this construction, from political identity to historical narratives and cultural elements, analysing how MEPs develop these different bases if identity in different enlargement contexts. It then looks at Turkey as a special case study of an enlargement that is still underway and explores the identity themes that emerge from the discourse surrounding this open-ended process. Ultimately, the thesis also shows that the European Parliament, thus far overlooked in the historiography of European integration, is in fact worthy of closer scrutiny as an institution in its own right.

Greece's accession to the EEC represents a fascinating case-study of the history of enlargement, of European integration and finally of the Cold War in the late 1970s.This thesis is the first detailed archivally-based study of the second enlargement. It is based on an extensive multi-archival and multinational research, including records of the Greek, American, British, French and German governments, of the EEC institutions (Commission, Council of Ministers) and a collection of personal papers. The conventional account of the second enlargement focuses solely on Greece and its policy towards the EEC. In contrast, this thesis casts new light on the way in which the Nine as a whole responded to the challenges posed by the Greek accession. Through this Community-based approach, this thesis challenges traditional views of the reasons that led Greece to apply for EEC membership, the rationale behind the Nine's acceptance of the Greek application, and generally casts new light on the way in which the Nine thought and finally acted regarding Greece's membership during the actual accession negotiations. Looking at these actors can tear down common misconceptions or, indeed, confirm existing beliefs about the communautaire behaviour of the Nine in the second enlargement. It also allows new conclusions to be drawn about the internal development of the Community in the 1970s, especially in relation to the perennial dilemma of widening versus deepening, while highlighting important aspects of the mechanics of the enlargement process. Last but not least, this thesis aims to place the details of the Greek negotiations within the context of regional and international considerations dominated by the realities of the Cold War, thus underlining the linkage between the two parallel developments of European integration and the Cold War. This thesis provides a detailed analysis of a vital chapter not only in post-war Greek history but, most importantly, in the process of European integration and Cold War in the 1970s.

The widely accepted external incentives model of conditionality (EIM) argues that the rewards promised by the EU need to be credible for target states to comply with costly EU conditions. Accordingly, compliance should come to a halt or decline significantly in countries where the credibility of accession – the most powerful reward used by the EU – is very low. The case of Turkey appears therefore to present a puzzle, since the current AKP government is still complying with costly EU conditions despite the negative signals from the most powerful member-states and the EU general public. This thesis first establishes that there is indeed a puzzle. The quantitative and qualitative data gathered on formal and behavioural compliance demonstrates that credibility is not a necessary condition for compliance. There are absolutely no signs of decline in compliance, which challenges the EIM’s credibility assumption. The second part of this thesis moves to consider why the Turkish authorities continue to comply under diminished credibility. It finds that the AKP makes strategic use of EU conditionality. Firstly, compliance with EU conditions serves to curb the powers of the Kemalist/secularist establishment and thereby to secure the party’s continued presence. Secondly, compliance helps the government to appear as a Western, reformist, moderate and neo-liberal party to the electorate so as to widen its domestic support. Moreover, lock-in effects of Turkey’s already established pro-European foreign policy, together with issue-specific costs/benefits, also inform the AKP’s decision to comply, albeit to a lesser extent. Finally, this thesis analyses the role of the EU-related bureaucracy as a separate, but limited, actor in the compliance process. In contrast to the political leadership, strong organisational lock-in effects and a high level of social learning motivate bureaucratic agents’ further compliance, which suggests there is a specific bureaucratic politics of compliance at work in Turkey.

Scholars have proposed and investigated a view of social relations as social networks and therefore the role of public policy in creating new networks and new social and economic relations. Are different incumbent institutional settings a relevant variable to explain different regional policies responses to Regionalization and Europeanization? I will address this question with regard to the regional policy that was initiated in Italy in 1950 and that represented the country’s attempt to improve its economic and geographic cohesion. The hypothesis is that, within a devolution process, different adaptation to regionalization and Europeanization pressures are correlated to “path dependence” from incumbent institutional settings. Specific attention is dedicated to the role of “paradigms” in the processes analysed. This, in turn could generate different devolution outcomes, in terms of discrepancy between formal and effective outcomes. Devolution is analysed in terms of institutional change and policy (regional policy) change. Institutional change is operationalized in terms of changes in polity and administrative variables, and policy change is investigated through variables representing formal (policy issues, i.e. design and responsibility) and effective (financial, i.e. uses and sources) dynamics under the two different pressures for change identified: regionalization and Europeanization of regional policies. The research proposed is pertinent and important in the context of European integration where national policies have been restructured due to, on the one hand, regionalization—i.e., the transfer downward to the sub-national level—of policies formerly handled at the national level and, on the other, “Europeanization” or the transfer of policies upwards to the European level. This thesis investigates the dynamics of the “paradigm and policy shift” that took place within Italian regional policy between 1950 when the policy began and 1992 when the policy was officially terminated due to a dual transfer of the policy upward to the European level with the co-financing of cohesion policy and the transfer downward to the role of the regions as management authorities for the operational programmes that were responsible for the bulk of Italian regional funds.

This thesis explores the moral implications of watching suffering on the media. In particular, it addresses the question of how audiences construct their moral agency vis-à-vis the suffering of distant others they witness through television news. Theoretically, the thesis takes as a point of departure the concept of mediation as media practices. Based on an underlying assumption of moral agency as discursively constructed and articulated, I have drawn an analytical framework which employs the discursive practices of media witnessing and media remembering to explore the ways audiences talk about distant suffering and position themselves in relation to it. The thesis is empirically grounded in the context of Greece and based on focus group discussions with members of the Greek audience. The empirical analysis indicates that viewers engage with distant suffering in a multiplicity of ways that are not exhausted in feelings of empathy or compassion and their diametric opposites of apathy and compassion fatigue. These forms of engagement are filtered through both the nature and extent of media reports of suffering, and discourses about power and politics entrenched within the national culture. In this context, the analysis demonstrates that viewers position themselves as witnesses vis-à-vis news reports of distant suffering in four different modes, which are described as “affective”, “ecstatic”, “politicised” and “detached” witnessing. The exploration of the practice of media remembering illustrates the construction of a moral hierarchy in the way viewers remember distant suffering, where some events are constructed as banal and others become landmarks in audience memory. Finally, the viewers’ positioning as public actors with regard to media stories of human pain is shown to be, on the one hand, conditional upon the media staging of humanitarian appeals, and, on the other hand, embedded within and limited by frameworks of understanding civic participation in public life. The thesis contributes to a growing body of literature on the mediation of distant suffering. It especially addresses the largely neglected empirical question of audience engagement with media stories of human pain, offering both empirical evidence and an analytical framework for the study of this engagement.

This thesis is comprised of three papers, each making a distinctive theoretical and empirical contribution to our understanding of interest representation within the European Parliament (EP). The papers are unified by two assumptions: first, the strategic behaviour of organised interests is significantly determined by the distribution of legislative influence, and second, the opportunity to become influential is a function of the EP’s decision-making rules. Each paper addresses a different aspect of this opportunity structure, which together provides a coherent explanation of the link between lobbying and the EP’s decision-making process. In so doing, insights are provided into the distribution of legislative influence within the EP and the legitimacy of the European Union’s policy process. The first paper explains how organised interests’ strategic behaviour is considerably altered in response to changes in the political opportunity structure afforded by each phase of the committee process. The second paper presents and tests a theory of indirect lobbying of the rapporteur. Here the institutional context is shown to be such that rapporteurs come to rely upon officials from their committee’s secretariat for relatively independent policy advice. But the policy expertise required by officials to carry out this role turns out to be endogenously derived from amongst the same lobbyists whose informational submissions the rapporteur seeks to verify. The final paper draws on longitudinal survey data to assess the impact of institutional rules and European party group membership, in the context of uncertainty amongst lobbyists as to whether their most closely aligned large party group will form part of a given legislative majority. This uncertainty provides an incentive for organised interests to lobby MEPs from opposing party groups in addition to more natural allies. But crucially, in performing this action lobbyists defer to their hard-wired principle and lobby the most closely aligned members from the otherwise unfriendly party.