At present, progressive theory‐building in the area of political party organisation is being hampered by the controversy over how much freedom of choice decision‐makers within a party enjoy in relation to their environment. This piece of research will therefore develop an analytical framework that transcends this debate by acknowledging the causal effects of both structures and party leadership. Based on the ideas of historical institutionalism, it will argue that party organisation is the product of strategic decisions made in a strategically selective context. The framework is then applied to political parties in the newer democracies of South Korea, Taiwan, the Philippines and Indonesia. The selection of cases is motivated by the fact that East Asia has so far been largely ignored by systematic studies of political party organisation. As will be seen, post‐autocratic environments in the region strongly favour political parties that are mere façades for informal patron‐client networks. However, we can also find parties characterised by a higher level of formal organisational strength, including parties that share many similarities with the classical mass party. These parties thus demonstrate that political actors are able to develop alternative organisational responses to the same structural context.

The ranging course of terrorism banishing peace and security prospects of today’s Pakistan is seen as a domestic effluent of its own flawed policies, bad governance, and lack of social justice and rule of law in society and widening gulf of trust between the rulers and the ruled. The study focused on policies and performance of the Musharraf government since assuming the mantle of front ranking ally of the United States in its so called ‘war on terror’. The causes of reversal of pre nine-eleven position on Afghanistan and support of its Taliban’s rulers are examined in the light of the geo-strategic compulsions of that crucial time and the structural weakness of military rule that needed external props for legitimacy. The flaws of the response to the terrorist challenges are traced to its total dependence on the hard option to the total neglect of the human factor from which the thesis develops its argument for a holistic approach to security in which the people occupy a central position. Thesis approach is also shown to hold the solutions for eliminating the causes of extremism on which terrorism feeds and grows. In sum the study deconstructs Musharraf’s regime’s response to terrorism by examining the conceptual mould of the strategic players in the country and postulates a holistic and integrated security framework to deal with terrorism on a pro-active and sustainable basis. An approach such as this would logically entail the redefining of the role of the state vis-à-vis its people as the fulcrum and medium of ensuring traditional and non traditional security of the country.

This project aims at illuminating that agents’ ideas/perceptions on their (social)surrounding affect their deliberative actions to improve their regional security. The engaging/networking agents’ main attempt is to enlarge the scope of traditional security to accommodate more comprehensive aspects by using regional economic concerns as a spearhead before extending to other fields. Familiarity and socialising process through conferences and workshops are both positive outcomes and structure for agents’ ideas/perceptions on engaging/networking activities. Yet, agents’(socially) collective identity has not commonly perceived as expected by a set-up framework. This project is conducted in a circular style which is open for revising a set-up framework employed here for narrating the results in a chronological fashion. The framework is constructed from related concepts and theories. Main concepts are ‘active agents’, ‘intellectuals’, and ‘networks’. Main sources of theories are drawn mainly from constructivism, epistemic community, advocacy coalition framework, and Jürgen Habermas’s theory of communicative action (TCA). The TCA provides a useful path to fill in the gap left by the earlier theories whose concerns are grounded on agents’ outward-looking aspects of cooperation. Trust is a presupposition from all theories. Although there is a trend towards it, the research result can not apparently express it.

This study is about how independent voters make their vote decision in presidential election focusing on electoral behaviour in South Korea. The main argument of this thesis is that voters are not very rational in voting choice when party constraints are absent. Both qualitative and quantitative approaches are employed in this study and provide a comprehensive analysis of voting behaviour of independent voters in the new democracy. In particular, the use of focus group interviews and in-depth one-to-one interviews conducted during the 2002 Korean Presidential Election provides detailed analysis of electoral behaviour in Korea. Korean voters have developed party identification, a long-term psychological attachment with a particular political party, under the institutional underdevelopment of the political parties in the new democracy. Regionalism is the predominant factor to explain partisan alignment in Korea, but ideological self-identification also accounts for the partisan alignment in new democracy. Over the last 10 years, party identification has markedly weakened in Korea, a 15 year old democracy, in contrast to experiences of other new democracies. This weakening of party identification is largely due to changes in political interest and dissatisfaction with political processes in new democracy. My findings confirm that the increase of independents and the process of partisan dealignment are closely related to a decline of electoral stability. But an increase of independent voters who are free from party constraints has not lead to an increase of rational voting behaviour in Korean presidential elections. Although independent voters are most interested in short-term considerations, such as candidate evaluation, issue stands and government performance, their voting choice is not politically rational. Independent voters are more likely to make vote decision based on insufficient information and heavily rely on candidate image rather than substance in their voting choice. Many independent voters cast their ballot based on the candidates' affective dimensions, such as integrity, empathy and appearance, rather than cognitive dimensions, such as competence to solve the nation's urgent problems.

This thesis investigates the role of politics in implementing educational reform in India during the period 1994 to 2011. Much of the recent research on politics and educational reform has been dominated by the analytical framework of formal political economy, but this framework has not been able to explain how reforms are successfully adopted. Also, the main focus has been on the negative role of politics, controlled by powerful interest groups and biased institutions, in constraining changes likely to benefit poor people. I focus instead on understanding the political dynamics in cases of success. In particular, why do political leaders and public officials support educational reform even though this does not suit their political calculations, and is likely to encounter resistance from teacher unions and educational bureaucracies? To understand these dynamics, I use the framework of comparative institutionalism, and examine the contested interaction of ideas, interests, and institutions, leading to success or failure. To analyse the process of reform implementation, I have selected two Indian states—Andhra Pradesh and Bihar. Both were educationally backward at the beginning of the 1990s and were confronted with a common agenda for reform established by the federal government. However, they pursued divergent trajectories over the next decade, with the former state achieving higher levels and reduced disparities in primary school participation. I compare the political dynamics in three important arenas: the management of teacher interests and their unions, educational decentralisation, and the daily interactions between poor households, schools, and the local state. I find that political strategies are important in determining variations in outcomes. In Andhra Pradesh, the political leadership found an alignment between the new opportunities provided by the federal government and its own agenda for development; it created new allies for change by reducing discretion in teacher policies, playing on interunion rivalries, and creating a local cadre of party loyalists. However, a wider agenda of development was missing in Bihar, and even successfully designed school decentralisation policies could not be implemented due to weak support from political leaders, and because of local elite capture. In both the states, however, the interaction of the poor with schools and the local state was a process of struggle, indicative of the challenges that lie ahead.

Since the early 1990s, the prominent role of 'Octobrists' – former left wing student activists from the 1970s – has become increasingly evident in parliamentary and extra-parliamentary politics. Some Octobrists have played leading or supporting roles in key moments of political transition, such as the 1992 urban middle-class movement for democracy, various social movements throughout the mid-1990s, the political reform process of the late 1990s, and the rise of the Thais Love Thais (Thai Rak Thai) government under Thaksin Shinawatra in 2001. But over the course of the past ten years, these former student activists have become increasingly divided, amidst the protracted conflict between 'Yellow shirt' (anti-Thaksin) and 'Red Shirt' (pro-Thaksin) forces in Thai politics. Octobrists have defended opposing political stances and severely attacked one another across the political divide. This thesis examines why the Octobrists have managed to remain a significant force in Thai politics, despite the collapse of left wing politics in the late 1970s, and why they have experienced deepening internal divisions and a crisis of legitimacy over the course of the past decade. This thesis argues that the Octobrists successfully exploited shifts in the structure of political opportunities over the 1980s and 1990s which allowed them to overcome constraints on their involvement in politics. These former left wing student activists successfully made use of the political skills, social networks, and progressive language which they had developed and refined since the 1970s, in order to gain access to new channels of political influence and power. Above all, they managed to reframe their earlier history as leftist failures and to craft a new political identity as 'Octobrists', as heroic fighters for democracy and against authoritarian rule in the 1970s. In examining the rise and deepening of conflicts among the Octobrists, moreover, this thesis traces the shifts in political environment which accompanied the ascendancy and entrenchment of the Thaksin government and the rise of antiThaksin mobilisation over the past decade, which undermined the loose unity among Octobrists and created new sources of tension and conflict in their midst. The thesis also shows how the notion of 'Octobrists' shifted from an effective rubric for forging a shared identity among former student activists to a rhetorical device for conflict and contestation among former comrades-in-arms.

This thesis is a history of South Korean policy towards North Korea and its general foreign policy at the time of fluctuation of relations between the allies, the Republic of Korea and USA, between 1968 and 1979. The thesis shows how American East Asian policy and South Korean people‘s aspiration for the reunification and democracy of Korea affected Park Chunghee‘s Cold War strategy. After Park Chunghee failed to find a common ideological foundation with the Americans, the South Korean leader started to re-consider the inter-Korean problem and ROKUS relations in realistic term. In the late-1960s and early 70s, Seoul shifted from antagonism toward Pyongyang to negotiation with the North Koreans in order to support American rapprochement with China. But simultaneously, the Park regime established the authoritarian state and resisted the American influence on its foreign policy. With regards to the ROK-US rift, the thesis points to their misperceptions between the South Korean and American leaders in their war in Vietnam and East-West reconciliation. In addition, this thesis also shows how South Korean nationalism and liberal movement affected Park Chunghee‘s policy. The aspiration of South Korean public for the reunification and democracy of Korea pushed policy makers over despotic rule and the aggressive policy toward North Korea.

This dissertation examines the divergent trajectories of ethnic and national politics in the Tamil speaking regions of India and Sri Lanka. Despite comparable historical experiences and conditions, the south Indian Tamil speaking areas were peaceably accommodated within a pan-Indian framework whilst Sri Lankan politics was marked by escalating Tamil-Sinhala ethnic polarisation and violent conflict. The dissertation explains these contrasting outcomes by setting out a novel theoretical framework that draws on the work of Reinhart Koselleck and his analysis of the links between concepts and political conflict. It argues that in the era of popular sovereignty the nation and ethnicity have become central and unavoidable concepts of political order, but concepts that can be deliberately constructed through political activity in more or less inclusive ways. Setting out the conceptual connections between the nation, ethnicity and popular sovereignty, the dissertation shows how the conceptual tension between a unified national identity / interest and ethnic pluralism becomes a central and unavoidable locus of political contestation in the era of popular sovereignty. Tracing the politics of ethnicity and nationalism in India and Sri Lanka from the late nineteenth century to the late 1970’s, the analysis shows that the accommodation of Tamil identity within Indian nationalist frameworks and the escalation of Tamil – Sinhala ethnic conflict in Sri Lanka cannot be linked to differences in ethnic demography, political system, historical experiences or the structure of economic incentives. It reveals instead that these divergent outcomes are best explained as effects of contingent and competitive processes of political organisation and mobilisation through which deliberately more or less ethnically inclusive national identities are asserted, established and then contested.

This thesis is intended to contribute to the discussion on China’s socio-economic development during the post-socialist period of reform and opening up. It is aimed at providing an explanation of the Chinese contemporary development trajectory, by establishing an institutional and policy model, which China is believed to have been following. This model is also believed to offer some general solutions to the underdeveloped countries in systemic transformation. The thesis argues that China’s post-socialist development trajectory has been determined by the provisions of the Developmental State (DS) model, as far as state development policies, state ideology, and state institutional arrangements are concerned, and to the extent, that China has become a genus of the Post-Socialist Developmental State (PSDS) model – this model being an alternative to the post-socialist neoliberalism. In the course of scholarly enquiry, China’s development trajectory is analysed against the paths of historical developmental states, and against the general and developmental aspects of the process of post-socialist transformation. I start by analysing the features of the historical developmental states and by investigating whether the provisions of the DS model are viable contemporarily and how the model extends to the discussion on China’s development. I then examine China’s post-socialist transformation, partly in its DS context. Next, I analyse the features of China’s development trajectory in comparison with the features of historical developmental states, as far as ideology and political and economic arrangements as well as state development policies are concerned. Finally, based on the previous analyses, I explain the DS-determined postsocialist development trajectory of China, address the causal relation between the DS institutionalisation and post-socialist transformation, and construct the PSDS model, as a general guideline for states in transition.

The thesis offers an examination of a distinct chapter in the era of economic reforms in India - the case of the state of West Bengal - and narrates the politics of an economic policy transition spearheaded by the Left Front coalition government that ruled the state from 1977 to 2011. In 1991, the Government of India began to pursue a far more liberal policy of economic development, with emphasis being placed on non-agricultural growth, the role of the private sector, and the merits of foreign direct investment (FDI). This caused serious political challenges for the Communist Party of India - Marxist (CPIM), the main party in the Left Front. Historically, the CPIM was committed to pro-poor policies focused on the countryside and had spoken out strongly against privatisation and FDI; however it could not ignore the stagnating industrial economy of the state, and was thus compelled to court private investment and take advantage of the liberalised policy environment. The nature of this dichotomy – one that characterised the political economy of West Bengal over the last two decades – is studied in this research as a set of why-how questions. Firstly, why did the CPIM/Left Front take upon itself the task of engineering a transition from an erstwhile landreform and agriculture based growth model to a pro-market development agenda post-1991? And secondly, how was such a choice justified to/negotiated with the various stakeholders (the rank and file of the CPIM itself, other coalition member parties, trade unions, the industrial class, etc.) while sustaining the party’s traditional rhetoric and partisan character? In examining the second part, the thesis also ventures into the recent cases of huge opposition to land acquisition for industrial plants at Singur and Nandigram, and demonstrates how the mandate of the top brass of party leadership in Calcutta was being implemented, translated or contested at the local levels. On the whole, this thesis attempts a reappraisal of the politicaleconomic history of the Left Front regime and particularly that of its majority partner, the CPIM, over the last two decades. It also places the case in a broader Indian context and contributes to wider debates on the changing nature of federalism in India and the politics of economic reforms