ABSTRACT Subnational foreign activities are a new and relatively unexplored aspect of the international system. The absence of clear and universal rules creates an ambiguous political playground that can be misused by both states and their subnational governmental units for reaching their foreign policy and foreign trade goals. Worldwide, different patterns for subnational foreign activities in federal states have emerged. For example, in the United States, member states of the federation are fighting over foreign investments mainly. In Germany, on the other hand, members of the federation have delegated their rights in terms of foreign activities to the federal government. In general, federations with long democratic traditions have managed to introduce the formulas for containing subnational foreign activities. In Russia, in contrast, the breakdown of the Soviet Union confronted both the federal centre and members of federation with a fundamentally new situation. In Soviet times, the territorial units of the Russian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic (RSFSR), were of administrative nature only, i.e. they lacked the political dimension. Some of the Russian regions were using their newly-gained freedom for the purpose of challenging the federal centre. Pskov region of Russia has been one of the most active subnational actors.

This thesis considers the impact of Europeanisation upon local government in the West of Scotland through analysing firstly, the response of Strathclyde Regional Council to Europeanising influences and the policies which SRC subsequently pursued to respond to these developments. The impact of European policies as a form of multi-level governance is also evaluated through research into the role of local government within two institutions established in Strathclyde to deal with aspects of European policy :- Strathclyde European Partnership and the Ouverture programme. Lastly, the impact of local government reorganisation upon SRC's successor unitary authorities to engage with European policy is considered. The research findings illustrate that the process of Europeanisation has developed through a number of cyclical stages which has resulted in the development of changing and varying response from SNAs to European policy developments. The initial engagement of SRC with European Institutions occurred at an early stage as the Council attempted to discover new sources of finance. The pro-active stance of the Council resulted in financial benefits for Strathclyde but also an increasing engagement within SRC with European policy as the Council responded to the emerging Single European Market. This engagement also led SRC to attempt to utilise a variety of means to influence European policy. The research suggests that while local government was able to influence the European policy process this tended to occur where European Commission and / or member-state(s) interests overlapped with those of local government. While multi-level governance exists in Western Scotland, the key partners remain the European Commission and the member state.

From 1992 to 2003 the emergence of the urban resident Minimum Livelihood Guarantee (MLG) system saw a major reconfiguration and expansion of social assistance in the People's Republic of China (PRC). There are currently two gaps in current studies of the MLG which this dissertation will address. First, detailed historical information on the MLG is lacking in the English language. Second, the focus of current studies on the effectiveness of the MLG has led to an implicitly rational explanation for the emergence and development of the policy. Such an explanation does not provide a satisfactory explanation for the MLG. Using Chinese language sources and interview data collected during two field trips to the PRC this dissertation uses four different periods in the MLG's development to argue that that explaining the programme requires a more complex approach. Drawing on insights provided by the China studies and wider political science literature I argue that the development of the MLG system has been a complex process which can be explained by using a synthesis of concepts. These are the role played by policy sponsors, a new concept developed in the dissertation, and policy entrepreneurs. Second, the continued importance of the structure of the Chinese state. Finally, the influence of feedback from previous policy decisions and outcomes. These three concepts are used to examine four significant stages of the MLG programme's development. First, the often overlooked emergence of the first MLG programme in Shanghai between 1992 and 1993 is examined. Second, the MLG's shift from a local innovation to a national policy from 1994 to 1997 is investigated. Third, the factors behind the significant expansion of the MLG between 1999 and 2003 are contrasted with more low key developments in the scope and delivery of social assistance. Finally, the concepts developed and applied to the MLG are taken and used to explain the emergence and spread of the Community Public Service Agencies in Dalian. I conclude that the synthesis of the policy sponsor and neo-institutionalist concepts provide a richer explanation of the MLG than that implicit in the existing literature.

The main goal of this thesis is to explore how the encounters between public professionals and citizens affect the quality of participatory democracy. Participatory democracy was introduced as a radical alternative to representative democracy, but has often not lived up to its promises. Among the great variety of factors that have been found to matter, questions have arisen about the added value of public encounters: are problems and failures of participation because of or despite public professionals and citizens coming together? Despite a growing body of research on this subject, public encounters have so far not been adequately understood on their own terms. Building on recent contributions to the communicative turn in participatory democracy, this thesis develops a relational, situated, performative approach to analyze the communicative “in-between” of public professionals and citizens. In order to examine their communicative practices, a narrative analysis has been conducted of the stories public professionals and citizens tell about their daily experiences. Through a grounded theory process of analyzing 59 intensive interviews conducted in Glasgow, Amsterdam, and Bologna, the research formulated a theory of communicative capacity. The research shows that when public professionals and citizens meet, they develop and sustain dominant patterns of communication that limit their ability to solve local problems. Each case was characterized by a distinct communicative pattern, because local actors focused more on the substantive issues at hand rather than on the way they communicated about these. This was difficult to change because three inherent processes of participatory practice were drawing public professionals and citizens into dominant communicative patterns. Therefore, the thesis argues that the quality of participatory democracy depends on the communicative capacity of public professionals and citizens to recognize and break through these dominant patterns by constantly adapting the nature, tone, and conditions of their conversations to the situation at hand. The main contribution of this thesis is that it provides a more grounded and rounded understanding of the nature and importance of the communicative “in-between” (interaction or encounter) of public professionals and citizens for the quality of participatory democracy.

This thesis presents an interpretivist analysis of institutional development in the English regional assemblies. It presents a history of institutional development in the regions, arriving at a conceptualization of this tier as a site of ‘institutional ambiguity.’ Exploring the theoretical bases of institutions and conducting a thorough critique of the schools of institutionalism, this thesis takes forward the theory of ‘constructivist institutionalism.’ A theoretical framework focussed on the processes of institutional design and change is built from constructivist institutionalism, as is a complementary and coherent methodological package to explore the empirical sites of the West Midlands and North West regional assemblies. The concepts of ‘frames’ and ‘stories’ are set out as interpretivist tools through which the primary interview data is analysed, to capture the development of the democratic institution of representation as it relates to the local government and stakeholder actors involved in these two regional assemblies. This thesis finds actors engaged in interplay between structure and agency while contributing to the processes of institutional design and change. Actors draw together their ideas with the pre-existing institutional context, relating them together in discursive constructions (frames, stories) that underpin their strategic-relational action, which in turn underpins the institutions of the assemblies. Regional representation transpires to mimic local governmental norms due to the dominant influence of the pre-existing context.

This study seeks to understand the relationship between decentralisation and human resource management in Botswana and South Africa. The study is situated within the context of the New Public Management (NPM) that has influenced the Human Resource Management reforms that the two countries aspire to adopt. This study’s main finding is that although strategic human resource management (SHRM) and decentralisation are frequently assumed to go together and are both advocated by the BrettonWoods institutions, in the cases researched SHRM reforms have been accompanied by a tendency towards centralisation. This implies a trade-off between SHRM and decentralisation in Botswana and South Africa. The study used a mixed methods approach consisting of both qualitative and quantitative research methods, applied to a sample of local authorities in Botswana and the neighbouring North West province of South Africa. In both countries the implementation of HRM reforms in local government has been slow due to other considerations – political factors in the case of South Africa and professional bureaucratic issues in Botswana, reflecting the different path dependencies of the two countries. This study argues that from the cases studied even though developing countries may implement similar reforms based on similar policy advice or prescription, a combination of factors such as social and organisational culture that are not transferable between countries account for the difference in outcomes.

In this thesis I argue for consideration of an anticipatory level of sensemaking that influences how individuals think about and respond to organisational change. In asking how knowledgeable agents understand an altered environment, I adopt a holistic view of organisational and cognitive sensemaking literatures, to produce a sensemaking template identifying four key relational influences: Equilibration, Intentionality, Temporal Context, and Knowledge Structures. The sensemaking template is used to inform the design of an interpretive study. A single local authority in the West Midlands region of England is the setting for the field research which was working to meet increasing demands for local services against a backdrop of austerity budgets and decreasing resources in 2012-2013. I employ cognitive mapping as part of a multi-method approach to identify previously tacit frames of reference used by research participants in making sense of self-selected episodes of change in the organisation. In arguing that organisational change emerges through the enactment of cognitive agency, I use empirical data to expound on a previously invisible sensemaking process that is complex and nuanced, and which offers methodological, theoretical and analytical contributions to knowledge.

We address some of the challenges in achieving internet voting for real world elections. One challenge is that home-based computers are likely to be infected by malware, threatening both the integrity and privacy of the vote. Another concern is the possibility that a voter may be coerced to vote in a particular way, for example by a family member or organised crime ring. Moreover, any voting system intended to be used on a large scale should not require complex operations by voters whose purpose is hard to understand. We introduce a series of novel proposals for internet voting, presented across three parts. First we examine how the problem of malware-infected computers in internet voting could be solved. We propose to use a dedicated hardware token (which is not required to be trustworthy) that helps remove the need to trust the voting computer and the server. Second we examine how the outcome verification methods provided by internet voting can be made more intuitive. We show how using trial votes help voters achieve more intuitive verifiability. Third we examine how the tension between verifiability and incoercibility can be reconciled while maintaining the usability of the voting systems. We propose a new property which we call “coercion-evidence” that helps improve usability, reduce trust assumptions, while maintaining the security of the system.

This research investigated the relationship between organizational culture and public sector performance management. The research was based on a study of the promotion of good governance in the Thai public sector through the implementation of the performance agreement (PA) scheme, using Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). The scheme had faced numerous challenges, perceived to be influenced by organizational culture. It had been assumed that a transformational shift in the organizational culture of the civil service, in the direction of market-based or new public management (NPM) values, was required in order to secure improved performance. The research aimed to explore how organizational culture influences civil service performance and identify other organizational factors that may also influence civil service performance in the provincial administration of Thailand. The research used a mixed methods approach of questionnaire surveys and semi-structured interviews, based on the Competing Values Framework (CVF). Questionnaire surveys were carried out with 480 civil servants within 16 provinces. Semi-structured interviews – in-depth and focus group – were conducted within four provinces. A distinction was made between the low and high KPI scoring provinces. The findings of the research suggest that there was no dominant type of culture in the low and high KPI scoring provinces. Instead, a strong culture was found to be important in gaining high KPI scores, supported by participative leadership and appropriate management. Leadership style appeared to influence whether the public services performed to a high level, which seemed to be achieved through a balance between task focussed and people focussed. Therefore, a transformational cultural shift may not be required, but instead more effective leadership and management.

The rise of indirectly elected institutions, such as the West Midlands Regional Assembly, has democratic implications for notions of accountability, legitimacy and representation. The representative function of these bodies must be explicitly fulfilled if they are to be considered democratic. The conceptual focus of this thesis is the representative function of members of the West Midlands Regional Assembly. The analysis applies a representative role framework based on Pitkin’s “Four Views of Representation” to explore the formalistic and substantive elements of representation through an appraisal of focus, style, role and scope. The results show that there are weak accountability structures in place, leading representatives to adopt a trustee conception of their roles. A grounded theory analysis is utilised to explore additional factors not covered in Pitkin’s framework. This surfaced the structural factors and role motivations that affect role choice. The thesis utilises Weick’s concept of sensemaking to explore the interpretation and enactment of different representative roles taking into account the importance of institutions in framing micro sensemaking processes. This new methodology permits an appraisal of the relative influence of institutional context, structure and individual agency and delivers a new model for understanding the logics of representative action in appointed bodies.