Secessionist movements have been found historically on both sides of the political spectrum, and sometimes have tried to remain apolitical completely, but because of the rise of partisan politics, secessionism has inevitably become politicized. Variations in Western European secessionism can be noticed, and as such, explanations put forward may be deemed insufficient, or incomplete. In my thesis I tested the hypothesis that secessionism varied on the political spectrum because it has been consolidated against ideological Others (in Scotland against Thatcher’s Conservatives between 1974 and 1990). I tested this methodologically through process tracing and theoretically by looking at the consolidation of the Scottish National Party through reactive nationalism. Specifically I analyzed the nationalist discourse used to justify ideological positioning in the 1970s and 1980s in propaganda materials and archival documents, and if and how this ideological choice was reflected or interpreted in newspapers (for opinions on how this consolidation was perceived by the electorate).

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Boston University / PLEASE NOTE: Boston University Libraries did not receive an Authorization To Manage form for this thesis or dissertation. It is therefore not openly accessible, though it may be available by request. If you are the author or principal advisor of this work and would like to request open access for it, please contact us at open-help@bu.edu. Thank you. / The purpose of this study is the description, analysis and explanation of the electoral growth of the National Party in the Union of South Africa, from the founding of the (Purified) National Party in 1934 to the General Election of May 1948. Consideration is given the following: the rise of the National Party to parliamentary supremacy in 1929; its electoral collapse at Fusion--the political union of Generals Hertzog and Smuts and of their respective parties--in 1934; the revival of Afrikaner economic and cultural nationalism beginning in the latter 1930's; the ending of Fusion in 1939 and the resulting temporary political reunion of Afrikaners in Opposition; fission of the Opposition, 1940 to 1943; postwar consolidation of Afrikaner opponents of the Smuts Government and its defeat by the (Reunited) National Party - Afrikaner Party alliance in 1948. Special attention is paid to four general elections, those of 1929, 1938, 1943 and 1948. The results of these elections, as they describe the strength of the National Party, are compared. Research was done in the Republic of South Africa. Newspapers, both English language and Afrikaans, were the foremost primary source. Others included the South African parliamentary Hansard, official publications and reports, party literature and personal interviews. This work finds that there exists a considerable similarity between the extent and distribution of the electoral support which placed the National Party in power in 1929 and that which sustained the 1948 victory of the (Reunited) National Party - Afrikaner Party alliance. A difference lies in the fact of unprecedented urban support for the (Reunited) National Party in 1948, especially along the Witwatersrand. However, it is shown that growing urban support for the (Reunited) National Party followed the movement of Afrikaners to the cities from the traditionally-Nationalist countryside, and hence expressed a permanence in long-term partisan alignments among these Afrikaners, rather than the contrary. The General Election of 1948 is thus said to signify the electoral revival of the National Party of 1929. Several factors are found to have contributed to this electoral revivals intensification of Afrikaner nationalist sentiment in consequence of such as the Voortrekker Centenary celebrations of 1938; maladroit postwar management of the country by the Smuts Government and exploitation of the racial fears and prejudices of the white electorate in 1948 by the Opposition parties. But of greatest importance is deemed to be the passing of Fusion in 1939. Hertzog and those Afrikaners who followed him entered Fusion in 1934 assuming that their political cooperation with English-speaking South Africans was possible on the basis of the principle "South Africa First." The insistence of Smuts in September 1939 that South Africa declare war on Germany seemed to Hertzog and most Afrikaners to contradict that principle. It ended Fusion and released Afrikaners from their adherence to the United Party, which had been its embodiment. Various wartime circumstances sustained Smuts and the truncated United Party in power at the 1943 General Election, but these passed with the War, or at the same time. It was thus likely in 1948 that--momentary issues apart--the (Reunited) National Party - Afrikaner Party alliance would, in the absence of a successful attempt on the part of Smuts at re-creation in postwar South Africa of the United Party of the 1930's, gather such electoral support as had sustained the National Party nineteen years earlier. In fact, such a re-creation may have been impossible, for the ending of Fusion had done more than allow for a reunion of those Afrikaners who had divided in 1934, it had discredited the spirit of Hertzog, i.e., "Hertzogism," which, from the side of the Afrikaner nationalist, had made Fusion possible. / 2031-01-01

By the 1960s violence became institutionalized in modern Jamaican politics. This endemic violence fostered an unstable political environment that developed out of a symbiotic relationship between Jamaican labor organizations and political violence. Consequently, the political process was destabilized by the corrosive influence of partisan politics, whereby party loyalists dependent on political patronage were encouraged by the parties to defend local constituencies and participate in political conflict. Within this system the Jamaican general election process became ominous and violent, exemplifying how limited political patronage was dispersed among loyal party supporters. This dissertation examines the role of the political parties and how they mobilized grassroot supporters through inspirational speeches, partisan ideology, complex political patronage networks, and historic party platform issues from 1940 through 1980. The dissertation argues that the development of Jamaican trade unionism and its corresponding leadership created the political framework out of which Jamaica's two major political parties, the Jamaica Labor Party (JLP) and People's National Party (PNP) emerged. Within the evolution of their support base Jamaican politicians such as Alexander Bustamante utilized their influence over local constituencies to create a garrison form of mobilization that relied heavily upon violence. By investigating the social and political connection between local politicians and violence, this dissertation examines how events such as the Henry Rebellion in 1960, the 1978 Green Bay Massacre, and the public murder of the PNP candidate Roy McGann in 1980 demonstrate the failure of traditional Jamaican political patronage to control extremist violence among grassroot supporters, giving rise to a general public dissatisfaction with the established Jamaican leadership. This transformation of the political system resulted in the institutionalization of political violence by the late 1960s, and a pattern of general elections destabilized by vicious conflicts between JLP and PNP gangs. This political violence was reflected in the rise of gang dons such as Jim Brown and Wayne "Sandokhan" Smith who became independent of the patronage system through their exploitation of the drug trade. Consequently, modern Jamaican politics in the twenty-first century is fractured and local political leaders have lost control of the gangs.

Secessionist movements have been found historically on both sides of the political spectrum, and sometimes have tried to remain apolitical completely, but because of the rise of partisan politics, secessionism has inevitably become politicized. Variations in Western European secessionism can be noticed, and as such, explanations put forward may be deemed insufficient, or incomplete. In my thesis I tested the hypothesis that secessionism varied on the political spectrum because it has been consolidated against ideological Others (in Scotland against Thatcher’s Conservatives between 1974 and 1990). I tested this methodologically through process tracing and theoretically by looking at the consolidation of the Scottish National Party through reactive nationalism. Specifically I analyzed the nationalist discourse used to justify ideological positioning in the 1970s and 1980s in propaganda materials and archival documents, and if and how this ideological choice was reflected or interpreted in newspapers (for opinions on how this consolidation was perceived by the electorate).

There have been various results in research focused on why people are attracted to religion and religious movements. This is also the case with the reasons why people are attracted to far–right nationalist movements. The focus of this thesis is to analyze British National Party’s political documents after nationalistic quasi-religious elements. If nationalism was to be seen as a form of religion or as a substitute for religion the result could be a better understanding of why people are attracted to nationalist movements in general, and also to far-right movements. By stating that nationalism is a quasi-religion which can function as a substitute for religion, this thesis attempts to show how the attraction of religion and nationalism has on people can be similar. Therefore, one of the conclusions of this thesis is that theories based upon religion, such as religious sect theories, can also be applied to nationalist and nationalist far-right movements. The main conclusion of this thesis is that British National Party’s political documents do contain quasi-religious elements.

This thesis is a study of contemporary British fascist ideology as expressed in the texts produced by or in association with the British National Party (BNP). It differs from previous studies in that it starts at the depth of the ideology and examines its rhetorical and ideological structure. Drawing on the theory and methodology of critical discourse analysis, this thesis explores the rhetorical and presentational strategies used in contemporary British fascist texts. As such, it examines how constructions of us and the Other are deracialised, warranted and constructed as fact. The thesis also differs from previous studies in that it explores the pattern of contemporary British fascist ideology and emphasises its intrinsically gendered nature. Eugenics is taken as the core ideological theme of fascism, whose focus is on breeding a racially pure and healthy nation. The notion of breeding ensures that gender lies at the core of the ideology. Drawing on the idea of a polarised rhetorical and argumentative structure, this thesis also examines how fascism constructs the ideological opposites of eugenics. The first opposite to eugenics explored in this thesis is liberal ideology and specifically feminism. The analysis examines how fascist opposition to these is based on the essentialist belief in the fixed biological nature of both race and gender. The analysis looks at the presentational strategies as well as the argumentative content of antifeminist discourse in contemporary British fascist texts. The second opposite to eugenics explored is multiculturalism. The thesis explores how stories about rape simultaneously construct race and warrant arguments about the harmful effects of their presence on our society. The analysis examines the various presentational strategies used to portray üs as the victims of the Other. It is by studying the interconnection between these three themes that this thesis argues that fascism, with its eugenic orientation, is not only a racial ideology but a gendered one. The analysis of contemporary British fascist accounts undertaken in this thesis goes some way to providing an understanding of the relationship between gender and race that is at the essentialist core of fascist ideology.

This thesis deals with the challenge posed to post-imperial British identity by the rise of Scottish political nationalism and its voice the Scottish National Party (SNP) from the late 1960s to 1980. With the ultimate decline of the British Empire in the decades following the Second World War, Britishness, which had been forged through the imperial experience, was fundamentally challenged by older national identities within the United Kingdom. Scottish nationalism was one of these identities which had been subsumed by an imperial British identity for over two hundred years. A combination of the collapse of the industry of empire in Scotland, relative economic deprivation in the 1960s and 1970s, and other Scottish political grievances prompted increased support for the SNP. Scots, viewing themselves as a nation and as distinct in many ways from the rest of the United Kingdom, reacted to the decline of the British unitary state and encouraged the growth of Scottish political nationalism. The political success of the SNP in the late 1960s and 1970s forced the main Westminster parties to address the issue of Scottish nationalism and Scots' sense of alienation from the centre of power. The Royal Commission on the Constitution and the resulting debate over devolution in the late 1970s, prompted by the growth of nationalism, represented the greatest challenge to the legitimacy of the United Kingdom since the Treaty of Union of 1707.

British politics at the start of the 21st century provide a good setting for examining factors associated with mobilisation for extremist politics. This thesis is concerned with the relationship between individuals' preferences, their local setting and political behaviour. With focus on two outcomes - participation in urban rioting and support for a far right party - this thesis is divided into two parts and consists of five research papers addressing different aspects of mobilisation. In the first part we focus on urban disorder and examine police arrest records from the London riot of 2011. Much of the sociological literature has focused on variation in rioting across cities; here we examine variation within London by mapping the residential addresses of 1,620 rioters onto over 25,000 neighbourhoods. Our findings challenge the orthodoxy that rioting is not explained by deprivation or by disorganisation. Furthermore, we present evidence suggesting the importance of political grievances, in particular relations with the police, and examine the process of mobilisation to show that it was aided by spatial proximity and social similarity. In the second part we look at factors associated with engagement with far right politics. We use individual attitudinal data from the British Election Study to examine whether concerns over immigration are associated with the actual experience of immigration in one's place of residence. The results suggest that local setting does play some role, although individual factors seem to be more important. Secondly, we use leaked British National Party membership list to map 12,536 far right supporters onto over 200,000 neighbourhoods in Britain. Our findings underline the importance of a larger geographic context, where some spatial configurations present particularly fertile grounds for the far right; we also report the relative unimportance of cultural threat and significance of the social distance. Lastly, we question the recently advocated 'legacy effect' and suggest that white flight mechanism may possibly be an alternative way of thinking about organisational continuity.

It has long been argued that underlying values should hold a central role in political analysis. This would seem particularly relevant in an era of de-alignment and catch-all parties in which political actors often make direct values orientated appeals to the electorate. With the expansion in appropriate data and measures available to empirical researchers, the last two decades have seen a substantial increase in the number of studies directly addressing the values-voting relationship. Values based explanations of vote choice have contributed to a more nuanced understanding of the processes underlying voter preferences and the structure of public opinion within democratic electorates. This existing empirical literature has generally focused on analysing the role of values on voting in single electoral contexts. While this approach has generated many useful findings that establish the role of values in differentiating political choice, it has only partially explored the contextual mechanisms through which values influence vote choice. This is necessary in order to understand under what political conditions values are likely to become more relevant to vote choice decisions. This thesis is an attempt to address three aspects of this gap in the cross-national research literature on values and voting using analyses of data from the 1990 and 2008 waves of the European Values Survey. Firstly it provides a cross-national analysis of core political values that enables a comparison of the role of values in structuring electoral competition across 15 West European countries. Secondly, it estimates the role that left-right political identity has in mediating the influence of values on vote choice using a structural path model. This provides a cross-national test of this mechanism and therefore assesses variation in the values-voting relationship across different national contexts. Thirdly, the thesis provides a systematic empirical analysis of the influence of political context on the values-voting relationship by testing the effect that macro level system factors, such as polarisation and the number of parties, have on the influence of values. The headline findings of the thesis are that political values are dynamic constructs that can demonstrate subtle variations in the preferences of voters across different electoral contexts. Political values have a multi-dimensional influence on electoral choice; with variation in voter preferences being highlighted by both value differentiation (having opposite preferences for the same value dimension) and emphasis (having a preference for different values). Left-right identity can act as both a mediator and a confounder of political values influence on vote choice. Political context is primarily relevant to the influence of values on voting through the content of supply side party competition as opposed to the structure of that competition. Overall, the study argues the findings show that supply side political context plays a crucial role in defining the parameters and strength of the values-voting relationship in each specific electoral arena.

M.A. (Deveopment Studies) / The imbalance of property ownership in South Africa dates back to the settlement of Jan van Riebeeck at the Cape. The Europeans did not originally plan an expanding colony, only a trade station for providing ships with vegetables, water and meat. Property ownership did not occur at the time, although a certain degree of property utilization did exist. The white colonists as well as the black native population needed property for a similar reason, namely for farming. Competition was therefore inevitable. Although a policy of partition regarding blacks and whites was encouraged, it was not based on constitutional law. since 1910 segregation however formed an integral part of the law of the Union of South Africa, and in 1913 and 1936 these important laws were romulgated. The passing of these laws resulted in 20% of the population (whites) presently owning 80% of land property in South Africa. Since 2 February 1990 phenomenal changes have taken place in South Africa. As a result of these changes, as well as several additional factors, it became clear that land tenure reform should take place in south Africa. One of the most important objectives regarding property ownership in the international context, constitutes the provision of property ownership rights in favour of those who did not possess any such rights in the past. Land tenure reform in Africa has always been politically inspired, as has become evident from reforms which have taken place after independence in most African countries. In South Africa it is not a question of whether land tenure reform will take place, but to what extent and by which modus operandi. This study aims at determining the nature of the view points of the African National Congress (ANC) and the National Party (NP) regarding land tenure reform. As a result of their positioning in the south African society, these two political groups will play an important role in determining the modus operandi' for land tenure reform. various differences of opinion as well as agreements on a policy of land tenure reform by these two political groups agreed upon were identified in this dissertation. Both groups agree that land tenure reform should take place, however, no agreement can be reached on the modus operandi. The ANC favours a policy of Government involvement in land tenure reform as well as a restriction on the quantity of property individuals are allowed to own. The National Party however, favours land tenure reform determined by market-related policies and unrestricted property ownership, which can be supplemented by letting properties. Land tenure reform should accommodate the needs of the largest possible section of the popUlation. The success of land tenure reform is determined by the degree to which the needs of the population are adhered to. At the same time, it has to be accepted that production will be of utmost importance for the allocation of agricultural property.