A basic problem for a rational choice theory of mass political action is to explain why average citizens would participate in such behavior, since they have nothing to gain by participating (they won’t receive compensation for participating but will receive the public good if they participate or not) but much to lose (it can be costly and harmful to participate). According to the rational theory, the incentive to participate must come from the expectation of receiving selective benefits; but since average citizens in a general case cannot expect substantial private material rewards, the relevant benefits must be psychological in nature. A public goods model is proposed stating that the value of revolution in terms of public goods can be a relevant incentive for participation. Using data from surveys conducted in Egypt, we investigate the relationship between participation in mass political action and measures of the incentives of public goods. Hypotheses of the public goods model are supported.

According to the gunman theory many revolutions do not take place, in spite of the fact that the majority stands to gain if they can put an end to the oppression exercised over it, since a gunman can see to it that egoistic individuals have no incentive to take part in the revolution. Champions of the idea that there is a paradox of revolution go further: Even if individuals care about the common good, they will not take action. This is wrong. If they care about the common good revolution will take place. This is good news. The bad news is, however, that those conditions, as we find them in social psychological literature, that are helpful to the revolutionary cause tend to get undermined by the oppressive system when it is well functioning.

In my thesis I will study how the revolutionary philosophy of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels was received and interpreted by early 20th century Russian intellectuals in an attempt to reconcile orthodoxy with the real conditions present in Russia. Through analysis of documents spanning several decades of debate, I will trace the evolution of this discussion to unlock the logic that led to philosophy put to action in the form of revolution. Finally, I will evaluate how this logic fits into the historic trajectory described by Marxism.

The Egyptian protest movement which brought down the Egyptian regime headed by President Hosni Mubarak, not only gripped the minds and hearts of the Egyptians, but it captured the interest of the national and international media as well.   The research aims at answering questions related to the kind of frames employed in four newspapers; namely, Al-Ahram, Al-Masry Al-Youm, The Telegraph and The Washington Post, in light of the protest paradigm, in addition to the way the same four newspapers tried to explore and identify the characteristics of war and peace journalism, according to Galtung’s dichotomous model, not to mention to trace how the four newspapers in hand depicted the protesters.   To achieve this, two methods were applied in this study; notably, frame analysis, and critical discourse analysis. A sample of 60 news articles and editorial pieces was thoroughly examined and taken from the aforementioned four newspapers. The derived non-random samples were covering the events of the Egyptian Revolution from the eruption on January 25, till February 17, 2011; means one week after toppling the regime and the resignation of the Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak on February 11, 2011.    The study revealed that the national newspapers; Al-Ahram and Al-Masry Al-Youm, were more prone to accentuate protesters’ acts of violence, albeit Al-Ahram showed a propensity toward using official sources at the expenses of voicing protesters, compared to Al-Masry Al-Youm. However, The Telegraph’s and The Washington Post’s coverage was more shifting away from the protest paradigm.   Similarly, the national newspapers in hand, were leaning more towards war-reporting; resorting to victimizing language in addition to a language of good and bad dichotomous, not to mention to abstain from exposing the untruth of all parties involved. However, The Telegraph and The Washington Post were adhering to peace-reporting; using extensively people sources and exposing the black and whites of all parties in the problem, in addition to taking the side of protesters and depicting them positively. From the findings, the study may reach a conclusion that the more a newspaper’s coverage adheres to the protest paradigm, the more it inclines to war-reporting. On the other hand, the more a newspaper’s coverage shifting away from the protest paradigm, the more it conforms to peace journalism.

<p>Chapter 1: Forcing Consent: Information and Power in Non-Democratic Elections. Why do governments hold elections that lack credibility? What explains variation in repression levels across non-democratic elections? While the literature has suggested many explanations for elections in autocracies, it has not yet provided a theory that would explain both the incidence of non-democratic elections and the variation in their degree of competitiveness. In this paper, we build an informational model of non-democratic elections explaining when elections may stabilize an autocrat's rule and when they may fail to do so. We argue that to achieve stability, elections must yield a sufficiently high vote-share for the incumbent and be optimally repressive. The degree of optimal repression is shown to increase with the incumbent's expected popularity. The model is then applied to explain some stylized facts about non-democratic elections and to derive a set of novel research hypotheses about the effects of non-democratic elections, variation in electoral repression, and fraud technology. We test the chief implication of the model using an original dataset on political arrests in the Soviet Union. We find that even if elections present no choice, they reduce the expression of anti-government sentiments. </p><p>Chapter 2: A Ballot Under the Sword: Political Security and the Quality of Elections in Autocracies. What explains the democratic quality of elections outside established democracies? We argue that when a government does not have to convince the opposition of its wide support in the society, it holds repressive elections. Conversely, when a government needs to send a strong signal about its popularity, it takes a riskier strategy of holding more competitive, and hence more informative elections. Using cross-national panel data, we find that the incumbents facing political insecurity -- measured through the incidence of economic crises and coup threats -- tend to hold higher quality elections than their more secure counterparts. In addition, via structural equation modeling, we find evidence that economic crises affect the quality of elections only indirectly through increased political insecurity. These findings reject the conventional view that autocrats use electoral repression when they are afraid of losing due to low expected support. This analysis has important implications for modernization theory and for understanding the role of political and economic instability in the democratization process.</p><p>Chapter 3: The Calculus of Dissent: Rigged Elections, Information, and Post-Election Stability. Why do some elections result in concession speeches while others spiral into protests, riots, and conflicts? This paper draws attention to the informational content of the electoral process and its outcome. We argue that elections induce stability when they communicate that the winners are truly popular and derive several novel predictions as to when such communication can succeed or fail. First, unfair elections lead to instability only if they are won by slim margins. Second, excessively large victory margins increase instability \emph{irrespective} of the unfairness of elections. The theory is then applied to explain the incidence of post-election protests across the world and the patterns of mandate denial in sub-Saharan Africa. We find that structural conditions (e.g., poverty and ethnic diversity) contribute little to post-election instability. Instead, the quality of elections and their results affect post-election politics in an interactive and non-linear fashion as predicted by the model. </p><p>Chapter 4: An Experimental Study of Fraudulent Elections and the Post-Election Protests. How can a winner of elections marred by fraud and voter intimidation convince the loser that he has large support in the society? Using an experimental setting, this paper studies how the information about election results and the competitiveness of the electoral process affect citizens' beliefs about the true popularity of the government and, subsequently, the success of a protest. We theoretically derive and evaluate the following hypotheses: (1) There will be no information update if elections are sufficiently manipulative and are won with great margins; (2) There will be positive updating in elections with medium levels of manipulation and high vote margin for the government; (3) There will be negative information updating if elections are highly manipulative but do not yield high margin for the government. We find relatively strong support for the first two hypotheses but none for the last one. The study also points to difficulties in studying rigged elections experimentally. The first difficulty has to do with the heterogeneity of the experimental population and the second one with the operationalization of electoral manipulation in a laboratory environment.</p> / Dissertation

In recent years, more and more rapidly changing industry environment, enterprises face the challenge of more intensive, rapid response and then how to stay competitive, re-use of information technology has leapt to the table; contingent competing in the business community into the building process in the ERP, From time to time to hear the company spent a lot of money, but often can not feel the corresponding benefits of ERP, gradually "ERP" in the public mind, by the tool should be as effective competition, and gradually became a large enterprise proprietary products or a modern enterprise to determine whether the "symbol", it is deeply regrettable. As "enterprise of change management into ERP" (Electronic Commerce Research, Winter 2003, Volume I, Phase II) mentioned in the article, the enterprise is full of setbacks to promote the main reason why ERP is: underestimation of change management, budget overruns and time schedule was repeatedly pushed back, in addition to employee resistance to mind is the reason can not be ignored. In other words, is not a warning to avoid the ERP can successfully import it? In the end what is the KSF for Company to implement ERP? Is ERP implementation a management innovation? How to make a management innovation? What are the bottlenecks to implement the ERP? How to break them? Can the ERP improve the performance of the business operation? Does ERP implementation needs lots of resources, ex: manpower or money? Is it right that ERP is the only way lead to the growth of a company, and it will lose its competitiveness without ERP? The ERP will be present to promote the success of the enterprise as a case study, to understand their development process, encountered those problems? How do they overcome? After implementation of ERP, what company can benefit ? Hope that the success stories by practitioners to explore the key factors to success, but also hope to set out clearly the importance of promoting the implementation of ERP programs, and touch to what the problem might be, how to solve in order to improve chances of success.

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This dissertation is an argument for the existence of a previously unidentified rebellion novel genre. A close study of dozens of rebellion novels proved this to be true. The findings are a significant step in genre studies and in the general understanding of British novels with political purposes. This dissertation primarily focuses on the rebellion novels by Sir Walter Scott (Waverley, Rob Roy, Black Dwarf, Tale of Old Mortality, and The Heart of Mid-Lothian), Charles Dickens (Barnaby Rudge: A Tale of the Riots of Eighty, and The Tale of Two Cities), and Robert Louis Stevenson (Kidnapped, David Belfour, Dynamiter, The Young Chevalier and Pentland Rising), brushing over the rebellion novels of several other major nineteenth century authors. The category of rebellion novels is defined according to both linguistic (sentence and word structure, use of regional and class dialects and use of foreign languages) and structural (purpose, characters, setting, plot and generic) criteria. Genre is commonly studied either with structuralism or with linguistics, but it is illogical to separate linguistics from structure in a discussion of a literary category. In order to create a unified, single argument, I am focusing on the radical purpose rebellion novelists had in mind when they wrote rebellion novels, and I am extending the discussion of purpose into the linguistic and structural sections for each author, to explain subversive and radical politics at work even in the structural and linguistic elements of these works. Scott, Dickens and Stevenson used the tools of political literary propaganda to assist the poor, disenfranchised and periphery people that they identified with and hoped to see free from oppression and poverty. / Dr. Christopher R. Orchard Dr. Christopher Kuipers Dr. Signe Wegener

This dissertation traces how Cuban and Angolan novels published in the final decades of the twentieth century engage with the political and artistic projects promoted by and through the post-revolutionary socialist-aligned political systems. The dissertation sustains that there are a collection of textual practices that insert themselves into the official “orthodox” historiographic and literary debates by reconsidering not just historical moments in the past that are central to these debates, but also reference how these moments are written and read from an official point of view. By employing tactics of ironic citation, parody and anachronism, these works not only comment upon official readings of history and demands of post-revolutionary literature, but they also reveal “silences,” to use Rolph-Trouillot’s term, in the literary corpus and in the experiences of Angolan and Cuban people that these alternative corpuses represent. Through revision of official discourses, they present an alternative reading of present subjects’ interactions with the past. These practices, which together I have termed “poetics of disappointment,” allow an intervention into the discussions surrounding both the production and the criticism of contemporary Cuban and Angolan literatures from a variety of political perspectives. The dissertation analyzes Cubans Alejo Carpentier’s La consagración de la primavera, Reinaldo Arenas’ La loma del ángel and Eliseo Alberto’s Caracol Beach as well as Angolans Manuel Rui’s Memória de mar, J. E. Agualusa’s Nação crioula and Boaventura Cardoso’s Mãe, materno mar. On one hand, these works recall the monumental events that the Cuban Revolution and Angolan independence represented, evoking a collective optimism and sense of community forged among pueblos/ povos in the processes of decolonization and promoting movements for social justice. On the other hand, the novels analyzed point out the limits of programmatic interpretations of post-revolutionary history. Demonstrating positions of discomfort with the notions of messianic immanence, idealized racial synthesis and the aftermaths of violence and displacement that official sources rarely document, these novels both privilege and question literary creation as a way of negotiating this disappointment. / text

This thesis aims to point out primarily the layered meanings behind Taiping art. It will provide an overview of the art made by the Taipings, and thereafter show how different political parties in post-Taiping China have manipulated the images and values of the Taipings to their advantage. A discussion of each party’s ideology will also be included. The contextual approach adopted by this thesis intends to illustrate the relationship between art and the Taiping Rebellion over time. The visual materials discussed in this thesis are the murals and wood engravings of the Taipings, a series of paintings made in 1886 as part of an imperial project and Shanghai lithographic illustrated publications in relation to the project, and the visual propaganda of Nationalists and Communists of the twentieth century which embody the two parties’ own interpretations of Taiping history. In view of the complexity of the subject, this thesis is primarily an information collecting exercise, offering a wider academic perspective, and revealing the characteristics of the visual works related to the Taipings, so that there can be more interpretations of the nuances of the Taiping Rebellion in the study of Chinese art history. / published_or_final_version / Humanities / Master / Master of Philosophy