In the early 1990s, Spain faced the risk of losing the market for low-cost manufacturing outputs to Eastern Europe, and the threat of losing control of its complex service sectors to more sophisticated competitors from Western Europe. Most industries had few alternatives other than to upgrade. By the late-2000s, Spanish firms in complex services like Banking and Telecommunications were amongst the most efficient, profitable, and sustainable in the world but most manufacturing sectors had not achieved a comparable outcome. My thesis explains these changes in the Spanish productive structure through an analysis of the institutional structure beneath them. I argue that upgrading in Spain’s complex services was enabled by Peer Coordination (PC), a non-hierarchical variant of relational coordination based on the presence of public-private interdependencies and direct business-state interactions. Under PC, firms in complex services contributed to the fulfilment of public policy objectives in exchange for sector-specific advantages. PC enabled firms in these sectors to undertake significant restructuration that enabled them to reach the efficiency frontier in their industry. Liberalisation did not unravel PC in Banking and Telecommunications because national-level interdependences remained a structural feature of the two sectors. By contrast, PC imposed constraints on capital and skill intensive manufacturing sectors that required patient capital and stable demand to develop new complex products. Firms in these types of sectors found it difficult to secure capital and stable demand on their own, and the state had limited capacity to articulate top-down industrial strategies that could facilitate access to such resources. As a result, firms in capital and skill intensive sectors struggled to upgrade. In exceptional cases, regional institutional structures, based on forms of coordination other than PC, were able to provide support for these underserved sectors. In this regard, regional institutions complemented the national ecosystem and contributed to upgrading.

The development of EU cultural policy has been characterised by a high degree of continuity. The objectives underlying present-day policy actions can be traced back to historical roots that date back to the mid-1970s. Since the first cultural actions were taken, EU cultural policy has had multiple objectives. Involvement in the cultural field has been justified on the basis of economic, social, political and, to a certain extent, cultural arguments. Although there have been shifts in accents and priorities, these various justifications can be found to co-exist throughout the process. In more recent times, the contribution of cultural actions to the emergence of European citizenship has emerged as a more dominant theme. Although peaks in expansion can be seen, Community involvement in the cultural field has overall developed through a slow process of developments and adjustments through relatively small-scale actions. As the Member States have retained much of their control over this area, policy development has been restricted to a limited range of actions for which only a narrow budget has been available. Given the dominance of the subsidiarity principle in all Community actions in the cultural field, the main policy mode has by necessity been one of consensus-seeking between actors with at times conflicting interests. However, over time the main priorities of all actors have become more or less aligned, so that the continuity of policy appears to be safeguarded. Recent developments suggest that culture has gradually come to take up a more prominent role within EU policies. However, consensus will continue to dominate the general approach as far as the development of Community actions is concerned.

This study is an in-depth investigation into the Christian Democratic parties of Germany, Austria and the Netherlands, focusing particularly on these parties during the 1990s. The primary intention is to give greater coverage to these oft-neglected parties through an account of political, electoral, programmatic and organisational developments. The research probes the position of the parties in the 1990s and analyses the extent to which the electoral decline of these parties after 1990 was the result of common factors as well as the role of nationally specific contextual variables. This is carried out through a consideration of the contraction of the social bases of Christian Democratic partisanship and detailed case-studies of the parties in the 1990s. The reactions of the parties to this decline are also analysed, looking specifically at strategic, programmatic and organisational changes. Historical background will also be provided by the opening chapters. Chapter two looks at Christian Democrats in the early post-war period, highlighting the rapid use of such parties and contrasting the lack of a unified Christian Democratic party in the Netherlands while chapter three investigates the reaction of the parties to the loss of national office and/or the emergence of electoral problems. In each case, programmatic and organisational adaptation occurred although as the chapter argues, by the end of the 1980s such efforts were very much marginal after the parties had re-established their position in government. Chapter four then examines the key social bases of Christian Democratic support and illustrates their long-term decline. It concludes that while such change need not necessarily result in electoral problems, there has been a decline of Christian Democratic partisanship in the electorate in the three countries. Chapters five, six and seven analyse the CDU, ÖVP and CDA in the 1990s. In each case, Christian Democrats found their position under greater threat than previously although the scale of their problems varied. Chapter eight scrutinises the development of Christian Democratic electoral programmes using the Comparative Manifestos Project dataset.

The thesis scrutinizes the effects of the Council Presidency on legislative decision making in the European Union Council of Ministers. The rotating Council Presidency has been one of most prominent topics of discussion in the debate on institutional reform. So far, however, a comprehensive evaluation of the effects of the Presidency is missing. The thesis addresses two questions: 1. Does the Council presidency have an impact on legislative activity in the Council? 2. Does the Council presidency gain disproportional benefits from the policies agreed upon during its term in office? The methodology used in the thesis consists of an exploratory case study, secondary analysis of the Decision-making in the European Union (DEU) data set, and statistical analysis of an original data set covering legislative activity from 1984-2003. It presents evidence for an effect of the Presidency on both legislative activity and decision outcomes.

This thesis argues that establishing legitimacy, both in relation to the international community and in relation to local populations, is a critical precondition for the success of international missions in post-conflict situations. The argument is developed through a study of post-conflict institution-building in Kosovo. In 1999, when the Security Council established the United Nations Administrative Mission in Kosovo, the international community had a unique opportunity to develop conflict management mechanisms capable of responding to the contemporary challenges posed by ethnic conflicts. By acting under the United Nations umbrella, the international community could have sent a strong message to the deeply divided population of Kosovo: this mission had the ability to protect them and provide them with institutional structures capable of sustaining long-term economic, political and social peace and stability. Yet the international actors failed to do so. They failed to grant the Kosovo population the security they so dearly needed, and they failed to construct institutions appropriate to the challenges faced by the territory. This thesis argues that this occurred because of the international community’s inability to provide legitimacy for their actions and policies. As the different actors focused their attention on attempting to secure legitimacy vis à vis the international community, they failed to nurture the roots of the new political system they wished to establish by obtaining the support of Kosovo’s population as a whole. After developing a working concept of legitimacy, I analyse the degree and nature of legitimacy of the different international actors, and their policies at each stage that led to the establishment of a new political system in Kosovo. Through this analysis, I provide an explanation for the failure of the international community to offer a satisfactory and sustainable solution to the Kosovo issue.

This thesis starts from the following question: Why, after 16 years of receiving Structural Funds, do some regions still have difficulties in spending their allocated resources? Empirical evidence shows that Funds implementation rates have varied widely among European Union Objective 1 regions. The overall performance of Italian regions, in particular, has consistently lagged behind other countries. However, an investigation into individual Italian Objective 1 regions reveals that not all follow this general trend. Indeed, some regions have outperformed others remarkably. Why is this the case? I explore these differences and identify potential variables that may account for such regional variation. My central hypothesis is that differences in implementation are strongly dependent on the degree of administrative capacity that exists in the recipient regional government. Due to the deficiency in the existing literature of a clear definition of administrative capacity, I attempt to fill this gap by introducing a novel characterization that allows me to operationalize and measure the concept. The core of the methodology is an in-depth case study supported by field research based on personal interviews and documented questionnaires. I investigate two contrasting southern Italian regions, Sicily and Basilicata, measure their respective degrees of administrative capacity and provide evidence to suggest that this latter variable is positively correlated to Structural Funds implementation. Answering my first query has prompted a further question: if it is trite that the variation in implementation of resources between regions can be explained by different degrees of regional administrative capacity, then what is it that determines the degree of administrative capacity at the regional level? In studying this second question I further test the hypothesis that the level of administrative capacity is influenced by three key political factors: namely, political interference, government stability and political accountability.

This thesis explores how Kurdish nationalists generate sympathy and support for their ethnically-defined claims to territory and self-determination in international society and among would-be nationals. It combines conceptual and theoretical insights from the field of IR and studies on nationalism, and focuses on national identity, sub-state groups and international norms. In so doing, this thesis presents a comprehensive understanding of the relationship between the self-determination claims of sub-state nationalist groups and their interaction with international society. Such assertions for the control of a specific territory typically embrace, either implicitly or explicitly, ethnic conceptions of national identity. A three-fold argument is proposed and developed to explain why these ethnic claims to self-determination gain sympathy and support. Firstly, political assertions regarding the identity of a specific piece of land and its cartographical depictions are powerful in influencing outsiders’ perceptions because of the normative context in which they are framed. The norms related to sub-state nationalist groups involve both a specific interpretation of self-determination and the norms of human rights and democracy. Secondly, such claims are further reinforced by the perception that the history of a territory is identical to the history of the people living on it. Although a political association between a people and a territory is a relatively novel link, such associations are often assumed and accepted to exist throughout all of history. Kurdish nationalists use the maps of Kurdistan effectively to convey the message. Finally, the diasporal activities of nationalists who, thanks to their location outside the homeland and their ability to communicate their ideas directly to international society, play an important role in asserting the rightfulness of their demand for self-determination and in promoting the idea of an ethnic territory.

This thesis develops an in-depth understanding of a specific case at the intersection of extreme right politics, marketing and language. More specifically, the research focuses on a Flemish extreme right party, the Vlaams Blok/Vlaams Belang which provides a rich site of enquiry for the analysis of political communications, marketing strategies and discursive processes. Critical discourse analysis of the verbal and visual elements of Vlaams Blok/Vlaams Belang publications reveals, on three levels, the strategic use of lexical, rhetorical and other linguistic devices to brand and differentiate the Vlaams Blok/Vlaams Belang from other political parties. The thesis demonstrates that the Vlaams Blok/Vlaams Belang manages to legitimate its political product by dismissing unfavourable features (such as racism and xenophobia), and repackaging them (as nationalist) for a wider audience as a ready-to-consume product that achieves electoral success. The main contributions of the thesis are fourfold. First, the research provides a marketing-related explanation of the success of the Vlaams Blok/Vlaams Belang. The pervasiveness of the Vlaams Blok/Vlaams Belang's discourse in Belgian politics makes the analysis of the party interesting in its own right. The critical discursive analysis reveals the underlying market-orientation of the party and the methods and techniques that the party uses to communicate and persuade. Second, this research demonstrates that marketing can be used to advance an ideological discourse that places consumption in a central position in people's lives. The application of critical discourse analysis thus provides a novel and valuable contribution to the understanding of political marketing. Third, the thesis sets the stage for furthering understanding of how marketing is deployed with increasing sophistication outside its traditional, commercial domain, and, more specifically, in politics. Finally, critical discourse analysis has an emancipatory goal in uncovering ideologies, and providing a voice to the silenced and the oppressed. This thesis is located firmly within that tradition with political reflexivity implicit throughout.

This project seeks to bring a critical utopian methodology to bear upon the institution of citizenship in the hope of imagining a theoretical formulation that could encourage active, anti-hierarchical, participatory and empowering practices. The critical utopian approach disrupts conventional disciplinary boundaries, and allows theories and practices that would not normally be associated with citizenship to be brought into dialogue with the concept in thought and imagination, as part of a strategic intervention. This produces a perspective that is simultaneously estranging and creative, deconstructive and experimental. The body of the work considers three themes in particular: territory, authority and rights, which are frequently posited as foundational for politics and citizenship, and proceeds to deconstruct their dominant formulations by imagining an infinitely critical utopian ‘outside’. Diverse bodies of theory including post-structuralism, anarchism, post-structural and post-left anarchisms, ecology, critical geography and feminism are drawn upon to articulate critical utopias of space without territory, decision-making without authority and ethics without rights. The project then brings another ‘outside’ into dialogue with the theory: practices in what are termed ‘autonomous utopian communities’; including intentional communities, autonomous social centres, housing co-operatives and eco-villages. The aim of the project is to use a dialogue between critically resistant theories and practices to expose the obscured normative and indeed utopian foundations of many dominant theories of citizenship, and to consider the ethical and practical effects of hegemonic and truth-claiming discourses. The project also posits something different: a contingent and open-ended critical utopian citizenship that favours perspectival multiplicity, process over closure, and contingency over certainty, that can be engaged in by citizens and non-citizens in everyday life.

This thesis examines the methodology prevalent in the analysis of democratic transitions, focusing upon the case study of Spain. Although current literature provides a detailed description of actions taken by elite actors during transition periods and the resultant outcomes, it fails to adequately connect these two factors. This thesis seeks to address the gap in the current literature and to underline the necessity for an explanatory methodology to take into account an amalgamation of approaches. The case of Spain is drawn upon to highlight the importance of the connection between the role of elite actors and the constraints set in place by the system in which they operate. I argue that an awareness of the existing parameters, both institutional and societal, is critical for an assessment of possible action to be undertaken. The methodology of comparative politics provides the ability to ascertain where there exists a failing in current theoretical approaches and to address this problem through increased analysis. An increasingly comprehensive appreciation of the actions of individuals and the underlying forces that drive these actions deepens our understanding of transition processes as a whole. I would argue that this thesis has implications for future research and indeed, relevance in the actual practice of politics. An awareness of the connection between the individual and the overriding political system is paramount for our understanding of democratic transitions and for future investigation of such processes. In this way, the thesis underlines that the connection between the micro and macro interpretations of transitions is fundamental; not only to guiding systematic analysis, but also to ensuring that research does not remain in the confines of the theoretical but is relevant in the real world.