Political journalists are some of Twitter’s most enthusiastic users and the platform has become one of the key social media tools in the news industry. While a growing body of research has addressed journalists’ observable tweeting practices, we know little about the considerations and strategies that underpin their activities on the platform, how these manifest themselves in their engagement, and which benefits they yield. This thesis examines US political journalists and the process of their Twitter engagement via an integrated conceptual framework that is organised by macro, meso and micro levels of investigation. On the macro level, it conceptualises the influence of organisational factors via a management of media innovation perspective. On the meso level, it uses the concepts of technology affordances and appropriation to analyse the role of journalistic routines and practices. On the micro level, it employs the uses and gratifications framework to examine individual-based motivations that drive Twitter engagement. The thesis further investigates how different socio-political environments and the type of news medium, that is, broadsheet and broadcast, moderate the factors located on each level as they impinge on journalists’ Twitter engagement. The empirical part of the study uses a mixed methods approach that combines expert interviews as the primary method with quantitative content analysis as the secondary method of (1) the Twitter profile pages of 120 political journalists and (2) 2,400 of their tweets, published during a mundane news period and the US Midterm elections in 2014. Findings indicate that journalists experience organisational influences on their Twitter engagement most prominently when their employer is in an advanced stage of innovation implementation and Twitter use has been formalised on an institutional level. The empirical analysis further demonstrates that practices and routines are especially sensitive to changing news climates, and it is here where the perceived benefits of Twitter use are most clearly articulated. Findings on the individual level indicate high degrees of individualisation and personalisation that shape journalists’ Twitter presence. Overall, the relationships and interactions between macro-, meso- and micro-level factors can create mutually beneficial outcomes for the employer, news product and journalist, but equally so, generate fields of tensions and significant conflicts of interest. The empirical analysis and its novel integration of independent macro-, meso- and microlevel concepts into a combined framework provide a basis for advancing a theoretical understanding of the interplay of factors that motivate, shape and moderate political journalists’ engagement with Twitter. This allows us to position and understand tweeting journalists, on the one hand, as employees bound by contractual agreements and occupational demands, and on the other, as autonomous agents who are not fully controlled by managerial strategies, organisational logics and professional workflows.

This dissertation attempts to provide a scholarly interpretation of Locke's political theory, the interpretation which reveals him as a classical liberal who defended property and justice. The major task of this dissertation is to elaborate this interpretation, and defend it against all major alternative interpretations. This task is performed in the Introduction, Chapter 1, and Chapter 2. The interpretation I offer is based on Locke's texts, and the writings of his 17th-century predecessors and 18th-century successors. Appendix 1 criticizes Peter Laslett' s "historical" approach to the Two Treatises. Appendix 2 criticizes a "philosophical" approach to Locke's political theory. I shall reject those approaches, and show the overall soundness of my approach to Locke's political theory. A subsidiary task of this dissertation is to criticize Locke's liberal political theory. Chapter 3 criticizes the concept of property which he uses in his political theory, by offering a detailed analysis. Chapter 4 criticizes his political theory by showing how it disintegrates with the erosion of its basis, i. e., a myth of appropriation. However, the present study is not intended to offer a full-scale critique of Locke's theory. It merely shows how his theory can be criticized on the basis of the interpretation provided in this dissertation. The major purpose of the present work is to understand Locke rather than criticize him. A systematic critique of his liberalism would have to take into account the whole classical-liberal tradition which developed after Locke. Such a task goes far beyond the scope of this dissertation.

Motivated by concern about growing social marginalisation and injustice in Western democracies, this thesis examines these issues from the perspectives of post-structuralist and perfectionist traditions of democratic political thought. Both traditions fear that dominant contemporary political theory, here represented by Rawlsian liberalism, is insufficiently attentive to voice. I seek to explore the critique put forward by each tradition, and demonstrate how in contrast to Rawls, the post-structuralists seek an open, revisable democracy, achieved via a culture of dissent or a democratic ethos. However, since post-structuralism lacks attention to the formation of democratic subjectivity I suggest that it may be productive to look to Cavell’s work on this topic, to help improve the post-structuralist ability to be attentive to the emergence of voice. Yet, given Cavell’s neglect of constructive social power, it becomes necessary to first bridge the gap between Cavell and the post-structuralists by examining the move from voicelessness to voice in more detail. I therefore propose using Rancière’s work on the development of subjectivity, complemented by reference to James Tully and Cristoph Menke, to show how Cavellian aversive thinking can help develop democratic subjects. This also leads me to challenge the strict nature of the divide that Rancière envisions between la politique and la police, making it possible for me to read Rancière as a call for political action, re-casting the ordinary as extraordinary. Hence I suggest that radical democratic political thinkers need to attend to the background police order to consider if it is possible to institutionalise conditions to encourage eruptions of politics, by supporting the cultivation and emergence of individual voice.

My thesis engages with the question about what it means to treat each other as equals, as this has been approached by luck and social egalitarians. Luck egalitarians maintain that luck inequalities should be equalized, while inequalities that are due to people’s choices should be left as they stand. This further implies that the scope of egalitarian justice is universal. Social egalitarians criticize luck egalitarianism for failing to provide a proper understanding of the value of equality. Equality is a relational ideal regarding how people should relate to each other as social and political equals, which properly understood requires that they relate to each other in a nondominating way. Given this, they argue, first, that luck egalitarian principles of justice violate the requirements of non-domination, since responsibility may conflict with the latter; and secondly, that strongly egalitarian duties are generated in virtue of morally significant forms of existing relationships, thus the scope of egalitarian justice is not universal. In my dissertation, I argue that Dworkin—who has traditionally been considered to be a luck egalitarian—shares the two social egalitarian commitments, namely that equality is a relational value and that strong egalitarian duties are generated in virtue of morally significant forms of existing relationships. Given this I defend two theses, both of which constitute an original contribution to our better understanding of the demands of social and political equality: a) Dworkin’s theory of equality properly understood is not only attentive to the social egalitarian requirement of non-domination, but it provides a better understanding of it precisely because it builds upon a conception of personal and consequential responsibility that is constitutive of non-domination. b) I challenge both Dworkin’s and social egalitarians’ view of the scope of egalitarian justice by arguing that properly understood the ideal of social and political equality tells us that we should relate to each other as equals, not that existing relationships are necessary for justice-based duties to be triggered.

Two interpretive trends have driven the recent revival of Kant’s political philosophy. On the one hand, a focus on his cosmopolitanism as providing a normative agenda for a global political order. On the other hand, a turn to Kant as a theorist of a distinctly state-centred political morality, based on his much debated property argument. This thesis argues that these interpretive trends have sidetracked us from Kant’s most sustained, systematic and original cosmopolitan vision as it is laid out in the Doctrine of Right. I develop this framework through the notion of a global standpoint as a distinctly first-person perspective from which agents reflexively recognise their systematic interdependence in a world of limited space. The global standpoint binds what I call ‘earth dwellers’ – corporeal agents who concurrently coexist on the earth’s spherical surface – to a certain kind of comportment towards distant strangers. It is a standpoint from which we must interact with others with the aim of finding shared terms of coexistence. What is particularly fascinating about this cosmopolitan vision and of continuing relevance is the way in which Kant folds it into his account of juridical statehood. The global standpoint is not only predicated on the existences of states. Despite being concerned with our comportment beyond borders, the ensuing obligations are also to be implemented within the state context. Kant’s cosmopolitanism as conceived from the global standpoint is not directed at a global institutional order, but a world of distinctly outwardlooking states that bind themselves (and their citizens) to rightful comportment towards other states and non-state peoples of their own accord. We take up the global standpoint from within states by transforming them into cosmopolitan agents.

In this thesis I attempt to clarify and evaluate G. A. Cohen’s positive contribution to the question of what type of society we ought to seek, following his turn from Marxism to normative political philosophy. I specifically focus on clarifying and evaluating certain views that appear in his critical engagement with Ronald Dworkin and John Rawls, and in his positive vision of society as set out in Why Not Socialism? I interpret Cohen as holding that, in principle, we ought to seek a society that reflects equal access to advantage (or some other luck egalitarian principle of equality of opportunity), Pareto-efficiency, freedom of occupational choice, and a principle of community that, by means of voluntary non-state agency, significantly tempers inequalities consistent with luck egalitarianism. With respect to evaluative matters, I argue: (i) that we ought not to embrace equal access to advantage but rather an alternative luck egalitarian principle of equality of opportunity where opportunities are specified in terms of resources; (ii) that although equality of opportunity, Pareto-efficiency and freedom of occupational choice might be co-obtainable in principle, they are not coobtainable in practice; and (iii) that in practice equality of opportunity ought to be constrained by a sufficiency qualification rather than by Cohen’s community principle. In addition, I interpret a concession from Cohen about Paretoefficiency often trumping equality of opportunity, in practice, in terms of a pluralist distributive ethic that combines telic egalitarian and telic prioritarian beliefs. I defend the plausibility of this ethic to some extent, but ultimately come to embrace a sufficiency-constrained luck egalitarianism that secures a decent life for all by means of state coercion, and which minimizes the unfairness of the prudent having to bear the costs of other’s imprudence.

Democracy substitutes election by the incompetent many for appointment by the corrupt few. —George Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman (1903) This thesis consists of three essays in the field of empirical political economy. The topics addressed in these essays are very diverse, as are the historico-institutional settings. What they share is the quantitative analysis of election results and – at least in the author’s opinion – the inquiry of relevant research questions about political attitudes and institutions. This gives the dissertation its title “No Ordinary Elections”. Chapter one looks at the effect of war service on political attitudes. I analyse the impact of WWI veterans on changes in electoral support for Germany’s antidemocratic right after 1918. In order to quantify the effect, I construct the first disaggregate estimates of German WWI veterans since official army records were destroyed. I combine this data with a new panel of voting results from 1881 to 1933. Differences-in-Differences estimates show that war participation had a strong positive effect on support for the right-wing at the expense of socialist parties. A one standard deviation increase in veteran inflow shifted voting patterns to the right by more than 2%. My findings are robust to a number of checks including an IV identification strategy based on draft exemption rules. The effect of veterans on voting is highly persistent and strongest in working class areas. Gains for the right-wing, however, are only observed after a time period of communist insurgencies. I argue that veterans’ impact is consistent with the spread of a popular anti-communist conspiracy theory, the stab-in-the-back myth. I provide suggestive evidence that veterans must have picked this idea up during wartime, injected it into the working class and facilitated the rise of right-wing parties. The second chapter documents evidence on how election fraud in authoritarian regimes can be used by lower-tier officials to cast signals about their loyalty or competence to the central government. I exploit a radical policy change in Russia in 2004 which allowed the president to replace governors of the country’s 89 regions at his own will. As a result, federal elections after 2004 were organised by two types of governors: one was handpicked by the president, the other one elected before the law change and re-appointed. Even though both types faced removal in case of bad results, the need to signal loyalty was much lower for the first type. In order to estimate the effect of handpicked governors on electoral fraud, I use a diff-in-diff framework over 7 federal elections between 2000 and 2012. For this time period, I construct a new indicator of suspicious votes for each region which correlates strongly with incidents of reported fraud. My baseline estimates show that in territories with a handpicked governor the share of suspicious votes decreased by more than 10% on average and dropped even further if the region’s economy had done well over the past legislature. These findings suggest that officials have less need to use rigging as a signal once loyalty is assured unless faced circumstances raising doubts about their competence. Finally, chapter three studies the Chernobyl nuclear disaster of April 1986 and voters’ response in West Germany. The analysis uses a diff-in-diff estimation which exploits variation in proximity to the nearest nuclear power plant (NPP) across 301 counties. Proximity is used as proxy for the shock from perceived risk of a nuclear accident. Using data over a time period of almost 40 years and 11 elections, my results indicate that living closer to an NPP increased polarisation and benefited anti- but even more pro-nuclear parties. While gains of Greens are shown to be similar across social groups and therefore in line with home-voter effects, the increase of conservatives runs counter to most expectations. Heterogeneity analysis shows that the effect on conservatives is far stronger in areas with an above-median share of adolescents in their impressionable years and of higher average education. I argue that this can be explained by differences in assessing the economic losses from exiting nuclear power over the risk of a nuclear accident after the disaster. Using variation in the scheduling of state elections, I can also show that the pro-nuclear response was stronger in counties which did not vote in the immediate aftermath of Chernobyl leaving more time for a rational electoral choice.

This thesis aims to draw a comparison on Britain and Japan on issues of citizenship and nationality for the former empire subjects. In multi-national state Britain, those of New Commonwealth immigration issue is mainly conceptualised as ‘racial' topics, while in nation-state Japan, Koreans and Taiwanese or aliens’ issue is mainly conceptualised as legal ‘nationality' topics. The framework is set from the Japanese ‘nationality’ perspective, in order to point out what are missed in the 'race' framework, in particular, when they are applied to the Japanese context. Discussion of formal rights in Japan is divided in two as rights with regard to residence, and their right for citizenship status. In chapter 2, I discuss that the former is similar to denizenship discussion while the latter is similar to patriality topic. The methodology section explores what is the best way to conduct a comparison between Britain and Japan on these citizenship and nationality issue, as well as considering what are the main factors in each country to make some impact on public policy of the government. I consider court cases are important tool for minorities in Japan, while in Britain, pressure through the parliament seems much more influential. The research chapters explore the topics of denizenship and patriality of each country, the British chapters examine the impact of the 1971 Immigration Act, while the Japanese chapters examine the impact of the 1952 San Francisco Peace Treaty and the following circular, and see whether minorities formal rights has been changed after since or not. The conclusion examines whether the withdrawal from empire had some significant impact of citizenship and nationality legislation as well as the concepts in Britain and Japan. It argues that the impact of the former empire subjects on legislation has been slow and continuous in Britain, while in Japan there was a major change once for all, but the results are continuous. The two concepts are slowly converging in Britain, while in Japan, they are gradually diverging.

This thesis examines Hannah Arendt’s argument for a council democracy and its relevance for contemporary democratic practices. References to the councils in Arendt’s work are often ignored or dismissed by her interpreters as a utopian commitment. Against the tendency to neglect this aspect of her thought, I argue that the councils play a crucial role in her work as the institutional embodiment of her principle of political freedom. Tracing the development of the council concept in Arendt’s thought, I offer a significant reinterpretation of her political theory as situated within the radical democratic tradition of Rosa Luxemburg. I contend that Arendt’s key contribution to democratic theory is her championing of a federal system of participatory and empowered councils as the central political institutions of a council republic. Arendt’s argument for a council democracy draws from historical examples of councils from the French Revolution to the 1956 Hungarian Revolution. However, Arendt mischaracterises the nature of the councils and the intentions of council delegates. She inserts them in the framework of her own political categories and disregards the delegates’ socialist ideology and socio-economic concerns. Arendt’s distortion of the councils gives rise to the need for a historical re-examination of their political practices. I return to the political struggles of the post-First World War council movements in Germany and Russia in order to place the councils in historical perspective and challenge the biases of Arendt’s account. My analysis reveals that the councils were concerned with both political and economic affairs. I revise Arendt’s depiction in arguing that the councils were transformative organs of democratisation that sought to introduce democratic conditions into all spheres of social organisation. Situating the councils in relation to contemporary democratic practices, my principal argument is that they offer a critical perspective on the limits of current liberal democratic regimes. Although the councils do not present a model that could be replicated today, council delegates engaged in significant political practices that are instructive for current attempts at political transformation. In particular, they reveal the insufficiencies of electoral institutions for enabling widespread political participation and holding elites accountable. I argue that the historical significance of the councils is their exemplary role as institutions through which working-class forces organised to restrain elites, dismantle hierarchical systems and equalise power between citizens.

Nations are not becoming conflict-free zones as once envisioned. They remain zones of conflict and of competition. It has been argued that competition over the memory of foundational events or of national identity can strengthen national identities. In some cases, however, competition brings more competition, leading only to fragmentation. When such competition continues without producing a definite outcome, the question remains: why is there continuous competition? This thesis answers this question through a case study, that of Dersim in the Turkish Republic. Despite appearing from the outside to be a unified zone of insurgent conflict against the Turkish state, Dersim is, in fact, a contested ground and a zone of conflict where multiple insurgent movements struggle not only against the state but also against each other. Why is it that Dersim remains a conflict zone in which the number of conflicting groups simply increases? Why do we not see a victorious or dominant movement but, rather, continuous competition that does not strengthen the nation but engenders new, ‘sub-nation(alism)s’? This thesis does two things. Firstly, it explains why there is this incessant competition. Secondly, it maps out the arenas in which this competition takes place, tracing its origins further back than the 1990s. I argue that competition continues because nationalist movements impose concepts of ethnicity and nationalism on the region in order to homogenise what remains a heterogeneous community. The outcome of this competition may not be ‘nation-building’ nor ‘strong collective identity,’ but neither does Dersim totally fragment. On the one hand, Dersimlis have been torn apart particularly by ethno-linguistic definitions of their collective identity that are unsuitable for the type of community it is. On the other, such is the tradition of resistance to the central authority in Ankara, that Dersimlis exhibit the same degree of solidarity that one finds in more cohesive nationalist movements.