Political parties serve a number of vital functions in representative democracies. Connecting citizens to government is perhaps the most important one. This is how parties were traditionally conceived, and it continues to be the main standard according to which their legitimacy as representative institutions is evaluated. In recent times, observers have noted a growing disconnect between citizens and parties. Parties have gradually transformed from agents that mediate between state and civil society to agents of the state. This sits uncomfortably with the ideal of parties as connectors of citizens and government. How can their capacity to perform this function be restored? This thesis seeks to offer a new answer to this question. Its main argument is that to revitalise their capacity to connect citizens and government, parties need to become more internally democratic, and that they need to become more internally democratic in a particular way, namely more internally deliberative. By this is meant that parties need to strengthen channels of communication from the bottom up and avail themselves of their internal deliberative resources: of the partisans on the ground, who deliberate over the demands of their community in local party branches. The theoretical part of the thesis proposes a model—called a “deliberative model of intraparty democracy”—showing how these traditional sites of partisanship can be empowered. The empirical part of the thesis then asks whether such a model can be realised in real-world parties. The main focus is here on the deliberative capacity of organised party members, which is likely the first target of scepticism. I examine three questions, drawing on the findings of a small-scale study of deliberation in party branches in Social Democratic parties in Germany and Austria: (1) Do party branches provide favourable preconditions for deliberation? (2) Are the political discussions in the branches “deliberative”, in the sense that they are marked by respectful exchanges of reasons? (3) When does intra-party deliberation fail? Though mainly indicative, the analysis of the empirical material suggests that party members do possess the deliberative capacity required to realise a deliberative model of intra-party democracy, and that possible deliberative deficiencies can be countervailed using simple institutional fixes. In light of this, the thesis concludes that making parties more internally deliberative in order to reconnect citizens with government is well within reach.

The essays in this thesis explore the effects of legislative leaders on the behaviour of parliamentarians in the European Parliament and the UK House of Commons, and the consequences of this relationship for parliamentary outcomes. The first paper argues that when party leaders are motivated to maintain the voting cohesion of their legislative contingents, and when disciplinary resources are in short supply, leaders may block policy proposals that threaten to divide their members. Accordingly, as the preferences of party members become more diffuse, agenda setting party leaders will be able to maintain cohesion but the actions they take to do so may contribute to the overall level of gridlock in the legislature. I introduce new data and methods to evaluate these relationships in the European Parliament, where agenda control and ‘carrot and stick’ disciplinary powers are held by different sets of parliamentary actors. The second paper argues that by making the status quo less attractive and by increasing legislators’ tolerance to new policies, external crises empower leaders who have the ability to propose legislation. In the context of the European Union’s response to the 2008 financial crisis, I combine topic modelling with a two-stage least squares procedure to show that voting coalitions in the European Parliament changed after the crisis in ways consistent with the theoretical model. The implication of the analysis is that prointegration agenda-setters were able to pass legislation in the post-crisis period that would have been impossible to pass in the absence of the crisis. In the third paper, I argue that when members of previously under-represented groups are appointed to positions of high office within the legislature, they can serve as role models to their fellow group members. Using a difference-in-differences design, I demonstrate that the appointment of a female cabinet minister in the UK House of Commons leads to an increase in the participation of other female members of parliament in legislative debates. Furthermore, I develop a novel approach for measuring the influence of legislators in debate, and use this to show that female members of parliament also become more influential following the appointment of a female minister. In exploring the mechanisms that underpin this role-model effect, I introduce an additional quantitative measure which reveals that female ministers are more responsive to the speeches made by female legislators than are male ministers. Taken together, these papers provide important theoretical arguments and empirical evidence concerning the central role that leaders play in the legislative process.

This thesis investigates the Convention on Access to Information, Public Participation in Decisionmaking and Access to Justice in Environmental Matters (Aarhus). It assesses its normative contribution to International Environmental Politics (IEP). Via English School (ES) lenses, it gauges the degree of pluralism and solidarism in the Convention. More specifically, it evaluates Aarhus’ role as a green human rights regime; scrutinises the contribution of Aarhus’ trinity of procedural rights; offers a regime analysis; and asks (a) what Aarhus’ association with democratisation is and (b) whether its success depends on Parties’ political cultures. Three originality claims are made. First, this project offers a particular investigation into an under-researched, quite elusive Multilateral Environmental Agreement (MEA). Second, it applies pluralism and solidarism to a tangible research object. Third, it addresses the overlooked issue of cosmopolitanisation in IEP. Three key findings are drawn. First, Aarhus demonstrates the presence of, and contributes to, a greener European international society. Second, Aarhus has considerable solidarist potential, offering tools for cosmopolitan human empowerment in IEP. Third, pluralist realities retain distinct influence. Cosmopolitan empowerment may be emerging, but it is still nascent. Sovereignty remains, and this is welcomed. Tentative cosmopolitanisation of political orthodoxies is morally desirable and practically feasible. Evolutionary reform of the statist status quo is more agreeable than revolutionary change. World society values, of the sort enacted by Aarhus, help render IEP more ethically ambitious and human-oriented. But they will not emerge without a stable political framework in which states can institutionalise them. Aarhus demonstrates that whilst IEP remains International, it can still be enriched by humanity, which states must accommodate if they are to be legitimate international citizens, exercising responsible sovereignty, in the twenty-first century.

This dissertation consists of three chapters, which aim at exploring respectively: i) how parties’ advertisements and voters’ strategic communication affect the political outcome; ii) whether and under which conditions a “market for votes” is preferable to the “one person, one vote” mechanism; and iii) whether subsidies to private donations may be used as strategical device by policy makers to secure re-election. The first chapter analyses how voters’ interactions affect the parties’ advertisement strategies and shape the political outcome of the election. We develop a two level game that embeds: (i) a model of political competition, where parties compete in campaign advertising, (ii) a model of personal influence, where voters can strategically communicate with each other in order to affect the policy outcome. We show that, first, homophily rises endogenously and individuals value only the information received from like-minded voters, regardless of the distance between the voters’ biases. Second, when the richness of the network or the degree of homophily within the network, or both, are low, then parties are likely to tailor their advertising to voters ideological biased toward their opponent - rather than targeting the closer ideological group of voters. The second chapter of this dissertation is joint work with Herakles Polemarchakis. In this chapter, we construct a simple centralized model of spatial voting where voters can sell/buy political influence by trading their votes for a consumption good. We model the voting game as a representative election game in order to concavify total voters’ payoff. By mimicking a majority rule in the election game we are able to focus on the effect of the distributional and ideological conflicts in the society and how these conflicts affect, in turn, the total welfare under two voting allocation mechanisms: the market and the “one person one vote” principle. We show that a market for votes is desirable with respect the “one-person one vote” principle if the degree of conflict in both income and political preferences is extreme, otherwise the simple “one-person one vote” performs better than the market mechanism, as it maximizes the sum of utilities of voters. The third chapter of the thesis is joint work with Carlo Perroni, Kimberly Scharf and Al Slivinski. In this chapter we study how tax relief on private donations towards the private provision of collective goods can protect minorities from majority-driven outcomes where high taxes are exclusively used to finance publicly provided goods that these minorities do not value. We show that an elected policymaker can use the same instruments as a strategic commitment device aimed at creating and supporting political alliances that would not otherwise be able to coalesce, thus securing majority support for re-election.

In contrast to the Great Game narrative, this thesis demonstrates the extent and limitations of Kazakhstan in generating autonomy. It provides a detailed account of the tactical and strategic choices that the state has made, particularly through its energy industry, to improve its position relative to Russia, China and the West. Using the innovative marginality literature, this thesis reimagines the Central Asian state as more powerful regional actor than has previously envisioned. Moreover, it explores how Kazakhstan is able to effect change in Russian and Chinese foreign policy, and exemplifies a marginal state affecting the centres of power. To demonstrate this, the thesis examines the strategic choices of the Kazak state, its governance structure and the changing identity politics. As geopolitics becomes increasingly antagonistic in Europe, it is vitally important that we understand how these large states are ‘playing’ overseas. It is suggested that Kazakhstan is not a “small” or a “weak” state and from its position on the periphery has exercised remarkable leverage: it is a prism thought which we can see the truly multi-polar nature of world politics in the second decade of the twenty-first century.

The emergence of sovereign wealth funds (SWFs) — large state owned investment funds – is attracting increasing attention from academics and policy makers. However, this research begins by pointing out that SWFs can differ considerably. The research question is: What accounts for the establishment of different types of SWFs across and within countries? This research analyses the role of domestic state-society structures in policy-making processes and their effects on policy choices regarding SWFs. It empirically investigates whether and how policy networks affect decisions regarding the types and choices of SWFs. Particular emphasis is placed on SWFs with savings mandates, and SWFs with development mandates. Using process tracing on qualitative data, the research identifies key actors and interests involved in policy processes, and offers causal mechanisms that connect policy networks to decisions about the creation of different types of SWFs. Acknowledging the particular regional and historical contexts helps to account for the effects of networks within countries and across domains, and within domains across countries. Using a case study on the ‘types and choices of SWFs in Hong Kong and Singapore between the late 1960s and 1980s’, this research examines whether domestic policy networks affect national decisions about SWF creation. These are hard cases for theories that emphasise the importance of domestic state-society structures. After all, over this period Hong Kong and Singapore were extremely exposed to international diffusion and economic pressures, and existing research emphasises a set of important factors (e.g. macro-economic characteristics, international economic pressures, diffusion). The present research draws attention to four key findings between the 1960s–1980s: there were external pressures to which Hong Kong and Singapore had to respond and different policy choices were available and discussed; policy networks included and excluded actors that were making these decisions; there were systematic linkages between the type of policy networks and the type of SWFs; these had important implications for actors and created winners and losers. Thereby this research adds to the ongoing debate on whether policy networks matter in explaining policy choices. It is doing that in four ways. To date, policy network approaches provide rather crude hypotheses on the effects of policy networks on a broad set of state strategies and forms of adjustment. These are difficult to verify because they are very broad. The present study offers a critique of policy network literature and develops policy network analysis with regard to causal mechanisms and hypotheses.

Situated as the cornerstone of the Common European Asylum System, the EU’s Dublin system functions as the legal mechanism for determining Member State responsibility for the processing of asylum claims. Controversial from inception, it has been subject to extensive criticism that speaks not only to the distributional inequalities that it produces among the Member States, but also to its potentially detrimental impact on the human rights of asylum seekers. Despite these problems, however, the core features of the system as originally agreed in the 1990 Dublin Convention have remained remarkably resilient over the course of two reforms – one in 2003, and one in 2013. At the same time, the EU’s governance landscape as it pertains to asylum policy-making has undergone a marked transformation. While Dublin I was the product of intergovernmentalism, both Dublin II and Dublin III were negotiated as part of the EU acquis communitaire, the former following the partial communitarisation of asylum policy-making and the latter following its full communitarisation. Though the specific changes to the institutional features of policymaking that this transition has entailed have been both theoretically expected and empirically proven to have a positive effect on EU policy output, the overall stability of the Dublin system in the face of these changes leaves it unclear as to what extent the ‘promise of communitarisation’ has been delivered in this particular case. How then do we explain the perseverance of a system that has not only failed to provide adequate standards of protection to those seeking it within EU borders, but which has also continually disadvantaged some of the very Member States party to its terms? And what impact, if any, has the communitarisation of asylum policy-making had on the attempts at its reform? This research traces the evolution of the Dublin system from its initial formation through to its current state, by analysing the negotiations that produced each of the three Dublin agreements in order to explain both the system’s emergence and its on-going stability. Using a rational choice institutionalist framework, it finds that the Dublin system’s endurance can ultimately be credited to the deliberate choices that have been made by both the Member States and the EU’s supranational institutions in pursuit of their preferences (bolstered or weakened by their relative strength of position) in the context of the (either empowering or constraining) institutional settings within which the reform negotiations took place.

This thesis consists of the three papers that present new formal models of functions and organisations of political parties. The models begin with a particular function or organisational feature of political parties and integrate it with the related issues that the formal literature in political science has either discussed separately or has not paid sufficient attention to. The first paper analyses the strategic interactions between parties and their candidates in elections. It answers the question of why parties provide greater campaign support toward open-seat races than reelection races; to what extent campaign support of parties influences and incentivises valence investment of individual candidates. It also identifies and distinguishes party and personal attributes to an incumbency advantage and discovers a ‘multiplying’ effect that the sequential nature of reelection race has on the advantage. The second paper discusses intraparty competition between factions. It identifies a trade-off between collective and individual benefits in faction members’ choice between intraparty factions and provides a theoretical explanation for factional splits and merges observed in politics. It differentiates itself from the small literature of factions, which is often found to be insufficient to analyse the dynamics of intraparty factions, by incorporating a hierarchical structure of party organisations. The third paper integrates different types of organisational hierarchies, in power, as the second paper does, and in decision procedures and connects them to the longevity of political power. It analyses endogenous allocation of power that gives rise to a specific pattern of power hierarchy that best serves the two objectives of political power, the absolute size and longevity of power. It also shows that the optimal power hierarchy differs across the types of decision hierarchies, indicating the decision-making procedures adopted by a parties. It offers a theoretical explanation to why some parties have undergone more frequent leadership turnover.

This thesis is an enquiry into political ordering under its four core attributes: the state, sovereignty, law, and politics. It advocates analysing ordering as a process, rather than ‘order’ as a static given, and introduces an interactive model of ordering, which takes into account both the creative and the limiting thrusts in political communities. This thesis is informed by the theories of Benedict Spinoza and Carl Schmitt. The first chapter is dedicated to assessing the current debate around the four core concepts: the state, sovereignty, law, and politics. Although it is not aimed at providing a full and definitive account of the scholarly debate, some major trends in current political and legal thinking are overviewed. This exposition subsequently serves as both the context and the impetus for the dynamic model of ordering, constructed in the final chapter. The following two chapters are dedicated to the theories of Spinoza and Schmitt. In Spinoza’s case, some metaphysical preconditions have to be explored beforehand: immanent causality, striving to persevere in existence, and the right as power doctrine. The thesis then moves to the role of the state, sovereignty, law, and politics as tools for ensuring communal cohesion despite a general lack of reason and for joint progression towards reason. As for Schmitt, the thesis first delves into his emphasis on the fallen nature of humans, based on his religious convictions. The state, sovereignty, law, and politics are then analysed as parts of an effort to establish order where actually there can be none (since human existence is groundless), necessitating order-qua-theology. Thus, Spinoza and Schmitt both oppose and complement each other. Lastly, the final chapter proposes an interactive model of ordering as perpetual process by revisiting the four core elements from a Spinozist-Schmittian perspective. This model postulates ordering as animated by constant tension between and reciprocal reproduction of the constitutive and the constituted thrusts, both of them being creative and limiting in different respects. In this model, groundlessness is seen as the basic condition which is, nevertheless, constantly counterbalanced by a need for quasi-religious belief in a quasi-objective given, e.g. Spinoza’s reason. Communal life is, therefore, constantly caught in-between these two poles. Consequently, ordering-as-process is claimed to be the only way in which anything common can be posited.

Alasdair Macintyre asserts in After Virtue that contemporary moral discourse is only arbitrary assertion of the will. Appeals to reasoned arguments have been replaced by expressions of preference, attitude and feeling-- in short, by "emotivism." Macintyre locates this moral breakdown in the Enlightenment philosophers' failed attempt to replace Aristotelian teleology with a rational justification for morality. Macintyre's analysis fails because he does not show whose interests are served through the assertion of arbitrary supposed will or whose interests were served when "objective" standard of the Middle the Ages prevailed. He does not acknowledge the preeminent role the material relations of production and exchange in the construction of a society's moral standards. A class analysis suggests that emotivism originated in the overthrow of feudal society by the newly developing industrial class of free traders. The concept of the "free individual" facilitated the organization of production on the basis of wage-labour. The ensuing class struggle led to the dominance of emotivism in contemporary moral discourse. Macintyre's revised version of the Aristotelian concept of the telos cannot establish a rational basis for morality. Without structural changes designed to eliminate class divisions, emotivism cannot be supplanted. It can only be suppressed by means of instruments such as Macintyre's version of the telos. It is because Macintyre fails to analyze emotivism as the product of class struggle that he advises us to prepare for "the new dark ages which are already upon us" (Macintyre, After Virtue, hereinafter referred to as AV, p. 263).