My research provides an insider’s view of how political consensus is formed within the business community. More specifically, my research sheds light on the sociological processes of political mobilization within the business community against the Clinton Health Security Act of 1994. In this study, I build off Jill Quadagno’s stakeholder thesis which largely attributes the defeat of the healthcare reform effort to the political mobilization of anti-healthcare business forces. I probe Quadagno’s thesis a bit deeper in this study by exploring how conflicting business forces resolved policy disagreements on the merits of healthcare reform in order to arrive at the position of unity necessary for its political mobilization against the effort.

The Internet has evolved as a major medium of information and communication; broadband connection especially enhances Internet's capacity as a virtual platform for social, economic, political and civil activities. The problem is there is a limited and skewed access to the Internet in South Africa. The slow growth of household Internet and fixed broadband is problematic for a country that aspires to be "an advanced information society in which information and ICT tools are key drivers of economic and societal development" (South African Broadband Policy 2010). This dissertation investigates the pattern of Internet penetration in South Africa. Largely, I explore the pattern of Internet penetration amongst university students; data were collected from 10 universities located in both rural and urban areas with other demographic qualities that are representative of the student population in South Africa. Following Mossberger, Tolbert & McNeal's (2008) use of the concept of digital citizenship, I rearticulate the concept as a citizenry with the fulfilled rights to regular and flexible access to the Internet—implicitly individual and household forms of access, the skills to use the Internet, and regular use of the Internet for participation in all spheres of society. I then develop a theoretical framework of digital citizenship by identifying five key elements, namely: citizenship rights, Internet access, Internet use, Internet/digital skills, and policy. These elements are used as measures to investigate the pattern of Internet penetration in South Africa. I conducted a survey amongst students, interviewed officials in government agencies in the communications sector, studied selected policy documents, and carried out digital skill experiments. From the findings, I argue that digital citizenship is largely nonexistent in South Africa, particularly amongst the university students. I claim that most of these students are partially digital . A partially digital person has limited access to the Internet, inadequate skills to apply this technology and as a result cannot efficiently use the Internet to participate effectively as a citizen in society. The study also reveals the skewed access to the Internet replicates the existing pattern of social inequalities in the country, often analyzed in terms of rural-urban inequalities, inequalities based on gender of household heads, family income, racial and population groups. I also claim that students from households that bear the brunt of social inequalities in South Africa are further deprived by the lack of access to the Internet, particularly household access, and the inability to effectively use the Internet. This deprivation means that their rights and abilities to participate in society as citizens using digital means are compromised. In conclusion, I offer recommendations towards achieving digital citizenship.

In this thesis, I use the concept of state capacity to account for cross-national levels of variation in policy effectiveness in Latin America between 1996 and 2006. In doing so, I make four contributions to the literature. Firstly, I develop a theoretically-grounded conceptualization and an empirically systematic measurement of policy effectiveness for 18 Latin American countries along security, welfare and economic policy dimensions. Secondly, I develop a novel conceptualization and operationalization of state capacity along three key dimensions – infrastructural power, bureaucratic capacity and political capacity. By disaggregating state capacity into these three distinct (but mutually reinforcing) constituent dimensions, I integrate different strands of the literature on state capacity and purport to increase the explanatory power of state capacity as a conceptual variable. Thirdly, I develop a simple but theoretically differentiated model of policy effectiveness which maps out and incorporates different kinds of politics-centred explanations of effectiveness, while situating state capacity as a direct (but not exclusive) cause of effectiveness. The final contribution is empirical: I triangulate statistical methods, crisp-set qualitative comparative analysis and an extended qualitative comparison of two countries (Argentina and Chile) along three policy areas (health, citizen security and economic regulation) to provide a rich analysis of the influence the different dimensions of state capacity have on each policy effectiveness dimension. My results suggest, firstly, that state capacity differences are indeed large and important for explaining within-region differences in effectiveness; secondly, that the use of this disaggregated approach provides important theoretical and empirical payoffs for understanding the multiple ways in which states affect outcomes; and thirdly, that differentiating ‘institutions as organizations’ (such as the state) from the standard understanding of ‘institutions as rules’ allows us to improve on standard institutionalist accounts of the influence of politics on development.

Why and under what conditions do governments borrow before elections? This thesis aims to shed light on this question by exploring governments' incentives that give rise to political budget cycles, i.e. fluctuations in the budget balance during election times, under different political, institutional, and economic contexts. The argument will be developed in three stages. First, the thesis will explain why politicians may choose to use debt strategically to win elections and discuss and evaluate different models that can explain political budget cycles. One model, a moral hazard type competence model is, as will be shown, particularly suited for this study. It will be extended in stages two and three. The second stage will look at the benefits and costs from public debt, with a particular emphasis on the likelihood of re-election (government popularity), party system polarisation, and sovereign risk. Sovereign risk increases the cost of borrowing and thus dampens the magnitude of political budget cycles; the effect of government popularity on strategic debt is conditional on the degree of polarisation. The third stage will take the motives to borrow as given and examine the effectiveness of debt as a strategic instrument. The less voters attribute responsibility for fiscal policy to governments, the less effective debt is as a strategic instrument. Economic volatility, regulatory density, and economic openness, this thesis argues, reduce this effectiveness and in turn the political budget cycle. Similarly, coalition government reduces responsibility associated with individual coalition partners, and thus the strategic value of public debt - yet this effect is moderated by the distribution of cabinet portfolios. The argument in this thesis is based both on formal models and on empirical, time series-cross sectional, analyses. It is arguably the most comprehensive treatment of political budget cycles and adds to an increasing literature on the contextual determinants of fiscal policy.

The thesis examines the political dynamics behind the contemporary trend towards pension privatization in Europe. Its aim is to develop a theoretical model that can explain not only why governments have increasingly replaced their public pay-as-you-go systems with private fully-funded schemes, but also why there is considerable diversity both in the extent and in the content of pension privatization. Private pension funds can indeed be governed by a variety of institutional arrangements and can have very different types of links with the financial system. They do not necessarily contribute to a financialization of the economy. The thesis takes issue with the idea that pension privatization would be primarily the result of a new pensions orthodoxy promoted by international organizations such as the World Bank or of an electoral strategy that consists in attracting the votes of the middle class. I argue that the driving force behind the more or less dramatic rise of funded pensions in Europe is a series of lobbying campaigns launched by the financial industry, and their varying influence. Financial firms have a vested interest in the development of a market in private pensions, which should profit them as an industry. However, pension reform is an issue that matters to voters and can therefore prove dangerous for party politicians. Moreover, it involves complex changes that directly affect key material interests of employers and workers. In this context, the success of financial firms’ campaign for pension privatization depends on their capacity to forge alliances with a variety of actors. This in turn contributes to limit the influence financiers can exert. The argument is tested using a comparative historical analysis of pension debates in the United Kingdom, France and Poland since the beginning of the 1980s.

From its formation, the American federal government partnered with private organizations to accomplish state goals. With little formal organizational capacity, the American state relied on the resources and credibility of private organizations. This thesis investigates the success of public-private partnerships in American state-building. By looking at alternative enforcement mechanisms, this thesis adds to theories of state-building and private power. The American experience helps us conceive a more nuanced perspective on state formation that recognizes the state’s varying tools rather than focusing solely on the development of formal organizational capacity. The questions driving this thesis are: How can public-private partnerships expand state capacity? Are there systematic differences in the outcomes and purposes of partnerships based on the branch of government – whether legislative, presidential, bureaucratic, or judicial – that mediates the partnership? My case studies examine the use of partnerships in the early state’s interactions with American Indian tribes. The cases put these general questions into more focus by examining if these partnerships expanded state capacity to dictate the terms of engagement and the content of racial orders. When these partnerships expand capacity, I explore the ways in which this state goal is accomplished. However, I remain acutely aware of the potential for partnerships to both fail to build capacity or become merely means to service a private interest.

This dissertation examines the process of limited political liberalisation in China by analysing the coexistence between critical journalists and the party-state under the Hu-Wen leadership. In contrast to the scholarship on authoritarianism and Chinese politics, which tends to analyse the perspectives of societal actors and the state separately from one another, this study brings the two together, unveiling the intricacies of their interactions. In the past decade, critical journalists and the party-state maintained a partnership which can be best described by a jazz ensemble metaphor. The players—critical journalists and the party-state—share a common purpose: improving their performance or governance within the existing political system. They overcome the limitations on their collaboration with ad hoc creative adjustments made in response to one another. The party-state acts as a band leader, setting the key by establishing a framework within which creative manoeuvring can take place. The study is based on unique access to politically sensitive material, including 120 in-depth interviews with critical journalists, media and crisis management experts, and government officials. It also includes multilayered textual analysis of the Chinese Communist Party journal, Qiushi, and investigative reports in two outspoken media outlets, Caijing and Nanfang Zhoumo. The data is employed to analyse the boundaries for limited political liberalisation of the media as well as how it manifests itself during major crisis events. More broadly, the dissertation draws the attention of both China and authoritarianism scholars to the significant yet neglected feature of interactive improvisation as a force that can sustain coexistence between critical actors and authoritarian states. It shows that by engaging in actor-driven analysis and illuminating the process of their interactions, we can better grasp the dynamics of authoritarianism in China and beyond. A step is made towards applying the analytical framework distilled in the China case on other authoritarian regimes by including a limited comparison to media–state relations under Gorbachev and under Putin. It shows that the variables of collaboration and improvisation are useful in explaining the different outcomes of political liberalisation reform.

This study aims at ascertaining via a cross-country/cross-city comparison why different national contexts characterized by allegedly opposite ideologies concerning the incorporation of immigrants (namely, the British Race Relations/multicultural model and French republicanism) have led to the adoption of similar policy tools in the prevention of forced unions amongst young people of ethnic minority background. In order to do so, the study will examine French republican and British multicultural rhetoric and policies aimed at the prevention of forced marriage at different institutional levels, with a focus on the preventive role played by the educational sector and within a historical institutionalist theoretical framework. The comparison begins with a consideration of French and British national rhetoric and policies against forced marriage from 1997 to 2008 to develop an adequate framework for the analysis of the preventive role attributed to educational policies in four major localities (the capital cities, Paris and London, and the second two largest cities per population size, Lyon and Birmingham). Despite differences in the policies and rhetoric adopted by multicultural Britain and republican France to tackle forced unions, the study hypothesizes a common trend in the ways French and British public authorities conceptualize the practice of forced marriage - intended mainly as the product of cultural difference. Similarities in the conceptualization of the practice, in turn, have contributed to the identification of similar policy tools despite dissimilar institutional contexts. Such a hypothesis contrasts with one of the key claims of historical institutionalism, according to which dissimilar institutions lead to different policy outcomes across different countries. The study will introduce the role of ideas – in the form of frames (Bleich 2003) – as a tool to explain the reasons why French and British policies aimed at the prevention of forced unions have led to similar policy outcomes despite dissimilar institutional contexts.

Non-economic factors like culture and politics, as well as the socio-economic background, matter significantly in directing economic development endeavours towards social wellbeing. Therefore, the current narrow definition of economic development must be extended to include overall wellbeing. As one of the primary forms of physical capital constituting a regional economy, transport investments have played a significant role in development plans. Given that accessibility to social infrastructure is a basic need, certain levels of infrastructure are essential. How these investments have an impact on different groups of individuals has kept many scholars busy for a long time. However, the economic spillover effects of these investments into female labour markets have remained largely unexplored. Situating the implications of development initiatives, including transport investments, for female labour markets in social and cultural contexts requires an integrated view of the regional economy. Although economic geography and existing development theories provide extensive conceptual models to elucidate the links between transport, labour markets and culture, the methodological implications are obscure; hence, the empirical evidence remains weak. This thesis explores the economic and non-economic dynamics of regional economies to clarify the links between transport infrastructure, labour markets, and social and cultural conditions. In particular, the association between female labour forces and development efforts, in the form of transport infrastructure development, is conceptually and empirically examined. This thesis conducts a case study on Turkey. With the extensive infrastructure investment that has been made since 2002 and the extremely low rates of female labour force participation (around 25%), compared to EU-15 and OECD averages of around 65%, Turkey serves as an illuminating case. Theoretically, the study shows that the focus of transport economics on the economic growth effect of investments is not consistent with current efforts to extend economic development objectives: transport research requires a broader view to assess its development implications. The study demonstrates how the interactions between the economic, physical, political, cultural and socio-economic attributes of regions significantly affect how individuals benefit from the investments. The overarching policy implications of the study are useful for regional development policy with a gender focus: complementary policy interventions in human capital development and the consideration of social and cultural attitudes should strengthen the positive impacts of physical investments on female labour markets.

This thesis seeks to contribute to the knowledge base about social policy in the United States, using long-term care (LTC) financing policy reform as an illustrative example. Specifically, this thesis explores LTC financing reform efforts during three U.S. Presidential administrations: Bill Clinton (1993-2001), George W. Bush (2001-2009), and Barack Obama (2009-2010). Within this historical framework, the LTC provisions of the Health Security Act of 1993, the development of the Community Living Assistant Services and Supports or 'CLASS' Act during the Bush Administration, and the legislative success of the CLASS Act as a part of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010 provide comparable cases to compare the drivers of social policy. Drawing on the explanatory frameworks of the welfare state such as ideology, historical institutionalism, and an actor-centered approach to policy analysis, this thesis argues that successful path-departing legislation is difficult to achieve due, in part, to the presumed high costs of social programs and the complex institutional framework of the American political system. Policy outcomes result from the interaction between the complex processes and dynamics of the political system through which policy change (or the failure to change) actually occurs. The fact that the CLASS Act was politically successful, yet administratively inoperable as designed, reinforces the argument that social policy outcomes in the United States are reflective of a complex, enduring struggle of competing ideologies. This continual struggle, coupled with a heightened concern over cost control and fiscal austerity, helps to ensure that policies which are legislatively successful within the institutional architecture of the American political system are unlikely to produce major expansions of the welfare state. Social change is therefore highly difficult to achieve, even in the face of significant unmet social needs. Comprehensive reform of U.S. LTC financing arrangements will remain an elusive goal for the foreseeable future. Instead, incremental, highly pro-market solutions are likely to be the types of policies promoted in the years of ahead.