In most of the world’s states, bureaucrats are managed based on patronage: political discretion determines recruitment and careers. Corruption, poverty and lower growth often result. Unsurprisingly, patronage reform has taken centre stage in foreign aid. Yet, reforms overwhelmingly fail. Bad government is often good politics. When does good government become good politics in patronage states? To address this conundrum, this dissertation develops and tests a theory of reform of patronage states. The theory builds on a simple insight. Not all patronage states are the same: bad government takes different forms in different countries. Patronage states differ in particular in the institutional locus of control over patronage. Variably, sway over patronage benefits is allocated to the executive, other government branches or public servants. These institutional differences shape the electoral usefulness of patronage states to incumbent Presidents and Prime Ministers. Where institutions deprive incumbents and their allies of patronage control, incumbents face greater incentives to draw on their legal powers to professionalize. The theory is empirically validated through a comparison of reforms in Paraguay and the Dominican Republic, which draws on 130 high-level interviews. Evidence from patronage reforms in the U.S. and U.K., and from cross-country expert survey data on government structures underscores the theory’s external validity. The theory’s implication is clear: the origins of professional bureaucracies may lie in the institutional design of patronage states. This finding challenges scholarly convictions about the ephemeral nature of institutions in patronage states: strong formal institutions may exist in weak institutional contexts. Moreover, formal institutions may be causes – rather than only consequences – of the demise of patronage, clientelism and bad government. As a corollary, this dissertation adds a fresh argument to the age-old debate about the merits of power centralization and fragmentation: good government may arise from fragmented control over bad government.

As a critical advocate of the philosophy of Enlightenment, Thomas Hill Green (1836-1882) reconsidered the development of the empiricist and naturalistic philosophies of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and held that their development was connected in intricate ways to various quite specific issues arising in nineteenth-century British society. In order to respond to these issues, he established a comprehensive framework of philosophical thought as the foundation for his practical activities. In this framework, the core argument focuses on the relationship between consciousness and action. However, though Green’s philosophy has been widely investigated, no study has, as yet, focused exclusively on Green’s practical philosophy, and in particular his idea of the ethical citizen. This thesis undertakes this task and argues firstly that viewing the relationship between consciousness and action as the nexus of the human condition, Green’s practical philosophy is a coherent and consistent philosophical system which includes metaphysics; moral and ethical theory; and social and political theory. I then go on to argue that, by virtue of his philosophical system, Green founded political activity on the basis of metaphysical and moral ideas, on the one side, but on the other side, provided politics with a deep raison d’être; that is, to maintain and to provide the equality of opportunity for individuals by means of state power. Finally, I argue that while Green accordingly established a justification for state action, the nature of such state action relates closely to the self-government of individual citizens. Hence, Green’s practical philosophy provides an ethical theory of politics which underpins an important legacy for contemporary liberal political philosophy.

The papers in this thesis study distortions and inefficiencies that impede the correct functioning of democratic systems. I specifically focus on two phenomena: organised crime and media bias. The first paper presents an analysis of the consequences of the collusion between criminal organisations and politicians on the allocation of public resources and the collection of fiscal revenues. To measure the presence of criminal organisations it exploits newly collected data on public spending, local taxes and elected politicians at the local level. Differences-in-differences estimates reveal that infiltrated local governments not only spend more on average on construction and waste management and less on police enforcement, but also collect fewer fiscal revenues. In addition, I uncover key elements of local elections associated with mafia-government collusion. In particular, Regression Discontinuity estimates show that infiltration is more likely to occur when right-wing parties win local elections. The second paper moves on to the study of media bias and persuasive communication. In democracies voters rely on media outlets to learn about politically salient issues. This raises an important question: how strongly can media affect public perceptions? This paper uses a natural experiment – the staggered introduction of the Digital TV signal in Italy – to measure the effect of media persuasion on the perceptions individuals hold. It focuses on crime perceptions and, combining channel-specific viewership and content data, this paper shows that the reduced exposure to channels characterized by high levels of crime reporting decreases individual concerns about crime. The effect is particularly strong for the elderly who are more exposed to television and less to other sources of information. Finally, it shows that such change in crime perceptions is likely to have relevant implication for voting behaviour. The third paper continues on the study of persuasive communication by investigating whether the amount and the type of news related to sovereign debt might have played a role in the triggering of the crisis by increasing the level of uncertainty among investors. In order to test these claims empirically, I collect a unique and new dataset on news from the main media outlets in a set of 5 European Countries from September 2007 to September 2014. I restrict my search to news related to sovereign debt and, in particular, to media stories related to political aspects of the debt. Time series and dynamic panel regressions reveal that, conditional on a full set of controls and falsification tests, the frequency of news is correlated to an increase in bond prices. Both time series and panel analysis reveal a certain extent of country heterogeneity in the effect. In particular, an increase in the number of news leads to an increase in bond yields of peripheral countries. Finally, this paper also shows how it is not just the amount of news that matters, but also their tone. More precisely, negative news in country i at time t − 1 increases significantly the sovereign bond yield of country i at time t. On the opposite positive news leads to a decrease in sovereign bond yields. In sum, the three chapters of this thesis aim to contribute to the academic study of organised crime and media bias. First, this thesis provides new conceptualisation in the study of these phenomena. Second, it exploits set of newly collected dataset which will eventually constitute a public good for all the researchers interested in the study of these topics. Finally, to overcome the difficult identification challenges that the above questions pose, this thesis contributes to the literature by proposing a set of rigorous ways to claim causality in the results.

This thesis seeks to explore the place and role of ideology in political communication under conditions of mediatization. Exploring the place of ideology, as I will argue, involves exploring the ways political meaning is produced through the mediatic practices of personalisation, conversationalisation and dramatisation, while exploring its role involves exploring the ways political power is exercised through these practices. Particularly, the thesis builds upon an analytics of mediatization according to which ideology lies in, the textually-discursively organised and ordered, performative capacity of mediatic practices to recall and rework institutional symbolisms from the past serving the institutional exercise of power in the present, or the recontextualizing dynamic of media performativity. To operationalise this analytical approach, the thesis employs a paradigmatic case study; the study of political advertisements produced by the two major political parties in Greece and the UK in the run-up to the January and May 2015, respectively, General Elections. The empirical analysis seeks to demonstrate that central to all the ideological mediatic practices is the fusion of the private with the public through different aesthetic regimes, such as the authenticity of charisma, the intimacy of ordinariness, and the ritualism of spectacle, each emerging invested with its own recontextualizing dynamic – the politics of mission, everyday life and belonging. Each, in other words, has its own capacity to emotive-cognitively and spatiotemporally rework institutionally symbolic meanings from the past enacting different forms of institutional agency (e.g. partisan or cross-partisan) and ordering (e.g. displacement, temporalisation or eternalisation) in the present. The overarching contribution of this analysis is to argue/establish that we cannot gain a full understanding of how political parties’ ideology is renegotiated nowadays without a critical interrogation of the recontextualizing dynamic of mediatic performances. Nor can we gain a full understanding of how parties and other political institutions ideologically deal with the pragmatic challenges of the present without a critical interrogation of the aestheticity and affectivity of (mediatized) political discourse.

This thesis is concerned with the role of sexuality and intimacy in austerity politics in the UK since the formation of the Coalition Government in 2010. Conceptualising austerity politics as a broad political, cultural, and economic formation, it interrogates some of the key ways in which sexuality and intimacy are embedded within the discursive and regulatory functioning of austerity. Each of its three case studies examines sexuality and intimacy within a different discursive and/or regulatory site, including policy discourse, media discourse, and processes of policy implementation and service delivery. The cases studies focus, specifically, on the sexual and gendered assumptions embedded in austerity discourse; the limited narrative possibilities available for sexualised and racialised subjectivities in circulations of austerity discourse within popular media; and the materialisation of neoliberal penalisation in sexual and intimate lives as a series of intimate disruptions. In enquiring after the kinds of sexual and intimate lives, subjects, and politics that are made (un)imaginable, (il)legible, or (il)legitimate by and within austerity politics, central to this thesis is the claim that austerity politics has a sexual and intimate life. It focuses on non-identitarian forms and modes of sexuality and intimacy, examining them through the frameworks of sexual inequalities, sexual subjectivities, and intimate disruptions. Finally, as well as intervening in epistemologies of sexuality, this thesis also explores the consequences that the embeddedness of sexuality and intimacy within austerity politics has for conceptualisations and understandings of the political.

This thesis interrogates how geopolitics as a political theory travels inter-regionally in an effort to expand the field of inquiry of critical geopolitics to non-Western states. As a case study, it examines the impact of German geopolitics on Japan during the second quarter of the last century, with a particular focus on the theory of the state as a living organism. Existing studies of critical geopolitics argue that geographical knowledge oppressed local knowledge by discursively actualizing the divided world when it was disseminated all over the world, However, given that critical geopolitical literature on non-Western countries is scarce, there is limited understanding on how classical geopolitics was interpreted in non-Western contexts. Contrastingly to common assumptions, aiming to fill this knowledge gap, this thesis argues that geopolitical knowledge becomes power in a foreign community only when it fits into the vernacular that is embedded in the local landscape. This thesis highlights the role of cognitive gaps that arise between analytical spaces in the course of the travel. In the gaps, the local mode of power mutates the concept without changing its appearance. Seeing intellectuals as a part of the wider community, this thesis unearths the neglected evolution of a traveling theory by thoroughly clarifying the context of the space of interpretation. Thus, it aspires to examine how spatial difference is manifested in International Relations discourses and why and how knowledge is making the world ostensibly one, despite the absence of consensus and therefore unsynthesizable. Japan is a country that is said to have become the first non-Western state by importing a number of European political theories. Analysing scholarly articles and discussions on space and knowledge in Japan, this thesis argues that in Japan, geopolitics helped Japanese people to imagine a different shape of the world. This was a borderless world in which the modern states dissolved into regions. Geopolitical theories supported Japanese government’s attempt to replace the deteriorating European world order of states with a regionalism called the Greater East Asia Co- Prosperity Sphere. In Japanese geopolitical discussions, its environmental determinism tuned into ecological fatalism. Therefore, at least in the first half of the twentieth century, geopolitics was knowledge that rationalized a localized worldview, but not a particular (European) geopolitical tradition, exposing the diversified political practices in world politics.

The present thesis offers a historical interpretation of Edmund Burke‟s classic text, Reflections on the Revolution in France. By contrast to the existing literature, it studies Burke‟s work as a purposive intervention in a domestic problem complex that turned upon the ways in which the French Revolution was refracted in various British contexts of argument. In short, British radicals put the principles and the very idea of the French Revolution to unique uses, employing them to increase the legitimacy and potency of their own arguments. To this end, they appealed to the authority of the French Revolution to augment their dynamic reading of the English Revolution of 1688, and denounced the lack of liberty in Britain by holding the French system of representation up as a model which would provide a genuinely accountable and participatory government. The thesis illustrates Burke‟s alarm at these developments, which he perceived as constituting a democratic threat to Britain‟s mixed constitution; such fears were compounded by the political behaviour of his moderate contemporaries, many of whom embraced natural rights arguments that were at odds with their aristocratic conceptions of politics. Guided by a critical acceptance of Quentin Skinner‟s interpretative injunctions, the thesis investigates Burke‟s response to these dilemmas by situating his utterances on the English Revolution of 1688, representation, and the French army in prevailing intellectual and political contexts. Adopting this approach, it highlights the complexity and originality of Burke‟s political argument by demonstrating that, in each case, Burke was manipulating the ideological conventions of Whiggism. Most significantly however, it stresses the anti-democratic character of his illocutionary intentions, for, in countering the democratic danger, Burke was stripping Whiggism of its populist potential and recommending increasingly conservative forms of political action.

This thesis investigates the Conservative Party between 2001 and 2010 and makes its principle contribution to the literature on this period by highlighting the importance of examining how the party has sought office, something which it argues has previously been insufficiently addressed, hi order to do this, Jim Bulpitt's statecraft approach is critically assessed, clarified, improved and adapted in order to provide a framework of analysis that is systematically applied for the first time to a political party in opposition. It argues that accounts of the Conservative Party under Duncan Smith should look beyond the theme of leadership failure to better understand the complex interaction of the party's putative statecraft and Labour's dominance of the party political context. It examines how the existing literature highlights the failure of the party to make further improvements and it is argued that the statecraft intentions of Howard were cautious because of the circumstances in which he became leader and the requirement to re-establish the Conservative Party as a credible political party after it edged towards the precipice in late 2003. This thesis argues that after 2005, the constraints on David Cameron altered, but remained, and that rather than exploring the party in relation to ideological change or party decontamination, these should be seen as part of the means used to return the party to an electable position, not as ends in themselves.

This thesis conducts an empirical analysis of how ‘reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation’ (REDD+) is rendered governable through negotiations under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. REDD+ is a proposed emissions trading scheme where deforestation in ‘developing’ countries is reduced through monetary incentives, and where this counts and ‘reduced greenhouse gas emissions’ that can be used by ‘developed’ countries to comply with their commitments to reduce emissions. A Foucauldian governmentality perspective is applied to conceptualise the negotiations as a process of contestation where the outcomes validate and target certain governance arrangements, actors and ideas, while subjugating others, with concrete effects for how forest users, forests and the climate will be governed. This process is analysed by drawing on discourse analysis and actor-network theory to consider both social and material contestation throughout the negotiations, which serves to elucidate the contested foundation REDD+ is built on. The process of validation and subjugation analysed throughout the negotiations is argued to manifest a governing strategy that subjugates deviations from how REDD+ was originally conceived, and that polices its borders so as not to jeopardise growth-oriented patterns of production and consumption outside of the scheme.

Although evidence is utilised by claims-makers to strengthen their arguments, quality evidence is not necessarily the precursor to driving or explaining policy decisions. Actors who share a common frame are more likely to perceive a policy problem and solution in the same way. Therefore, decision-making processes are not about finding the highest quality evidence to support decisions; they becomes about which actor is better at presenting a believable argument that will persuade others their claims are more agreeable. Using a single case study design, qualitative methods are used to examine the role of evidence in the context of the construction of a new high speed rail network in the UK, High Speed Two (HS2). It examines how these actors frame the debate and how they negotiate evidence with one another in different policy environments, through a process of claims-making. The study provides a new perspective to the High Speed Two debate, one which has received little attention in academic circles. A claims-making framework is utilised to provide a rich description of the naturalistic processes occurring in the decision-making processes of High Speed Two and it offers a sophisticated understanding of how evidence interpreted and negotiated by policy actors. In addition, it unpacks and refines notions of argumentation which acknowledges the subjective nature of evidence.