This thesis aims to examine the question of dissent, in relation to the tenuous position offered to campaigners in modern British society. Using figures such as George Hegel, Max Weber, and Michel Foucault, the work builds on a number of ideas that have remained central to the theory of political organisation, to illustrate how the British state has historically sought to control protests and manipulate public opinion. Themes to be examined within the thesis will include the articulation of common and individual rights (as they set the context for political disputes, and are often used to deny campaigner's the opportunity to participate in the policymaking process); the bureaucratic regulation and surveillance of demonstrators (through which, unsolicited public actions are now considered illegal); and the situation of activists within governmental discourses on terrorism (in which protestors are depicted as posing a threat to National Security). The main hypothesis is that in the UK, dissent has become the focus for an increasing number of agencies and administrative practices, through which it is intended that public demonstrations will eventually be constrained to follow a legitimate, staged, and thus an entirely manageable course of actions. This thesis also serves to address a gap in the developing field of surveillance studies, in which a number of key authors have failed to engage with the critical role that surveillance now plays in the suppression of dissent- with a particular emphasis being placed on how numerous causes and campaign groups are now monitored by the state and by private sector interests alike. Undeniably, the field of authority exerted over campaigners today is vast, and the strict management of public order affairs imposed by the police, enables an abundance of disciplinary techniques to take place, both prior to and during all protest events. Indeed, according to Foucault's theories on power, governmentality, and biopolitics, these legitimising mechanisms and procedures of coercion include visible forms of surveillance (the presence of the authorities during demonstrations); the overt surveillance and covert infiltration of campaign groups by the state and from private industry; and bureaucratic forms of surveillance enacted through a requirement to submit evidence of Health and Safety compliance, and Public Liability Insurance. Original empirical evidence supporting this thesis includes; Acts of Parliament covering seven-hundred years of legislation; Freedom of Information requests from three large-scale environmental campaigns; public order and counter-terrorism initiatives issued by HM Government; tactical policing manifestos; public inquiries into the misuse of police powers; and the newfound discourses that have been disseminated into the public domain concerning extremism. Putting it simply, the modern campaigner's lot is an unhappy one, in which activists must navigate an unconscionable array of legislative acts and have become the continual focus for corporate and state surveillance. Seemingly then, today's model of dissent offers two explicit choices, either conform to a wholly sanitised and regulated course of actions, or suffer the consequences.

The inclusion of women in the public sphere delineates the last century from the previous ones. This thesis investigates three key aspects of the gender revolution. At the turn from the 18th to the 19th century, countries began to grant women equal voting rights to men. Equality in the act of voting, however, failed to ensue. To address this conundrum, the first essay argues that elites and organizations had greater incentives to mobilize women to vote under a proportional representation (pr) than a plurality electoral system. I test the argument empirically by studying a reform which required half of the about 600 Norwegian municipalities to replace plurality with pr before the 1919 election. The difference-in-difference design reveals the reform increased women’s share of the votes cast by about ten percentage points, thus notably reducing gender inequities in political participation. Women’s inclusion in voting did, however, not imply women’s inclusion in employment, education, and political offices. Indeed, after World War II, the social partners and political parties favored policies aimed at male-breadwinner families. The second essay studies the puzzle of why unions, employers, and parties nonetheless, from the 1970s and onwards, went from opposing to proposing work-family policy reforms, such as daycare services and paid parental leave. My argument is that, as women have become an increasingly important part of the membership base for unions and source of high-skilled labour for employers, the social partners have come to push for the expansion of work-family policies. Yet, centralised corporatist institutions, which give policy influence, are needed for unions and employers to succeed with their policy demands. Both a time-series crossnational quantitative analysis and an in-depth case study of Norway and shadow case studies of the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and Sweden support the argument. By the new millennium, women made up half of the labor force but only one-third of managers, indicating that significant gender inequities remain. The third essay therefore examines whether the introduction of full-time daycare services increase mothers’ possibility and willingness to invest a professional career. Empirically, the essay exploits a staggered, large-scale expansion of daycare centres across Norwegian municipalities in the 2000s. Analysing registry data on the whole Norwegian population, the instrumental variable estimates indicate that the availability of daycare services made women more likely to enter into occupations requiring longer hours and leadership positions. In sum, the thesis demonstrates that reforms of political and public policy institutions can impact both the pace and the direction of theongoing gender revolution.

The career background of politicians is an issue that could potentially have profound implications for the functioning of democracy, yet it has only received sporadic and lukewarm attention from political scientists. Based on the hypothesis that the experience and skills an MP acquires throughout his or her career is going to affect the MP’s performance in the future, this dissertation seeks to explore if the career background of MPs, both professional and political, influences their parliamentary career trajectory and behaviour when they enter parliament. By utilizing a new dataset compiled from the biographical information of all new MPs elected in the 2010 British general election, this dissertation shows that the amount and nature of MPs’ pre-parliamentary careers has a profound impact on the allocation of seats among MPs as applicants, their prospects of frontbench promotion, their voting behaviour, as well as their participation in parliamentary debates. These results show that the pre-parliamentary careers of MPs do affect the way they conduct their duties as representatives. These results also suggest that the background of MPs shapes the composition of parliament in terms of the occupation and political experience, which has an important influence on how representative democracy works.

The papers in this thesis explore the political economy of the macroeconomic imbalances that built up between advanced democracies during the Great Moderation—the long period of reduced macroeconomic volatility and low inflation that preceded the global financial crisis. More specifically, the papers focus on the role that institutions, political systems and electoral politics, and government demand-side policies played in the imbalances that emerged in real exchange rates and current accounts. The first paper uses macroeconomic data on OECD economies and a new statistical approach for causal inference in observational studies—the synthetic control method—to estimate the effect of the European Monetary Union (EMU) on the current account balances of individual member states. This counterfactuals approach provides strong evidence that the introduction of the EMU was responsible for the divergence in current account balances among member states. The second paper maps out the complex set of interrelationships between varieties of capitalism, growth models, and political systems in advanced democracies. The new approach to comparative political economy developed in the paper provides a theoretical framework that helps explain the current account divergence between the export-led coordinated market economies (CMEs) and the consumption-led liberal market economies (LMEs). The third paper brings modern macroeconomics back into political science. The paper sets out a suite of simple open economy macroeconomic models and uses them to show how governments pursuing different demand-side policies can result in persistent current account imbalances between countries within a system of independent inflation-targeting central banking. Taken together, the papers provide important theoretical arguments and empirical evidence on the political (and political economic) drivers of the macroeconomic imbalances that were a crucial precursor to the worst global economic downturn since the Great Depression of the 1930s.

This thesis traces the creation and trajectories of regulatory transparency policies (RTPs) within what I define as the three ‘logics of regulatory transparency’: control, performance and transaction. Through in-depth case study analyses of the birth and long-term evolution of selected RTPs in Brazil and the United Kingdom, this study shows that the logics can impact the trajectory of an RTP by shaping the power and priorities of actors in particular ways or by disclosing specific types of information. What I refer to as RTPs in this thesis are a specific class of transparency policies that carry an inherent regulatory goal pursued through the disclosure of information and published directly by governments and regulators. These are not a new class of policies; rather they are studied from the perspective of government transparency or from the perspective of governance. The goal of the thesis is to understand the creation and evolution of RTPs, identify eventual patterns of progress, and learn about the stability of these policies and of the multi-actor interactions that take place during or as a result of their creation and progress.

This thesis offers a positive reinterpretation of the relevance of Isaiah Berlin’s political thought. It re-examines his work hermeneutically with the double aim of claiming its intrinsic relevance as a work of political theory beyond what most critics have acknowledged, first; and second, with the intention of using it to draw conclusions that will address some of the most pressing discussions found in contemporary liberal political theory, such as the conflicting link between value pluralism and liberalism, or the recent confrontation between political moralism and political realism. This is achieved by reading Berlin hermeneutically, and thus transcending the categorical differentiation between historical and philosophical methods in his work. The argument is presented in three sections. The first one is a biographical introduction that acts as a methodological statement. In it, the dilemma on the nature of values that sits at the heart of Berlin’s work is defined by reference to his biographical context. The second section of the thesis is formed by three chapters that look at the central philosophical aspects of Berlin’s political thought: value pluralism and a neo-Kantian normative ethical theory that emerges in relation to it. By claiming a relationship between Berlin and Kant, and by presenting value pluralism as a meta-ethical theory, the thesis offers an alternative reading of Berlin’s work that deviates substantively from most existing scholarship. The third section of the thesis compares Berlin’s political interpretation of value pluralism with that of Bernard Williams and John Rawls, in order to claim that liberal theory demands a hermeneutic method in its justification. This will show the enduring relevance of Berlin’s contribution to political theory as one that expands beyond his own historical moment, against what many commentators have argued. It also raises a strong claim on the crucial implications of method in political theory, calling for a more hermeneutic approach.

This thesis consists of three papers that make a distinctive contribution to the study of decentralization in the areas of fiscal policy, legislative behavior and government responsiveness. The first paper revisits theories of substate tax policy that usually draw on evidence from stable federations. Investigating fiscal decentralization reforms in four European countries subject to intense center-periphery territorial competition, I find that incentives operating in such systems generate a paradox whereby prominent autonomist regions are among the least likely to make proactive changes after decentralization. I theorize this as the best response to central government attempts at blame-shifting by locking regions into making controversial policy changes. The frequent alignment of autonomist parties as ‘catch-all’ parties buttresses incentives to avoid tax innovation. The second paper picks up these themes of institutional constraints and electoral incentives faced by political actors. Addressing a frequently confounding question in the field, I exploit the unusual treatment of dual candidacy in the UK’s devolved legislatures to examine whether mixed-member electoral systems influence the legislative behavior of reelection-seeking politicians and uncover a split finding. Although there is some evidence that status as a list or constituency member influences members’ assignments, other connections to members’ presumed re-election interests are not found. I contend that the influence of electoral rules is conditioned by contextual factors including re-selection procedures, chamber size and strong parties. Building on insights from the first paper, the third paper empirically scrutinizes expectations from fiscal federalism theory that lower tiers of government should be more responsive to citizens. Using the responses from two waves of FOI requests emailed to 812 public bodies, I develop objective measures of timeliness and quality which identify significant variations in responsiveness across the tiers and territories of the UK. I argue that the theoretical foundations of traditional fiscal federalism theory are inadequate because they ignore institutions’ cultural underpinnings, capacity constraints and principal-agent relationships shaping public officials’ behavior.

This thesis challenges the widely accepted discourse of post-truth politics, which finds support in what is in this thesis referred to as ‘antinomy hypothesis’ – the belief that politics and truth are opposites and external to one another, where one exists the other disappear; truth is abstract and absolute, while politics is a theatre of appearances with no room for truth. In contrast, this thesis explores the conditions of possibility for thinking that we inhabit a world of post-truth politics, by proposing the concept of the ‘politics of truth’ – the struggle at the most general level of society where the true is separated from the false and where what gets to count as truth and reality is decided. If truth only has value in so far as it serves life then the central problem in the politics of truth, the thesis argues, is to establishes the socio-political limits of thought: how and by what practices is it possible for thought to test its own truth in politics? It is by erecting the epistemological space that sets out possible answers to this question that thought became the tyrant of truth, which today has taken form of hyper-real politics of truth. This thesis thus asks the genealogical question: what will or wills have shaped the politics of truth, so that it today has become hyper-real? To answer this question the thesis develops a theory of ‘traditions of thought’ based on the French school of Historical Epistemology. The rest of the thesis explores, in a series of chronological chapters spanning from Archaic Greece until today, how the politics of truth has been problematized in thought through the concepts of parrhēsia, exhortation, public critique, and hyper-real politics. In hyper-real politics of truth where the real is in the process of being replaced by its copy, there is no space for the difference of thought, only the positive mode of thought that affirms and produces more truth.

How do practices guiding the engagement of the international private sector in fragile and conflict-affected states emerge, and who are the important actors and institutions in this process? Using a human security framework, this thesis seeks to apply critical security studies by taking a closer look at the role of the Turkish private sector in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq. This thesis argues that the international private sector can be a vital tool to enhance human security, in particular economic security, in fragile and conflict-affected states. However, without a regulatory environment for the private sector to follow “best practices,” it is largely at the discretion of each business to adopt measures to enhance human security. In this light, this thesis presents the conditions that either enhance or constrain economic security following the intervention of the international private sector. The central findings suggest the Turkish private sector enhanced certain economic security areas such as infrastructure recovery and restoration of access to basic services, the dismantling of a war economy and illegal economic networks, and expansion of opportunities for people through training, skills development and empowerment. The central findings also suggest the Turkish private sector constrained economic security in the areas of job creation or to the establishment of public and private sector employment, wage employment and self-employment. The impact of the Turkish private sector on public-private relations appeared to have had a mixed impact. Moreover, there were some economic security conditions such as basic income and poverty alleviation, rehabilitation and diversification of the agriculture sector, development of productive activities for ex-combatants, returnees and impoverished groups, provision of microfinance opportunities, clarification of property rights, macroeconomic development, and provision of well-coordinated, predictable, and multifaceted aid, where the Turkish private sector appeared to have had little impact if any at all.

This interdisciplinary dissertation seeks a more holistic and broader understanding of political identity formation processes in post-USSR Eastern Europe. It seeks to develop a theoretical approach for assessing the non-rationalistic factors, which influence domestic and foreign policy, political attitudes and identities in the region – including associative symbolism, human experience, political images and historical narratives. The research is based on the main case of Lithuania, which is analysed in the first three chapters of the dissertation from three perspectives: the historical/political, the intellectual/narrative and the experiential/symbolic. Along the way, a theory is being inductively elaborated, offering new insights into the process of Lithuanian political identity formation. In the next two chapters, other cases are also explored in order to examine the theory’s applicability and broaden its spectrum of inquiry. These include Russia, Poland, Estonia and the ongoing conflict in Ukraine. Qualitative methods are used in this dissertation, including textual and visual analysis (of primary and secondary literary sources, photographs, film, etc.), unstructured interviews, historical analysis, as well as political, philosophical and anthropological theoretical approaches by Roland Barthes, Raoul Girardet, Alasdair MacIntyre, Charles Taylor, Victor Turner, Arpad Szakolczai, and others. The dissertation seeks to improve our understanding of political identity formation, periods of political transition and the importance of human experience to politics. It also aims at developing a theory capable of accounting for the often unrecognised factors of historical narrative, political symbolism and emotional associative charge. As a result it makes a contribution towards a better understanding of post-USSR Eastern European politics and thus to more effective policy towards the region, which is gaining increasing importance in global political arena.