Divergent forms of female embodiment have prompted contemporary feminist theorists to depart from gender essentialism and draw attention to the heterogeneity of gender performances in the (re)conceptualisation of 'women'. I argue feminist politics may become ossified and repressive if the public arena fails to reflect the plurality of women and their diverse political claims. Exploring the theorisation of 'women' in the context of the politics of difference, this thesis analyses the reciprocal relationship between the construction of 'women' and the pluralisation of feminist politics, by articulating a 'feminist politics of discursive embodiment'. The thesis is divided into two parts. I begin with Iris M. Young's conception of 'gender seriality' that categorises 'women' as a social series constructed through a practico-inert reality of gender and characterised by a passive member relationship, rather than as a social group with common objectives and essential attributes. I then draw on Maurice Merleau-Ponty's phenomenological concept of 'the lived body', to deepen this account and to sketch out how the female body is the material locus of gender imperatives and, hence, the primary site of politicisation. The second part of the thesis articulates a feminist politics of discursive embodiment concentrating on how the politicisation of different experiences of female embodiment pluralises feminist politics. I argue that the combination of a reworked understanding of female authority and an agonistic ethos as a political practice can facilitate democratic deliberation and can inaugurate a progressive feminist politics. The Milan Women's Bookstore Collective's depiction of 'the symbolic mother' is specifically used to demonstrate how politicising womanhood can recuperate the historically absent female relationship against patriarchy. I conclude with an exploration of agonist ethos that recognises the constitutive tension between different political claims and encourages openness and the (re)signification of each asserted 'womanhood', so ensuring the responsiveness of a democratic feminist politics.

In its recent history, Iran has exhibited the highest rates of brain drain in the world and simultaneously has been recognized as one of the world's largest refugee havens. Consequently, Iranians inside and outside this country have come to closer contact to a wider range of cultures than ever before. Recognizing the importance of fostering intercultural sensitivity, there is a growing need to introduce intercultural learning into the Iranian educational curricula. The first step in this involves understanding current levels of awareness of children in Iran and the potential for creating opportunities for intercultural learning. Therefore, this research aims to explore how children educated at primary level in Iran make sense of/understand concepts such as intercultural interaction and adjustment. The conceptual framework for this research draws on Anderson’s Obstacle Model to cultural adaptation. In this study, the child-participants were asked to either reflect on their real intercultural experiences or imagine what it would be like to move to and live in another country. This study is also an attempt to explore the boundaries of child-focussed research methodologies. Hence, it consisted of three phases: designing the child-friendly research instruments, data collection, and sharing the data with the child-participants. The data collection was via the administration of 294 ‘child-friendly’ questionnaires and conducting five group interviews in five primary schools in Tehran with children of age 10 to 12. The findings of this study revealed children’s ambivalent feelings about experiencing intercultural encounters. Schooling, friendship, and language were found to be the key influential elements in children’s understanding of intercultural interaction and adjustment. These three elements are related to one another. These findings contribute towards developing a model which incorporates children’s views about cross-cultural adjustment in a more comprehensive way. The findings also have far-reaching implications for EL teachers in Iran.

This dissertation explores how social power relations affect poor, vulnerable people’s access to clean and sustainable water in El Salvador. It does so using an in-depth case study of people living in seven socially deprived rural communities of San José Villanueva, province of La Libertad, southern El Salvador. Drawing on several strands of social and political theory, the research conceptualises ‘power’ along three axes: on local/global, material/ideational and structure/agency lines. Using El Salvador’s neoliberal transition as its sociohistorical backdrop, the research explores the power dynamics shown by water actor groups in positions of hegemony, counter-hegemony and social exclusion. The study shows how these water actors use strategies, tactics and actions along the three power axes. The thesis assembles empirical evidence from academic research; policy documents, media outlets and civil society sources; interviews with policy makers; and poor people’s narratives. The research argues that the current state of unequal power relations in water governance constitutes the main factor shaping poor people’s water access outcomes today. Five key knowledge contributions emerge from this enquiry. First, the thesis handles the concept of ‘power’ as a tool to enrich the traditionally depoliticised approaches regarding water access today in El Salvador. Second, the research builds an innovative conceptual synthesis on power, an ‘axes of power approach’. Third, the thesis provides new empirical evidence using an in-depth case study. Fourth, the study fills an existing gap in country-specific water politics knowledge. Finally, the research offers relevant knowledge in a key water governance period for El Salvador as policy-makers negotiate the country’s first General Water Law in its history.

Much academic debate in the tradition of economic geography has focused on how to design successful strategies to trigger local and regional development. How a more effective economic policy to tackle regional imbalances and inequalities should be developed remains hotly discussed. Too frequently, however, the effective delivery and implementation of policies across all cities and regions fail not simply because of wrong policy tools. Often, one of the challenges is, also, to sort out the institutional process so that incentives to achieve effectiveness arise among politicians and bureaucrats. This thesis specifically focuses on pork-barrelling and distributive politics, that is, how politicians selectively target cities and regions with more or less governmental goods to reinforce their electoral advantage. While a significant number of contributions have been made to this field of enquiry, numerous gaps remain in understanding the implications of distributive politics on regional economic development policymaking and performance. The dissertation critically examines four different aspects and effects of distributive politics, drawing from the case of post-2002 Turkey. In spite of a significant burgeoning of this line of research across the world, questions about the extent to which ‘tactical allocative games’ prevail over technical policymaking criteria are frequently left unanswered. The first theme concerns the extent to which electoral factors prevail over technical considerations in the allocation of public investment by the central state to Turkey’s provinces. The evidence suggests that, while the government has allocated spending to reward its core constituencies, socioeconomic factors nonetheless remain the most relevant predictors of investment. Relatedly, almost no research has so far explored whether pork-barrelling has any economic consequences on regional economies. The second theme explores whether votes for the incumbent party can ‘buy’ preferential policy treatment and regional economic growth. The results show how, after addressing potential endogeneity, economic performance is almost entirely explained by ‘standard’ drivers, primarily human capital endowment. Third, the literature on distributive politics has frequently been legislature centric, in the sense that it has not paid adequate attention to the role played by bureaucratic agencies. The third paper explores whether the institutional characteristics of the agency in charge of the project cycle condition the attainment of publicly-oriented goals. Results point towards the argument that, to enhance policy effectiveness, bureaucracies must be not only capable an autonomous, but also accountable. Finally, the literature still provides unclear evidence on whether shifts from highly competitive electoral environments towards electoral one-party hegemony may lead to higher – or to lower – levels of pork-barrelling. The fourth theme therefore explores whether the constant surge of power enjoyed by Turkey’s AK Party has determined any change in the way public investment is allocated for tactical redistribution. Findings unexpectedly uncover decreasing levels of ‘punishment’ against opponents’ strongholds. Such reduction, however, is accompanied by increasing populist spending throughout the country. Overall, by providing novel evidence on the links between elections, public investment, and regional economic growth in post-2002 Turkey, the thesis contributes to advancing the understaning of the political economy of local and regional development.

This is a study of Daniel Defoe's political rhetoric and polemical strategies between the years 1697 and 1717. It explores and analyses a representative selection of what may be termed Defoe's `public voices'. In its broadest definition, these public voices are understood to be the opinions expressed and the rhetorical stances taken by Defoe in those pieces of his writing which directly or indirectly relate to the sphere of official, governmental and national discourse and activity. In the most basic sense, this thesis attempts to highlight and explain the way in which the language, imagery and concerns of Defoe's publications were shaped by the events and attitudes of the historical moment at which they were produced. In the process, this study re-situates, and thus necessarily re-evaluates, the voices and apparent meanings of some of Defoe's better known texts, while offering extensive investigations of the rhetorical strategies of publications which have previously been neglected by Defoe scholars. In the context of the above, an attempt is made to demonstrate that the poem The True-Born Englishman (1701) was not only a response to xenophobic sentiments prevalent in English society at the turn of the century but did, in fact, represent Defoe's final, summative contribution to the standing army controversy of the late 1690s. On a similar note, this thesis aims to show that the verse satire Jure Divino (1706) was the culmination of Defoe's involvement in the occasional conformity controversy of the early 1700s and constituted on important element of his campaign in favour of religious toleration. In addition, I argue that volume one of The Family Instructor (1715) was Defoe's response to the Jacobite-inspired unrest of the years 1714-15 and, as such, represented an important political act. Finally, this study offers an extensive investigation of one of Defoe's most problematic publications, An Argument Proving that the Design of Employing and Tnobling Foreigners, Is a Treasonable Conspiracy (1717). The pamphlet, I suggest, represented a highly ironic attack on one of Defoe's old adversaries, John Toland, and only develops its full rhetorical force if read in the context of the standing army controversy.

Citizen orientations towards their political leaders, institutions and political systems sits at the heart of political science and political behaviour, yet despite the potential challenges distrusting citizenries pose for the operation and stability of democratic systems, there has been no consensus on what political distrust really is, what it means for the citizens that express it, what its implications are for political systems and how to best capture it across established democracies. The dissonance between empirical observations of citizen distrusting attitudes and the analytical concepts used to study political orientations, which have mainly focused on trust, make this the right time to ask “What is political distrust?” and to investigate how this attitude area can help social scientists better understand current phenomena of political behaviour across democratic systems. This thesis postulates that we cannot conclusively interpret the significance of plummeting trust indicators nor apprehend their consequences for democratic politics without a clear understanding of citizens’ political distrust, defined in its own right and separated from competing notions, such as cynicism or the lack of trust. The thesis follows a mixed methodological approach to the study of political distrust from the perspective of citizens. It develops a conceptual model for distrusting political attitudes based on theoretical work and novel empirical evidence from three European democracies – Italy, the UK and Greece. Our model conceptualises political distrust as a dynamic, relational and evaluative attitude that follows technical, ethical and interest-based assessments to judge the untrustworthiness of political agents. Further, the thesis puts this conceptual model to the test, creating a novel survey indicator and providing new quantitative evidence regarding the structure and operation of political distrust. It finds support for our conceptualisation of distrusting attitudes as retrospective and prospective evaluative judgments and highlights the prominence of perceptions of unethical political conduct in shaping political distrust. Using a multiple-item indicator tapping into evaluations of national parliament and a citizen’s preferred political party we explore the dimensionality and hierarchy of each evaluation and unravel a double operation of distrusting attitudes, both as specific assessments of political agents along these three dimensions and as a cognitive evaluative shortcut acting in a cyclical reinforcing manner. We also investigate how the newly identified aspects of political distrust relate to citizens’ behavioural intentions for participating in politics and find differences in the motivating and demotivating influence of distrusting attitudes targeted at different parts of the political system.

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This study aims to examine why Niebuhr viewed democracy as a necessary and valuable instrument for the promotion of greater social justice. His democratic views flow logically from his reflections on human nature and the pursuit of greater justice within societies. In the course of this study, Niebuhr’s theological ideas are considered as far as it provides key insights from which he extrapolates his political thinking. Niebuhr’s conception of human nature depicts humans as capable of being both caring of others but also as self-interested seeking power and glory. This also has implications for the behaviour of groups within societies. Niebuhr tries to find some political means to address especially the dangers of group interest and domination. He argues that a need for political organisation exists that provide the necessary protection against domination and exploitation of some groups over others, but also as force that promotes equilibrium of power between competing groups within society. Niebuhr thus searches for a system of government that would deal more appropriately with the problems of freedom and order within societies and found democracy as appropriate instrument. Ultimately, Niebuhr argues that democracy is a valuable form and necessary instrument in the organisation of society because it does justice to the essentially free nature of humans, but also takes seriously the dangers of human self-interest. Democracy is also capable of absorbing and advancing many different and diverse views, as well as to readjust different claims in the promotion of the welfare of societies. He supported liberal democratic ideals but realised that the government has a vital role to play and he advocated for government involvement in the promotion of social welfare, which alludes to important social democratic principles. His view on government is always informed by his theological convictions and he thus aims to impart Christian values into the organisation of society so as to promote greater levels of justice throughout society. / Dissertation (MA)--University of Pretoria, 2016. / Political Sciences / Unrestricted

The objective of this thesis is to show that conceptualizing democracy in terms of "agonism" best addresses the ills of post-democracy. I characterize post-democracy as a democratic order that has all the trappings of democracy, including multi-party elections, but which has been enmeshed in a particular discourse or discourses that have become hegemonic. This has the effect of effacing real political difference as though various political actors in a democratic order might be different in word and name, they converge on major policy points. To show agonistic democracy as the best conception, I compare and contrast it to deliberative democracy. Briefly, deliberative democracy emphasizes rational argument and reaching consensus, whereas agonistic democracy valorizes fierce political conflict between competing hegemonic projects. I argue that an emphasis on consensus does not address the specific nature of the post-democratic age, while a valorization of fierce conflict ensures the facilitation of real political difference requisite for a vibrant democratic politics. Focusing on Chantal Mouffe's conception of agonistic democracy, I identify some limitations which I attempt to overcome, namely her insistence on a form of consensus by which fierce political conflict should be bounded in order to stabilize democratic confrontations. I argue that it is possible to envision agonistic democracy in a purely procedural way, without any such consensus. Recognizing post-democracy to be a worrying reality in contemporary democratic societies, and the growing dissatisfaction with this situation, I believe democracy requires serious re-examination. This thesis does exactly that. / Thesis / Master of Arts (MA)

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