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Through the case study of a regional welfare information system, I analize how the process of keeping information systems workable and operational unfolded.

Understanding how political parties and social movements interact and what are the results of these interactions is important for both scholars of Political Science and Sociology. This is particularly true for far-right actors since they are characterised by diverse ideological and organisational features. Understanding how parties and movements interact can help shed light on how these features develop and, ultimately, explain their success. In the dissertation a novel conceptualisation of party-movement interactions is presented, as well as a theory that aims to explain when parties and movements are more likely to develop stronger interactions on three different dimensions, frames, actions and organisations. This theory is tested by looking at two sets of far-right parties and movements, Lega Nord and CasaPound Italia in Italy and the United Kingdom Independence Party and the English Defence League in the United Kingdom. The analysis is carried out through a Political Claim Analysis and a document analysis of parties and movements documents for the period 2009-2019. The analysis finds that parties and movements have closer interactions on the frame dimension when issues they own gain prominence in the public debate and when political parties are weak electorally. In the actions dimension, interactions tend to be closer when parties are weak electorally and movement organisations moderate their repertoire of actions. Finally, in the organisational dimension, relations are closer when parties are weak electorally and in proximity of electoral campaigns. This research makes two contributions to the study of far-right parties and movements. The first is theoretical, for the paper advances a new theory of party-movement interactions that could be tested in different scenarios. The second is empirical, for the paper provides indications on when parties and movements are more likely to have closer interactions and how through these interactions they change and develop their features.

Idea Management (IM) is the process of requesting, collecting, selecting and evaluating ideas to develop new and innovative products, services or regulations, or to improve existing ones. The process is supported by dedicated Idea Management systems (IMS), which lets people propose ideas, as well as rate and place comments on other users’ suggestions. When used in the civic domain, IM serves as a tool to engage citizens in processes of innovation of public services, laws, and regulations. A key ingredient in the success of IM is the community of participants. The larger the community, the more diverse views are likely to appear and diversity of views increases the chances of discovering valuable ideas that can lead to innovations. However, having a large number of people participating in IMS is a hard challenge; it requires an understanding of the people and their needs and designing the technology to match these characteristics. In this thesis, we aim at involving the society at large into IM processes. Achieving this ambitious goal requires integrating IMS with people’s everyday life tools and spaces of participation. We understand that tools for civic engagement should engage people on their own terms and should be readily available. We meet these requirements by proposing an approach that integrates IMS into common physical and virtual spaces of participation enabling people to participate in IM using ordinary tools and without having to step outside their daily habits. In a systematic and extensive study of the literature about technologies used to foster civic engagement in innovation processes, we found that the choice of technology and its “situated- ness” is essential in granting ease of public access and promoting inclusive processes of civic engagement. We also discovered that civic engagement technologies still have room to improve their use of multiple channels of participation. In this regard, we saw social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter as having a strong potential to lower participation barriers and engage citizens, considering how pervasive these sites are today as daily tools. We show how the lessons learned can be applied in practice by presenting two solutions to increase participation in IMS. The first solution is a platform that extends IMS by integrating them into displays located in public spaces. From this experience, we found that taking the right instruments to where people actually are is important to address specific inequalities regarding access to technology. We also saw that the display represented for citizens not only an opportunity to make their voice being heard but also an occasion for socialization. The second solution is a model and tool that empower IMS through Facebook services. Here we found that the integration with Facebook facilitated participation by reducing the friction related to getting informed and involved in IM. Also, the participants reported that the familiarity and easy to use of Facebook features represented an advantage for participation. We informed the design of both solutions with large- and medium-scale data analysis studies on the behavior (individual and collective), practices, and motivation factors of IM communities’ participants.

With the debate on global warming and climate change, renewable energy resources, such as solar energy, are being considered. If solar energy is to make a major utility contribution, it will need to be more ubiquitous in today’s society. The research described hereafter analyzes the use of Solar in Public Spaces (SPS). SPS is defined as solar energy used in the public domain to power electronics away from the electric grid. This research specifically examines the viability of integrating solar panels into existing surfaces to charge portable electronics. Viability is evaluated using three criteria: (1) user interaction, (2) technical feasibility, and (3) cost analysis. User interaction is primarily focused on usage trends, user preferences, and user concerns. Technical feasibility includes shading effects, weather effects, and solar panel/battery sizing. Cost analysis is considered using energy savings, portability savings, and motivations.The research objective is answered through eleven research questions. All research questions are answered using surveys together with data from six different charging devices placed around Brigham Young University (BYU) campus. Surveys are used to add validity and support conclusions drawn from charging device data. A model is also developed to estimate solar panel and battery sizing needed to account for differences in geographical locations, incident solar power, weather, temperature, daylight hours, shading, and usage. All research questions are answered and demonstrate that solar panels integrated into existing surfaces is a viable solution for charging portable electronics in public spaces under the circumstances discussed herein

Increasing calls for regional independence are being made in several European countries, and such calls are accompanied by growing public support for secessionism. Over the last decade, Catalonia and Scotland have enjoyed the highest level of political mobilization for secession in the European Union. This research highlights the role of the media in changing attitudes toward independence and studies regionalist parties' strategic choices to understand their electoral success at the regional elections at a time of fast growth of independence sentiments among the population. This study employs different methods: process tracing to focus on the specificities of the independence process in a view to understand how the secessionist agenda transformed the cases; frame analysis of media links the theoretical arguments and their representation in the public discourse; content analysis of regional parties’ electoral programs via Regional Manifesto Project approach helps to define the strategic choices of regionalist parties which brought success to their secessionist agenda at the regional elections; most-similar cases comparative analysis allows to identify commonality and differences between the cases of Catalonia and Scotland. This dissertation uncovers how: the media communicate regionalist arguments to the audience; the media justify independence claims; regionalist parties strategize their secessionist programs. First, a strong pro-region bias is the main feature of media coverage. Secondly, saliency in influenced by the political process as a largely exogeneous factor, but the framing process may also influence reality by giving particular meaning to the major political events and by framing them as political opportunities or as having transformative power. Third, the political competition structure contributes to the strategic choices of political parties. My research contributes to the framing literature by considering the role of diagnosis, prognostic, and motivational framing in the independence discourse. It highlights the extent of pro-region message flows vis-à-vis pro-center and neutral messages in media communication. My analysis contributes to previous research on regionalist parties by making an in-depth case study to differentiate between subsuming and blurring strategies adopted by secessionist actors.

The study of household wealth as a distinct dimension of social stratification is crucial to understand the main factors and mechanisms driving the intergenerational reproduction of inequalities in contemporary societies. This dissertation aims to contribute to the expanding literature on wealth inequalities by investigating the role played by parental wealth in shaping children’s educational opportunities. More specifically, the dissertation concentrates on three main research axes. First, it investigates the relevance of wealth gaps in education in Italy, a country that received little attention in the literature so far. In doing so, it evaluates wealth gaps in the attainment of upper secondary degrees, in the enrolment at university, and in the attainment of tertiary degrees. Second, it aims to clarify the various roles played by different levels and components of parental wealth in providing children with advantages in educational outcomes. In this regard, it provides a theoretical reflection linking potential wealth mechanisms to the combination of levels and components of wealth and it empirically evaluates their relevance in the transition to post-secondary education. Third, it explores whether and how wealth gaps in education vary across different national contexts. Broad international comparisons are still missing in the literature and single-country studies are hardly comparable. To this purpose, this dissertation aims at evaluating wealth gaps in the access to post-secondary education across 14 European countries while also accounting for the relative importance of different wealth components.

In the last three decades, civil conflicts have become more complex and intractable than in the past. One reason for this development is the proliferation of rebel groups within the armed oppositions involved in these conflicts. Today, armed oppositions are more likely to be movements composed of loosely connected or competing rebel groups rather than unitary blocs. Yet, despite their centrality to the dynamics of conflict, different structural characteristics of and competitive and power relations within armed oppositions have not been taken in adequate account as possible predictors of civil conflict outcomes. To further our knowledge and cover this gap in the scholarship, the dissertation investigates how and to what extent the fragmentation, internal competition, and internal power distribution of armed oppositions affect civil conflict termination. The dissertation develops a theory that sees the fragmentation of, a moderate and severe competition, and a dispersed distribution of power within armed oppositions as having an impact on the fighting effectiveness of the rebels, the countereffort of the government, bargaining problems, and the intensity of the conflict. This impact shapes, in turn, how civil conflicts end. This theory is tested with a nested analysis consisting of a large-N and a small-N analysis. Through the large-N analysis, the dissertation demonstrates that, at a general level, these characteristics of armed oppositions indeed affect how civil conflicts end. Through the small-N analysis, the dissertation further illustrates the causal mechanisms linking these characteristics to specific civil conflict outcomes. With these findings, the dissertation makes two important contributions. First, it provides generalisable conclusions that remedy the limited generalisability of the scholarship on the phenomena under study. Second, it provides indications on how to resolve conflicts in which the involved oppositions are fragmented and bedevilled by internal competition, thus helping disentangle the proverbial complexity of multi-party civil conflicts.

Educational credentials have a central role in contemporary societies. However, social origins continue to affect educational performances and transitions well before children enter compulsory school, thus threatening future outcomes and development. By interacting research streams from economics, psychology, and pedagogy, this dissertation locates within the literature on child development, early education, and social stratification, and it aims at further contributing to the sociological evidence on the mechanisms that lead to inequalities in skills. The core of this dissertation lies in the analysis of the characteristics of the early childhood educational system (ECE) and of the home learning environment (HLE), as growth-promoting or unfavourable contexts for the development of both cognitive and noncognitive skills. Adopting recent cross-national and longitudinal data, this dissertation asks (1) whether and how much ECE matters in the lives of children around Europe, leaving long-lasting traces on their achievements once adolescents; (2) whether and how much parental social position, beliefs, and other family and child characteristics play a role in the care selection process in Germany; and (3) whether and how much quality in HLE and ECE contributes at explaining differences in skills before entering primary school in Ireland.

Surface engineering is increasingly becoming inevitable for meeting the high-performance requirements constantly expected from modern engineering components. Higher demands for combined functionalities, which a base material alone cannot provide, motivate intensive academic studies on various types of coatings, with the ultimate objective of their practical utilisation in industries. Especially the study of wear has become of critical importance for the industry development of new components, as wear-related mechanisms frequently compromise the durability and reliability of machines. Consequently, the need for effective wear control has become progressively vital in pursuing advanced and dependable technology for the future. Different coating technologies are being developed to forestall the wear of engineering components. More specifically, the thermal spraying technique of atmospheric plasma spraying (APS) has been proven particularly efficient in implementing thick film coating for aeronautic, automotive and medical applications. However, advanced coatings are required for improved performance and extended durability in harsh operating environments. These developments have stimulated research on developing novel coating through optimised deposition parameters and modified feedstock characteristics to achieve a more redefined microstructure. The primary scope of the research associated with this thesis is to target the study and research of plasma-sprayed ceramic coatings designed to provide exceptional wear resistance to targeted components as well as improved mechanical properties. The presented work involves an investigation of varying feedstock powder particle-size distributions, different coating chemistries and comparing the suspension plasma injection technology to its more traditional powdered feedstock variant. The result obtained suggested that the influence of powder-size particles affects the resultant microstructure with a finer composition, denoted by a lower porosity of 1.3% compared to the coarser powder fed 1.9% (both presenting a standard deviation of 0.2%). However, it could be seen that both the presence of optimised spraying parameters and finer feedstock particles were significant in obtaining improved mechanical properties. Furthermore, an examination of the powder-fed coating revealed slightly improved hardness properties to the newly developed suspension-sprayed samples. However, the powder-fed coatings distinctly exhibited superior resistance to sliding wear with an average specific wear of 5.7 (± 0.9 standard deviation) compared to the 12.8 (± 1 standard deviation) × 10-6 mm3∙N-1∙m-1of suspension-based coatings. In conclusion, it was observed that the chemical composition of the alumina-chromia composite coating demonstrated exceptional hardness properties among the analysed samples (1603 Vicker Hardness 0.2) and superior sliding wear resistance (0.59 × 10-6mm3∙N-1∙m-1).