Although democracy promotion initiatives have spread around the world and supported transition, many countries have fallen back into autocracy or stalled on their way to democracy. However, the events in the Middle East and Northern Africa have revitalised the issue of democratization. On the other hand, this cry for democracy seems to be homegrown, casting doubts about the efficacy of external democracy promotion. Nevertheless, stalled and setback democracies cannot be blamed solely on the flawed strategies of democracy promoters or autocratic stubbornness of democracy targets. Similarly, labelling democracy promotion as “the grand failure” of the West is an argumentative overstretch, which lacks any practical application. This dissertation argues that democracy can be achieved from outside, but the obstacles associated with it are more serious than anticipated by promoters. More specifically, the chances of liberal democracy being exported from outside will increase provided the utility of domestic adaptation to democracy is at least moderate, promoters are actively involved in resolution of pressing national issues, and there is no regional actor that blocks democracy and receives support for its policies from the target country. By structurally and conceptually expanding Schimmelfennig’s international socialization framework, this study develops an analytical framework to decipher mechanisms, strategies, and subsequent outcomes of democracy promotion and democratization. While applied to Armenia, the proposed framework is a useful reference for both academics and practitioners as it provides tools for researching the outcome of democracy and democratization and provides policy recommendations. This dissertation introduces the concept of democracy blocker—a powerful authoritarian regional actor capable and willing to influence domestic policy choices of a democracy promotion target in order to block democratization. This study also makes an empirical contribution by comparing democracy promotion policies in a country that has long been neglected by the academic literature. Using process-tracing, within-case, and before-after analyses, this study compares democracy promotion policies of the EU and the USA within three different target-sectors in Armenia. The analysis of three different target-sectors of democracy promotion—elections, parties, and the media—shows democratic transformation on the macro level of a country and micro level of specific sectors. This study argues that increased political and economic interdependence and interconnectedness of different realms within a democratizing country has led to merging of international democracy promotion and domestic democratization. In addition, the mere adoption of a law or a code of conduct does not guarantee the establishment of democracy and democratic behaviour by domestic stakeholders. Consequently, a likely upgrade of a formal democratic transformation into a behavioural one, would require democracy promoters to guarantee consistency in their efforts and follow-up on their activities, without assuming that a formally adopted rule or a completed project will necessarily assure rule-based behaviour. Thus, democracy promotion needs to be simultaneously cross-sectoral, offering material incentives for democratic transformation. Democracy promotion has the potential to not only produce numerous academic and policy analyses but also to result in a genuine democratic transformation, if promoters rationally choose their strategies and base them on existing domestic conditions.

This article examines the relationship between social cohesion and economic vulnerability in Europe. The analyses are build around two main research hypotheses. The first one argues the existence of a direct and negative association between economic inequality and social cohesion. The second supposition states that this connection is mediated by some factors which include the individualsâ€TM position in the stratification system (i.e. social class). Finally, we believe that welfare state could be relevant because it influences both the relationship between social class and economic vulnerability and the link between social cohesion and economic vulnerability. The empirical analysis –based on the European Social Survey (ESS) carried out in 2003– shows the central role played by the welfare state and the existence of a direct and negative connection between social cohesion and economic vulnerability, only partially mediated by the effect of social class.

In the last decades, an increasing awareness of instances of grave violation of human rights on a massive scale has brought to attention the problematic that whether states and the international community have an ethical responsibility to react to such cases, and (when the conditions require so) to undertake humanitarian military interventions. In the immediate post-Cold War environment, this has taken place parallel to the shift of focus in the security literature from national security towards human security. The varying responses to the grave cases of the 1990s such as Somalia, Rwanda, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo reaffirmed the necessity to undertake decisive and timely collective action, reminded the question of an ethical duty on the part of the international community to react to mass atrocities. By December 2001, the introduction of the concept of the Responsibility to Protect (RtoP) set a new framework to take up this question with the aim of transforming the notion of the “right to intervene” into a “responsibility to react”. With all its controversies humanitarian intervention continues to be a part of international political conduct. At the current state of affairs, humanitarian intervention has become politically relevant within the context of the RtoP doctrine. In this context, this dissertation seeks to assess the role of moral/ethical motives in the decisions and/or behaviour of the international community. Accordingly, it takes the assumption of humanitarian intervention as a moral duty as its subject matter, and puts it into test in relation to its newly defined limits and conduct within the RtoP framework.

States often invoke international norms to justify their foreign policy-making. In the last twenty years, a large body of literature has shown that norms matter in international politics since they provide frameworks for legitimate international action. Nevertheless, it is often overlooked that the absence of a centralized authority capable of enforcing and providing unambiguous interpretations of norms leaves states, particularly great powers, free to decide whether to recognize or reject the legitimacy of norms. In specific instances of foreign policy-making, states take actions that cohere with norms, while at other times they contest them. Operating in a decentralized system, international norms crucially depend on state support for their legitimacy, prominence, and effectiveness. Variations in the way states respond to norms call for an investigation into the domestic conditions that lead states to recognize or reject their legitimacy. These conditions will be investigated by comparing the attitudes of the United States and the United Kingdom towards the norms of humanitarian intervention and international criminal responsibility and by studying how these norms influence their policy-making. During the 1999 NATO intervention against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, both countries invoked the norm of humanitarian intervention. In contrast, during the 1998 Rome Conference for the adoption of the Statute of the International Criminal Court, their behavior diverged with the UK endorsing the Court and the US rejecting it. The analysis aims to discover the domestic actors that are responsible for how international norms are interpreted at the state level and the mechanisms and transmitters through which norms come to be viewed by states as legitimate or illegitimate frameworks of behavior.

This thesis positions itself within the stream of research on self-tracking practices for the management of chronic illnesses. Self-care technologies, such as smartphones and many other mobile health devices, have led to the production of health data of patients outside institutional settings. This shift on the "personal" dimension of data has placed emphasis on self-knowledge practices supported by such technologies and on the concept of patient empowerment. Flanking a clinical trial conducted in north Italy aimed at quantifying the effectiveness and the acceptability of a self-tracking/remote-monitoring platform for type 1 and 2 diabetes patients, this work explores how a particular tool for self-tracking, the "personal experiment", fits in the process of knowledge of the patient with Type 2 Diabetes, exploring how the practice of learning to manage your own diabetes data is a complex activity that involves heterogeneous objects, actors and contexts. The leading research questions in this work were: (1) How do the knowing processes triggered by personal experiments involve patients’ with Type 2 Diabetes situated practices through their bodies, objects, technologies, contexts and relations? (2) How do personal experiments affect the empowerment and motivation of patients with Type 2 Diabetes to maintain a correct lifestyle? (3) How do personal experiments fit in the doctor-patient relationship, affecting existent educational practices and reconfiguring knowledge processes that involve patients with Type 2 Diabetes and their clinicians? By adopting a knowing in practice perspective and a subsequent qualitative research methodologies such as observation, semi-structured interviews, focus groups and co-design workshops, it was possible, firstly, to design a paper prototype of the digital personal experiment, “the notebook”; secondly, considering the notebook as a knowledge artefact allowed to explore the processes through which patients with Type 2 Diabetes learn to manage their disease, observing learning as a situated and emergent activity that involves first and foremost the patient's body, the objects and the power relationship with their clinicians.The main contributions of this thesis are on three different levels: first, analyzing self-knowledge of diabetes as a situated and emergent activity, it proposes to address the gap of studies on health literacy, which limit themselves to measuring what the patient learns as a result of the educational actions carried out by health professionals. Second, analyzing diabetes’ self-knowledge as a process that involves the practical knowledge and reconfigures power relationships between all actors involved, it aims to integrate studies on patient motivation and empowerment which conceive the doctor-patient reflections on patient’s data as a well-defined moment that follows a structured script. The ultimate goal of the thesis is to provide guidance to designers to develop digital personal experiments that are less standardized and more practice-based.

The aim of this research is to analyse the educational gap between native and foreign students in Europe. In last decades, because of the increasing number of immigrants, the sociological literature on the ethnic stratification in education has considerably grown. However, several aspects of the relationship between ethnicity and educational inequality are still under debate. This research is based on the assumption that the gross educational disadvantage of foreign students is due to differences in both achievements and educational choices. I analyse the several dimensions that scholars have identified as being able to influence one of them, or both. The roles played by individual characteristics –micro-level– (such as: social class, cultural background, gender, ethnicity and migration background), by the school context –meso-level– (i.e. peers group, teachers, and the school) and by the institutional context –macro-level– (the educational system and the country’s migration history) will be analytically divided. As different European nations have historically attracted migrants from specific countries in specific periods, individual’s ethnicity has long coincided with his immigration generation. Nowadays, because of the growing number of nationalities present in each country, it is finally possible to separate these two dimensions. Thus, I add to the debate in that I analyse whether ethnicity and migration background influence the individual educational success independently one another and independently of social origins. Moreover, I address whether the relationship between ethnicity and educational inequality is due to primary or secondary effects. In other words, I investigate if ethnicity and migration background influence only academic competences – which than translate in better choices – or if they are also able to directly affect the latter, net of individuals academic skills. I

Over the past two decades, the European Union has taken important steps towards the establishment of a common European asylum policy. The question of the impact of this cooperation on domestic asylum policy has so far received surprisingly little attention. Most explanations have focused on how an agreement on restrictive policies was achieved at EU level, and assumed a relatively unproblematic implementation of these measures domestically. More recently, some scholars have contested these explanations by emphasizing the rights-enhancing effects of recent EU asylum policy legislation. This thesis argues that rather than focusing on the question of whether EU cooperation increases or decreases domestic asylum policy standards, we should focus on explaining how EU asylum policy affects domestic asylum policy. The question can only be addressed satisfactorily if the inter-related processes of arriving at these policies at EU level and implementing them domestically are taken into account. The theoretical account proposed here conceives of preferences as the crucial variable connecting the processes of uploading and downloading. The main argument of this thesis is that governments try to project their policy preferences which reflect their desire to change or retain domestic status quo and to download policies in accordance with these preferences. At the EU level, governments seek to upload or support policies in line with their domestically-shaped preferences and oppose those which contradict them or at least seek flexibility allowing them to maintain existing policies. At the national level, states download EU policy selectively, in line with their domestically-shaped preferences, leading to over-implementing, under-implementing or not implementing certain provisions. In addition, the thesis locates the sources of these preferences on asylum policy in public opinion, party ideology, and the number of asylum seekers. The dissertation shows that issue salience in the media and among the general public affects the relationship between these variables. Depending on the political-institutional context, the factors identify above interact with each other, resulting in differential impact of EU asylum policy on domestic policy. The thesis distinguishes between simple and compound polities, and shows how they differ in their responsiveness to the variables identified above, in the frequency and stability of reforms, and in the way they use the EU to facilitate domestic change. It also demonstrates that in compound polities preferences are mostly influenced by party ideology while in simple ones they are more likely to reflect public opinion. In order to trace the impact of EU cooperation in asylum policy on domestic policy, this dissertation employs process tracing and a three-step analytical framework which encompasses preference formation, EU-level negotiations and implementation. Such framework allows us to answer the question of the impact of EU asylum policy on national ones without under- or overstating the role of the EU. The dissertation applies this framework to study all major EU asylum policy agreements adopted between 1990 and the completion of the first phase of the Common European Asylum System in 2007, and their impact in Germany and Britain.

Over the last decade, EU–Russia gas relations have witnessed significant deterioration—the bilateral agenda has been narrowed down to ad hoc consultations, disputes over investment and long-term contract provisions have multiplied, and disagreements between the EU and Russia have significantly hindered the multilateral process of the Energy Charter Treaty (the ECT). This deterioration seems to be rather paradoxical in light of high gas interdependence between the EU and Russia and a rich history of well-established cooperation during the Cold War under profound ideological and strategic constraints. In addition, conflictual patterns in EU–Russia gas relations occurred in the beginning of the 2000s, during the period of high oil prices and growing global natural gas demand—the period when enhancement of cooperation would be a more expected outcome. Therefore, the core research question of the thesis addresses the puzzle: why, despite decades of cooperation during the Cold War between Western European countries and the USSR, have EU–Russia gas relations become conflictual since the 2000s? By answering this research question, the study seeks to contribute to the analysis of institutionalisation of energy relations and to reveal factors that lead to cooperative or conflictual outcomes. So far, IR research inquiries in the field have prioritised resource and normative determinisms in addressing the success or failure of energy cooperation, which assume a geopolitical-realist struggle for energy resources and a priori benevolence of free markets in line with the neoliberal economic agenda respectively. The broader geopolitical approach has explained energy conflicts by structural factors of unequal resource allocation across the world and attributed a direct impact of a state resource base (an energy-rich or energy-poor state) on states’ behaviour in the international arena. Another strand of the literature, ‘the market approach’, has also viewed problematic cooperation as a result of different interests of energy producers and consumers—but from a slightly different perspective. Limited institutionalisation of interactions has been explained by different models of gas markets producers and consumers choose. Thus, consumers favour a model of the competitive liberalised gas market (a market actor model), while producers would opt for a model of vertically-integrated monopoly and resource nationalism (a geopolitical actor model) in order to preserve control over resources. Pointing to a number of opposite cases, this study disregards the straightforward assumption that there is a direct link between a resource base and states’ strategies in the international arena. Bringing domestic conditions back to these debates, the study argues that increasing differences between the EU and Russia’s domestic institutional models of the gas market have been the main factor that has triggered conflictual patterns in EU–Russia gas relations since the 2000s. These domestic institutional changes have replaced attempts to build a strategic partnership with ad hoc consultations at the level of practical implementation, and have triggered broader deinstitutionalisation of multilateral gas governance in Europe. The three case studies analyse three instances of EU–Russia gas relations, tracing the crucial differences to determine the outcome—cooperation (a creation of a new or enhancement of an existing international institution), institutionalised conflict (disagreements regarding institutional settings of interactions, which are discussed and settled within the procedures of pre-existing or negotiated international institutions), or institutional conflict (expansion of disagreements beyond the pre-existing or negotiated framework of international institutions, which are no more accepted by the parties for conflict resolution) between the parties. The thesis contributes to ongoing debates about the impact of domestic institutions on actors’ policy strategies in the international arena, bringing insights from energy economics, energy law, and regulatory studies to IR. It argues that differences in domestic models under conditions of high interdependence might lead to politicisation of gas market issues and broader aspects of energy governance. The study also enriches debates about energy security, arguing that energy security depends also on a stable and predictable institutional framework for interactions, which inter alia requires compatibility of actors’ domestic models.

The process of European integration forces the scientific community to reflect on the importance of the national level as the appropriate one for the analyses of social inequalities. Especially among the studies on poverty and deprivation there is growing concern about the choice of the proper geographical reference. Indeed, within the research on poverty, beside the †̃traditionalâ€TM approach based on a national poverty line other studies rely on different geographical thresholds, either supra-national (the pan-european approach) or sub-national (the regional approach). I aimed to add to this debate an additional level of investigation, centred on the theoretical relevance of trans-national clusters of European regions that is cluster of regions that could belong to different nation-states but that nonetheless show more economic, social and institutional similarities than those existing among different †̃areasâ€TM belonging to the same nation-state. In order to analyse the micro and macro determinants of poverty, I organized this thesis balancing both theoretical and methodological aspects. The first chapter reviews the most important literature on social inequality, distinguishing between the micro-level perspective (i.e. individualization theory versus cumulative risks theory) and, the macro-level one emphasizing, above all, the institutional rules in shaping social inequalities underlined by the political economy, the economic sociology, the urban sociology and the economic theories. In the second chapter I overviewed, discussed and problematized the several conceptualizations, operationalisations and measurations of poverty, therefore it represents a theoretical and methodological contribution at the contemporary debate on poverty as well as an important starting point for the analysis presented in the three empirical chapters. From a methodological point of view, on the one hand I used complex statistics techniques (the multiple imputation methods) to create an high-quality database for the analysis of poverty by a multidimensional, longitudinal and regional-comparative perspective. On the other one, this thesis is valuable for using cutting edge techniques in the area of poverty and social exclusion. More specifically, in the first two empirical chapters (Ch. 3 and 4) I specified several multilevel models (random intercept and random slope too) in order to disentangle the household and individual level determinants of poverty from the macro-level ones, and also to describe which of the macro-institutional perspective (national, European, regional or trans-national) is the most useful in describing e predicting the distribution of poverty within the European regions analysed. While in the last empirical chapter (Ch. 5) I specified an econometric panel model to specifically analyse the true state dependence in poverty; so doing I focused also at the social exclusion phenomena. Furthermore, every model presented in the three empirical chapters has been specified using several operationalization of poverty (that is, using the national, European, regional and trans-national poverty lines). The main conclusions of this thesis are linked with the validity and reliability of the relative poverty measure and the institutional concepts of welfare-states, economic regions and trans-national clusters. First of all, it seems that the relative measure of poverty is a good one to predict and describe the phenomena. Indeed, the micro-determinant of poverty are not affected by the poverty line (national, European, regional or trans-national) used in the models proposed. Obviously the number of people at risk of poverty are affected by such definitions, but the relative structure of relation among the individual and household determinant are not. Secondly, it seems that the macro-determinant of poverty are affected by the poverty line definition and, above all, the variation produced on the country-variables effect is not coherent with the welfare state interpretation of poverty and social exclusion. On the contrary, the regional and the trans-national perspectives effects are more stable regardless the poverty line adopted, and they help to capture the most part of the regional variance among the European regions analysed. Furthermore, I pointed out the interaction effect between the individual characteristics linked to labour market position (i.e. unemployed status) and the regional framework: the random slope models show the significant impact of the regional context in shaping the social exclusion experience. Finally, it is important that these results are coherent with both multilevel and panel models.

Questa tesi di dottorato affronta e approfondisce tre temi diversi ma legati tra loro: le performance accademiche degli studenti nell'istruzione terziaria, l'uso del tempo e l'utilizzo dei Big Data nelle scienze sociali. Gli obiettivi che hanno fatto nascere questo lavoro, attraverso un approccio a tratti interdisciplinare, sono stati, in primo luogo, cercare di colmare empiricamente alcune lacune legate a interrogativi di ricerca rimasti parzialmente senza risposta in letteratura e, in secondo luogo, proporre soluzioni metodologiche connesse soprattutto alla raccolta dei dati e alla loro affidabilità nel rispondere a questi interrogativi in un modo quanto più possibile coerente con la realtà . La tesi non ha una struttura monografica in quanto i quattro capitoli empirici hanno una struttura propria. Il primo capitolo empirico vuole essere un inquadramento generale dell'intera tesi che mira a indagare l'effetto del capitale culturale familiare sia sulle performance accademiche degli studenti, sia su alcuni aspetti legati alla gestione che essi fanno del proprio tempo che, tradizionalmente, sono associati a una buona riuscita accademica, ipotizzando che l'origine sociale non esaurisca il suo effetto nei livelli d'istruzione precedenti. I modelli di equazione strutturali, attraverso l'analisi multi-gruppo, hanno consentito di costruire l'analisi in un'ottica comparativa rispetto al settore disciplinare di appartenenza. Il secondo capitolo approfondisce la dimensione temporale, ovvero come gli studenti organizzano le attività durante le loro giornate, al fine di comprendere come essa possa influire sui risultati universitari. L'obiettivo principale è stato colmare alcune lacune empiriche presenti in letteratura che mostrano risultati contrastanti su questo tema, dettati soprattutto da problemi di raccolta dati, non sempre adatti a indagare l'uso che gli studenti fanno del proprio tempo. Anche questo capitolo propone uno sguardo comparativo, confrontando degli studenti del primo anno, cioè gli studenti più a rischio rispetto al gestire il proprio tempo in modo poco efficace, con gli studenti degli anni successivi. Il terzo capitolo descrive il progetto SmartUnitn, fulcro di questo lavoro di tesi al fine di evidenziare come l'utilizzo di ICTs è in questo caso gli smartphone nella fase di raccolta dati possa contribuire a migliorare la qualità del dato ottenuto andando a risolvere alcune questioni problematiche derivanti dagli strumenti tradizionali utilizzati dagli scienziati sociali. Il quarto e ultimo capitolo, propone un caso concreto di utilizzo dei dati ottenuti dall'esperimento SmartUnitn, proponendo un metodo che, grazie all'unione dei dati dei sensori e i dati delle risposte degli studenti, possa colmare alcune lacune presenti in letteratura sul tema dell'influenza dell'utilizzo dei social media sui risultati universitari.