This thesis researches the variation in levels of liberalisation within the European services market, focusing in detail on four selected service sectors (i.e. postal services, electricity services, healthcare services and the services covered by the Services Directive) from 2001 until 2011. In this thesis, I propose a model of European integration capable of explaining the exact levels of liberalisation in each service sector. I argue that the level of liberalisation can be explained by looking at the drivers of integration (i.e. expected economic benefits from further integration and the level of supranational activity), which determine the societal demand for further integration and the shape legislators’ preferences and constraints, and the intervening influence of adhoc politicisation (i.e. the influence of public opinion through mass mobilisation). To illustrate this, this thesis applies a two-tiered approach of analysis. First, it explains the context in which the legislation is made to understand the economic implications of the proposed legislation, the level of supranational activity preceding the tabling of the legislation and the preferences of all actors involved. Second, taking preferences as exogenously given, this thesis applies a method of process tracing to study in detail the negotiations between legislators – the amending stage of the legislation. The case studies show that the drivers are crucial to explain the general demand for integration and at the same time show how politicisation, taking various guises, influences the level of liberalisation – primarily by altering legislators’ relative power. Particularly interesting is that politicisation can affect the negotiations even in absence of politicisation actually materialising causing some legislation to be made in the ‘shadow of politicisation’. These findings confirm existing explanations of European integration and add new insights as to how we can understand the process of European integration more generally.

<p> The purpose of this study was to examine the ways in which business-led advocacy coalitions are developed, used, and maintained to advance higher education as a state budgetary priority; policy participants&rsquo; perceptions of the effectiveness of these coalitions in the state budget process, and factors that policy participants believe impede or facilitate business-led coalition advocacy on behalf of public higher education. To address these research questions, I employed a thematic analysis of qualitative data derived from interviews with policy participants and an analysis of documents in two states. </p><p> Themes garnered from the data indicated that the coalitions arose as the result of state economic downturns. The coalitions established and advanced public agendas that linked state needs, higher education reform, and increased funding for higher education. Coalition leaders maintained these efforts by combining long- and short-term goals, keeping stakeholders abreast of their progress, and celebrating successes. Policy participants perceived the coalitions to be effective because of the credibility they derived from their independence, economic understanding, and leadership experience. The effectiveness of coalitions was enhanced through access to policymakers, experienced and respected staff, and a far-reaching vision for higher education. Coalition advocacy was facilitated by higher education leaders&rsquo; dedication to improved campus performance, the identification of a cadre of business leaders who understand and believe in the purposes of public higher education, and continuous communication between business leaders and higher education officials. Despite these efforts, many policy participants stated that budgetary constraints still play a major role in determining funding levels. </p><p> The findings of the study signified that business-led advocacy coalitions can have a strong voice in making public higher education a state priority, but rely on a group of business leaders who believe in higher education, as well as a well-connected, experienced coalition staff that advances the coalition&rsquo;s agenda. This study is relevant to higher education and political science because it adds to existing knowledge of the process in state higher education appropriations, provides clarity to the state-level political relationship between business and higher education, and offers new information on the role of state-level business coalition advocacy in higher education policy.</p>

<p> This study is primarily about regime survival. Applying some aspects of rentier-state model, the metaphor of father and family, and the functional superiority perspective and predominantly based on the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia&rsquo;s experience, this study sought to unravel factors that have enabled the monarchical regimes of the Middle East to survive the ongoing upheavals in the region. While the region-wide upheavals have swept away the republican regimes of Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, the monarchies of Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Morocco, and Qatar, among others, have remained largely intact, raising the questions as to why and how they have been able to stem the tides of collapse. In response to this question, it was argued here that the ability of long-established regimes to mobilize resources&mdash;both material and non-material&mdash;to strategically and tactically deal with internal discontents provides a framework to analyze regime survival. It must, however, be noted that regime survival does not necessarily connote state or regime stability, if stability refers to absence of sociopolitical frictions and political schism. Here, regime survival simply referred to the ability of rulers to remain, or stay, in power, even if there were continuing struggles on the part of sections of the citizenry to remove them.</p><p>

My research provides an insider’s view of how political consensus is formed within the business community. More specifically, my research sheds light on the sociological processes of political mobilization within the business community against the Clinton Health Security Act of 1994. In this study, I build off Jill Quadagno’s stakeholder thesis which largely attributes the defeat of the healthcare reform effort to the political mobilization of anti-healthcare business forces. I probe Quadagno’s thesis a bit deeper in this study by exploring how conflicting business forces resolved policy disagreements on the merits of healthcare reform in order to arrive at the position of unity necessary for its political mobilization against the effort.

The Internet has evolved as a major medium of information and communication; broadband connection especially enhances Internet's capacity as a virtual platform for social, economic, political and civil activities. The problem is there is a limited and skewed access to the Internet in South Africa. The slow growth of household Internet and fixed broadband is problematic for a country that aspires to be "an advanced information society in which information and ICT tools are key drivers of economic and societal development" (South African Broadband Policy 2010). This dissertation investigates the pattern of Internet penetration in South Africa. Largely, I explore the pattern of Internet penetration amongst university students; data were collected from 10 universities located in both rural and urban areas with other demographic qualities that are representative of the student population in South Africa. Following Mossberger, Tolbert & McNeal's (2008) use of the concept of digital citizenship, I rearticulate the concept as a citizenry with the fulfilled rights to regular and flexible access to the Internet—implicitly individual and household forms of access, the skills to use the Internet, and regular use of the Internet for participation in all spheres of society. I then develop a theoretical framework of digital citizenship by identifying five key elements, namely: citizenship rights, Internet access, Internet use, Internet/digital skills, and policy. These elements are used as measures to investigate the pattern of Internet penetration in South Africa. I conducted a survey amongst students, interviewed officials in government agencies in the communications sector, studied selected policy documents, and carried out digital skill experiments. From the findings, I argue that digital citizenship is largely nonexistent in South Africa, particularly amongst the university students. I claim that most of these students are partially digital . A partially digital person has limited access to the Internet, inadequate skills to apply this technology and as a result cannot efficiently use the Internet to participate effectively as a citizen in society. The study also reveals the skewed access to the Internet replicates the existing pattern of social inequalities in the country, often analyzed in terms of rural-urban inequalities, inequalities based on gender of household heads, family income, racial and population groups. I also claim that students from households that bear the brunt of social inequalities in South Africa are further deprived by the lack of access to the Internet, particularly household access, and the inability to effectively use the Internet. This deprivation means that their rights and abilities to participate in society as citizens using digital means are compromised. In conclusion, I offer recommendations towards achieving digital citizenship.

In December 2015, the world leaders gathered in Paris trying to address the urging challenges with climate change. The product of this meeting is called the Paris Agreement. Beforehand, many argued that another failure could not be accepted and the policymakers must let science influence the policy process. The aim of this study was to explore, through the epistemic community approach, in what way IPCC where able to influence the Paris Agreement. The results shows that the Paris Agreement was highly influenced under the topic sustainable development, while IPCCs assessments for mitigation and adaption was partly implemented.

In this thesis, I use the concept of state capacity to account for cross-national levels of variation in policy effectiveness in Latin America between 1996 and 2006. In doing so, I make four contributions to the literature. Firstly, I develop a theoretically-grounded conceptualization and an empirically systematic measurement of policy effectiveness for 18 Latin American countries along security, welfare and economic policy dimensions. Secondly, I develop a novel conceptualization and operationalization of state capacity along three key dimensions – infrastructural power, bureaucratic capacity and political capacity. By disaggregating state capacity into these three distinct (but mutually reinforcing) constituent dimensions, I integrate different strands of the literature on state capacity and purport to increase the explanatory power of state capacity as a conceptual variable. Thirdly, I develop a simple but theoretically differentiated model of policy effectiveness which maps out and incorporates different kinds of politics-centred explanations of effectiveness, while situating state capacity as a direct (but not exclusive) cause of effectiveness. The final contribution is empirical: I triangulate statistical methods, crisp-set qualitative comparative analysis and an extended qualitative comparison of two countries (Argentina and Chile) along three policy areas (health, citizen security and economic regulation) to provide a rich analysis of the influence the different dimensions of state capacity have on each policy effectiveness dimension. My results suggest, firstly, that state capacity differences are indeed large and important for explaining within-region differences in effectiveness; secondly, that the use of this disaggregated approach provides important theoretical and empirical payoffs for understanding the multiple ways in which states affect outcomes; and thirdly, that differentiating ‘institutions as organizations’ (such as the state) from the standard understanding of ‘institutions as rules’ allows us to improve on standard institutionalist accounts of the influence of politics on development.

Why and under what conditions do governments borrow before elections? This thesis aims to shed light on this question by exploring governments' incentives that give rise to political budget cycles, i.e. fluctuations in the budget balance during election times, under different political, institutional, and economic contexts. The argument will be developed in three stages. First, the thesis will explain why politicians may choose to use debt strategically to win elections and discuss and evaluate different models that can explain political budget cycles. One model, a moral hazard type competence model is, as will be shown, particularly suited for this study. It will be extended in stages two and three. The second stage will look at the benefits and costs from public debt, with a particular emphasis on the likelihood of re-election (government popularity), party system polarisation, and sovereign risk. Sovereign risk increases the cost of borrowing and thus dampens the magnitude of political budget cycles; the effect of government popularity on strategic debt is conditional on the degree of polarisation. The third stage will take the motives to borrow as given and examine the effectiveness of debt as a strategic instrument. The less voters attribute responsibility for fiscal policy to governments, the less effective debt is as a strategic instrument. Economic volatility, regulatory density, and economic openness, this thesis argues, reduce this effectiveness and in turn the political budget cycle. Similarly, coalition government reduces responsibility associated with individual coalition partners, and thus the strategic value of public debt - yet this effect is moderated by the distribution of cabinet portfolios. The argument in this thesis is based both on formal models and on empirical, time series-cross sectional, analyses. It is arguably the most comprehensive treatment of political budget cycles and adds to an increasing literature on the contextual determinants of fiscal policy.

This thesis is an exploratory study of the ‘expression of values’ within development organisations. I consider the value-bases of the economic and humanist paradigms of development, the nature of values and their relation to both organisational and personal positions, and how these impact on non-governmental development organisations (NGDOs). The expression of development values is embedded in theory, in practice modalities, in organisational structure and function, and in personal beliefs, attitudes and behaviours. Development values are also inherent in statements of an organisation’s vision and mission. More often than not these values are implicit, and do not always match with the organisation’s operations. In the course of this exploration I draw on the broad history of development paradigms, the influences of moral philosophy, and the evolution of NGDOs. I acknowledge the complexity of ‘development’, evident in the multiplicity of players and the multi-disciplinary nature of development in practice. A case-study of Oxfam New Zealand illustrates the significance of values and their relevance to operational functioning. My research methodology involved open-ended questionnaire techniques and analysis of secondary resources drawn from Oxfam publications. Analysis of findings reveals an interdependence between words and their meanings and the interpretation of both organisational and personal values. When the results of the case-study are aligned with the literature, my conclusions make a case for stronger articulation of values as an important future role and function of NGDOs, including Oxfam New Zealand. Values represent the why of development that shapes the how of development practice, and thus explicit values can enhance organisational strength and power.

The thesis describes and analyses the Thai alcohol policy process in the period 1997 - 2006, in order to investigate the characteristics and areas for potential improvement of the Thai alcohol policy process. The analysis used several extant public policy models. The models covered three aspects of the process at the macro leve l : stages of development, the characteristics and behaviours of maj or policy players, and the policy context. At the micro level the analysis employs concepts of agenda setting, policy formulation, policy implementation, monitoring and evaluation, stakeholder relationships and policy context. Information on Thai alcohol policy was collected from two sources: secondary data included official documents, literature, technical publications and mass media; pnmary data was collected through stakeholder interviews. Thai alcohol policy, during this period became more comprehensive and more oriented to public health. Problem-reduction values gained momentum while economic values remained significant. Thai policy stakeholders focused on the formulation process, while implementation, monitoring and evaluation were neglected. Limited resources, human capacity and ineffective management exacerbated this situation. Incrementalism characterised Thai alcohol policy formulation; existing policy or the policy precursor was very important to the decisions made. Limitations in the availability, accuracy and utilisation of knowledge about alcohol consumption, related problems and alcohol policy also affected the process. The Thai alcohol policy process became a more open public policy sphere for stakeholders. Many new players made major contributions to the process. The mechanisms stakeholders use to influence policy have become more complex and included: technical knowledge, the use of mass media and civil movements, and coordination among stakeholders. A centralised bureaucratic administration and personal and institutional interests are critical features for official stakeholders, while connection to high ranking officials and representation in the process are significant for interest groups. The Thai cultural context had a crucial impact on the alcohol policy process; cultural features which are not explicitly covered in the Western policy models utilised include cronyism, relationships, representation, commitment, negligence, and compromise. These characteristics make the Thai alcohol policy process difficult to fully explain in terms of the available public policy theories.