Thesis (doctoral)--Universität Breslau.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, San Diego, 1998. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 183-196).

No description available.

The purpose of this thesis is to provide a case-study in the making of British foreign policy by relating a substantial body of historical evidence to problems raised by a comparative and analytical perspective. The particular period between Munich and the German invasion of the Soviet Union has been chosen because of its intrinsic interest and because it allows us to observe a democracy facing up to the most fundamental question of external relations, that of war or peace. The thesis focusses on the political aspects of decision-making, at three levels: the Cabinet, at the apex of the system; the press, as the most extensive of all lobbies; and public opinion, arguably the ultimate source of legitimacy in British politics. The aim is to reveal the role of domestic factors in British foreign policy, which are usually acknowledged but not dwelt upon, and thereby to peel back some layers of the complex process of causation in history. The main hinge of the thesis is therefore the argument that neither the 'logic of events', nor some self-evident rationality, explains why the British government entered and remained in the war between 1939-41. While their importance must not be exaggerated, such decision-making factors as the operation of the Cabinet and the character of public debate, also helped to determine the British position towards Germany. The other main theme of the thesis is the relative weakness of power-based explanations of decision-making. The roles of Prime Minister and Cabinet are not best described in terms of either's dominance; the press is sufficient of an insider in policy-making circles to complicate immensely any assessment of its separate influence; public opinion can barely be distinguished from the perceptions of politicians who defer to it. Some alternative interpretations are presented for the period under review; those working in different areas may find them suggestive.

The structure of the Canadian cabinet has been taken by a variety of observers and participants in government to be an important, or at least an intriguing subject. The volume of writings about the Canadian cabinet has increased over the past decade. Civil servants have produced unpublished additional volumes of memoranda. The pace of change in cabinet structures, and prime ministerial announcements about them, suggest that they are regarded as significant policy instruments and as significant indica- tions of the character and directions of a government. Certainly it is no longer true to say, as Prime Minister Diefenbaker did in 1960, that "The means by which the Cabinet conducts its business are traditionally regarded as its own affair, and questions on the subject are normally neither asked nor answered". [Continued in text ...]

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Sydney, 2003. / Title from title screen (viewed Apr. 8, 2009) Degree awarded 2003; thesis submitted 2002. Submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy to the Dept. of Government and International Relations, Faculty of Arts. Includes bibliographical references. Also available in print form.

Thesis (doctoral)--Universität München, 1970. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 165-179).

In this thesis, I aim to answer the following questions: (1) is there a relationship between the gender of the nominator and the beauty of the ministers that he or she selected, and (2) do nominators select more attractive ministers of the opposite sex. I compare and contrast the physical beauty of ministers of three cabinets nominated by a male prime minister and three cabinets nominated by a female prime minister. My descriptive statistics and multivariate regression analysis, in which I control for the age of the nominator, the physical attractiveness of the nominator, the professional experience of the nominator, the age of the minister and the margin of victory of the nominator`s party, reveal interesting results. I find that both male and female prime ministers nominate better-looking women, and that this tendency is even stronger and slightly more pronounced for female nominators than it is for male nominators.

No description available.

This thesis argues that the concepts of curiosity and the marvellous resurface at different moments in cultural history, most notably in periods of transition and epistemological uncertainty. The sixteenth- and seventeenth-century ‘culture of curiosity,’ which is characterised by the amateur collector’s engagement with rare and boundary-crossing objects in the process of assembling a cabinet of curiosities, presents a rich contextual foil against which to place the practice of the Surrealists and of some contemporary artists and curators; it has profound resonances for the relationship between modernism and postmodernism, and between art and science. Within modernism, the Surrealists initiated a large-scale, fundamental probing of the principles underlying rationalist thought, and of the categories and hierarchies of academic art and bourgeois taste, which had dominated Western culture since the Enlightenment; and within postmodernism, artists and curators who revert to practices of collecting and appropriate protocols of the natural sciences question institutional frameworks of knowledge production, identity formation and meaning making through material artefacts. In both instances, curiosity and the marvellous – and the related themes of classification and dilettantism – have emerged as especially effective and resonant means of reading dominant culture against the grain. More specifically, this thesis contends that the Surrealist marvellous is rooted in the early modern discourse of the marvellous and monstrous which was characterised by ‘paradoxes of classification.’ This is particularly evident in the Surrealists’ engagement with objects testifying to the natural marvellous and the natural fantastic: stones, coral and insects, among other things and creatures, carry distinctly subversive implications of obscuration, entanglement and excess, metamorphosis and mimicry, and deviation and transgression, straddling the boundaries between art and nature, and art and representation. Furthermore, contemporary artistic and curatorial practice drawing on the ‘age of the marvellous’ – which, in this perspective, extends to Surrealism, with the potential to recur at any time thereafter – is primarily concerned with overcoming ‘white cube’ and Beaux-Arts-Museum historicity, aesthetics and display rationales by reintroducing subjectivity, doubt and digression into the context of the museum and the sciences. In this regard, scepticism towards intellectual certainties and accomplished systems of classification leads to an informed recourse to moments in history when the meanings of objects were being constantly negotiated rather than set in stone.