The xenophobic attitudes in Europe are stronger than even. Never before have the member states had as many right-wing parties in action. The aim with this report is therefore to consider whether the Schengen cooperation has had an influence on the development of xenophobia in the member states of EU. The Schengen cooperation became a part of the European Union in 1997, with the aim to abolish the internal border controls for citizens and strengthen the external boarders towards non-members. The intention is furthermore to investigate whether the distance to Schengen ́s external boarder has an impact on the xenophobic attitudes. Three countries are compared: Italy, Netherlands and the United Kingdom. The comparison is based on three indicators: immigration, right-wing parties and the economic situation. Italy is the most xenophobic country like the hypothesis of the report did foresee. Italy and Netherlands are both members of the cooperation and more xenophobic than the United Kingdom. United Kingdom is on the other hand not a member of the cooperation. Consequently are member states of the Schengen cooperation more xenophobic than others.

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A body of research has established the political relevance of Social Media (SM) platforms for populist parties, claiming that populist politicians utilize a ‘bypassing-strategy’. However, the rather reluctant employment of Facebook and Twitter by German citizens other than, for example, media professionals and politicians, raises questions of the utilization intention for public actors. Even though multiple scholars already indicated the necessity of research on the ‘embeddedness of digital tools’ in journalists’ routines (Jungherr, 2016: 374) such studies remain scarce. Therefore this study aims to shed light on how power is exercised by political actors through the use of SM within Chadwick’s (2017) hybrid media system. In order to do so it firstly examines the existence of references to the Twitter and Facebook pages of politicians of the German right-wing populist party AfD within the coverage of four German newspapers about the party during the final phase of the 2017 General Federal Election campaign. Secondly, by employing issue competition theory, issues and topics that three AfD politicians communicated about on their SM pages are compared with those that the party has been covered in relation to in newspaper articles. The findings of the quantitative content analysis on the newspaper articles showed only few cases in which AfD politicians’ SM statements were quoted. In regard to issue competition theory, the quantitative mapping of issues and topics in newspaper coverage about the AfD as well its politicians’ SM statements however, demonstrate prevailing similarities between the issues and topics that dominated the newspaper coverage about the party as well as its politicians SM pages. A thematic analysis on the latter found three themes that suggest a possible explanation for the few cases in which newspaper articles referenced SM statements: All three politicians used SM differently to promote, circulate and comment on issues and topics which influenced whether statements originated from the platform or from other contexts, such as rally events, tv debates, media article etc. These different types of content distributed and published on the politicians’ SM pages could be a possible explanation for the limited instances in which SM statements were quoted by newspaper articles. These findings suggest that the AfD did indeed pursued a bypassing strategy and employed SM platforms to directly communicate with its supporters. However, future studies should continue research on the embeddedness of SM statements in contexts other than campaigning times. Furthermore insights from qualitative interviews with politicians about their utilization strategies and journalists regarding their possible hesitance to quote politicians’ SM Statements, that may be grounded in professional standards, are necessary in order to obtain a more complete assessment of the role of SM for political actors in navigating the hybrid media system.

Avec plus de 57 milliards d’€ de CA en France en 2014, le e-commerce continue à se développer, tant en volume qu’en nombre d’acteurs. Pourtant peu d’industriels se lancent dans le e-commerce, alors que les théories économiques suggèrent que ceux-ci devraient intégrer les fonctions d’intermédiation dès lors qu’il est capable de les effectuer à un coût moindre que des opérateurs extérieurs.Dans cette recherche, nous explorons les freins des industriels du secteur de l’électrodomestique vis-à-vis du e-commerce et suggérons que, conformément à la théorie de la concurrence multipoints, les industriels évitent de commercialiser leurs produits sur Internet dans un souci de stabilité de leur système de distribution. Des résultats de notre recherche, nous mettons en évidence les facteurs de création du conflit dans ce contexte, ce qui nous conduit à formuler des recommandations à l’égard des managers qui envisageraient l’ouverture d’un site marchand. / With more than 57 billion € turnover in France in 2014, the e-commerce continues to grow, both in volume and number of players. Yet few manufacturers are engaging in e-commerce, while economic theories suggest that they should integrate intermediation functions as soon as they are able to perform at a lower cost than external operators.In this research, we explore why the household appliance industry sector do not launch e-commerce site and suggest that, according to the multipoint competition theory, they do so in order to avoid coercion from the traditional distribution system. From the results of our research, we emerge factors that create conflict in this context, which leads us to make recommendations in respect of managers who would consider opening a retail website.

The aim of this thesis is to determine what affects cross-national differences in attitudes towards immigrants and immigration in Europe while using mainly theoretical framework of the Ethnic Competition Theory and the Human Capital Theory. We use multilevel models to test the hypotheses based on these theories. We use individual level data from European Social Survey 2014/2015 and country level data from World Bank, Eurostat, and MIPEX. The thesis finds a support for the Human Capital Theory, but does not find a clear support for the Ethnic Competition Theory. Even though economic vulnerability of a person is associated with attitudes towards immigrants, this association can be due to education. It seems in this thesis that people with higher education tend to hold more positive attitudes towards immigration of both skill levels of immigrants, professionals and laborers, than individuals with less years of education. Therefore, we find a support for the Human Capital Theory. On the contextual level, more permissive migrant integration policies seem to have positive effect on attitudes towards immigrants. Further investigation of the association between attitudes towards immigrants and immigration, and education and migrant integration policies is needed.

The regulation of hedge funds has been at the centre of a global policy debate for much of the past decade. Several factors feature in this debate including the magnitude of current global investments in hedge funds and the potential of hedge funds to both generate wealth and destabilise financial markets. The first part of the thesis describes the nature of hedge funds and locates the work in relation to four elements in existing theory including regulatory competition theory, the concept of differential mobility as identified by Musgrave, Kane’s concept of the regulatory dialectic between regulators and regulatees, and the concept of unique sets of trust and confidence factors that individual jurisdictions convey to the market. It also identifies a series of questions that de-limit the scope of the present work. These include whether there is evidence that regulatory competition occurs in the context of the provision of domicile for hedge funds, what are the factors which account for the current global distribution of hedge fund domicile, what latitude for regulatory competition is available to jurisdictions competing to provide the domicile for hedge funds, how is such latitude shaped by factors intrinsic and extrinsic to the competing jurisdictions, and why do the more powerful onshore jurisdictions competing to provide the domicile for hedge funds not shut down their smaller and weaker competitors? The second part of the thesis examines the regulatory environment for hedge funds in three so-called offshore jurisdictions, specifically the Cayman Islands, Bermuda and the British Virgin Islands, as well as two onshore jurisdictions, specifically the United Kingdom and the United States. The final section presents a series of conclusions and their implications for both regulatory competition theory and policy.