Within the field of public health, there has been increasing interest in the factors that influence national priorities in health in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), where resources are often particularly scarce and decision-making processes are often ad- hoc. Understanding how priorities are set in these countries necessitates a look at the process concealed in the black box that transforms policy inputs into outputs. However, rigorous health policy analysis of macro-level priority setting in LMICs is rare. Using a case study approach, this thesis explores the drivers of priority for primary health care, sanitation and HIV/AIDS over the past five decades in Barbados. To do this I use process tracing techniques, drawing on analysis of public expenditure on health from 1960 to 2010, in-depth interviews with key policy actors, non-participant observation, archives, media reports, parliamentary records and other documents. I argue that powerful individual policy actors or 'policy entrepreneurs' act as necessary drivers of macro-level priority setting in Barbados, although they do not single- handedly determine the outcomes. In particular, I find that these actors are successful in generating priority when they are able to propagate powerful framing ideas and can effectively navigate the policy context by seizing windows of opportunity and managing negative constraints. Moreover, because resources are scarce, their ability to mobilize external financial support is also important. In particular, this thesis stresses the fact that allocating public resources for health is a political process and suggests that it is best explained by considering a set of interrelated factors. In doing so, it illustrates the utility of health policy analysis in helping to open the black box of macro-level priority setting in LMICs more broadly.

This thesis examines whether and how participatory governance (PG), a model for incorporating citizen participation in designing and/or implementing strategies to solve public problems, can strengthen civil society and improve the quality of democracy. The study focuses on community-managed schools (CMS) in Honduras and Guatemala, arguably each country's largest PG initiative, in which parents managed rural schools. This thesis advances a "political capabilities" framework to explore state efforts to strengthen civil society and improve the quality of democracy. I use a mixed-methods approach, centering on surveys of over 2,000 parents and eight community case studies. My research first shows how different long-standing political legacies—“controlled inclusion” in Honduras and “coerced marginalization” in Guatemala—impinged on CMS. In Honduras, patronage networks captured CMS. In Guatemala, community- and national-level polarization contributed to CMS's reversal. Both undermined the CMS model and reduced the likelihood that participants would develop political capabilities. Despite these obstacles to stimulating civil society, I find surprising evidence of important individual-level “spillover” effects—such as gaining skills and increasing participation in other organizations—among a non-trivial minority of participating parents. Moreover, regressions and case study analysis indicate that state support, parents' level of involvement, and parents' perceptions of council effectiveness and democraticness can increase the likelihood of certain spillovers. Still, prior organizational experience remains the best predictor of subsequent participation and leadership. And qualitative analysis further demonstrates the limits of CMS's impacts on rural civil society. For the most part, individuals have not used newly acquired skills to build new types of groups and organize autonomously. Instead, community organizations remain very limited in their scope of action and heavily circumscribed by the state. In sum, this thesis demonstrates how, through one type of PG initiative, states can stimulate participation and produce changes in individuals’ civic and political behavior. But CMS was not a “game-changer” for rural civil society—the link from incremental changes in individual behavior to how rural communities organize themselves and engage with the state remains tenuous.

This thesis addresses the question of who votes in Africa and why. It uses three sets of quantitative data at three different levels to test its claims: an original compilation of national level institutional and socioeconomic indicators for over 700 elections from independence until 2006 compiled by the author; the Afrobarometer survey of almost 50 000 voters in 17 multiparty African regimes; and the first ever purpose-built survey aimed at testing rational choice turnout models in an African case study, which was designed, administered and analysed by the author in 2005 in Durban, South Africa. It uses a mixture of statistical methods to test comprehensively the determinants of voting in pooled and multilevel, logistic and linear, individual and national level models. It finds that the central claims of the rational choice model do not generally apply in African elections. Both the closeness of the election and the costs of participation are not found to be central to the voting calculus of African voters. Instead those citizens who face the highest barriers to participation in the West: the rural, poor and minimally educated, are the citizens who vote most in Africa. The thesis argues that this is because turnout in Africa is mobilised turnout and these are the groups of people targeted by mobilising agents. It further finds that three central institutions of African politics; ethnicity, clientelism and regime type further structure patterns of mobilisation in ways that have been entirely neglected in studies of turnout until now. Finally, it confirms that voting is habitual and that voters are socialised by formative experiences in their youth, especially the nature of the regime that they grow up in and how democratic they think the country is.

This paper analyzes the utilization of repression and democratic institutions by a non-democratic government striving for political power and private rents. We find that economic development has different impacts on policy choices, depending on whether it appears in the form of rises in income or in education: A higher income level reduces democracy, whereas more education leads to both more democracy and more repression. These theoretical findings are corroborated by panel data regressions.

This dissertation proposes a normative theory of political representation grounded in popular sovereignty and positive law, rather than in democracy and efficient labour allocation. The first three chapters assess the contributions to the idea of representation of three early modern thinkers. Hobbes proposes a formal model of authorised action at a distance, but, contrary to a long-standing consensus in political thought, not an actual theory of representation. Rousseau, a well-known opponent of representation, proposes ideas about government, sovereignty, and positive law, which, despite his contrary intentions, form a foundation for a normative theory of representation. Sieyes refines concepts from both to create a more mature practical statement on representation which he attempts to implement in three revolutionary constitutions in France in the 1790's. The next three chapters make an argument connecting representation to law creation. First the concept of a decision is defined, and then abstracted through various levels of political authority and action. Law creation is distinguished from all other classes of authorised political decision making by four unique properties which tie in with problems initially raised by the early modern philosophers regarding popular sovereignty. Various numbers of authorised actors are considered as constituting political bodies credentialed to carry out the relevant decisions identified as meeting the minimal conditions of law, and ultimately only assembly — a body numbering in the hundreds, with a reserved place for making recognised decisions, and a formal connection to expressed popular preferences — meets the conceptual requirements of the class of decisions mooted. The thesis ends with an argument connecting law to representation as the solution to the problem of plurality.

The dissertation solves the empirical puzzle why similar regimes such as Morocco and Jordan vary in their engagement in family law reform between 1999 and 2013. Differences with respect to family law reform in the two monarchies are threefold: the way the reform processes were carried out, the content of the new family codes that were issued in Morocco in 2004 and in Jordan in 2010, and the way the laws were applied. Using Pierre Bourdieu's theory of practice as a theoretical framework the dissertation establishes the links between the designs of the legal systems, how reform processes are carried out, the family laws countries end up with, and the way the laws are applied. French and British colonialism had shaped the legal systems of Morocco and Jordan to different degrees, producing a legal system that was unified after independence in Morocco whereas the Jordanian one continued to be divided into regular and religious courts. As a result, Moroccan family courts are less autonomous and more subjected to political decisions than Jordanian sharia courts. The institutional design of both judicial systems affected how family law reform was carried out because those systems contain biases towards different actors who are seen as competent of reforming family law and thus came to influence the reform process. The different access criteria to the juridical fields promote different types of cultural capital, so that actors participating in the process have different preferences regarding the development of the content of family law. In Jordan, the absence of the Jordanian king allowed the sharia court administration to exploit the structural bias in its favour and come to dominate both the process and content of family law reform. For this reason the 2010 Jordanian family law reflects to a lesser extent the demands of women's groups. The absence of the Jordanian king from the reform process demonstrates that change in authoritarian states is not necessarily imposed from above nor is it predetermined from the beginning. The Jordanian reform process saw little engagement from the top-level of the regime and could be classified as a mid-level process. It was led by a government body, the sharia court administration, which however enjoyed relative autonomy from the upper echelon of the regime. By contrast, the Moroccan family law reform was a textbook example of authoritarian politics, the reform being imposed from above and the king playing a leading role during the process. In contrast to the process and content of reform, the application of the reformed law in Morocco challenges the notion of the omnipotent authoritarian regime. While the monarch could impose legislative change, the state is at best partially able to enforce this very law or to impose a consensus over its interpretation. The designs of the legal systems again had an impact here. International law occupies different places in the Moroccan and Jordanian constitutions: Jordanian sharia courts enjoy greater autonomy, reject international law, and thus were able to resist its intrusion.

Après plus de cent ans d’une prise de connaissance de la modernité occidentale et de ses réalisations matérielles et intellectuelles, la question de savoir comment faire face à ce phénomène reste toujours une des questions complexes du débat intellectuel dans la société iranienne. Même après la Révolution islamique 1979, cette question se pose mais autrement.Face à ce défi et face aux militants de la culture occidentale et à ceux qui la niaient ardemment en faveur de la culture indigène, certains penseurs s’est mis à chercher une solution conciliante ces deux. Une partie considérable de ces efforts a été réalisée par un cercle de penseur, connu sous le titre des intellectuels religieux. Moins d’une décennie après l’installation du gouvernement islamique, ces penseurs musulmans et partisans de la Révolution islamique ont présenté leurs points de vus basées sur une interprétation de la religion (islam) et de la question de l’identité, permettant à réconcilier de la modernité occidentale et l’islam (en tant qu’un des éléments le plus important de la culture indigène).Les idées des intellectuels religieux, semblent-elles pouvoir être reconnues comme un ensemble intellectuel et comme un discours religio-politique. Ce discours a progressivement commencé à viser le discours idéologique de l’islam, au pouvoir depuis le chut d’anciens régime. / After more than a hundred years of obtaining an understanding of Western modernity and its material and intellectual achievements, the question of how to deal with this phenomenon remains a complex question of intellectual debate in Iranian society. Even after the Islamic Revolution in 1979, the question arises at its different forms. Faced with this challenge, as well as by facing with the militants of Western culture and those who ardently denied the indigenous culture, some intellectuals began to seek a conciliatory solution to the coexistence of both modernity and the indigenous culture. A considerable part of these efforts was conducted by a thinker circle, known as the religious scholars. Less than a decade after the installation of the Islamic government, the Muslim thinkers and supporters of the Islamic Revolution presented their points of views based on an interpretation of the religion (Islam) and the question of identity, to reconcile of Western modernity and Islam (as one of the most important elements of the indigenous culture).The ideas of religious intellectuals seem to be recognized as an intellectual religious-political discourse as a whole, since the falling down of the former regime.

This paper analyzes the utilization of repression and democratic institutions by a non-democratic government striving for political power and private rents. We find that economic development has different impacts on policy choices, depending on whether it appears in the form of rises in income or in education: A higher income level reduces democracy, whereas more education leads to both more democracy and more repression. These theoretical findings are corroborated by panel data regressions.

Since Africa’s ‘second liberation’ from authoritarianism at the beginning of the 1990s, political parties have assumed a critically important role in the processes by which social interests are articulated, institutions are legitimised and conflicts are managed. Many authors question the extent to which these organisations recognise the intrinsic value of free political competition, personal liberty, political accountability and social inclusion, although relatively few studies have attempted a comprehensive exploration of either party or voter behaviour. This research project represents a hypothesis-building case study of Namibia and addresses three areas of concern. First, it builds upon existing party system research to demonstrate that Namibia’s opposition vote is characterised by acute volatility and attributes this phenomenon to weak parties, salient ethnic identities and a permissive electoral system, all of which serve to encourage party fragmentation. Second, it investigates the more proximate causes of party fragmentation and concludes that leadership succession contests tend, in Namibia, to trigger splinter group formation either when factional support has been mobilised around a divisive issue or when defeated contenders are coerced into submission. Third, it explores the nature and drivers of dominant-party motivation, challenging an assumption that ruling elites are primarily interested in gangster-style theft and demonstrating that Namibia’s governing party has pursued, not only a formally legitimate path to wealth accumulation, but also a set of progressive social policies designed to empower its support base. Finally, it argues that Namibia’s opposition parties are not primarily motivated by a desire to secure ministerial office through election or co-optation, as the literature would suggest, but by a determination to capture the salaries, party income and media opportunities associated with parliamentary office. Each of these four arguments is tested through comparative analysis, using secondary literature, of Namibia, South Africa and Botswana.

This thesis concerns persons recognised as refugees based on the criteria set by Article 1A(2) of the 1951 Geneva Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees (CSR1951) and residing in a Contracting State. It appraises the exclusion of CSR1951 refugees from participation in elections of their countries of asylum pursuant to a citizenship voting qualification, which most countries set. It is emphasised that, since neither the CSR1951 refugees nor their country of asylum know when or indeed whether cessation of CSR1951 refugee status may occur, their exclusion may last for an indeterminate period of time. CSR1951 confers on recognised refugees a host of civil, social and economic rights in their country of asylum; voting rights are absent. Concomitantly, while the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (and regional human rights treaties) pronounce that all persons are entitled to have their rights respected, protected and promoted, Contracting States are permitted to reserve two rights for their (full) members: the right to enter and remain in their country, and the right to vote in its elections. The central claim of this thesis is that recognised CSR1951 refugees are a special category of non-citizen residents, due to their unique political predicament. They are unable to participate in elections of their country of origin, do not enjoy its diplomatic protection and consular assistance abroad, and – most fundamentally – are unable or unwilling, owing to a well-founded fear of persecution, to return to it for an indeterminate (and potentially protracted) period. It is submitted that recognised CSR1951 refugees should be entitled to vote in elections of their countries of asylum, notwithstanding general citizenship qualifications imposed by these countries. At present, treaty law does not require countries of asylum to enfranchise their recognised CSR1951 refugees. Hence, this thesis explores a gap in international refugee law and international human rights law between de lege lata and de lege ferenda; it is an exercise in ‘progressive development of the law’. Its inquiry is located in the international domain, and concerns, in principle, any Contracting State which admits and recognises CSR1951 refugees. References to national or regional practices serve solely an illustrative purpose.