The release of Nelson Mandela in 1990 marked the beginning of a transition process during which South Africa would finally move from an authoritarian apartheid state to a democratic state that respected and upheld the basic principles of human rights. The field of ""transition politics"" is huge. It necessarily encompasses and is a reaction to the years of history prior to the period of transition, which may have (and has often) been marked by struggle, whether it was violent or passive, against the former regime. It covers areas as broad as the field of politics itself from constitution design to public administration reform. Ultimately the raison d'etre of a political transition period is encapsulated in the attempt to create a utopian ideal state or political entity which corrects the perceived injustices and faults of the system it is attempting to replace or redesign. This dissertation focuses on a small but nonetheless significant area of that attempt to create the ideal political system. It is an area than has been and remains particularly pertinent in South Africa and was particularly important during the transition period, namely the intermediation of the demands of interest groups, and in particular, the mediation of the demands of key producer interest groups.

Includes bibliographical references (p. 59-61). / In December 2007, Kenyans went to the polls to elect a president, Member of Parliament, and local councillor. As citizens who had most recently voted out one of Africa's longest standing "Big Men," in Daniel Arap Moi, there was an understandable level of excitement and enthusiasm from citizens to exercise their vote once again, as well as from the rest of world which was eager to uphold Kenya as a model of African democracy. Unfortunately as the polls closed five days later; the Kenyan Electoral Commission had been disgraced, the two main political parties were mired in ballot stuffing accusations, and violence had engulfed Nairobi, Kisumu, and the Rift Valley. While the flawed election led to an irreplaceable loss of life and severely damaged the nation's economy and reputation, it is unclear whether this flawed election would diminish Kenyan's democratic health and progress towards democratic consolidation. Indeed, recent and compelling social science evidence suggests that flawed elections do not necessarily hinder democratic development in Africa, and thus the greatest indication of Kenya's democratic progress was simply that the election was held. However, as a witness to Kenya's 2007 election, I feared that Kenya's democratic progress would be severely impeded as people voiced their discontent with elections, voting, political parties, and most importantly, democracy itself. In an attempt to determine if in fact flawed elections have a long-term detrimental impact on democratic health and consolidation I investigate the relationship between the "freeness and fairness," of elections {or electoral quality} and two indicators of democratic health: {1} popular perceptions of democratic supply and {2} popular demand for democracy. "Supply," is measured as popular satisfaction with the way democracy works plus the recognition of living in a democracy. "Demand," is measured as support for democracy plus rejection of three forms of authoritarianism, military rule, one man rule and one party rule. These indicators are aggregate measures taken from responses to Afrobarometer surveys, and have been utilized previously to assess citizen's views of democracy and the prospects for democratic growth and consolidation. Using three rounds of Afrobarometer surveys I analyze data from 18 countries and 33 elections in Africa between 1996 and 2005, using both elections and countries as the unit of analysis. The empirical results demonstrate that there is a strong correlation between electoral quality and perceived supply of democracy, but no correlation between electoral quality and the current level of demand. In other words electorates tend to see electoral outcomes as the preeminent event in determining how satisfied they are with democracy, but do not directly link the outcome of the most recent election to their support for democracy. Although the level of electoral quality did not directly correlate with the level of demand, further analysis showed that flawed elections on average negatively influence both supply and demand. Free and Fair elections, on the other hand, had a much smaller but positive influence on supply and demand. Taken together, there is compelling evidence to suggest that electoral outcomes do shape people's perception and support for democracy. If in fact citizen opinion and support for democracy is critical to democratic consolidation than this research finds that flawed elections can significantly impede democratic growth and retard the consolidation process.

Includes abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 63-66).

Includes bibliographical references (leaves 87-93). / This study investigates the willingness of Zimbabweans to use protest participation as an alternative route to the democratisation of Zimbabwe. A set of theoretical determinants from the literature are tested against individual reports of protest participation usmg the Afrobarometer survey: Round 3. Explanations include economic, political, cultural, cognitive and collective action factors. The evidence from this study reveals that, while conventional wisdom would associate protest with the economically insecure, the unemployed and individuals who belong to the working class, in Zimbabwe protest potential is high among the urbanised, the young, professionals, educated and the economically secure. The study raises questions about the efficacy of the strategies of civil society and opposition in Zimbabwe to mobilise protest Zimbabweans, despite being marginalised and confronted with the most severe crisis, are not inclined to push for economic and political transformation.

Information Technology Governance (ITG) is one of the most innovative practices through its provision of support for decision-makers in organisations. Interestingly, it has increasingly become a de facto strategy for organisations that are seeking to optimise their performance. ITG has emerged to support agencies in the integration of information technology (IT) infrastructures and the delivery of high-quality services. On the other hand, decision-making processes in public sector organisations can be multi-faceted and complex, and decision-makers play a major role in the adoption of innovation and technology in the government agencies. While formally adopting IT governance (ITG) has numerous reported benefits, many studies have shown that few organisations have adopted the ITG practice, particularly in the government sector. Therefore, this study attempts to identify and understand the dimensions that hinder ITG adoption and its successful use. The main objective of this research is to investigate and develop a theoretical model of the obstacles preventing formal ITG adoption, from both institutional and individual perspectives. Based on empirical evidence gathered via semi-structured interviews (n=32) with IT directors in government organisations as a qualitative inquiry, this study attempts to investigate institutional and individual dimensions that impact decision making for the adoption of ITG in the context of the public sector in development countries such as Oman. Furthermore, this study focuses on combining institutional and individual perspectives to explain how individuals can make decisions in response to institutional impacts via the integration of theories such as Institutional Theory and the Theory of Planned Behaviour (TPB). It also explores the key dimensions that influence decision-making in the public sector concerning the adoption of ITG. The findings of this study illustrate and analyse the institutional and individual dimensions that impact on decisions for the adoption of ITG and contribute to the body of knowledge by highlighting the dimensions impacting decision-making for adopting ITG in public sector organisations. In doing so, this study contributes to better understand the applicability of integrating both TPB and IS theories to explore and develop a model of ITG adoption in the public sector organization and advances the scholarship by developing a more holistic model. This adoption has benefits such as reaching organisations' strategic goals, improving performance and conferring other competitive advantages. As a final point, this study advises accelerating the adoption of ITG to increase the efficiency, productivity and transparency of government work as well as to make available integrated smart electronic services. Further studies on the adoption of ITG in the public sector in different contexts, or comparative research, may help to develop a deep understanding of the value of ITG innovation in government organisations to enable evaluation of its significance in enhancing e-government.

There are many networks of transport and communication that cross national borders, but the Internet’s infrastructure has been designed to do so with unusual subtlety. As a result, public policy issues raised in governance of the Internet tend to be inherently transnational in nature. This makes the legitimacy of a purely domestic legal approach to Internet governance questionable. The fact that conflicting domestic regimes may interfere with each other, and may clash with the transnational cultural and technical architecture of the Internet, further complicates an approach to governance based around legal rules. But on the other hand more traditional and decentralised mechanisms of Internet governance such as norms, markets and architecture suffer their own deficits of both legitimacy and effectiveness. Governance by multi-stakeholder network conceptually provides a solution in that it brings together each of the other mechanisms of governance and the stakeholders by whom they are commonly employed. Such a multi-stakeholder approach has begun to permeate (and in some issue areas even to supersede) the existing international system, as partially evidenced in the Internet governance regime by reforms that took root at the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) and have begun to find expression in its product, the Internet Governance Forum (IGF). Governance by network does not however emerge spontaneously, but requires supportive institutional structures and processes. To maximise the legitimacy and effectiveness of these, and to ensure their interoperability both with the international system and with the architecture of the Internet, requires a balance to be struck between the anarchistic and consensual organisational models typified by “native” Internet governance institutions such as the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), and hierarchical and democratic models drawn from governmental and private sector examples and from the study of deliberative democracy. As an early experiment in multi-stakeholder governance by network, the Internet Governance Forum does not quite strike the correct balance: its hierarchical structure under the leadership of the United Nations is incompatible with its multi-stakeholder democratic ambitions, and more importantly it lacks the institutional capacity to fulfil its mandate to contribute to public policy development. This can largely be redressed by reforming the IGF’s plenary body, and its online analogue, as venues for democratic deliberation, subject to the oversight of an executive body or bureau to which each stakeholder group appoints its own representatives, and which is responsible for ratifying any decisions of the larger group by consensus. In particular, requiring this bureau to broker consensus between stakeholder groups (as in a consociation), rather than just amongst its members at large, can assist to diminish the power games that have limited the IGF to date.

Master-Arbeit Univ. St. Gallen, 2007.

In modern dynamic business environment, every enterprise needs to emphasize more on IT in order to increase the benefit. The well-performed IT governance is the key to effectively apply IT resource. This research focus on the following dimension: IT governance maturity, IT Governance Archetype, Strategic alignment and Organization performance. Accoridng to the literature, an empirical research was performed to examine the relation among these four dimensions. Through the empirical research, this research verify the significant positive relation among IT governance maturity, strategic alignment and organization performance. Also among IT governance Archetype (the level of centralized) and strategic alignment. As for IT governance Archetype (the level of professionalize), there is significant positive relation between IT governance Archetype (the level of professionalize) and stragic alignment and significant negative relation between IT governance Archetype (the level of professionalize) and organization performance.

The concept of "corporate governance", which has appeared in the United States, is however recently subject to vivid discussions across the world. The notion is understood differently in distinct jurisdictions. Nevertheless, corporate governance widely refers to the way corporations are managed. The present study firstly concentrates on the United States since the latter has been the first country to host debates on the topic. Different governance models basically distinguish the North-American and European (Continental Europe) governance systems. However, debates in the United States and Canada concentrate on distinct issues. The third studied country, France has also its own characteristics. International organisations' initiatives on the topic such as the OECD, illustrate the importance given to "corporate governance". Although the uniformity of distinct national governance systems is not likely to be reached in the near future, certain similarities might be pointed at, especially through the recent activism of institutional shareholders.

Thesis (doctoral)--Göteborg University. / Includes bibliographical references.