This thesis presents a comparative analysis of the relationship between party political ideology and changing family policies during the 1980s and 1990s in France, the UK and Spain. It explores theoretical perspectives on political ideology, policy analysis and policy change. Different disciplinary approaches to the analysis of public policy are reviewed in relation to policy change and ideologies. The thesis tests theories of ideology by applying them in three substantive case studies of family policy change in France, the UK and Spain. Each case study analyses the manifestos of the major political parties in relation to eight family policy instruments, pro-family statements and their position in relation to the opposing state intervention dimensions of public/private and family/individual. The policy measures are further considered within two dimensions: regulatory and support.

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D. Litt. et Phil.

Before, after and during the Brexit referendum in the UK immigration has been one of the most popular topics, which politicians discussed in their campaigns. Some of them were supporting the immigrants from the EU, arguing that they were bringing up the economy in the country, helping out the NHS and public services, and supporting the image of the multi- cultural society in the UK. However, others were saying that immigrants were stealing jobs, making unemployment rate higher and salaries lower. Immigration is still a very sensitive topic in the British society, ever since Brexit happened. This master thesis deals with the Discourse analysis of five main British political parties and the way they talked about immigration in their pre-Brexit speeches and campaigns. The main focus of the research is on understanding, whether immigration was indeed as important during the Brexit debate and also whether some of the UK's political parties tried to form a negative image of immigrants in British society. The analysis bases on the Political Marketing theory and is done by collecting the data out of the primary sources (such as speeches, campaigns and web-sites of the parties), and using the qualitative analysis on them.

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<p>What role do state party organizations play in twenty-first century American politics? What is the nature of the relationship between the state and national party organizations in contemporary elections? These questions frame the three studies presented in this dissertation. More specifically, I examine the organizational development of the state party organizations and the strategic interactions and connections between the state and national party organizations in contemporary elections. </p><p>In the first empirical chapter, I argue that the Internet Age represents a significant transitional period for state party organizations. Using data collected from surveys of state party leaders, this chapter reevaluates and updates existing theories of party organizational strength and demonstrates the importance of new indicators of party technological capacity to our understanding of party organizational development in the early twenty-first century. In the second chapter, I ask whether the national parties utilize different strategies in deciding how to allocate resources to state parties through fund transfers and through the 50-state-strategy party-building programs that both the Democratic and Republican National Committees advertised during the 2010 elections. Analyzing data collected from my 2011 state party survey and party-fund-transfer data collected from the Federal Election Commission, I find that the national parties considered a combination of state and national electoral concerns in directing assistance to the state parties through their 50-state strategies, as opposed to the strict battleground-state strategy that explains party fund transfers. In my last chapter, I examine the relationships between platforms issued by Democratic and Republican state and national parties and the strategic considerations that explain why state platforms vary in their degree of similarity to the national platform. I analyze an extensive platform dataset, using cluster analysis and document similarity measures to compare platform content across the 1952 to 2014 period. The analysis shows that, as a group, Democratic and Republican state platforms exhibit greater intra-party homogeneity and inter-party heterogeneity starting in the early 1990s, and state-national platform similarity is higher in states that are key players in presidential elections, among other factors. Together, these three studies demonstrate the significance of the state party organizations and the state-national party partnership in contemporary politics.</p> / Dissertation