Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Hong Kong, 1999. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 363-395) Also available in print.

Although a lot of people are not familiar with the term non-political politics, it has its indisputable place in the Czech history. It has evolved from thoughts of Karel Havlíček Borovský as a solution to the nation which was facing lack of its independence and was based upon awareness of national culture and self-governance. This conception was later adopted by Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk, who implemented the idea into its own political programme aimed at free and educated society. His non-political approach reflected intellectual and steady attitude with a manifest perspective which made him a leading person in establishing an independent state of Czechs and Slovaks. In 1970s, Václav Havel restored non-political idea and designed it for the purpose of the confrontation with the communist regime. Owing to his authority, non-political politics became again one of the main mechanisms leading to political pluralism. The topic of non-political politics, which is often perceived as the legacy of Václav Havel, is still present in the days of growing scepticism towards a democratic system with political parties. This thesis aims at description of non-political approach of K.H.B., T.G.M. and Václav Havel. It also attempts to ascertain if there is some similarity and continuity among the attitudes using the...

<p>Croatia became an independent country 1991 and has since then strived to reach a democracy level, which can lead to membership of the European Union. The purpose of this essay is on the basis of consolidate democratic perspective to illustrate Croatia’s democratic development.</p><p>In order to fulfil the aim, I have applied a qualitative text analysis technique. Through analysis of books and documents, data was collected to accommodate a valid result. I have used consolidated democracy, with its five areas (political, civil, economic, legal and bureaucratic), as my theoretical framework to the data, to provide answers and develop an analysis.</p><p>The conclusions show that the consolidate democracy in Croatia has developed a lot since the independence, and Croatia is on its good way to turn into a democratic state like other West-European countries. Croatia has developed and is still developing their political, civil, economic, legal and bureaucratic areas. A good sign of their democratic development is that Croatia received status as a candidate country in June 2005 for European Union, which shows that Croatia is on the way to complete its transition to consolidated democracy.</p>

Active and engaged citizens are the backbone of a strong democracy and a vibrant civil society. Yet recent trends of low electoral turnout in Europe and decreasing levels of civic engagement have called into question the legitimacy of governments and the stability of democracy in the long term, particularly in Europe. Against the background of such developments this research sets out to provide a comparative study of civic engagement and analyse the variations in civic engagement between countries. The study is mainly based on the analysis of the European Social Survey 2002, covering 35,000 individuals from 19 European countries and applies advanced statistical modelling techniques including Multiple Correspondence Analysis MCA) and Multi-level modelling. Although there is a good deal of research examining civic engagement using individual level data or aggregate level data, very few studies have combined both approaches. This study addresses this gap and applies multi-level modelling to examine the relative importance of an individual’s socio-demographic characteristics and his/her country in determining levels and types of civic engagement. Thus, it has the advantage of identifying whether civic engagement is significantly affected by country characteristics or the converse, whether a person’s characteristics (age, education, social class etc.) are all that is needed in order to account for the variations in civic engagement. The innovative application of MCA to explore indicators of civic engagement has led to the identification of three dimensions of civic engagement; political activities, political consumerism and associational involvement. Moreover, by projecting all activities on a two-dimensional map it become evident that citizens who tend to carry out ‘individual’ types of political consumerism such as ‘buycotting’, boycotting and signing petitions are also more likely to be involved in New Social Movement organisations. These significant results shed new light on activities usually regarded as ‘individualistic’ type of activities and suggest viewing them in the context of a wider array of collective actions. Furthermore, in addition to the standard contextual measures such as economic development, welfare regime, income inequality, and levels of democracy, this study introduced two innovative policy measures. To consider the impact of government policies on levels of civic engagement measures of governments’ support of the voluntary sector and civic education at school (comparing the education policies of 19 European countries from 1945-2002) were developed. The results confirmed the importance of both individual level characteristics as well as country level characteristics in explaining civic engagement in Europe. However, differences between countries were reduced to a greater degree when contextual factors were introduced. Particularly the welfare state, showed the greatest effect. This implies that socio-economic conditions and in particular social policy and the degree to which it reproduces egalitarian structures determine to a great extent citizen involvement. In other words the results of this study suggest that the national context matters and that governments can and do shape the nature and levels of civic engagement.

The objective of this thesis is to analyze the authoritarian Karimov regime in post-Soviet Uzbekistan on a comprehensive basis and shed light on the domestic and international factors that has shaped this regime. The thesis consists of three main parts. The first part of the study defines the concepts of democracy and authoritarianism and provides the criteria to determine if a regime is democratic or authoritarian. The second part applies the theoretical framework developed in the first part to Uzbekistan. The third part deals with the factors that helped Karimov to strengthen his authoritarian rule in the country. The main argument of this study is that the incumbent leadership in Uzbekistan has failed to take steps to establish democracy in the country in post-Soviet period. The changes that were introduced proved to be only decorative, they lacked substance. The president of the country, Islam Karimov, has aimed at consolidating his own authority rather than establishing democracy and that his attempts to realize this aim resulted in the strengthening of executive branch in Uzbekistan at the expense of legislative and judiciary, silencing of the opposition forces, curtailment of the civil and political rights of the citizens, restriction of autonomy of civil society organizations and media.

Croatia became an independent country 1991 and has since then strived to reach a democracy level, which can lead to membership of the European Union. The purpose of this essay is on the basis of consolidate democratic perspective to illustrate Croatia’s democratic development. In order to fulfil the aim, I have applied a qualitative text analysis technique. Through analysis of books and documents, data was collected to accommodate a valid result. I have used consolidated democracy, with its five areas (political, civil, economic, legal and bureaucratic), as my theoretical framework to the data, to provide answers and develop an analysis. The conclusions show that the consolidate democracy in Croatia has developed a lot since the independence, and Croatia is on its good way to turn into a democratic state like other West-European countries. Croatia has developed and is still developing their political, civil, economic, legal and bureaucratic areas. A good sign of their democratic development is that Croatia received status as a candidate country in June 2005 for European Union, which shows that Croatia is on the way to complete its transition to consolidated democracy.

This thesis answers the question how and why do individuals specialise in different types of political participation? By examining the degree to which individuals concentrate their political activities within one type of political participation, or spread them out across many. This thesis complements previous research on rates of political participation; and adapts and extends existing theories of political participation to explain differences in the degree of specialisation between different groups in society and between countries. Using data from the European Social Survey, covering as many as 21 European countries, and applying a range of different statistical methods, I distinguish four types of political participation: voting, conventional and unconventional political participation and consumer politics. I show that in countries with higher levels of socio-economic development, more democratic experience, and an increased presence of mobilising agents, the degree to which individuals concentrate their political activities within one type of political participation is higher, regardless of the accessibility and responsiveness of their political institutions. This is partly due to the fact that these countries have a higher educated population and that higher educated individuals specialise more. Specialisation also varies along the lines of other socio-demographic divisions, such as those based on gender. Moreover, I show that in contexts in which political issues are salient, such as during an election year, individuals are more likely to engage in non-electoral types of political participation if they also vote. This implies that specialisation is reduced during times of country-wide political mobilisation. The final finding of my thesis is that non-Western immigrants tend to concentrate their political activities less within one type of political participation than the majority population in Western Europe. Western immigrants specialise quite differently, suggesting differences in the way in which they are mobilised. As well as providing an important contribution to the study of political participation, these findings are relevant to discussions regarding citizen engagement and representation.