Political scientists have largely overlooked the issue of effort. It is a seemingly simple concept with great implications for the study of political behavior. With intuition alone we can often classify behaviors as more or less effortful. And many of the behaviors that interest political scientists concern this fundamental concept, but, somehow, we have failed to formally incorporate effort into our theories. Indeed, normatively speaking, citizens will engage the democratic process effortfully, not effortlessly. But what makes a behavior more or less effortful? How does the amount of effort expended in pursuit of a behavior affect the likelihood of actualizing that behavior? To answer these questions I have developed a resource model of political cognition which posits that effortful behaviors are essentially fueled by a limited, but renewable, supply of cognitive resources. In this dissertation I report the results of a series of experiments in which I apply the resource model to collective action behaviors as well as information processing. The results suggest that these behaviors, and mostly likely others as well, are, to a significant degree, dependent upon the sufficient availability of cognitive resources.

現在台灣的國家（族群）認同正處在一個不明的階段，不僅是族群間有對立的國族意識型態，對第三國－日本的態度似乎也出現族群之間的不同。本研究目的就在瞭解台灣的不同族群之間是否有不同的對日態度，以及族群認同的工具性是否涉入其中。抽樣295位台灣民眾所得的研究結果顯示，不同族群認同者確實有不同的對日態度。族群自我認同為「台灣人」者比起其他族群認同類別者給予日本比給予中國更多的好評，另外，他們也覺得中國比較沒有那麼親近，同時也對日本負面歷史行為做出更有利的歸因。此外，台灣人民的台灣意識為其「族群認同」對親日態度預測力的中介變項。研究結果以選擇性遺忘、建構認同及三角群際關係來加以解釋，亦即，後殖民時期台灣人民的對日態度為建構自身認同所展現的工具性態度，目的在對抗主要外團體中國，不能只是解釋為殖民主義的影響。 / This study was set to investigate how people in Taiwan perceive Japan and China differently in terms of their ethnic identities. Taiwan has experienced the Japanese colonial regime and the Nationalist regime consecutively each for about fifty years. Over the century, Taiwan has kept searching for its collective identity, and China remains the number one threat to its nation-building project. From 295 sampled Taiwan people, we found different ethnic self-identifiers showed different attitudes toward Japanese. Those who identify themselves with Taiwanese showed most positive attitudes toward Japanese, regardless of the fact that they are mostly offspring of people having been through Japan colonial regime. To be more specific, they tended to evaluate Japan better than China, to rate China less close, and to make more “Japanese-serving attribution” when reasoning about Japanese's historical brutality during the Second World War. Moreover, the correlation between Taiwan people's ethnic identities and their attitudes toward Japanese has been found mediated by Taiwan political ideology. The results were discussed by referring to instrumentality of ethnic identification and selective forgetting of collective history in order to reconstruct a new ethnic identity.

This thesis is a comparative study of how elites in Sweden and Poland approach and make sense of EU membership. It begins with the observation that the public debates in several EU member countries are becoming increasingly politicized around a dichotomy, i.e. enthusiasm and skepticism vis-à-vis European integration. Whereas a lot of research in this field covers the characteristics of the European integration process itself, fewer studies focus upon the cognitive complexity involved in national strategic policy choices. The aim of this thesis is to explore, compare and contrast the organizational and cognitive aspects of how Sweden and Poland entered the EU and thereby to contribute to an understanding of how national policymakers in Europe believe that national and supranational integration can work together. The theoretical point of departure is Stein Rokkan’s model of political integration, which emphasizes the importance of functional and territorial political cleavages in the development of modern European nation states. The model is used to identify political actors and structures that are transnationalizing forces in Europe and to determine in what ways they form a challenge to national governments in the process of adaptation to the EU. Representing different theoretical points of intersection in the Rokkanian model, these challenges are defined as Integration, Trade and Industry, Functional Regionalism and Territorial Regionalism. The empirical analysis builds on these theoretical categories and covers three different areas. First, the ways in which adaptation to the EU was organized by the governments of Sweden (1988-1994) and Poland (1998-2004) are scrutinized. Second, documents concerning the strategic policy deliberation of both organizations are analyzed in the light of Rokkanian integration categories. Third, the results of two sets of research interviews, one in each country, are analyzed. A major conclusion drawn in the study is that Rokkanian integration theory holds the key to an understanding of how national policymakers believe that European integration can be segmented and how supranational integration in the economic sphere can evolve separately from other areas of social and political integration. Although from very different countries and political experiences, elites in Sweden and Poland show remarkable cognitive similarities. Another contribution to a cross-national understanding of adaptation to the EU is the cognitive model, which is developed on the basis of empirical study. The model expands upon and goes beyond the simple dichotomy of Enthusiasts and Skeptics in the discussion about European integration. Two new categories are introduced and defined as Voluntarists and Pragmatists. The argument is that new cognitive categories are necessary to improve the description and analysis of how national policy makers in Europe set up long-term political goals and manage complex issues in the process of European integration.