This thesis explores how constructivist insights could help us to form a more complete picture of lobbying in EU foreign policy-making, with a special emphasis on EU foreign policy towards the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It demonstrates that non-state actors (NSAs) such as business groups, NGOs, solidarity movements and think tanks, are important players in the EU’s foreign policy-making. By sharing the constructivist views on the embeddedness of actors and assuming that actors interact with each other in order to make sense of the world, this thesis investigates lobbying on the basis of three analytical dimensions; namely roles, frames and levels. It is shown that NSAs lobbying the EU play a consensual role, which is based on mutually legitimising social interactions that do not challenge the EU’s actorness and policies towards Israel and Palestine. When combined with the use of legal or technical frames, these consensual forms of interaction are conducive to a re-framing of EU policies towards Israel and Palestine. In contrast, confrontational forms of social interactions, combined with the use of political frames are more recurrent at the national level. Finally, this thesis analyses how the national level is used, when NSAs lobby the EU. It concludes that there is a partial Europeanization of lobbying carried out by NSAs based in member states. The EU and national levels tend, however, to remain quite disentangled from each other. The argument presented in this thesis is tested in three case studies (EU-Israel trade relations, the UN Report following the war in Gaza in 2008-2009 and the EU-Israel Agreement on pharmaceutical products), which represent important aspects of EU foreign policy and were frequently mentioned by NSAs and officials. Moreover, the national level is analysed in the cases of France, the United Kingdom and Germany, which are the three big member states of the EU and crucial players in EU foreign policy.

Over the last two decades the shape of the European public administration has changed considerably; the EU has become much more strongly involved in the regulation of very dynamic and fluid market activities. One of the consequences of that has been an increasing reliance on EU regulatory agencies to perform the novel administrative tasks. While agencies can be beneficial for the EU, they also generate new problems. In particular, these bodies have limited resources and have to rely on (national and sector) external capacities to a significant extent. There is a risk here that if the important issues are mainly capacity-related and „liquid‟, it will be very difficult to ensure „checks and balances‟ in these institutional systems. The thesis examines this through case-studies (EU regulatory agencies) in medicines, chemicals, financial services and aviation. It finds that the problems in each EU agency are different and unpredictable. In such a context, having more external and static controls on the agencies will hardly improve things. An alternative „framework‟ (that of fluid administrative law) should be considered to deal with the challenges of the new administrative state. It promotes constant administrative law principles (internal process, external justification, commitment to pluralism and policy effectiveness) to coordinate the operation of the agencies, and offers institutional tools for the dynamic application of such principles. As the „solutions‟ for each agency should have to vary, the review of these bodies (which usually occurs every three years) could be used to address the required heterogeneity of the controls. In order to make the best use of that exercise, the creation of a new European agency to review the regulatory agencies and make proposals for each of them (according to the fluid law principles) might be envisioned.

Throughout the 1990s and 2000s, epidemic corruption hindered Russia's economic performance. At the grassroots level, low-level administrative agents preyed on small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), exploiting Russia's ever-changing and loophole-ridden legal codes to extort rents from these relatively powerless firms who lacked the political connections necessary to protect themselves from these predations. In contrast to larger, better-connected firms, SMEs suffered from this "grabbing hand" of the state. They lacked the resources to engage in the "capture" and "elite exchange" models of business-state ties that characterized interactions at higher levels of the politico-economic hierarchy. While some firms benefitted under Russia's systemic corruption, SMEs tended only to suffer under it. This pervasive "grabbing hand" drove the consolidation of the SME interest toward the resolution of this common problem. But, given their individual weakness, SMEs' only means of systemic political leverage comes from pooling their resources into mechanisms of collective action. This presents a number of problems according to the theory of collective action as laid out by Mancur Olson. As a large, diverse, and geographically scattered interest, SMEs face significant organizational costs in achieving political outcomes when compared to smaller, sector-specific organizations. However, the Putin administration has put SME development and the reduction of corruption at the center of Russia's modernization program. Through the creation and empowerment of "peak" SME business associations, the administration has in effect subsidized these increased costs of collective action for the SME community. The synergy of interests between Russia's "power vertical" and the SME community has resulted in a push for a more professional, accountable, and transparent administrative apparatus. This dissertation explores the thesis that the common administrative obstacles facing the SME community has driven the emergence of an "encompassing interest" in administrative modernization, which is more likely to produce results given the support of Russia's powerful president.

The US Democrats, Australian Labor Party and British Labour Party adopted the issue of childcare assistance for middle-income families as both a campaign and as a legislative issue decades apart from one and other, despite similar rates of female employment. The varied timing of parties’ policy adoption is also uncorrelated with labour shortages, union density and female trade union membership. However, it is correlated with two politically-charged factors: first, each party adopted childcare policy as their rate of ‘organised female labour mobilisation’ (union density interacted with female trade union membership) reached its country-level peak; second, each party adopted the issue within the broader context of post-industrial electoral change, when shifts in both class and gender-based party-voter linkages dictated that the centre-left could no longer win elections by focusing largely on a male, blue-collar base. Were these parties driven to promote childcare in response to the changing needs of their traditional affiliates (unions), or was policy adoption an outcome of autonomous party elites in search of a new electoral constituency? Using both qualitative and quantitative techniques, this research analyses the correlates of policy adoption and the specific mechanisms through which party position change on the issue took place (e.g. legislator conversion versus legislator turnover). It finds that parties largely adopted the issue as a means to make strategic electoral appeals to higher-educated, post-materialist and in particular, female voters. However, the speed in which they were able to make these appeals (and hence, the time at which they adopted the issue) was contingent on the speed in which elites were able to reform their party’s internal organisation and specifically, wrest power away from both the unions and rank-and-file members in order to centralise decision making power on election campaigns, executive appointments and candidate selection processes into the hands of the leadership.

The thesis develops a theory of legislative cooperation in bicameral legislatures. At its core is a distinction between two decision-making scenarios leading to a concurrent majority in the two chambers. In an inter-institutional scenario, the chambers oppose each other as unitary actors. In a trans-institutional scenario, the constituent actors enter into cooperation across the boundaries of their chambers. The central argument is that formateurs face a strategic decision on which of these two routes to take. They can stick to their intra-institutional coalition, or they can abandon it and propose a logroll across issues within a bill that is carried by a majority across the chambers. The thesis comprises three papers, united by the general topic of trans-institutional legislative cooperation, and each demonstrating the crucial role of the formateurs. The empirical analysis focuses on co-decision legislation proposed in the bicameral system of the European Union between 1999 and 2009. In particular, it draws on a new dataset on early-stage and final-stage coalitions in the European Parliament and the Council of the EU. This is based on an extensive analysis of more than 18,000 Council documents and 19,000 amendments in the EP presenting for the first time a systematic insight into early-stage coalitions. Three central findings emanate from the application of the theoretical framework to the new data. First, formateurs can obtain an outcome closer to their preferences by choosing between inter- and trans-institutional scenarios. Second, the transaction costs of exchanges across institutional boundaries are lower if formateurs’ preferences are similar. Third, the decisions of the formateurs potentially produce winners and losers as some actors are included and others are excluded from the coalitions. These findings build on and further develop theories of bicameral coalition formation and legislative organisation. They highlight that the strategic environment in which actors operate surpasses their individual chamber, and explain how this affects the process and outcome of decision-making. This leads to important empirical and theoretical contributions which raise normative implications.

Since Vladimir Putin first became Russia’s President in 2000, the state has played an increasingly active and interventionist role in the economy, including through its involvement in a large number of coercive takeovers of privately-owned businesses. The best known case is the Yukos affair, but there have been many other, less prominent takeovers. These have largely been explained as predatory acts by state officials seeking to enrich themselves or increase their power. This has contributed to the perception that Putin’s Russia is a kleptocracy, with the state given free rein to engage in economically-destructive attacks on property rights. This thesis studies a number of state-led coercive takeovers in Putin’s Russia, including the Yukos affair, and argues that they cannot be explained as predatory acts initiated by rent-seeking state officials. Instead, they were the work of state officials attempting to pursue economic development while countering perceived threats to state sovereignty. The Yukos affair resulted in the company’s de facto nationalisation and heralded a broader trend of expanding state ownership in the economy. But two other coercive takeovers studied here instead resulted in the companies being transferred to new private owners. In other cases where nationalisation was the clear goal, the state-owned companies who emerged as buyers chose indirect forms of ownership over their new assets. The varying ownership outcomes are found to have been determined by institutional factors which constrained the behaviour of the state, contributing to its preference for takeovers that were negotiated rather than entirely coercive, and turning each case into a bargaining game between state and targeted business owner. Thus Russia is some way from kleptocracy, not only because of the developmental aspirations of its political leadership, but also thanks to partial progress towards institutional checks on arbitrary state coercion.

This thesis investigates the effects of village economic wealth and economic autonomy on the authoritarian control of local government over village elections in China. With new data - qualitative evidence and quantitative data collected from the extensive fieldtrips to a county in Guangdong Province, this study finds that given that village elections operate within China’s one party authoritarian regime and the official purpose of the elections is to solve the grassroots governance crisis, local government have the incentive to control the elections in their favour, that is, to have incumbents and/or party members elected. Using the election of party members to the village committee chairman position and the re-election of incumbent chairmen as proxies for the inclusiveness and contestation dimensions of village elections, this study demonstrates that collective village wealth triggers fierce electoral competition, as collective village wealth represents the lucrative benefits candidates can obtain from holding the office. However, the success of authoritarian control hinges on village economic autonomy - the opportunities for economic development beyond the control of local government. If economic resources are controlled by local government, economic development might strengthen the capacity of local government to control the elections in their favour. Even if opponents win the elections, they are inclined to be co-opted by the local government - becoming party members, because their economic gain and maintenance of power are affected by the authoritarian local government control over economic resources. In most villages in the sample, authoritarian control prevails in village elections. The findings of this thesis suggest that until now the elections have been maintained within the boundary of the CCP’s authoritarian governance. In rural China, for elections to serve the function of promoting democracy and fostering checks and balances of power - neither manipulation by the local government nor manipulation by rich opponents - the key lies in the economic empowerment of villagers.

The aim of the thesis is to examine the implications of the internationalisation of regulation in China as a developing country. To achieve this, variations in different Chinese food regulatory regimes are compared, ranging from those for domestic consumption to export. In particular, the three control components of a regulatory regime, namely standard-setting, information-gathering and behaviour-modification are analysed. This study finds a pattern of changes in the Chinese food regulatory regimes. At the initial stage, Chinese national food standards were less stringent than international standards, and the gap between established national standards and local enforcement was significantly high. In recent years, it is observed that Chinese national food standards have witnessed an upward movement to converge with international food standards. In the meantime, regulatory enforcement in the localities has undergone continual adjustment to strengthen enforcement force towards areas under public concern. This thesis aims to explain this trend of changes in terms of the internationalisation of regulation. It argues that while coercive international pressure is mainly exerted on the Chinese exported food regulatory regime, the domestic food regulatory regime in China has also been increasingly influenced by global forces over the past decade, in terms of policy transfer from developed countries and policy learning from the transnational professional networks. Regarding domestic food standard-setting, normative influence from the international community has induced a generally higher level of Chinese national food standards. With respect to regulatory enforcement, while enforcement work has been constrained by the incapacity of regulators and the inextricably linked interests in the localities, these domestic factors are becoming less influential under the context of internationalisation of regulation. In particular, food safety crises prompt the Chinese government to push forward regulatory changes in spite of strong resistance in the localities. This has been attributed to the aim of the Chinese government to safeguard the reputation of products ‘Made in China’ under the context of internationalisation of regulation, and build up an international image that China is a committed and responsible trading partner and world leader.

Governmental authorities are known for zealously protecting their ‘turf’, which is usually seen to inhibit them from coordinating their work with rival authorities. In the EU, however, national regulators often engage proactively in coordination with sister authorities in the forum of EU regulatory bodies. This is puzzling if one considers that this means that national authorities actively support EU bodies –potential rivals- in their work. The thesis hence examines what determines the coordinative behaviour of national regulators at a transnational level in the European Union. It analyses the engagement of UK and German authorities in transnational coordination in the regulatory regimes of drug safety, maritime safety, food safety, and banking supervision. The study demonstrates that coordinative behaviour is driven by strategic considerations of national regulators that want their coordination activities to add value to their own work, rather than being determined by their professional norms, functional pressures or the ‘shadow of hierarchy’, as stipulated in the EU governance literature. Their strategic assessments of whether they are getting something out of transnational activities are informed by the interpretative filters of the social relations they are embedded in at the domestic level. They are also fundamentally shaped by the institutional frameworks provided by the tasks of the EU regulatory bodies in which national regulators come together. This explains variation of coordination patterns across policy areas and national regulators, which the EU governance literature has not accounted for. The argument of the thesis implies that the engagement with coordination can be linked to an enhancement –rather than a loss– of bureaucratic autonomy. By identifying the determinants of coordinative behaviour at a transnational level, this thesis hence also seeks to contribute to our understanding of the conditions in which transnational administration functions. This, in turn, is vital for understanding of how capacity to manage cross-border risks is created in the absence of a ‘European’ state.

This thesis is a qualitative and interpretive exploration of continuity and change in the role of executive agencies in UK central government. Its three objectives are: (i) to test the longevity of the semi-autonomous agency model first introduced by Conservative governments after 1988; (ii) to explore the department-agency task division in the policymaking processes supposedly fragmented by this ‘agencification’; and (iii) to evaluate the paradigmatic testament of contemporary agency policy and practice in Whitehall. The thesis builds from an extended case study conducted during the 2010 Coalition Government in the Ministry of Justice and three of its agencies – the National Offender Management Service, HM Courts and Tribunals Service, and the Office of the Public Guardian. Social constructivist meta-theory and the application of narrative and discourse analysis together make for an account of interpretive transformation that is theorised by discursive institutionalism. Substantively, the thesis first describes an asymmetric departure from the ‘accountable management’ philosophy which the 1988 Next Steps agency programme originally epitomised. Agency meaning is multivocal, but contemporarily converges towards accountability and transparent corporate governance, rather than managerial empowerment, de-politicisation and decentralisation. Secondly, institutional preservation of the policy-delivery work dichotomy is registered, yet found to be a poor descriptor of both historic and contemporary policy processes. Agency staff act as policy initiators and collaborators, contrary to Next Steps’ quasi-contractual, principal-agent logic, and further evidencing the departmentalisation of the once arm’s-length agency model. Thirdly, and paradigmatically, while no unidirectional trend is found, the thesis adds to the growing literature positing some departure from the former ideological and practical predominance of ‘new public management’. In so doing, it also demonstrates the challenges faced by large-N population ecology and administrative systems analysis – the favoured methodology in much international agencification scholarship – in accounting for continuity and change in policy, practice and paradigm.