Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Political parties; Arab countries; politics and government'

On May 1st 2004, Poland entered the European Union (EU), introducing new variables into the domestic politics of the Polish Republic. Since gaining its independence from Soviet control in 1989, Poland’s political landscape can be described as a dynamic and ever changing force towards democratic maturation. With the accession of Poland to the EU, questions of European integration and Europeanization have arisen, most specifically with how these two processes effect and shape the behaviors of domestic political actors. With Poland entering its second decade of EU membership, this study attempts to explain how, and if, further European integration has had any effect on the Europeanization of political parties in Poland. Building upon the work of various scholars, most notably Aleks Szczerbiak, this study examines the years 2009-2014, and examines Poland’s political parties through Robert Ladrech’s framework of Europeanization.

This dissertation analyzes the political leadership crisis and the violations of human rights in the Arab countries during the period 1970 to 1990. The main purposes of this study could be briefly summarized as follows: (1) to explore scientifically whether there is a political leadership crisis in the Arab World; (2) to explore the concept of political leadership, i.e., what constitutes political leadership, what are its necessary requirements, and what differentiates it from dictatorship; and (3) to examine the effects of political leadership in the Arab countries upon the violation of human rights.

In representative democracy the chain of political legitimacy runs from voters to governments through votes cast at elections. In order for representation to occur, political parties must offer distinct policy platforms that citizens consider in their vote choices. This thesis examines whether citizens are adequately represented within the European Union. It finds that although representation on left-right issues occurs, it does not occur for European integration preferences. Over the course its history, European integration has changed from being primarily an economic issue to a social issue. This separation from the primary axis of political competition has increased the need for representation on EU issues directly. Political parties have polarised over European integration providing increased choice, but voters have not engaged with the issue. Examining how voters process party signals about policy positions shows that very few are affected by signals on the EU. Accounting for voters' cognitive biases suggests that the influence of EU issues in European Parliament elections has been overestimated and is non-existent in most member-states. As direct democracy might offer an alternative to inadequate representation this thesis examines why referendums have been held on the EU but finds that they are largely driven by governments' desire to contain the threat of EU issues at national elections, further undermining representation. However, as a result of institutional differences between national and European Parliament elections rather than the emergence of the EU as an electoral issue, the size of party systems at European Parliament elections has grown considerably over successive elections in many member-states, a change that has fed into national party systems. Although representation on EU issues is inadequate, the expansion of European party systems and the redrawing of the lines of political competition offers some hope that representation on EU issues might improve in the future.

Why do revolutions happen? What role do structures, institutions, and actors play in precipitating (or preventing) them? Finally, What might compel social mobilization against a regime in the face of potentially insurmountable odds? These questions are all fundamentally about state-society (strategic) interactions, and elite and societal preference formation over time. The self-immolation of Muhammad Bouazizi in Sidi Bouzid on December 17, 2010, served as a focal point upon which over twenty years of corrupt, coercive authoritarian rule were focused into a single, unified challenge to the Ben Ali regime. The regime's brutality was publicized via social media activism and satellite television, precipitating mass mobilization across Tunisia and, eventually, throughout the region and beyond. In light of the rapid and unforeseen nature of these events, scholars writing about the causes of the Arab Spring have focused their critiques on scholarship that they felt overemphasized the role of institutions and elite-level actors over 'under the radar' changes within society. This paper essentially agrees with this point of view, but is not content to simply 'throw out' institutionalism. As Timur Kuran (1991) argued in the wake of the unforeseen collapse of communism in Eastern Europe, one cannot understand revolution without understanding the 'true' preferences of social actors. In this way, the inevitability of revolutionary surprises seems a given so long as analysts continue to look from the top-down. Yet, this paper contends that institutions do still matter. They matter because different institutional arrangements incentivize and constrain regime strategies, which, in turn, inform the strategic calculations and preference orderings within society. These two societal variables are determined - in part - by the degree of regime flexibility, and they affect whether, how, and where social actors choose to vent their dissent. This paper proposes a model for the development of contentious social mobilization under authoritarianism. In order to do so, two models - one game-theoretic, and the other rooted in the contentious politics subfield of political sociology - are synthesized toward elucidating how altered societal preferences affect strategic interactions between the regime and society over time and during acute contentious episodes. The synthesized model is then illustrated through narrative case studies of two North African states that experienced divergent outcomes in the wake of the Arab Spring: Tunisia and Morocco. The limited spaces and institutions for the expression of dissent in Tunisia gradually changed societal preferences over time. In 2010, Tunisians' preferences shifted from various socioeconomic demands and other issue-specific grievances toward a galvanized demand for the fall of the regime. In Morocco, on the other hand, social actors, by and large, continued to prefer limited reforms to a complete upheaval of the political system. This paper contends that this divergence in preferences and therefore outcomes was in part determined by the variation in the two regimes' respective strategic mixes of concessions and/or coercion. To the extent that such strategies and institutions were more flexible - i.e. were more permissive of (limited) political contention and contestation - social movements were less likely to become emboldened against the regime.

Defence date: 2 July 2019
Examining Board: Professor Hanspeter Kriesi, European University Institute (Supervisor); Professor Elias Dinas, European University Institute; Professor Liesbet Hooghe, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; Professor Kai Arzheimer, Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz
Does European integration contribute to the rise of the radical right? This dissertation offers three empirical contributions that aid understanding the interplay between political integration within the European Union (EU) and the surge of the populist radical right across Europe. The first account studies the impact that the European Parliament (EP) elections have for the national fortune of the populist right. The findings of a country fixed-effects model leveraging variation in the European electoral cycle demonstrate that EP elections foster the domestic prospects of the radical right when national and EP elections are close in time. The second study demonstrates that the populist radical right cannot use the EP elections as a platform to socialise the most impressionable voters. The results of a regression discontinuity analysis highlight that the EP contest does not instil partisan ties to the political antagonists of the European idea. The third study shows that anti-European integration sentiments that existed prior to accession to the EU cast a long shadow in the present by contributing to the success of contemporary populist right actors. Relying on an original dataset entailing data on all EU accession referenda on the level of municipalities and exploiting variation within regions, the study demonstrates that those localities that were most hostile to the European project before even becoming part of the Union, today, vote in the largest numbers for the radical right. In synthesis, the dissertation approaches the relationship between two major current transformations of social reality: European integration and the surge of the radical right. The results highlight that contention around the issue of European integration provides a fertile ground for the populist radical right, helping to activate nationalistic and EU-hostile sentiments among parts of the European public.

Defence Date: 15/05/2009
Examining Board: Mark Franklin (EUI); Michael Laver (New York University); Peter Mair (EUI) (Supervisor); Cees van der Eijk (University of Nottingham) (External Co-Supervisor
PDF of thesis uploaded from the Library digital archive of EUI PhD theses
Party politics is about cooperation and conflict between political parties. At certain times, a party may rule out all political cooperation with a particular other party. In these cases, there is only conflict between the parties. This dissertation is about such situations. I define the systematic refusal of a particular party to cooperate politically with a particular other party as the party’s ostracism of the other party. It is the causes and consequences of ostracism that I wish to explain in this thesis. In order to do so, I first define the concepts of the ‘anti-immigration party’ and the ‘communist party.’ Based on both a literature review and an expert survey, conducted in the course of this study, I classify other parties’ responses to the existence of 46 anti-immigration and communist parties in 15 countries in postwar Western Europe as either ‘ostracism’ or ‘no ostracism.’ In the first part of this dissertation, I use the resulting classification as the dependent variable in a comparative-empirical analysis, in order to explain the variation in other parties’ political responses to particular political parties. Using logistic regression analysis on the basis of two different data sets, I find that other parties are likely to systematically boycott a far right party if they do not need to cooperate with it anyway. They are even more likely to do so if it holds anti-democratic ideologies. The ‘ostracism’ / ‘no ostracism’ classification is the main independent variable in the second part of the research, which aims at exploring the consequences of the exclusion of political parties for their electoral support. I argue and empirically demonstrate, by way of different regression analysis techniques on the basis of 15 different data sets, that when ostracized, anti-immigration and communist parties are less able to affect policy outcomes, which is what generally interests voters. As a result, these parties lose votes. There is one main exception to this rule. Anti-immigration parties that operate in a political context where opposition influence in parliament is high, and which are represented in the national parliament, are immune to the deleterious impact of ostracism on their electoral support. It seems that these parties can exercise power over policy-making in spite of being ostracized, thereby remaining attractive to voters. Thus, institutional factors determine whether or not ostracizing a rival party is an effective tool in the hands of targeting parties in order to safeguard democracy - or just to hold on to power.

Defence date: 13 September 2013
Examining Board: Professor Laszlo Bruszt, (EUI - Supervisor); Professor Philippe C. Schmitter, (EUI - Co-Supervisor); Professor Holger Albrecht, (American University in Cairo); Professor Robert Springborg, (Naval Postgraduate School, Monterrey, CA.)
PDF of thesis uploaded from the Library digital archive of EUI PhD theses
Why did different regimes react differently to the mass uprisings that shook the Middle East and North Africa in 2010 and 2011? Why did the personalist presidencies of Husni Mubarak in Egypt and Zine al-Abidin Ben Ali in Tunisia collapse only weeks into the uprisings while Syria’s Bashar al-Assad still holds onto power and Yemen’s Ali Abdallah Salih could negotiate his way out of office? Focusing on the cases of Egypt, Syria, Tunisia and Yemen, this thesis is an attempt to answer this question. The central argument of this thesis is that military elite behavior shaped regime trajectories in the Arab Spring. Where the armed forces as an institution defected from the incumbent, the presidency immediately collapsed; where at least some military elites remained loyal, the respective chief executives survived in office for a significantly longer period. I develop an explanation that focuses on the presence of regime cronies within the military leadership. Where such cronies exist, the costs of defection increase for all members of the officer corps. Since the loyalty of cronies appears as a forgone conclusion, defection would likely lead to confrontation within the military. In other words, the absence of crony officers is a necessary condition for the cohesive defection of the armed forces from authoritarian presidents. Empirically, the fact that there were no crony officers in their respective militaries enabled the Egyptian and Tunisian armed forces to defect from their commanders in chief without endangering their internal cohesion. In Syria and Yemen, on the other hand, the defection of the armed forces as an institution was not an option given the fact that key units in both militaries were controlled by officers closely connected to the president. The result was the swift collapse of personalist presidencies in Egypt and Tunisia and the escalation of conflict in Syria and Yemen. This thesis traces the emergence of patterns of political-military relations in Egypt, Syria, Tunisia and Yemen from regime foundation in the 1950s and 1960s to the uprisings of 2010 and 2011. I argue that path dependent processes of institutional development link patterns of political-military relations at the outbreak of the uprisings to the dynamics of regime foundation in the early 20th century. While the institutional form of the founding regimes that II emerged in the 1950s and 1960s was a function of the composition of regime coalitions, the patterns of political-military relations that shaped regime trajectories in 2011 were shaped by attempts to reproduce these initial institutional features over time and under changing environmental conditions. The initial role of the armed forces in founding regimes was determined by whether or not the regime coalition had drawn institutional support from the military. Where this was the case as in Egypt and Syria, the military developed into a central regime institution, whereas the armed forces remained marginal in Tunisia and institutionally weak in Yemen. These initial differences were reproduced in the context of a period of institutional and economic reform from the second half of the 1970s onwards. While all four regimes succeeded in reining in the military, they used different strategies that had different and partially unintended consequences. In Egypt the depoliticization of the military was sugarcoated by the emergence of a parallel ‘officers’ republic’ that ensured substantial military autonomy, in Syria the armed forces were controlled via a system of praetorian units, while in Tunisia the military remained marginal but largely independent from the regime and in Yemen tribal dynamics prevented the army from developing into a strong institution. These processes all fulfilled their primary goal of ensuring that the armed forces would not actively intervene in politics. At the same time, however, they produced different incentive structures for military elites confronted with regime threatening protests.

Defence date: 6 December 2013
Examining Board: Professor Adrienne Héritier, EUI (Supervisor); Professor Stefanie Bailer, ETH Zürich (External Supervisor); Professor Mark Franklin, EUI & MIT; Professor Simon Hix, London School of Economics and Political Science.
PDF of thesis uploaded from the Library digital archive of EUI PhD theses
Voting unity in parliamentary parties is an inescapable phenomenon in parliamentary democracies. Knowing only which party a legislator belongs to and how the majority of that party voted allows for the identification, with extremely high levels of accuracy, how said legislator actually voted. However, most explanations of why this is the case rests of unsustainable assumptions about the effects of institutions and electoral systems on the behaviour of parliamentarians. Further, most work ignores the most basic explanation of why legislators vote the way they do: Their policy preferences. Without first explaining the role they play in legislative behaviour, little else can be explained with confidence. This work first theorises and develops measures of how parliamentarians’ policy preferences lead to incentives for them to vote against their party’s line in floor votes, and then applies them to a series of diverse institutional setups, showing that while parliamentarians’ preferences may explain significant parts of parliamentary party voting unity, it is also clear that they cannot, except in rare circumstances, explain all of it. Having shown that preferences cannot explain unity, this work then argues that by analysing MPs’ attitudes to party unity, we can understand why MPs choose to vote contrary to what their preferences alone would predict. Applying this logic to parliaments at either extreme of the spectrum of parliamentary institutionalisation, it is shown that there is little evidence that legislators are compelled to act in ways they do not want. Rather, what is found is that they recognise the value of party voting unity and can overcome the temptation to free-ride on their co-partisans. Finally, analysing floor votes in the European Parliament, it is shown that what explains defection are the long-term rather than short-term goals of parliamentarians, complementing the previous findings.

Defence date: 17 September 2013
Examining Board: Professor Stefano Bartolini, EUI (Supervisor) Professor Mark N. Franklin, MIT/EUI Professor Kaare Strøm, University of California, San Diego (External Supervisor) Professor Shane Martin, University of Leicester.
PDF of thesis uploaded from the Library digital archive of EUI PhD theses
Recent contributions in legislative studies field have coined the term mega-seats to denote committee systems and leadership bodies. The significance of viewing the internal bodies of legislatures as mega-seats is that they are conceived as part of the democratic delegation chain. Consequently, such an approach adds a political bargaining dimension to the allocation of mega-seats. During the internal organization process of the legislature, plenary legislators become principals, who delegate power to internal bodies, mainly to enhance labor division, tackle information asymmetries, and channel party demands. This thesis examines the process of payoff distribution in legislatures, using an original dataset containing 350 parties, in 12 Western European parliamentary democracies. The analysis is carried out at the party level as well as at the legislature level. Moreover, I conduct two case studies - Portugal and the United Kingdom - to further disentangle the causal mechanisms used to explain mega-seats allocation in parliamentary democracies. The empirical analysis starts with an examination of whether the division of payoffs (i.e., mega-seats) follows a proportionality logic. The proportionality assumption is borrowed from coalition studies, which have long established that institutional payoffs are distributed in a 1:1 proportionality. Using a new index to gauge disproportionality in the allocation of legislative mega-seats, the first finding of this thesis is that mega-seats allocation in parliamentary democracies is not proportional. Subsequently, I adduce a model that explains this counterintuitive finding at the party and legislature levels. The second main finding is that a party’s degree of disproportionality is a function of its power. Parties are conceived as having a number of resources to spend on mega-seats distribution. The way they spend these resources is constrained by the existence of proportionality protection rules within an institution and incentivized by the value of the payoff. Regarding the former, I find that rules matter in protecting proportionality whilst for the latter I find that the amount of resources parties are willing to spend on a mega-seat depends on the mega-seat’s power. Finally, the third main finding is that, at the aggregate level, the overall power of the legislative branch vis-à-vis the executive branch is important in determining the degree of disproportionality. Powerful legislatures tend to be more disproportional, as executive members seek control of its internal bodies.

Defence date: 21 June 2017
Examining Board: Professor Alexander H. Trechsel, University of Lucerne (Supervisor); Professor Hanspeter Kriesi, European University Institute; Professor Russell J. Dalton, University of California, Irvine; Professor David Farrell, University College Dublin
How is electoral competition structured in Europe? This fundamental problem lies at the core of democracy, as popular sovereignty depends on the existence of a real policy choice, and requires the most preferred alternative being selected and implemented (Dahl 1956). However, there is no consensus yet regarding the actual occurrence of this mechanism of responsive electoral competition (Schumpeter 1942). I develop a new empirical design to test whether a structure of electoral competition in Europe actually exists, based on the idea that greater party system polarization should be associated with a smaller propensity for voters to switch between electoral blocks. To do so, I identify two potential loci of electoral competition in Europe: the left-right dimension (Downs 1957; Bartolini and Mair 1990), and the more recently introduced integration-demarcation cleavage (Kriesi 1998; Kriesi et al. 2006). Data from the European Election Survey (2009, 2014) allow the implementation of the novel design in order to study electoral competition in 27 EU member states. For this thesis to empirically address the question of electoral competition in Europe a preliminary, methodological development has to be made. Indices of political polarization are generally produced using survey respondents’ average perceptions of party positions. I show that this approach leads to systematic measurement error: the problem, known as Differential Item Functioning (DIF), depends on the fact that voter perceptions are subjective and cannot be directly compared, neither within nor between countries. To separate the actual polarization from perceptual bias, I develop a two-stage Bayesian Aldrich-McKelvey (2S-BAM) scaling procedure and apply Dalton’s index on DIF-corrected measures of party positions (ideal points) on both dimensions. Results show that when standard DIF-inflated polarization indices are used, left-right ideology seems to be still structuring European electoral competition. However, once the indices are optimized, using party ideal points, the integration-demarcation cleavage gains the upper hand over the left-right dimension in structuring electoral competition in contemporary Europe. Thus, this thesis makes both a methodological and theoretical, as well as an empirical contribution to the literature in this field.

The focus of my thesis is on the rise of Hezbollah as a military and political group and its significance in Lebanon and the Middle East. Many scholars consider the emergence of Hezbollah as essentially a resistance to the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon. Critical interpretivist approach has been adopted in this study, making use of a detailed history of the Lebanese resistance. Hezbollah’s political, social and ideological character, domestic alliances and the historical governmental neglect of the Shia, the bottom class since 1943 are often subordinated when studying the rise of the organisation. The emergence of young and educated leaders and the military and financial support from Syria and Iran were also significant for Hezbollah. The main topic of the thesis is that there are many historical, social, political, ideological, economic and military reasons behind the formation of the organisation. The purpose of this research is to carry out a broad analysis of the organisation from diverse perspectives to add a new dimension to previous studies conducted in this field. The author is taking a critical interpretivist approach, making use of a detailed history of the Lebanese resistance. The growing influence provided Hezbollah with an opportunity to fill the vacuum of power within the political system in Lebanon to pose as a state within a failing Lebanese state. This project also aims to show that Hezbollah managed to develop its character from purely Islamic to a hybrid of Lebanese national and Islamic identity. The intention includes examining three major wars against Israel that changed the nature of the Arab Israeli conflict. This study will also analyse the impact of Hezbollah’s Alliance with the Christian group the Free Patriotic Movement on the politics of Lebanon.

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI)
Opposing the culture of différance created through American cultural media, this thesis argues, Arab hip-hop artists revive the politically conscious sub-genre of hip-hop with the purpose of normalising their Arab existence. Appropriating hip-hop for a cultural protest, Arab artists create for themselves a sub-genre of conscious hip-hop – Arab-conscious hip-hop and function as Gramsci’s organic intellectuals, involved in better representation of Arabs in the mainstream. Critiquing power dynamics, Arab hip-hop artists are counter-hegemonic in challenging popular identity constructions of Arabs and revealing to audiences biases in media production and opportunities for progress towards social justice. Their identity (re)constructions maintain difference while avoiding Otherness. The intersection of Arab-consciousness through hip-hop and politics of identity necessitates a needed cultural protest, which in the case of Arabs has been severely limited. This thesis progresses by reviewing literature on politics of identity, Arabs in American cultural media, Gramsci’s organic intellectuals and conscious hip-hop. Employing criticism, this thesis presents an argument for Arab hip-hop group, The Arab Summit, as organic intellectuals involved in mainstream representation of the Arab community.

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI)
While the Arab spring succeeded in ousting the long-term dictator led governments from power in many Arab countries, leading the way to a new democratic process to develop in the Arab world, it did not end the old suspicions between Arab Muslims and the West. This research investigates the beginning of the relations between the Arab Muslims and the West as they have developed over time, and then focuses its analysis on perceptions from both sides beginning with 9/11 through the events known as the Arab spring. The framework for analysis is a communication perspective, as embodied in the Coordinated Management of Meaning (CMM). According to CMM, communication can be understood as forms of interactions that both constitute and frame reality. The study posits the analysis that the current Arab Muslim-West divide, is often a conversation that is consistent with what CMM labels as the ethnocentric pattern. This analysis will suggest a new pathway, one that follows the CMM cosmopolitan form, as a more fruitful pattern for the future of Arab Muslim-West relations. This research emphasizes the factors fueling this ethnocentric pattern, in addition to ways of bringing the Islamic world and the West to understand each other with a more cosmopolitan approach, which, among other things, accepts mutual differences while fostering agreements. To reach this core, the study will apply a direct communicative engagement between the Islamic world and the West to foster trusted relations, between the two.