Dissertations / Theses: 'Public institutions – Europe – History'

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Di, Cataldo Marco. "Regional and local development in Europe : public policies, investment strategies, institutions." Thesis, London School of Economics and Political Science (University of London), 2017. http://etheses.lse.ac.uk/3715/.

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The development strategies being promoted in the EU – Europe 2020 and the 2014-2020 Cohesion Policy – aim to supersede the presumed incompatibility between efficiency and equity through a policy approach tailoring interventions to the key specificities of all territories, including the most disadvantaged. In this view, the socio-economic progress of lagging regions would help keeping under control any increase in inequalities potentially associated with the economic development process. However, the idea of promoting spatially-targeted interventions in economically backward areas has been conceptually questioned, and the effectiveness of the Cohesion Policy programme in poorer regions is yet to be convincingly proven. In the policy framework underpinning EU strategies, a key role is assigned to the quality of regional and local government institutions. Public institutions are conceived as instrumental for identifying and solving the bottlenecks inhibiting economic growth and perpetuating social exclusion in poorer places. Nevertheless, local governments may also be responsible for wastes and misallocations of financial resources. While theoretical contributions on the importance of government institutions for regional and local development abound, empirical evidence on their functioning is scarce. Through which mechanisms they influence the design and outcomes of public policies is unclear. Drawing from cross-country investigations and case-studies in the European context, the four quantitative studies composing this Thesis contribute to shed light on these related issues. Focusing on the United Kingdom, the first paper evaluates the economic and labour market impact of EU Cohesion Policy. Counterfactual analyses demonstrate that EU regional policies may have a beneficial impact on the labour market and growth path of peripheral regions. The study warns over possible negative repercussions of a discontinuation of EU financial support to poorer areas, a result of obvious relevance for the country after ‘Brexit’. By exploiting panel samples of EU regions, the second and third papers shed light on the role of government institutions for the returns of regional investments and for labour market and social conditions in Europe. The second paper examines the link between institutional quality, transport infrastructure investments, and economic growth. It shows that improvements in secondary (local) roads are conducive to a better economic performance only in presence of sound regional governments. The third paper investigates the extent to which the factors at the centre of European growth strategies – institutions, innovation, human capital and transport infrastructure – contribute to the generation of employment and to social inclusion in EU regions. The evidence produced suggests that regional government institutions have been essential to mitigate social exclusion issues in EU regions. The fourth paper focuses on Southern Italy to examine how public finances are distorted by ‘local governments captures’ operated by organised crime. Collusions between mafia and local politics have a significant impact on the selection of investments and on the collection of fiscal revenues. The local policy agenda is modified to the advantage of the interests of organised crime. Overall, the evidence emerging from this Thesis suggests that policy interventions have the potential to boost the economic and labour market performance of the less developed EU regions. However, any favourable policy outcome (both in terms of efficiency and equity) is conditioned by the competence and the goodwill of government institutions responsible for defining development targets and enforcing investment plans. When politicians are conditioned by illegal pressures from criminal groups, investment decisions follow special interests rather than general welfare goals. In turn, inadequate governance harms the economic impact of selected interventions. The results are particularly relevant for the lively debate, within economic geography, on the pre-conditions and policy measures enabling ‘smart and inclusive’ development at the sub-national level.

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Di, Cataldo Marco. "Regional and local development in Europe: Public policies, investment strategies, institutions." Doctoral thesis, LSE, 2017. http://hdl.handle.net/10278/3727743.

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The development strategies being promoted in the EU – Europe 2020 and the 2014-2020 Cohesion Policy – aim to supersede the presumed incompatibility between efficiency and equity through a policy approach tailoring interventions to the key specificities of all territories, including the most disadvantaged. In this view, the socio-economic progress of lagging regions would help keeping under control any increase in inequalities potentially associated with the economic development process. However, the idea of promoting spatially-targeted interventions in economically backward areas has been conceptually questioned, and the effectiveness of the Cohesion Policy programme in poorer regions is yet to be convincingly proven. In the policy framework underpinning EU strategies, a key role is assigned to the quality of regional and local government institutions. Public institutions are conceived as instrumental for identifying and solving the bottlenecks inhibiting economic growth and perpetuating social exclusion in poorer places. Nevertheless, local governments may also be responsible for wastes and misallocations of financial resources. While theoretical contributions on the importance of government institutions for regional and local development abound, empirical evidence on their functioning is scarce. Through which mechanisms they influence the design and outcomes of public policies is unclear. Drawing from cross-country investigations and case-studies in the European context, the four quantitative studies composing this Thesis contribute to shed light on these related issues. Focusing on the United Kingdom, the first paper evaluates the economic and labour market impact of EU Cohesion Policy. Counterfactual analyses demonstrate that EU regional policies may have a beneficial impact on the labour market and growth path of peripheral regions. The study warns over possible negative repercussions of a discontinuation of EU financial support to poorer areas, a result of obvious relevance for the country after ‘Brexit’. By exploiting panel samples of EU regions, the second and third papers shed light on the role of government institutions for the returns of regional investments and for labour market and social conditions in Europe. The second paper examines the link between institutional quality, transport infrastructure investments, and economic growth. It shows that improvements in secondary (local) roads are conducive to a better economic performance only in presence of sound regional governments. The third paper investigates the extent to which the factors at the centre of European growth strategies – institutions, innovation, human capital and transport infrastructure – contribute to the generation of employment and to social inclusion in EU regions. The evidence produced suggests that regional government institutions have been essential to mitigate social exclusion issues in EU regions. The fourth paper focuses on Southern Italy to examine how public finances are distorted by ‘local governments captures’ operated by organised crime. Collusions between mafia and local politics have a significant impact on the selection of investments and on the collection of fiscal revenues. The local policy agenda is modified to the advantage of the interests of organised crime. Overall, the evidence emerging from this Thesis suggests that policy interventions have the potential to boost the economic and labour market performance of the less developed EU regions. However, any favourable policy outcome (both in terms of efficiency and equity) is conditioned by the competence and the goodwill of government institutions responsible for defining development targets and enforcing investment plans. When politicians are conditioned by illegal pressures from criminal groups, investment decisions follow special interests rather than general welfare goals. In turn, inadequate governance harms the economic impact of selected interventions. The results are particularly relevant for the lively debate, within economic geography, on the pre-conditions and policy measures enabling ‘smart and inclusive’ development at the sub-national level.

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Miller, William J. "Citizens' Trust in European Union Institutions." University of Akron / OhioLINK, 2010. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=akron1276308801.

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Wilkoszewski, Harald. "Germany's social policy challenge : public integenerational transfers in light of demographic change." Thesis, London School of Economics and Political Science (University of London), 2011. http://etheses.lse.ac.uk/886/.

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This dissertation addresses the question of to what extent growing numbers of older people who might have similar preferences regarding public intergenerational transfers (family and pension policies) will limit the scope of future social policy reforms in Germany. We are interested in to what extent the shift in the country's demography will trigger a so-called "gerontocracy." As a theoretical framework, we combine Mannheim's concept of political generations with a demographic life-course approach. According to Mannheim, growing numbers of a societal group, combine with unified preferences within the group, enhance the group's political power. To empirically test this hypothesis, we use three analytical steps: First, we analyse the future age composition of the German population, including familial characteristics, using a micro-simulation approach. The results suggest that the number of older people will grow substantially over the coming decades, particularly the share of older people who will remain childless and who will not be married. Second, we analyse preferences regarding redistributive social policies according to age, parity, and marital status, based on recent survey data. Generalised Linear Models and Generalised Additive Models are applied to examine what the effects of fdemographic indicators are on these preferences. Results show that older people are less in favour of transfers ot the younger generation than their younger counterparts. This is particularly true of childless interviewees. Third, we explore the extent to which these developments are likely to have an impact on the political sphere. How do policy makers perceive ageing and the preferences structures found? How do elderly interest groups define their roles in light of these results? In-depth interviews with these stakeholders provide a mixed picture: whereas most interviewees are convinced that older people have gained more power due to their bigger population share, there is little awareness of differences in policy preferences between various demographic groups. The biggest challenge for social policy makers is, therefore, to find ways to mediate between these two interesrs. if they fail to do so, a conflict of generations might become a realistic scenario for Germany.

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Varol, Osman. "Public management reform experience of Turkey : effective factors on the administrative reform process of Turkey in the period of 1980-2010." Thesis, University of Southampton, 2015. https://eprints.soton.ac.uk/377154/.

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Zigante, Valentina. "Consumer choice, competition and privatisation in European health and long-term care systems : subjective well-being effects and equity implications." Thesis, London School of Economics and Political Science (University of London), 2013. http://etheses.lse.ac.uk/850/.

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Consumer choice has become a key reform trend in the provision of public services in Western European welfare states. Research on the welfare effects of choice reforms – including greater provider choice for the individual and competition between providers – has largely focused on economic evaluations of the extrinsic (outcome) effects of choice, thereby leaving its intrinsic, or procedural, value unexplored. The overarching objective of this thesis is to investigate the welfare effects of choice in the provision of health and long-term care (LTC) and their implications for equity. The thesis utilises the subjective well-being approach – incorporating both procedural and outcome utility from choice – to measure welfare effects based on quantitative analysis of survey data. Welfare effects and equity implications are examined in relation to: competition in health care in the English National Health System (NHS); choice of care package in the German long-term care system; and individual preferences and views of choice as a priority in the provision of health care in three NHS countries. The thesis argues that both service characteristics – extent of competition, information availability, technical complexity – and individual capabilities – ability to process information, capacity to manage transaction costs, availability of private support – influence the benefits that individuals derive from choice. Results suggest that choice policies have an overall positive welfare effect in both health and long-term care. However, while direct evidence of outcome improvements is found, the empirical analysis only finds indirect evidence of procedural utility. Middle class characteristics, primarily income and education, are found to have a positive influence on the benefits of choice, amounting to evidence of inequitable facets of choice policies. The middle class further exhibits preferences for choice over and above other characteristics of health care systems. Overall, this thesis advocates a holistic approach to the analysis of choice, incorporating its procedural value and paying particular attention to the equity implications of the choice situation, information processing and differences in available options as well as preferences for choice.

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Lodemel, Ivar. "The quest for institutional welfare and the problem of the residuum : the case of income maintenance and personal social care policies in Norway and Britain 1946 to 1966." Thesis, London School of Economics and Political Science (University of London), 1989. http://etheses.lse.ac.uk/107/.

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This study focusses on the relationship between social assistance and personal social services on the one hand and various forms of social insurance on the other hand. During the period the expressed objective was in both nations to replace the Poor Law with insurance, leaving only a small last resort assistance scheme. While Norway continued the pre-war practice of breaking down the Poor Law "from without" through the gradual extension of insurance, Britain attempted a more immediate transition through the creation of a universal National Insurance and a National Assistance freed from the cash-care multifunctional nature of the Poor Law. The comparison of the ensuing development rests on two postulates. First, Norwegian social insurance will be seen to have experienced a more favourable development in terms of coverage and levels of benefits. Second, in the case of assistance the Norwegian scheme covered a decreasing proportion of the population with a service bearing strong resemblance to those of the Poor Law. Britain, by contrast, experienced a growth in the number covered by assistance, in terms of numbers as well as need categories. The services obtained bear, however, less resemblance to the Poor Law compared to their Norwegian counterpart. For both nations it will be hypothesised that the scope and nature of assistance can be largely explained by the development of social insurance. The findings will be discussed in relation to Titmuss' models of welfare. The hypothesis is that while Norway on the whole has reached an income maintenance closer to the institutional model compared to Britain, a paradox emerges when we see that Norway also features a more residual assistance in comparison to services offered to equivalent groups in the UK. These findings are also discussed in relation to theories about the social division of welfare as well as different interpretations of determinants of welfare. The study is in two parts: Institutional and residual welfare. In the first we analyse first the emergence of the models of insurance in the two countries and, second, the 1946-1966 development of old age and disability pensions. The second part focusses on assistance and the changing nature of social work in the local authority personal social services.

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Zanasi, Francesca. "Carers and Careers. Grandparental care investment and its labour market consequences in Europe." Doctoral thesis, Università degli studi di Trento, 2020. http://hdl.handle.net/11572/258594.

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As life expectancy increases, grandparents spend a longer part of their life with grandchildren, which opens opportunities for sharing time, resources, and affection. The present dissertation aims at investigating the content of the grandparent-grandchild relationship and, at the same time, the consequences that becoming a grandmother could have on mid-life women’s labour market participation. It revolves around three main contributions. First, it approaches grandparenting from a stratification perspective, putting forward that grandparents could perform different activities with grandchildren according to their educational levels. Second, it investigates grandmothers’ transition to retirement as driven by the institutional context, which shapes both the extent to which grandparental childcare is needed as support for the younger generations (measured through the availability of childcare services) and the extent to which it is easy and attractive to withdraw early from the labour force for old-age individuals (measured through the generosity of the pension system). Finally, it considers grandmothers’ labour market withdrawal as enabled, or constrained, by women’s previous work history, with two case-studies: England and Italy. In fact, decisions taken earlier in life on work-family reconciliation, on the one hand, could be reproduced in late-life upon the grandchild’s birth; on the other hand, years worked, and kind of job held open different routes for retirement. Taken together, the present dissertation unveils that grandparenthood is a multifaceted phenomenon, which must be studied in a multi-generational framework and by considering demographic, social, and institutional trends of current European societies.

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Ilbiz, Ethem. "The impact of the European Union on Turkish counter-terrorism policy towards the Kurdistan Workers Party." Thesis, University of Nottingham, 2014. http://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/14280/.

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This study seeks to examine the impact of the EU on Turkish counter-terrorism policies towards the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK). It analyses what impact it has had within three distinct periods: the pre-Helsinki European Council (1984-1999) period, the post-Helsinki European Council (1999-2004) period, and the post-Brussels European Council (2004-2013) period. It conceptualizes and empirically investigates the EU’s norm diffusion role by relying on the concept of “Rule Adoption”, and by utilising two norm diffusion mechanisms: the “Conditionality” and the “Socialization” mechanism, and their domestic and EU-level determinants. The thesis argues that when the EU has promoted democratisation in Turkey, it has also implicitly impacted on Turkey’s counter-terrorism policies. It argues for this thesis by generalizing from the following empirical findings: When the EU has provided a credible membership prospect to Turkey, and when the PKK attacks have been at a low-level, then the EU conditionality mechanism has been influential on Turkey’s adoption of EU promoted norms. However, when there has been no membership prospect and high levels of PKK violence, it has been the openness of Turkish political actors that has resulted in rule adoption, in which the social learning of the Turkish political actors has led to the adoption of EU promoted norms as an appropriate way to solve existing terrorism problems.

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Albuquerque, Bruno Alexandre Ferreira. "Fiscal institutions and public spending volatility in Europe." Master's thesis, Instituto Superior de Economia e Gestão, 2010. http://hdl.handle.net/10400.5/1947.

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Mestrado em Economia Monetária e Financeira
This work provides empirical evidence for a sizeable, statistically significant neg¬ative impact of the quality of fiscal institutions on public spending volatility for a panel of 25 EU countries in the 1980-2007 period. Following Fatas and Mihov (2003), the dependent variable is the volatility of discretionary fiscal policy, which does not represent reactions to changes in economic conditions and which may only reflect exogenous political preferences. Our baseline results thus give support to the strengthening of institutions to deal with excessive levels of discretion volatility. This relationship is based mainly on the fact that countries with more checks and balances make it more difficult for governments to change fiscal policy for reasons un¬related to the current state of the economy. Our results also confirm the findings of Furceri and Poplawski (2008) that bigger countries have less public spending volatil¬ity, while the stabilising function that bigger governments exert also contributes to lower policy volatility. In contrast to previous studies, the political factors do not seem to play a role, with the exception of the Herfindahl index, which suggests that high concentration of parliamentary seats in a few parties would increase public spending volatility. In addition, the run-up to EMU and the SGP dummies have the expected negative sign on policy volatility, while for the new EU members, the results also give some support to reduced levels of policy volatility, reflecting recent improvements in public finances.
Este trabalho documenta empiricamente a existência de um impacto negativo, de magnitude considerável e, estatisticamente significativo da qualidade das instituições orçamentais sobre a volatilidade da despesa pública para um painel de 25 países da UE no período 1980-2007. Seguindo Fatás e Mihov (2003), a variável dependente e a volatilidade da política orçamental discricionária, que não representa reacções a mudanças nas condições económicas e que pode apenas reflectir preferências políticas exógenas. Os resultados de base fornecem então, suporte para o fortalecimento das instituições de modo a lidar com níveis excessivos de volatilidade da política discricionária. Esta relação é baseada sobretudo no facto de que em países com melhores instituições é mais difícil aos governos alterarem a política orçamental por razoes não relacionadas com o estado actual da economia. Os nossos resulta¬dos também confirmam os alcançados por Furceri e Poplawski (2008) de que países maiores tem menor volatilidade da despesa publica, enquanto que a função de estabilização exercida por governos maiores também contribui para reduzir a volatilidade da política. Em contraste com estudos anteriores, os factores políticos não parecem ser importantes, com excepção do índice de Herfindahl, que sugere que elevada concentração de assentos parlamentares em poucos partidos iria aumentar a volatilidade da despesa pública. Adicionalmente, as dummies para a UEM e para o PEC tem o sinal negativo esperado, enquanto que para os novos membros da UE, os resultados também fornecem algum suporte para níveis reduzidos de volatilidade da política, reflectindo melhorias recentes nas finanças públicas.

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Gallego-Calderon, Raquel. "'New public management reforms' in the Catalan public health sector, 1985-1995 : institutional choices, transactions costs and policy change." Thesis, London School of Economics and Political Science (University of London), 1998. http://etheses.lse.ac.uk/3231/.

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This research uses a transactions costs approach to examine recent developments in the public sector organisational arrangements. It explores the extent to which transactions costs or other factors drive the institutional choices that legislators make about policy implementation. The area of application is the adoption of 'new public management' (NPM) reforms in Catalonia for the governance of the public health care sector in the period from the early 1980s to the mid-1990s. The methodology used combines qualitative and quantitative approaches in the analysis of data from both primary and secondary sources. The primary sources used here include thirty-eight in-depth and semi-structured interviews with key informants, non-published internal reports from major organisations and an annual survey of all health providers carried out by the Department of Health and Social Security of the Catalan government. The secondary sources include official publications and relevant academic journals and books on the subject. The study analyses both the policy formulation process leading up to a particular institutional design and the nature of the further implementation process in the Catalan health sector. First, policy precedents are identified and the resources and interests of the policy elites analysed as a basis for understanding the output of the reform formulation in 1990. Second, the analysis shows how transactions costs considerations shaped the stances taken by legislators and influenced the final institutional design. Third, a number of subsequent implementation short-falls are traced to some efforts at minimising transactions costs which turned out to be incompatible with NPM postulates. The analysis shows that the impact of politics, that is, the repeated interactions among policy elites controlling complementary resources, shape the way in which transactions costs and other considerations are approached in both policy formulation and implementation processes. A central theoretical lesson drawn from this research is that although transactions costs are difficult to measure, they are useful heuristic tools for analysing the rationale driving decision-making processes on institutional design. However, both the theoretical definition of transactions costs and their actual impact on decision making are mediated by power relations, that is, by politics.

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Widrich, Mechtild. "Performative monuments : public art, commemoration, and history in postwar Europe." Thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2009. http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/54554.

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Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Architecture, 2009.
Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.
Includes bibliographical references (p. 343-364).
The performative monument, as I term an emergent genre of interactive public actions, rests on a new notion of agency in public space, in which political responsibility is performed by historically aware individuals in acts of commemoration. This dissertation argues that public performance art starting in the 1960s provided a crucial impulse for new forms of commemoration in 1980s Europe and beyond. I claim that performance, a supposed antipode to the monument in its ephemerality and dematerialization, did not neutralize the monumental but reinvented it as a new practice: one that involved the audience explicitly through conventional transactions, best understood through the speech-act theory of J. L. Austin (who coined the term "performative" in the 1950s). To specify the correlation between performance and monumental public space, I draw attention to the empirical shift from performance to monument production in the work of postwar Central and Eastern European artists, and to the theoretical continuity that makes this shift possible. Monumental architecture played a role in the early performances of Anselm Kiefer, Joseph Beuys, Jochen Gerz (all German), Valie Export, Peter Weibel, and Giinter Brus (Austrians), Marina Abramovid and Braco Dimitrijevid (from former Yugoslavia), among others. These artists brought a performative component to the memorial culture of the 1980s and '90s, mediating between history and the individual in ways sketched by the ephemeral events of '60s and '70s performance.
(cont.) I examine these interconnections in the passage from confrontation to commemoration through a variety of heterogeneous but related documents: photographs and eyewitness accounts of early performance; interviews and press accounts that evolved their own logic and myths over the years separate from the events; plans and drawings of unrealized monuments, and that most complicated and characteristic form of 'performative documentation,' photographs modified through drawing, painting, or collage techniques to involve their viewers in a collaborative re-imagining of the role of commemoration in public space.
by Mechtild Widrich.
Ph.D.

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Marrone, Jenna. "INSPIRING PUBLIC TRUST IN OUR CULTURAL INSTITUTIONS: ARCHIVES, PUBLIC HISTORY, AND THE PRESIDENT'S HOUSE IN PHILADELPHIA." Master's thesis, Temple University Libraries, 2012. http://cdm16002.contentdm.oclc.org/cdm/ref/collection/p245801coll10/id/162224.

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History
M.A.
The so-called culture wars of recent years have created an ethos of caution in our cultural institutions. Museums often avoid exhibits and programming that might prove controversial for fear of public backlash. This paper examines how public historians and archivists might work together to devise strategies for positive public engagement in controversial history projects. Archives have the power to ensure the public's trust in their cultural institutions, while primary source material can be utilized to promote constructive conversation among audiences. Public conflict will be directed into more productive channels if museums create a safe space for dialogue.
Temple University--Theses

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Thorpe, Benjamin J. "The time and space of Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi's Pan-Europe, 1923-1939." Thesis, University of Nottingham, 2018. http://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/51778/.

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This thesis investigates the historical geographies of the Pan-European Union, and its founder and leader Count Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi, focusing in the main on the period from 1923 to 1939. A mixed-race Austrian aristocrat, philosopher and writer who made it his life’s mission to see Europe politically united, Coudenhove-Kalergi’s was a singular life, which he used to his advantage by weaving his life story into his political campaigning. The thesis opens by investigating the relationship between a life lived and a life told, and about the consequences for researchers attempting to recover his biography. The bulk of the thesis looks at the ways in which Pan-Europeanism both responded and itself contributed to shaping three broad sets of spatial and temporal ideas, each revolving around the notion of a supranational European polity. First, it confronts the way history was invoked both to bring into being a ‘literature’ that would add prestige to its arguments, and to craft a narrative arc that would add the force of apparent inevitability to its arguments. Second, it looks at the way in which Pan-Europeanism employed a form of spatial reasoning that shared many points of reference with the German school of geopolitik, despite a fundamentally incompatible view of international politics. And third, it analyses the Pan-European invention of ‘Eurafrica’ as a neo-colonial system that would offer a ‘third path’ internationalism that fell between the imperialism of the British Empire, and the Mandate-based theory of international governance advocated by the League. Each of these sets of ideas, I argue, persisted both outside the bounds of the Pan-European Union, and after its eventual marginalisation.

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Connolly, Richard M. "Economic structure and social order development in Post-Socialist Europe." Thesis, University of Birmingham, 2010. http://etheses.bham.ac.uk//id/eprint/1065/.

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This study examines the role of economic structure in explaining the different trajectories of social order development across the post-socialist region. Social orders are shown to differ according to the extent to which competitive tendencies contained within them – economic, political, social and cultural – are resolved according to open, rule-based processes. Social orders are also assumed to exhibit a ‘double balance’ between political and economic systems in which political systems will tend to reflect the prevailing economic system within a society. The focus of this dissertation is placed on tracing which economic conditions facilitate increased levels of political competition. Principally, it will test the hypothesis that the nature of a country’s ties with the international economy, and the level of competition within a country’s economic system, will shape the nature of political competition within that society. After several decades of relative ‘bloc autarky’, the ongoing process of reintegration across the post-socialist region has resulted in varying patterns of interaction with the international economy. This study will focus primarily on the links with the international economy that are formed through export sectors.

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Wickramanayaka, Sarath Sisara Kumara. "The management of official records in public institutions in Sri Lanka 1802-1990." Thesis, University of London, 1992. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.283192.

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This study examines the management patterns of public records in Sri Lanka and their impact on administration during the period 1802 to 1990. This covers the period of British colonial administration and four decades of the post independence era. The study shows that during British colonial administration the administrators did not have an adequate understanding of the necessity of developing a proper record-keeping system to support the efficiency of the administration. The failure of repeated attempts at improving the management of current records testifies to the shortfalls entrenched in the system such as the inadequacy of suitable training for the subordinate staff and the lack of attention to the semi-current phase of records. These were not properly detected by the authorities even up to the date of independence. A significant drawback of the system was that its scope was not extended to cover the entire life cycle of the records. It was assumed that semi-current and non-current records would not be useful to the administration. This situation led to the accumulation of records in the creating agencies which in turn caused long term problems in terms of retrieval and dissemination of information. The necessity of an archives was recognised in the beginning of the twentieth century. However, once established the aim of the Archives was to retain records of the Dutch administration for current administrative requirements. Therefore, the records of the British colonial administration were not transferred to the Archives until the last decade of the colonial rule. Even after independence the Archives staff were primarily concerned with the appraisal, accessioning and disposal of non-current records; insufficient attention was paid to semi-current records. The lack of trained professionals, inadequate funding and narrowly defined work programmes hindered the development of a comprehensive archives. Since independence, changes in the country's major political, constitutional, social and administrative systems have not been paralleled by the development of systems to manage public records. An examination of the record-keeping practices in the public administration has revealed the fact that the bureaucrats have not yet grasped the necessity of proper management of records and their immediate contribution to the efficiency of the administration. They have still not considered the consequence of the lack of an integrated policy for the management of records. The study concludes by stressing the necessity for new legislation, the creation of a separate record service, reorganisation of the Archives and training for public administration personnel. It is suggested that records managers be recruited to the public administration in order to bridge the prevailing gap between the archivists and the administrators. They should be trained and placed at the public institutions as officers responsible for managing records at the current and semi-current phases. On the whole, it is argued that improvement in all phases of the life cycle of records is vital for the efficiency of the public administration and for the advancement of the country.

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Smith, Harry John. "Propertied society and public life : the social history of Birmingham, 1780-1832." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2013. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:608bf88d-87af-4dba-993e-8772b86afd71.

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Social history has been much criticised over the past thirty years. This criticism and the consequent turn to cultural history have brought many advances, developing our understanding of the language, discourse, ritual and culture. However, it has also led to a neglect of structural factors and a turn away from the study of collectivities. This has meant that many subjects that class used to explain (social difference, social relationships and collective actions) are often ignored or undertheorized in current historical scholarship. This thesis examines one of these issues: how should historians understand and analyse the process of social-group formation? It does this through a case study of propertied society in Birmingham between 1780 and 1832. Propertied society is a loose category that does not have the connotations of concepts such as ‘middle class’. This thesis suggests that there were many different types of social group and that historians need to differentiate between them when analysing past societies. The most important distinction is between groups who shared attributes and groups that acted together. However, there was no simple relationship between attributes and actions; individuals who shared attributes did not necessarily act in the same way. The first part of the thesis (chapters 1-3) discusses who was included within the category of propertied society and the social and geographical understandings of those individuals. The second part of the thesis (chapters 4-6) moves from the general material and cultural structures of propertied society to consider three case studies that examine a number of processes by which individuals came together to form groups focused on particular discourses, institutions and events. The three case studies discuss the family and the transfer of social knowledge (chapter 4), local government and the nature of elites (chapter 5), and the process of politicization through examining membership of the Birmingham Political Union (chapter 6).

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Anderson, Yvonne. "The analysis and understanding of cross European project work : towards a grounded theory of collaboration." Thesis, University of Southampton, 2003. https://eprints.soton.ac.uk/344317/.

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Summary: I was commissioned in 1994 by the European Commission to lead a project that would produce distance learning materials on cancer education for post-basic nurses across the European Union. In facilitating the process with a group representing eleven countries I adopted an approach based on democracy, participation and experiential learning. The process was researched using grounded theory and aimed to discover the conditions required for collaborative working within the EU and with applications to other settings. The early chapters reflect both the concerns for the project and the interrelated but separate issues of research method and methodology. Regarding the former the original aims and commitments are set against the constraints imposed by funding and budgeting issues, translation difficulties and the challenges presented by dissemination. The context in which the research arose is given within a brief history of the project, set against the background in which this and similar projects were being funded by the Commission during the early 1990s. A review of the technical literature focuses on the Commission's own evaluations of public health projects in the first two action phases 1990 - 2000 and the subsequent adaptations to funding criteria from lessons learned. The embeddedness of the research within the project implementation creates complexities that are addressed first by a number of narratives that seek to elucidate antecedents. Brief auto/biographies underpin and provide a rationale for the development of the methodology that informed the implementation of the project. Narratives provide the platform for the ensuing exploration of foreshadowed problems that led to theoretical sensitivity. The case is made for the adoption of grounded theory methodology, acknowledging the procedural as well as epistemological challenges this poses. Later chapters track the development of the emerging theory by providing thick description about the data, its collection and analysis, as the techniques progress from open coding to explicit theory formation. Early themes deriving from theoretical sensitivity are re-assessed and some original concepts earn their way into the theory whilst others are rejected or transformed. The formal expression of the necessary conditions for collaborative project working in the EU is synthesised in chapter 12 in which the proposition is made for a theory of Facilitative Leadership. The case is made for a substantive theory that approaches multi area formality through its wider applicability across similar settings. The dissonance created for the social scientist in choosing to adopt the original model of grounded theory in its entirety is pervasive throughout the thesis. This theme is addressed explicitly in the closing chapter, in which the major elements of both the project and the research are re-assessed.

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19

Jordan, Mark. "Contextualising and comparing the policing of public order in France and Britain." Thesis, Cardiff University, 2012. http://orca.cf.ac.uk/40799/.

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France and Britain are European neighbors and have distinct policing styles and traditions which are evident in their approaches to public order policing. Using an updated version of David Waddington's 'Flashpoints' model this thesis examines and compares the policing of public order in these two countries. It focuses on the institutional and operational dimensions within their historical, social and political contexts indicating the main areas of convergence and divergence. This research argues that a further review and adaptation of the 'flashpoints' model could effectively operationalise it as a tool for police community threat assessment. It also identifies a number of policy implications for both countries that should be accepted as further good practice guidance. There is a strong case for modification and convergence of approach on both sides of the channel. Neither country has achieved the necessary balance between state responsibility and civic rights required by the social contract. Police community relations in France need to be addressed at a fundamental level and public order policing in Britain requires additional research and review of its operational capability, for it is on the ground that disorder situations are dealt with and it is here that public confidence is won and lost.

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20

Mathisen, Ashley. "Treating the children of the poor : institutions and the construction of medical authority in eighteenth-century London." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2011. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:f891db5f-d9ab-4f23-b685-eac1818fb109.

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It is commonly accepted that, prior to the rise of paediatric medicine as a formal medical specialisation in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, medical care of children was primarily conducted by women in the context of the household. However, as this thesis argues, there was vibrant medical interest in children prior to the development of formalized paediatric medicine. Over the course of the eighteenth century, a network of medical practitioners interested in children’s health sought to establish their authority over the subject and, in doing so, devoted increased attention to children, channelling general medical interest into the basis for future medical specialisation. As this thesis argues, medical authority over children’s health was gradually constructed over the eighteenth century through printed texts, institutional experience, medical understandings of disease, and efforts to devise therapeutic practices suitable to children. Key to these developments were the efforts made by medical men to supplant women as authorities on children’s health. Also crucial was the role played by institutions in providing spaces for medical practitioners to encounter children. Institutions, such as the Dispensary for the Infant Poor and the London Foundling Hospital, increased the opportunities for medical practitioners to gain experience treating child patients. As this thesis demonstrates, it was the children of the poor who provided medical practitioners with the hands-on experience necessary to bolster their emerging claims of authority. As such, institutions and poor children both had essential roles to play in the development of medical interest in children, and the translation of that interest into claims of medical authority.

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21

McCrum, Elizabeth M. "Teaching history in postmodern times : history teachers' thinking about the nature and purposes of their subject." Thesis, University of Sussex, 2010. http://sro.sussex.ac.uk/id/eprint/6266/.

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This thesis investigates how secondary school history teachers at the start of their teaching careers view the nature and purposes of their subject and how they think these views impact on their practice. Data were collected through in depth individual qualitative interviews with eleven teachers completing their initial training. These focused on: how these beginning teachers conceived of the nature of their discipline; the rationale they presented for the purposes of their subject in the school curriculum; the origins of their views on the nature and purposes of history; and how they are manifest in what and how they teach. In order to maintain coherence and to represent the richness and complexity of each teacher's own story these were written, analysed and presented as narrative accounts. A summary is given of each the accounts with three presented in full. The accounts show these beginning history teachers' views on the nature of history as reflecting the dominant discourse that characterises history as an academic subject, being largely Constructionist and emphasising the objective analysis of historical evidence. The teachers' rationales for the purpose of history emphasised broader educational, social and moral purposes. More postmodern perspectives are apparent in the emphasis given to the importance of historical interpretations. Family background, lived experiences, literature and the media are significant influences on the teachers' beliefs about the nature and purposes of history. These beliefs seem to impact on classroom practice and pupil learning in the subject. They influence teaching style, choice of learning activities and the areas of historical understanding emphasised, with, for example, views of the past as an uncontested body of knowledge leading to a pedagogy dominated by the transmission of substantive knowledge; and views which emphasise the more constructed nature of history leading to more pupil centred skills based approaches. Teachers' views on the nature and purpose of the subject are a significant influence on their mediation of the National Curriculum. The National Curriculum for History has increasingly provided opportunities for interpretations more sympathetic to the postmodern orientation but research and inspection evidence suggest that these opportunities are often poorly realised in schools. One reason for this is proposed as history teachers' lack of engagement with postmodern perspectives on history. It is important for teachers to engage with such approaches as without further consideration of their implications history teachers are unable to teach aspects of secondary History. Teachers also need to recognise and make explicit different orientations towards history in order to facilitate pupil learning, to engage pupils and to provide them with the skills necessary to be critical consumers of the range of histories presented to them in society. The research has implications for history teaching, pupil learning and the initial training and professional development of teachers. The case is made for further consideration being given to postmodern perspectives on the nature of history in initial and continuing teacher education in order to improve teaching and learning. The initial teacher education of history teachers needs to ensure that those on programmes have the syntactical knowledge necessary to develop effective teaching strategies and approaches, to enable pupil learning, and to develop their own subject knowledge and ability to reflect on their own practice and development. This research also emphasises the need for all those involved in training to critically engage with subject orientations as where beginning teachers' beliefs conflict with the dominant discourse of history teaching this can lead to problematic experiences of teaching and of teacher training.

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22

Carvalho, Susana Adelina S. G. S. "Nationalism and regime overthrow in early twentieth century Portugal." Thesis, London School of Economics and Political Science (University of London), 2012. http://etheses.lse.ac.uk/404/.

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The thesis aims to explain the role played by opposition nationalisms in the overthrow of two distinct regimes in early twentieth century Portugal – the Constitutional Monarchy in 1910 and the First Republic in 1926. After identifying a gap in the existing literature on Nationalism – namely, the importance of political opposition nationalisms in explaining the overthrow of ruling regimes in homogeneous, but ideologically divided, nation-states – this research project presents a three-phased theoretical framework devised with the objective of explaining the political events that led to the demise of both regimes. Accordingly, this thesis argues that in the case of Portugal, the demise of the Constitutional Monarchy and of the First Republic were preceded by the emergence of two opposition nationalisms, a left-wing and anti-clerical republican nationalism and a reactionary and Catholic integralist nationalism, respectively. Both opposition nationalisms were anti-systemic and revolutionary. They unfolded in three phases, which are common in both cases. Phase One, an opposing intelligentsia created a new nationalist ideology that contested the official rule of the governing regime. During the Constitutional Monarchy, this opposing intelligentsia was embodied by the 1870 Generation (1870-1876), whereas during the First Republic it was best articulated by Integralismo Lusitano (1910-1916). Phase Two, the ideological movement gave rise to a political opposition movement that competed at the electoral level, albeit with little success, and disseminated an alternative definition of who and what constituted the nation. Once again, intellectuals of the 1870 Generation created the Portuguese Republican Party (PRP) in 1876 while the integralists created the Junta Central do Integralismo Lusitano in 1916. Finally, Phase Three, the political opposition movement, barred from exercising power, formed a civilian-military coalition with the explicit aim of overthrowing the ruling regime from power. Between 1903 and 1910, an alliance was gradually built between the lower ranks of the military, the PRP, the Masonry and the Carbonária. In the final years of the First Republic (1922-1926), a civil-military alliance was formed between the higher ranks of the military and moderate and radical conservatives, including the integralists. As this thesis argues, these civil-military coalitions succeeded in overthrowing the regime when a series of economic and political crises put in question the legitimacy of the ruling institutions, and the defensive forces, loyal to the regime, ultimately adopted a neutral position vis-àvis the belligerent attacks of the opposition nationalists.

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23

Meyer, Niclas. "Public intervention in private rule-making : the role of the European Commission in industry standardization." Thesis, London School of Economics and Political Science (University of London), 2012. http://etheses.lse.ac.uk/236/.

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The thesis investigates the role of public actors in private rule-making processes at the example of the European Commission’s interventions in private industry standardization in the mobile telecoms, high-definition television, digital broadcasting and intermodal transport industries. It demonstrates that, far from having replaced public rule-making or representing a form of ‘better’ regulation, the private development of technical standards is constrained by the same collective action and decision-making problems that constrain conventional policy-making processes. Without the facilitating interventions of public actors, private standard setters often struggle to overcome these constraints. The ability of public actors to facilitate the private development of technical standards, however, depends on a number of conditions. First they need to rely on entrepreneurial rather than conventional policy instruments based on hierarchical authority and the power of hard law. Hierarchical interventions—in addition to the well-known information problems—only tend to have the unintended effect of exposing technical standardization processes to political contestation, exacerbating the inherent decision-making problems. Entrepreneurial interventions, by contrast, may facilitate the private development of technical standards without exposing the standardization process to political contestation. While such interventions may raise serious legitimacy concerns, they also depend on a number of conditions, such as early intervention, the presence of industry crisis, and the availability of positive feedback mechanisms that drive compliance with the developed standards. With its focus on technical standardization, this thesis seeks to contribute to wider debates on self– and co–regulation and the transforming role of government in the governance of advanced market economies more broadly.

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24

Rodda, Ruth. "The 1989 revolutions in East-Central Europe : a comparative analysis." Thesis, University of Plymouth, 2000. http://hdl.handle.net/10026.1/372.

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There is a substantial amount of existing literature that focuses on the revolutionary events of 1989 in East-Central Europe. Yet, there are few comparisons which apply a comparative-historical approach to a small set of cases. A large body of existing literature provides the ideal situation for a comparative-historical study. This thesis will test the utility of applying a comparative-historical methodological approach to the events of 1989 in four countries in East-Central Europe. The four countries are paired into two cases. The case of Poland and Hungary is compared with the case of Bulgaria and Romania. A theoretical frame of reference is developed from previous comparative-historical studies of revolutionary events, criticisms of them, and the general theoretical debates which they generate. This frame of reference incorporates a broad range of variables, and is used to inform the application of the method. Differences (and similarities) between the cases are then investigated, and the utility of the method assessed. Additionally, the application of the method allows some current theoretical and conceptual debates concerning the East- Central European events to be confronted. Part 1 of the thesis applies a comparative-historical method of analysis to the cases up to, and including some aspects of the 1989 events. In Part 2, patterns of difference between the cases are identified in terms of revolutionary forms and outcomes. Following the logic of the method common factors are identified as potential contributing factors to the collapse of communism, while patterns of difference suggest that the political, economic and social 'nature' of the communist systems had an impact on the forms of change and their outcomes. It is recognised that the comparative-historical approach utilised in this thesis has limitations. However, the method is shown to be useful for identifying common factors across cases, and significant variations between cases, which can generate potential explanation, and provide better understanding of such revolutionary phenomena as that which occurred in East-Central Europe in 1989.

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25

Tatnall, Arthur, and mikewood@deakin edu au. "A curriculum history of business computing in Victorian Tertiary Institutions from 1960-1985." Deakin University, 1993. http://tux.lib.deakin.edu.au./adt-VDU/public/adt-VDU20051201.145413.

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Fifty years ago there were no stored-program electronic computers in the world. Even thirty years ago a computer was something that few organisations could afford, and few people could use. Suddenly, in the 1960s and 70s, everything changed and computers began to become accessible. Today* the need for education in Business Computing is generally acknowledged, with each of Victoria's seven universities offering courses of this type. What happened to promote the extremely rapid adoption of such courses is the subject of this thesis. I will argue that although Computer Science began in Australia's universities of the 1950s, courses in Business Computing commenced in the 1960s due to the requirement of the Commonwealth Government for computing professionals to fulfil its growing administrative needs. The Commonwealth developed Programmer-in-Training courses were later devolved to the new Colleges of Advanced Education. The movement of several key figures from the Commonwealth Public Service to take up positions in Victorian CAEs was significant, and the courses they subsequently developed became the model for many future courses in Business Computing. The reluctance of the universities to become involved in what they saw as little more than vocational training, opened the way for the CAEs to develop this curriculum area.

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26

Cherok, Jessica A. "Explaining Education: Case Studies on the Development of Public Education Institutions." Ohio University Honors Tutorial College / OhioLINK, 2010. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ouhonors1275426868.

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27

Bain, Katrin. "New public management, citizenship and social work : children’s services in Germany and England." Thesis, University of Warwick, 2008. http://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/3114/.

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This thesis examines the citizen-state relationship in the context of the modernisation of public services as effected by New Public Management (NPM). It explores the extent of the impact of one element of NPM - the shift towards representing service users as consumers or customers - within children’s services in Germany and England. Two qualitative case studies, one of a German and one of an English children’s social service, were conducted. The studies examined conceptions of citizenship in relation to parents who were users of these services by analysing national and local policy documents, local organisational procedures and by conducting semi-structured interviews with managers and social workers, partly based on the use of vignettes. These studies found that in children’s services, the impact of NPM is mainly at the organisational level with regard to elements of NPM other than consumerism. As far as consumerism is concerned, the studies demonstrated that this element of NPM is not central to an understanding of contemporary state-citizen relationships in this field and that the consumerist version of citizenship has had little impact. Rather than being a singular concept, citizenship was revealed as being open to a number of interpretations and formulations. In each country five different conceptions of citizenship were identified. These were ideal-type conceptions that served as discursive resources on which politicians, managers and social workers drew in different combinations, depending on the specific situation and wider context. Although there has been research on the impact of NPM on children’s services, there has previously been little consideration of its consumerist agenda, especially with regard to conceptions of citizenship that come into play in relation to parents as service users, as representations of state-citizen relationships in this field. The conceptions of citizenship that have the most impact on parents as service users derive from different understandings of the family and parenthood in the German and English contexts. Parenthood in Germany is a legal status that includes both the responsibility for the safe upbringing of one’s children and the right to receive support from social services. Parents are perceived by social workers as being the holders of these responsibilities and rights. In contrast, parenthood in England is an identity. In their contact with social services, English parents are perceived solely as their children’s carers, to the extent that they are referred to and addressed directly as ‘mum’ and ‘dad’ by social workers. The thesis concludes that the findings demonstrate that policy initiatives, organisational structures and social work practice impacting on state-citizen relationships are shaped by the wider historical and political context from which they emerge. Accordingly, rather than emerging from consumerism as a dominant paradigm, conceptions of citizenship vary; they are complex, competing and contested conceptions and they combine in a variety of different ways.

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28

Savkova, Lyubka G. "Mass-elite dimensions of support for the EU in Bulgaria (1989-2007)." Thesis, University of Sussex, 2010. http://sro.sussex.ac.uk/id/eprint/2474/.

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This research studies mass-elite dimensions of support for the EU in Bulgaria. The scope is to fill a missing gap in the existing literatures on public opinion and party positions on European integration providing an in-depth study on a specific case of Central and Eastern Europe before accession. In order to present the most comprehensive study, the research employs quantitative and qualitative research methodologies in the form of cross tabulations of public opinion surveys, contents and discourse analysis of election programmes, parliamentary debates and elite interviews. The main research question is what the level of support was for the EU at mass and elite levels in Bulgaria during the accession process, and what the relationship between them was. The results are likely to be valid well beyond the specific interest of the research in all current member states and candidate countries. The main conclusions drawn from this project are that in Bulgaria the utilitarian and proxy models of support explain well the high degree of public support for EU membership before accession and in that respect Bulgaria conforms to the analysis of past academic contributions on public opinion in Central and Eastern Europe. At elite level European integration was perceived positively and debated in broad terms until the Copenhagen criteria for accession were formulated. In the latter part of the transition EU membership was established as a valence issue in Bulgarian party politics but the parties differed in their visions of the EU according to ideology, their coalition potential and positions in the party system. Moreover, the level of support for the EU in Bulgaria was influenced by internal (domestic) and external (EU related) factors associated with European integration. Chapters 2 and 3 of the thesis provide a contextual framework for the empirical chapters by describing the environment in which support for the EU in Bulgaria was formed and developed. Chapters 4, 5 and 6 analyse the public and elite debates on European integration. The concluding Chapter 7 builds upon the thesis' findings by suggesting new avenues for research.

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29

Leitch, Duncan. "International assistance and the reform of public administration in Ukraine : fiscal decentralisation and regional policy 2000-2012." Thesis, University of Birmingham, 2015. http://etheses.bham.ac.uk//id/eprint/6382/.

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The thesis examines the influence of external advice on domestic reform in a post-communist state following the dissolution of the Soviet Union. As an example of this, the research analyses the role of international assistance in the reform of public administration in Ukraine in the period 2000 to 2012, with particular reference to the relationship between the national and sub-national tiers of government. Two empirical case studies, on fiscal decentralisation and regional policy, are employed to provide an in-depth analysis of reform programmes introduced by the Government of Ukraine and an examination of the contribution of external advice to each. The thesis draws on concepts from Institutional Theory, Comparative Politics and Development Studies to explain the interaction between external donors and the domestic recipients of their advice. It is argued that international assistance to public administrative reform in Ukraine is a form of normative institutional isomorphism involving the deliberate transfer of models of state institutions from donor countries where they are regarded as good practice. The findings of the case studies indicate the narrow circumstances in which this transaction may lead to short-term progress with reform, through the establishment of a policy transfer network linking domestic and external actors. However the case studies also demonstrate that in the longer term both these attempts at reform, and the international advice which contributed to them, failed to achieve a sustained outcome. Employing the political economy analysis of development aid the thesis argues that the international community bears a large share of the responsibility for this owing to the technocratic nature of assistance programmes and their limited engagement with the political realities of reform processes.

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30

Dickinson, Hilary. "Learning disabilities in Britain 1780-1880 : perceptions and practice." Thesis, University of Greenwich, 2000. http://gala.gre.ac.uk/6439/.

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This thesis aims to elucidate perceptions and practices in relation to learning disabilities in different contexts over a period of a hundred years, between 1780 and 1880. Previous studies have concentrated on institutional and professional contexts, on informed medical opinion for example, or on focused studies of local practices. Here a wider range of opinion and practice is sought. The Introduction includes a discussion of nomenclature, and explains why 'intellectual impairment' is used rather than the familiar term 'learning disability'. Part I of the thesis explores perceptions of, and responses to, intellectual impairment held by different people in various contexts, while Part II employs biographical methods to examine the life histories of a number of intellectually impaired people in their familial setting. Part I starts with the views of professionals - educationists,doctors (who were at the forefront of the well documented emergence of idiot education in the 1840s) and also charity workers. Concentrating on previously neglected issues, the thesis shows that educational theory and practice offered nothing to families with an intellectually impaired child, and medical dominance had negligible competition. In a chapter on the efforts of charity workers as well as doctors to promote and raise money for the new idiot asylums, the focus is on the notion of idiocy that they put forward. Here ideas from the past mingled with new ideas. The question of the nature and origin of the image, or images, of the idiot is continued in two chapters that explore the varied and changing portrayals of intellectual impairment in imaginative literature. Part II uses family papers in a novel way to investigate the lives of individuals who had an intellectual impairment, and the responses of their families. These families, well known because of at least one eminent member, and well documented, are at the least, comfortably off. But within these parameters there is variation. Augustus, son of William and Caroline Lamb, is from the aristocracy, while Laura, daughter of Leslie Stephen of DNB fame, is from the middle class intelligentsia. This makes the similarity of responses to an intellectually impaired child the more interesting. For the most part, a child's difficulty was conceptualised as an educational, health or social problem, and not in terms of idiocy or a related all inclusive notion. The final chapter of Part II, that explores experiences of the modestly off or the poor, uses, in the absence of family papers, other sources of information. The inclusion of both the familial and private, and the public, contexts enables this thesis to reveal a wider range of perceptions and practices in relation to intellectual impairment during the period than have previous studies.

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Ghadimkhani, Parisa. "Increasing Walkability In Public Spaces Of City Centres:the Case Of Tunali Hilmi Street, Ankara." Master's thesis, METU, 2011. http://etd.lib.metu.edu.tr/upload/12613235/index.pdf.

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ABSTRACT INCREASING WALKABILITY IN PUBLIC SPACES OF CITY CENTRES: THE CASE OF TUNALI HILMI STREET, ANKARA GHADIMKHANI, PARISA M.Sc., the Department of City and Regional Planning in Urban Design Supervisor: Assist. Prof. Dr. MÜ
GE AKKAR ERCAN May 2011, 204 pages Liveability and walkability have recently become one of the major policy topics in the agenda of many cities all over the world because of the negative effects of car-oriented urban developments that have impoverished physical, social, cultural, economic and environmental values of cities. In Ankara, however, the urban development policies based on the decentralization of the city centre and inner city, the impoverished public transportation services and infrastructure, the increasing car-dependent development and the neglect of pedestrians accessibility within the urban public spaces in last twenty years have decreased the walkability and therefore liveability of the city center. This thesis aims to investigate the notion of &lsquo
walkability&rsquo
in urban space, specifically in urban public space, and to identify the measures of &lsquo
walkability&rsquo
. By employing a case study method, it examines how far Tunali Hilmi Street (THS) - one of the major high streets and public spaces of Ankara - is a walkable street and identifies the positive and negative factors which effect its walkability capacity. The analysis on THS is carried out through six measures of the walkability: safety, orientation, attractiveness, comfort, diversity and local destination. Based on the findings of the investigation, this thesis gives recommendations which are practical and which can be implemented on the design of the case study area, as well as on the public spaces that are similar to THS in Ankara or other cities. Key words: Liveability, sustainability, walkability, public space, urban design, Ankara, Tunali Hilmi Street

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32

Moses, Christopher. "Producing an Islamic institution : a London case study." Thesis, University of Cambridge, 2018. https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/275750.

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This thesis constitutes a case study of how an Islamic institution in London is produced as an object of knowledge. It develops an argument by Maussen about mosques in Western Europe, which suggests that they ‘do not have a self-evident, clear and constant meaning’. On the basis of a literature review, he points to how academics have shaped ‘the processes of the production of meaning’ regarding these mosques, something that has political consequences for knowledge. This thesis builds on his work by shifting the research focus to a specific example of an Islamic institution, and including a broader group of actors involved in its production as an object of knowledge. For this research, I undertook an ethnographic study of the institution, holding a junior position within the leadership as a way of learning about its everyday life. This material is complemented by other forms of data, such as research literature, archival sources, media accounts, Council documentation, Parliamentary proceedings, maps, images, and photographs. The thesis has three ‘threads’, which fall into six chapters. The ‘public sphere’ thread comprises three chapters, which look at the institution’s representation by and engagement with three sets of actors: researchers, state representatives, and journalists. A ‘community’ chapter explores local productions of meaning: specifically, how the community’s internal complexity shapes understandings of the institution. Finally, the ‘history’ thread comprises two explorations: perspectives on the meaning of its foundational moment, and its relationship with the history of its built environment. Each of the chapters offers a way of reading the institution, while there are also matters of internal heterogeneity, and further temporal and material complexities in its construction as an object of knowledge. The thesis conclusion proposes the metaphor of ‘palimpsest’ to describe the resultant complexity of meaning in play.

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Hollow, Matthew. "Housing needs : power, subjectivity and public housing in England, 1920-1970." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2012. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:9e2e2766-9360-4fb6-bf9e-39386b18e7fd.

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This thesis addresses two key questions: First, how did those involved in the provision of public housing in twentieth-century England conceptualise the people who they were providing houses for? Second, how did their ideas change over time? These questions are important and need answering because, although there has been a great deal written about the history of public housing in England, there has up until now been very little thought given to the manner in which the council estate tenants themselves were actually identified and conceptualised as subjects in need of state-funded housing. My thesis begins to redress this imbalance by providing an overview of the changing forms and practices through which prospective tenants were conceptualised and acted upon by those in positions of power in England between 1920 and 1970. Using records from local authority archives, sociological surveys, architectural and town planning journals, central government publications, Mass Observation reports and tenant handbooks, and focusing primarily on council estates in London, Manchester and Sheffield, it shows how ideas about what prospective tenants needed from their homes changed dramatically over the course of this period, with the narrowly sanitary and biopolitical approaches of the 1920s and 1930s increasingly being challenged and complemented by a host of new ideas and discourses which placed far more emphasis upon the prospective tenant’s emotional, social and personal needs. As such, this thesis not only adds substantially to our understanding of the changes that took place in the English public housing sector between 1920 and 1970, but also adds to the burgeoning literature on questions of governmentality; contributing in the process to our understandings of modern modes of power.

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Lavallée, Stéphane. "Analyse des institutions municipales et foncières instituées par la Convention de la Baie James et du Nord québécois sur le territoire du Nunavik par Stéphane Lavallée." Thesis, McGill University, 1994. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=26208.

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The present thesis analyzes both the municipal and the land regimes established in northern Quebec (Nunavik) pursuant to the James Bay and Northern Quebec Agreement. First, we will begin with an historical study of aboriginal rights, background for the framework of the James Bay Agreement. We will then focus our attention on the municipal regime of the Province of Quebec in an effort to subsequently evaluate its establishment in northern Quebec. Third, we will analyze the concept of landholding corporation as initiated at the time of the James Bay Agreement. Finally, we will take a look at the extensive repercussions as a result of the creation, organization and interaction of these two corporate entities in an aboriginal context.

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35

Tsekoura, Maria. "Joining the adventure? : exploring young people's experience within spaces for youth participation in the United Kingdom and Greece." Thesis, University of Birmingham, 2012. http://etheses.bham.ac.uk//id/eprint/3783/.

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Youth participation has gained increased prominence within recent policies and is expected to serve a number of agendas and aims including the empowerment of young people, the creation of future active citizens, the prevention of anti-social behaviour and the integration of youth into society. When young people’s involvement in participatory activities is discussed, it is often done on the basis of its expected outcomes, and more rarely in terms of how young people themselves make sense of and use existing opportunities. This study addresses this issue by focusing on how young people conceptualise participation, how they represent their experience within particular projects and how such experience relates to participatory policies. Drawing from different contexts - Greece and the UK - this thesis presents examples of how engagement with similar processes of participation is mediated through the environments within which young people shape their everyday lives. The particular values and strategies that the participants associated with their involvement allowed for commonalities to emerge across contexts. Such approaches to participation are summarised in three profiles, namely the professionals, visionaries and adventurers. In this study, young people’s perceptions of themselves as participants are often in stark contrast with policy frameworks which construct young participants as active citizens in the making in both countries. Processes within the explored spaces for participation were dominated by policy priorities, while minimal space was allowed for a type of deliberation which enables young people to affect the contexts within which their lives unfold. While young people were expected by policies to populate spaces for participation, there were examples of the participants making efforts to reinterpret/contextualise the meaning of participation according to their lived experience, to maintain a critical distance from funding bodies and to enlarge their repertoires.

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Ionescu, Daniela. "Controlling corruption or controlling states? : EU and anti-corruption policies : the case of Bulgaria and Romania, 2000-2008." Thesis, University of Birmingham, 2017. http://etheses.bham.ac.uk//id/eprint/7583/.

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This thesis challenges the idea that the EU anti-corruption policies’ main rationale is to root out corruption. The research hypothesis is that EU anti-corruption policies are used not so much to control corruption as to control and diminish the powers of nation states and to redesign the classic power balance in these democratic states. The actors who end up being empowered are supranational, international and non-governmental entities: the EU/ the European Commission, International Organizations and domestic civil society with a pro-EU agenda. The domestic decision-makers are structurally disempowered by the anti-corruption policies. The lessons derived from the specific experience of Romania and Bulgaria have a general value because their model inspired the recent decision of the European Commission to introduce the same anti-corruption policies across the EU.

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Curto, Millet Fabien. "Inflation expectations, labour markets and EMU." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2007. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:9187d2eb-2f93-4a5a-a7d6-0fb6556079bb.

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This thesis examines the measurement, applications and properties of consumer inflation expectations in the context of eight European Union countries: France, Germany, the UK, Spain, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands and Sweden. The data proceed mainly from the European Commission's Consumer Survey and are qualitative in nature, therefore requiring quantification prior to use. This study first seeks to determine the optimal quantification methodology among a set of approaches spanning three traditions, associated with Carlson-Parkin (1975), Pesaran (1984) and Seitz (1988). The success of a quantification methodology is assessed on the basis of its ability to match quantitative expectations data and on its behaviour in an important economic application, namely the modelling of wages for our sample countries. The wage equation developed here draws on the theoretical background of the staggered contracts and the wage bargaining literature, and controls carefully for inflation expectations and institutional variables. The Carlson-Parkin variation proposed in Curto Millet (2004) was found to be the most satisfactory. This being established, the wage equations are used to test the hypothesis that the advent of EMU generated an increase in labour market flexibility, which would be reflected in structural breaks. The hypothesis is essentially rejected. Finally, the properties of inflation expectations and perceptions themselves are examined, especially in the context of EMU. Both the rational expectations and rational perceptions hypotheses are rejected. Popular expectations mechanisms, such as the "rule-of-thumb" model or Akerlof et al.'s (2000) "near-rationality hypothesis" are similarly unsupported. On the other hand, evidence is found for the transmission of expert forecasts to consumer expectations in the case of the UK, as in Carroll's (2003) model. The distribution of consumer expectations and perceptions is also considered, showing a tendency for gradual (as in Mankiw and Reis, 2002) but non-rational adjustment. Expectations formation is further shown to have important qualitative features.

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Jovchelovitch, Sandra. "Social representations and public life : a study on the symbolic construction of public spaces in Brazil." Thesis, London School of Economics and Political Science (University of London), 1995. http://etheses.lse.ac.uk/119/.

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In this thesis I relate the work of both Arendt and Habermas concerning the public sphere to Moscovici's theory of social representations. I propose a distinction between social representations in and of the public sphere to show that (i) social representations are forms of symbolic mediation firmly grounded in the public sphere, and (ii) public life plays a constituent role in the development of representations and symbols. Drawing on Winnicott's concept of potential space, I show that the constitution of social representations and public life rests neither upon the individual nor upon society, but upon those spaces of mediation that link and separate them at the same time. The concept of public sphere is operationalised along two dimensions: the space of the streets and the arena of politics. The research comprises three empirical studies: (i) content analyses of the Brazilian press, (ii) focus groups with street children, taxi drivers, policemen, professionals, students and manual workers, and (iii) narrative interviews with Brazilian parliamentarians about the impeachment of the former president. The roles of the media, of conversation and of narratives in the shaping of both social representations and public life guide the analyses. The findings suggest that the blurred character of the relationship between self and other in Brazil lies at the very heart of social representations of public life. Threat and fear on the streets and corruption in political life are anchored in older metaphors of corrupt blood and a contaminated, ill, social body. The results suggest that the workings of social representations are inseparable both from the historical features of the society in which they develop and from the processes whereby a community struggles to maintain an identity, a sense of belonging and a location in the world.

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Rimner, Steffen. "The Asian Origins of Global Narcotics Control, c. 1860-1909." Thesis, Harvard University, 2014. http://dissertations.umi.com/gsas.harvard:11587.

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This dissertation traces the ferment of private ressentiment, public protest and political response to the Asian opium trade from the "Second Opium War (1856-60) to the first, multilateral anti-drug summit in human history, the International Opium Commission in Shanghai (1909). Rather than isolating single anti-opium movements and drug control policies by administration, the focus is on moments and dynamics of ideological proliferation, social mobilization and political lobbying across the borders of societies in East Asia, Southeast Asia, South Asia, Western Europe and North America.
History

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Chen, Maria X. "Wine in their veins : France and the European Community's common wine policy, 1967-1980." Thesis, London School of Economics and Political Science (University of London), 2013. http://etheses.lse.ac.uk/933/.

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This thesis analyses the impact that the European Community had on table wine growers in the Midi region of France in the 1970s. This work is divided into the following parts: the negotiations leading to the creation of the Common Wine Policy (CWP) in 1970, its operation in the early 1970s until its first major crisis in 1975-1976, its drastic transformation from liberal policy to one of restrictive control in the late 1970s, the reaction of table wine producers in Languedoc-Roussillon to these changes over the decade, and the change in political relationships and governance at three levels - Brussels, Paris, and Languedoc-Roussillon - as a result of this process. It argues that the first decade of the CWP changed relationships between different groups at the European, national, and local level in two major ways: first, national French government institutions voluntarily decreased their power over a key national industry – this was the most marked feature in the French wine industry of this time period. Second, the CWP helped facilitate the rise of sub-national and non-state actors in policy circles from which they were previously excluded. Empowered by the new responsibilities given to them by the French government, particularly via a newly-created national office of wine, French vignerons began attempting to bypass the national French bottleneck to the Community and directly lobby European-level institutions, either via their own organisations or as part of transnational endeavours. Given the French government’s particularly adamant control of who represented the country at the Brussels levels in the 1960s, this change in only a decade was a significant shift. In analysing this process, this thesis also makes broader comments on the integration process as a whole, adding particularly to the literature on the Community’s agricultural integration, and is the first comprehensive review of the history of the Common Wine Policy, and the first to make an extensive assessment of the impact on local farmers in the Midi during this time in relation to the European Community’s policies.

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Maiga, Sigame. "Les institutions politiques de Jean-Jacques Rousseau." Thesis, Aix-Marseille, 2016. http://www.theses.fr/2016AIXM3081/document.

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C’est en 1758 que Rousseau constate qu’il ne peut achever rapidement les Institutions Politiques, et décide d’en séparer le Contrat social et Lettre à d’Alembert sur les spectacles. En 1761, Il finit de travailler sur une partie des textes de l’Abbé de Saint-Pierre qui lui permis d’avoir une approche claire avec les relations internationales. Ce texte dit extrait du projet de paix perpétuelle de l’abbé de Saint-Pierre se veut une solution de sortie de crise politique dans laquelle les États européens s’étaient engouffrés. Les premières notions telles l’idée d’une citoyenneté européenne ou d’une confédération voyaient le jour
It is in 1758 that Rousseau finds that he can quickly complete the Political Institutions, and decided to separate the Social Contract and Letter to d'Alembert on the shows. In 1761 he finished work on a part of the texts of the Abbot of St. Peter which allowed him to have a clear approach to international relations. This text says excerpt of perpetual peace project of the Abbot of Saint-Pierre wants a political crisis solution in which European states were engulfed. The first such concepts the ideas of European citizenship or a confederation were emerging

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Wilkinson, Sarah. "Perceptions of public opinion. British foreign policy decisions about Nazi Germany, 1933-1938." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2000. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:e4be72fd-3dd2-44f5-8bf6-19922402e397.

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This thesis examines the historical problem of determining the relationship between a government's perception of public opinion and the decisions it takes. We introduce evidence for the social habits of the Cabinet in order to suggest new formulations of 'élite' and 'mass' public opinion. We argue that parliamentary opinion was generally more important in decision-making for the Cabinet, except at moments of extreme crisis when a conception of 'mass' opinion became equally significant. These characterization of mass opinion were drawn from a set of stereotypes about public opinion which academic and political theorization had produced. It is argued that this theorization was stimulated by ongoing debates about mass communication, the importance of the ordinary man in democracy and the outbreak of the first world war during the inter-war period. The thesis begins with an introduction to the methodological problems involved, followed by one chapter on theorization about public opinion in the inter-war period. Three diplomatic crises are considered in the case study chapters: the withdrawal of Germany from the Disarmament Conference in 1933, the German reoccuption of the Rhineland in 1936 and the threat of invasion of the Sudetenland in 1938. Two further chapters examine the role of public opinion in protests to Germany about the treatment of the Jews in 1933 and in 1938. It is argued that perceptions of public opinion played a much more important role in decision-making than has hiterto been thought. The most significant argument posits that perceptions of public opinion were equally as important as military considerations in the decision to refuse the Godesberg terms in 1938. More generally, the way in which politicians used public opinion rhetorically is described and the limits of the usefulness of the term for historians are suggested.

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Szigeti, Thomas Andrew. "Bridge Over Troubled Waters:Hungarian Nationalist Narratives and Public Memory of Francis Joseph." The Ohio State University, 2015. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1429889907.

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Mikuš, Marek. "What reform? : civil societies, state transformation and social antagonism in 'European Serbia'." Thesis, London School of Economics and Political Science (University of London), 2013. http://etheses.lse.ac.uk/788/.

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This thesis examines a set of intentional transformations of the government of society and individuals in the globalising (‘Europeanising’) and neoliberalising Serbia in 2010–11. It asks two closely related kinds of question about these ‘reforms’ – first, what reform is really there, of what depth, and second, whose reform is it, in and against whose interests? This inquiry strives to identify some of the dominant transformational tendencies and resistances to these, and to relate these governmental projects and their actual achievements to the conflicted interests and identities in Serbian society that undergoes profound restructuring in the context of a prolonged economic decline and political crisis. Based on ethnographic engagements with various kinds of nongovernmental organisations, social movements and public institutions, the reforms are traced at the interface of the ‘state’ and ‘civil society’ so as to examine how their mutual relations are being reimagined and boundaries redrawn. Civil society is conceptualised, building on anthropological and Gramscian approaches, as a set of ideas and practices that continually reconstitute and mediate the relationships of ‘state,’ ‘society’ and ‘economy,’ and which reproduce as well as challenge domination by consent – cultural and ideological hegemony. While a particular liberal understanding of civil society has become hegemonic in Serbia, in social reality there is a plurality of ‘civil societies’ – scenes of associational practice that articulate diverse visions of a legitimate social order and perceive each other as antagonists rather than parts of a single harmonious civil society. The discourses and practices of three such scenes – liberal, nationalist and post-Yugoslav – and their relationships to the perspectives and interests of various social groups are examined in order to identify some of the key moments of social antagonism about reform in contemporary Serbia.

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Picardo, Edward Nicholas. "The war and siege : language policy and practice in Gibraltar, 1940-1985." Thesis, University of Birmingham, 2012. http://etheses.bham.ac.uk//id/eprint/1500/.

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My thesis explores language policy and practice in the history of the people of Gibraltar between 1940 and 1985. This period covers the wartime Evacuation and the Spanish border restrictions and closure, and it is also fundamental in the emergence of Gibraltarian identity and democratic rights. My contention is that these developments were facilitated by growing accessibility to the English language. From being largely the preserve of the colonial establishment and the elite, it emerged as pre-eminent in official use, the media and culture, and higher oral registers. This change was hastened by the Evacuation, which increased awareness of the need for English. The Clifford Report of 1944 reformed the whole education system and gave a central role to English. Clifford, Gibraltar’s Colonial Secretary, and indeed educationalists at the Colonial Office, proved themselves far more enlightened than their governing counterparts in Gibraltar. Their reform greatly contributed to political development in the following decades. With the Spanish border closure, the English language and the sense of attachment to Britain gained further consolidation, co-existing with the move away from overt colonialism. In my examination of language behaviour in Gibraltar, including bilingualism and the use of Spanish, interview material supplements written sources.

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Bratu, Roxana. "Actors, practices and networks of corruption : the case of Romania's accession to European Union funding." Thesis, London School of Economics and Political Science (University of London), 2012. http://etheses.lse.ac.uk/891/.

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This thesis offers new insights into the challenges and opportunities brought by European Union (EU) integration policies by taking as a case study the process of accessing EU funding in Romania and its impact on the performance and reproduction of contemporary entrepreneurial identities. It is based on 16 months of ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Romania between June 2007 and September 2008. The thesis argues that EU funding - as an economic process shaped by EU anticorruption practices, policies and assumptions – configures new political and economic subjects through intertwined vocabularies of corruption and crime, a mix of formal and informal entrepreneurial practices and the commodification of finance. This dynamic process concomitantly enables Romania’s top-down integration into the EU through the adoption of transnational regulations, institutions and anxieties and Romania’s bottom-up integration into the EU through the assimilation of the EU funding regulations into the vernacular practices of doing business.

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St, John Sarah K. "The struggle for power in education : the nation-state versus the supranational in the evolution of European Union education policy, 1945-1976." Thesis, University of Glasgow, 2018. http://theses.gla.ac.uk/30580/.

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European integration is a curious concept. There is stark disparity between some areas of policy that seemingly glide through the integration process, while others lag behind and despite decades of attempts, never reach the status of a fully-fledged area of European Union competence. Once such area is education. Through integration theories, political scientists have sought to explain how policies develop and are implemented at European level. This interdisciplinary study borrows the opposing theories of neofunctionalism and intergovernmentalism with the aim of identifying the influence of the supranational and the strength of the state in the evolution of a European Union education policy. It seeks to pinpoint how education can be placed within the construction of Europe and the process of early European integration to determine the feasibility of these integration theories in explaining the journey of education policy in the European context. Historical methodology is adopted, based on archival research at the Historical Archives of the European Union, using documentary analysis to trace the history of activities and initiatives relating to education between 1945-1976. Collective biography methodology is adopted to give space to the role of states in driving the scope, direction and extent of integration based on domestic interests, while a case study implements methodological triangulation to stress-test the case of education. The study proposes that education is a complex case that does not slot neatly into a theory of integration. Education is multifaceted, a cultural – while at the same time – economic component: it is woven into the fabric of nation-states, it contributes to increasing global competitiveness, it diversifies across borders, and its development is attached to temporality and context. Despite suggestions that the state is diminishing in power, education serves as an example to demonstrate that the state is very much alive and at the centre of certain areas of policy development at European level.

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Buonamano, Roberto Law Faculty of Law UNSW. "A genealogy of subjective rights." Awarded by:University of New South Wales. School of Law, 2006. http://handle.unsw.edu.au/1959.4/31948.

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This dissertation is an historical and philosophical study on the development of a subjective concept of individual rights. It takes the form of a history of ideas informed by genealogical methods of inquiry. Rather than seeking an origin for and underlying truth to human rights, it treats human rights as a product of various historical developments which are capable of being investigated in terms of their contingency as well as their continuous traditions. The thesis begins with an analysis of political theory in ancient Greek thought, primarily as a means of suggesting possible alternative political philosophies to the rights-based approach dominant in modern Western societies. The thesis then considers the theologicalpolitical discourse on sovereignty in the early Middle Ages, revolving around the doctrine of divine right and influenced by the function of the Christian Church in defining the nature of government. This is followed by an examination of the emergence of hierarchical, feudal relations and the formulation of feudal rights as based on proprietary notions and coinciding with individual liberties. In the following chapter there is a discussion of the juridical construction of sovereign power that emerged from the reception of Roman law and the development of canon law, the influence of legal textuality on the granting of rights and liberties, and the emergence of a discourse on public right as a way of defining the relationship between the prince and his subjects and thus delimiting sovereign authority. Finally, the thesis considers the legacy of the theory of natural rights and its relationship to forms of liberty, with an analysis of: firstly, the idea of natural rights that developed through canon law and the discussions surrounding the Franciscan poverty disputes; secondly, the role of property rights in the formulation of the rights of liberty; thirdly, the Christian understanding of liberty as a subjective attribute or power through the theo-ontological theory of human nature as represented by the free will; and fourthly, the transformation in Renaissance and early modern legal and political theory of the concept of liberty into a political doctrine about individual autonomy and inherent freedom. The purpose of the dissertation is to describe the multiple and complex historical processes from which the idea of subjective rights has emerged, as a means of understanding how human rights have come to play a seemingly essential role in modern legal and political discourses and practices.

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Matthew, Ayibakuro Noah. "The approach to corruption in law and development : towards a rights-based perspective in Sub-Saharan Africa." Thesis, University of Birmingham, 2017. http://etheses.bham.ac.uk//id/eprint/7887/.

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Using the various moments of ideological change in the law and development movement as an analytical framework, this thesis examines the indifference to corruption in international development in the period preceding the 1990s, and the attributes, challenges and prospects of the current global anticorruption agenda in sub- Saharan Africa. With Nigeria as a case study, the research finds that the approach to corruption has been overwhelmingly influenced by the respective predominant global development ideology during each moment, whilst ignoring local experiences and efforts to address corruption. Hence, despite the heightened attention to the issue in the last couple of decades, anticorruption reforms have failed to enhance pre-existing efforts to deal with corruption in countries. The thesis concludes that the currently evolving paradigm of a rights-based approach to anticorruption demonstrates a promising response to some of the shortcomings of this approach to corruption over the years. However, the nature of its conception and proposals for its implementation reaffirms the entrenched nature of these shortcomings and their inherence in the overall strategy of law and development reforms in countries in sub-Saharan Africa.

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Bilgi, Seniz. "A Comparative Study Of The European Union." Master's thesis, METU, 2007. http://etd.lib.metu.edu.tr/upload/3/12608588/index.pdf.

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This thesis mainly analyses the change in the enlargement strategy of the European Union (EU) especially in the case of Turkey. Although the Union has always sought ways to enlarge, it has been rather reluctant as far as accepting Turkey as a full member into the EU is concerned. In 2004, the EU enlarged so as to include the Central and East European countries (CEECs), but Romania and Bulgaria were left behind since they did not fulfill the membership criteria at the time. However, these two countries became members on January 1, 2007 and Turkey is still waiting in the line to become a member. Therefore, the writer has chosen Turkey and Bulgaria in order to analyze the change in the enlargement strategy of the Union. The medium to arrive at conclusions as regards the strategy is mainly the environmental aid as the two countries display noticeable differences. Furthermore, the enlargement strategy papers prepared by the European Commission have also been analyzed in order to see the changing attitude of the EU especially by re-introducing the concept of absorption capacity. Even though the Union states it keeps its open door to new members, the new enlargement strategy proves that it will be rather difficult for the candidate states and especially Turkey to enter into the EU.

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Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Public institutions – Europe – History'

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