Every political party has three lives: a public life, a private life and a secret life. Publicly, parties campaign for office and, if elected, form governments. Privately, parties attract funding, formulate policy positions ...

This thesis investigates lobbying by stakeholders, i.e. firms, NGOs and industry organisations as well as other private and public bodies from the international to local level, in the context of the European Commission's ...

This thesis contains a critical analysis of deliberative democracy. I present the normative arguments for the theory in the context of a discussion of how to explicate democracy more generally, and I assess these ...

This thesis examines interest groups' partieipation in environmental policymaking in the European Union. It investigates two fundamental questions that are essential to understanding the EU's policymaking system: first, ...

This dissertation studies the descriptive (i.e. numeric) representation of women in national parliaments in three related but independent papers. The empirical analysis presented in the papers is based on two original data ...

This thesis examines the policy making process of the European Union (EU), an entity whose reach and depth is in constant evolution. More specifically, it evaluates the degree to which two competing theories - liberal ...

Between October 1988 and January 1992, one of the most interesting attempts to move away from authoritarian rule towards democratic governance occurred in Algeria. While the attention of the world was focused on events ...

The seemingly increasing frequency and deadliness of what are often termed religious conflicts have led to a revival of studies attempting to explain the relationship between religion and violence. These studies are generally ...

This research is a systematic and rigorous analysis of the types of normative justifications used by various groups that employ, threaten, or advocate the use of terrorism or political violence. It examines the internal ...

This study contributes to the general question of whether the democratic functioning of civil society organisations is a necessary condition for building a democratic political culture. Specifically, it empirically tests ...