Master thesis | European Politics and Society: Vaclav Havel Joint Master Programme
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This master thesis answers the research question “what is the French perception of Poland's strategic potential?”, and it is analysed within the period 2015-2021. This master thesis consists of six...Show moreThis master thesis answers the research question “what is the French perception of Poland's strategic potential?”, and it is analysed within the period 2015-2021. This master thesis consists of six chapters. The first one is introduction, when the next one is literature review. The third chapter is research methodology. Two next chapters are analytical and based on conducted qualitative content analysis. The first of them (chapter four) is about contemporary Polish-French international relations, and the next one (chapter five) about French perception of the strategic potential of Poland. The last chapter includes conclusions. This thesis is part of a broad academic debate about how Western Europe perceives Eastern, based on the example of Polish-French relations. One of the supporting research questions concerns whether this division is still valid in contemporary European relations. The qualitative content analysis carried out indicates that it is not a decisive factor, similar to ideological differences between the governments of Poland and France. In addition, this master thesis emphasizes the importance of perception in international relations, but also indicates its variability, depending on both external and internal conditions.Show less
Master thesis | European Politics and Society: Vaclav Havel Joint Master Programme
open access
This thesis aims to understand the reasons behind the increase in the duration of government formation negotiations in Western Europe. It argues that there is a gap in the existing scholarship on...Show moreThis thesis aims to understand the reasons behind the increase in the duration of government formation negotiations in Western Europe. It argues that there is a gap in the existing scholarship on this issue. On the one hand, scholars have noted that party systems in the region have undergone profound changes over the last decades, and particularly since the 2008 financial crisis. On the other, the effect this has had on the duration of government formation has not been as thoroughly researched. In order to explain this phenomenon, this thesis expands upon the survival analysis literature, by means of applying recent innovations to the Cox proportional hazards model, such as the Cox with Expected Durations package (Kropko & Harden, 2017, 2020). All in all, the results show that longer government formation processes can be attributed to two main phenomena: the rise in parliamentary fragmentation, and the rise in less stable legislative types as per the typology outlined by Laver and Benoit (2015). The findings of this thesis thus contribute to a better understanding of this crucial development in the Western European political landscape, which has wider implications for the stability of Western European democracies as a whole.Show less
