Events of extreme ethnic violence in Bosnia and Herzegovina and Rwanda shook up the international community in the 1990s. In the years after genocide and ethnic cleansing both countries employed in...Show moreEvents of extreme ethnic violence in Bosnia and Herzegovina and Rwanda shook up the international community in the 1990s. In the years after genocide and ethnic cleansing both countries employed in different strategies for rehabilitating ethnic groups and mitigating ethnic tensions. This thesis focuses on the electoral institutions, and thereby aims to contribute to the literature on power sharing institutions. In Bosnia international actors have attempted to reconcile ethnic groups by dividing power in the country’s most important political institutions along ethnic lines. Though Bosnia has remained peaceful in the last two decades, cooperation between the Bosniak, Croat and Serbian ethnic minorities has proven difficult. The Office of the High Representative has used his ‘Bonn powers’ frequently to pass legislation or remove politicians that frustrated the peace process. In Rwanda the story is entirely different. The Arusha Peace Agreement of 1993 entailed democratization and power sharing between the Hutu government and Tutsi rebels, the Rwandese Patriotic Front (RPF). However, in a society in civil war, where ethnic discrimination was prevalent, power sharing catalysed a genocide. Now the RPF are in firm control of Rwanda’s political institutions. The RPF aims to ban the notion of ethnicity from the political sphere.Show less
This study focused on the extent to which British political parties made pledges and policies for youth in their 2010 election manifestos to motivate them to vote and the extent to which these...Show moreThis study focused on the extent to which British political parties made pledges and policies for youth in their 2010 election manifestos to motivate them to vote and the extent to which these policies were subsequently reflected in the news to enable the youth to be informed of the policies that are relevant for them. Previous literature has argued that political parties are to blame for low youth voter turnout but these arguments were based on survey studies among young people and no research had been conducted on the actual policies parties make for youth. Content analysis was carried out on the election manifestos of the three biggest parties in the UK and news articles by three online news sources to determine the attention given to young people. The results showed that very few pledges were made specifically for young people in the manifestos but that news media did report about these pledges fairly often. It was concluded that the political parties offer young people very little motivation to vote, but also that the media does inform youth about the policies that are relevant for them. These results lend support to the claim in the literature that youth are often marginalised in policy discourse and youth voter abstention could, to some extent, be a result of the reluctance of political parties to sufficiently address youth issues.Show less
