Foreign aid policies vary greatly in their means and ends. Long-term development policies, aiming to promote development and welfare, distinguish from short-term humanitarian policies that respond...Show moreForeign aid policies vary greatly in their means and ends. Long-term development policies, aiming to promote development and welfare, distinguish from short-term humanitarian policies that respond to humanitarian emergency crises. Politicians seem to differ in their preferences, leading scholars to question how these preferences emerge. Existing literature has been focusing on theories of elite competition in explaining why states construct and implement certain policies. However, these theories seem to ignore the concept of political agency, and grant no primacy to the role of ideas and values. This thesis aims to fill this gap by asking how party ideologies influence foreign aid policy preferences. It employs the discursive legitimation model of Van Leeuwen (2008) to analyze Dutch parliamentary debates. Here, it is found that conservative values affect politicians to refer to authorization and rationalization when legitimizing their preferences, while liberal values work through to moral evaluation and story-telling strategies. This confirms that ideas and ideologies do matter for policy preferences.Show less
The ratification of the Paris Agreement by the European Union has determined its trajectory and set in motion the green transition of the European economy. Even though the European climate...Show moreThe ratification of the Paris Agreement by the European Union has determined its trajectory and set in motion the green transition of the European economy. Even though the European climate ambitions seem political of nature, the European Central Bank has recently shown its willingness to support the Union’s climate ambitions within its institutional capacity. European policy research organisations put forward new ideas on greening policy instruments, which also touch upon other institutional characteristics of the ECB. However, the monetary authority is de jure independent of exogenous actors in determining its policies and strategy. Recently though, under Lagarde's presidency, the ECB has for the first time opened up to ideas from civil society, think tanks and academia when defining its new long-term "green" strategy. While the new strategy is still on the drawing board, theories from discursive institutionalism assert that ideas resonate the ECB’s communication strategy, through discourse. When juxtaposing and comparing the results from two qualitative research methods, the study concluded that specific, programmatic ideas are not significantly represented in the ECB's discourse. Instead, more a general and normative ideational shift has taken place where a stronger and more decisive change in tone has become visible in the ECB’s discourse on its green strategy that can rather be explained by other exogenous events and factors.Show less
Depictive power of photography has to a great extent constrained people's perspectives on photography. Also, it is the reality that photography cannot dispense from depiction. However, the...Show moreDepictive power of photography has to a great extent constrained people's perspectives on photography. Also, it is the reality that photography cannot dispense from depiction. However, the depiction is not the only nature of photography, rather it is a kind of art that carries artists' intentions and ideas and a kind of medium that convey the ideas to audiences. It seems that the depictive power and the artist's intentions to some extent are contradictory. With Jeff Wall's constructed photography we may see how the contradiction is solved by a conceptual means. Jeff Wall's works exemplify that how a conceptual photograph could express the photographer's intentions and at the same time reflect the social reality. In such an artwork, there are both aesthetic value and fundamentally true social significance. It might not be able to depict how the world is, but reflect how the world could be, which provide more possibility for photography. At the same time, it provides more space for audiences to participate in the interpretative process of artworks.Show less
