VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Symbolic and ideological representation in national parliaments.

Using a cross-national perspective covering all free and partly free countries, this thesis addresses two questions: What factors are associated with levels of gender representation, ethnic group representation, and ideological representation? And what are the relationships between levels of gender, ethnic group, and ideological representation? Ideological representation regards policy positions in different issue domains, whilst gender and ethnic group representation are concerned with the inclusion of women and ethnic groups in parliament. The representation of ethnic groups is approached in a multivariate cross-national analysis for the first time. Cultural rather than institutional factors seem to be the best predictors for the different levels of gender representation and ethnic group representation. Cultural attitudes are measured with survey questions on attitudes to women as political leaders, and tolerance of marginalized groups in society. The thesis finds that on average quotas for women and ethnic groups are not associated with higher levels of representation, perhaps because of issues regarding how quotas are implemented. Broadly speaking, little effect of the electoral system on any form of representation could be observed. Looking at levels of ideological representation, in line with some recent studies, the thesis suggests that the electoral system is not associated with different levels of ideological representation. I show that this is the case across various policy domains. Furthermore, the thesis finds no evidence for a direct relationship between levels of gender representation and levels of ethnic group representation, but levels of gender representation may be associated with levels of left–right representation. The relationship between different forms of representation might be shaped by the salience of ideological domains and awareness of under-representation of ethnic minority groups. Overall, the thesis argues that cultural attitudes are central to understanding levels of political representation, a factor often neglected in the literature.
Protest and repression in democratic systems: a comparative analysis with a focus on Brazil

This thesis focuses on whether protest affects the levels of repression in electoral democracies and, if so, in what manner. After an overview of the literature, Chapter 2 contains an empirical analysis of the relationship between protest and repression at a global level, using a dataset of 71 democracies over 10 years. The results point to a positive association between protest and repression that is driven primarily by post-1974 democracies. The chapter then develops a theoretical model of the costs and benefits accruing to a democratic leader when deciding whether to repress a protest. The model yields a number of testable hypotheses about which factors will affect the likelihood that repression will be chosen, which are then tested for using cross-national and sub-national data. The impact of constitutional constraints is examined first using the cross-national dataset, which reveals that executives in new democracies centralise power in response to protest. Chapter 4 is a quantitative study of the 27 Brazilian states over a 9-year period using data on the repression of land protesters and political variables. The results indicate that governors with precarious political positions are less likely to promote repressive policing strategies. Chapter 5 uses data drawn from five Brazilian national newspapers to identify whether under-reporting of land protest events might contribute to the level of state repression. Chapter 6 is a qualitative comparison of two states – São Paulo and Pará – and suggests that while tight political control over the police explains repression in the former, the unaccountability of the police and the ideology of the main opposition parties in the state assembly may explain why the latter has a much higher level of repression than would be predicted by political factors alone. Chapter 7 revisits the cross-national dataset of 71 democracies to test whether additional determinants of repression identified in Chapter 6 have an effect at the global level.

Keywords: social movements
Brazil
democracy
protest
repression
Latin America
Advisor: Foweraker, J
Statistical methods for the analysis of genetic association studies

One of the main biological goals of recent years is to determine the genes in the human genome that cause disease. Recent technological advances have realised genome-wide association studies, which have uncovered numerous genetic regions implicated with human diseases. The current approach to analysing data from these studies is based on testing association at single SNPs but this is widely accepted as underpowered to detect rare and poorly tagged variants. In this thesis we propose several novel approaches to analysing large-scale association data, which aim to improve upon the power offered by traditional approaches. We combine an established imputation framework with a sophisticated disease model that allows for multiple disease causing mutations at a single locus. To evaluate our methods, we have developed a fast and realistic method to simulate association data conditional on population genetic data. The simulation results show that our methods remain powerful even if the causal variant is not well tagged, there are haplotypic effects or there is allelic heterogeneity. Our methods are further validated by the analysis of the recent WTCCC genome-wide association data, where we have detected confirmed disease loci, known regions of allelic heterogeneity and new signals of association. One of our methods also has the facility to identify the high risk haplotype backgrounds that harbour the disease alleles, and therefore can be used for fine-mapping. We believe that the incorporation of our methods into future association studies will help progress the understanding genetic diseases.

Keywords: association analysis
HAPGEN
association study
imputation
IMPUTE
allelic heterogeneity
GENECLUSTER
fine-mapping
Advisor: Donnelly, P
Marchini, J
Henry James, Emmanuel Levinas, and the ethics of literature

This study constitutes an attempt to isolate and elucidate the event of personal relations in the later writings of Henry James. I argue that James' singularity rests on his treatment of personal relations in a radical and unfamiliar way. The main goal of this piece is, then, to trace the workings of personal relations, and to understand the peculiar way in which they figure and unfold in the later narratives. By reading James through the ethical philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas, I wish to reconstruct James' major phase as primarily "ethical." Levinasian ethics differs from the branches of moral philosophy in its insistence on the absolute priority and exteriority of the ethical relation between persons: its disengagement from the realms of psychology and consciousness. The ethical relation is envisioned as flourishing precisely in the absence of cognition and thought. Rather than relating to one another as potentially knowable beings, then, persons in James and Levinas relate to one another as mutually unfathomable others. I maintain that this breaching of cognition and knowledge essentially characterizes Jamesian sociality. Read through ethics, as divorced from ideas of consciousness, James' major phase finds its meaning outside the traditional reign of James studies, which takes James as the master of complex elaborations on modes of consciousness. Not consciousness but alterity is James' defining feature, and it is through the readings of alterity that the fundamental event of Jamesian sociality emerges as both primary and unique. "Ethics" thus opens up a new horizon in which the Jamesian is no longer synonymous with consciousness, a horizon which transforms the understanding, not only of James in particular, but of literature in general.

Advisor: Johnson, J
Genome evolution in Streptococcus pneumoniae.

Streptococcus pneumoniae (the pneumococcus) is a bacterial pathogen responsible for >1.6 million annual deaths globally. Pneumococcal penicillin-resistance is conferred by acquisition of ‘altered’ penicillin-binding protein (pbp) genes. The first penicillin-nonsusceptible pneumococci were identified in the late 1960s. Global pneumococcal penicillin-nonsusceptibility rates rapidly increased in the 1980s/90s.
Since 2000, protein-conjugate vaccines, targeting 7, 10 or 13 of the ≥94 different pneumococcal capsule types (serotypes), have been introduced in many countries. Following vaccine implementation there has been a decline in vaccine-type pneumococcal disease and an increase in non-vaccine-type disease. These epidemiological changes result from “serotype replacement” and/or “serotype switching”. The former describes the expansion of non-vaccine-type clones in the absence of vaccine-type pneumococci. The latter describes serotype change following recombination at the capsule polysaccharide synthesis (cps) locus.
To fully understand how pneumococci respond to vaccine- and antibiotic-induced selective pressures, we must better understand the evolutionary history of this pathogen. This thesis describes the study of a global collection of 426 pneumococci, dated 1937 - 2007. Serotype, genotype and penicillin-susceptibility data were collected. Nucleotide sequences of three pbp genes (for 389 isolates) and whole-genome sequences (for 96 isolates) were also generated.
The data demonstrated the long-term persistence of certain clones within pneumococcal populations, and that pbp and large-fragment (>30 kb) cps ± pbp recombination was occurring prior to both widespread antibiotic use and vaccine implementation. The data highlighted the promiscuous nature of the globally-distributed PMEN1 clone and its contribution to the spread of pneumococcal penicillin-resistance. PMEN1 also donated multiple, large regions (1.7 - 32.3 kb) of its genome to at least two un-related clones. Finally, six “Tn916-like” genetic elements, conferring resistance to non-penicillin antibiotics, were newly identified. These included two of the oldest ever described.
These results provided a unique insight into the history of pneumococcal evolution and the importance of genetic recombination.

Keywords: recombination
evolution
resistance
penicillin
genome
Streptococcus pneumoniae
Advisor: Brueggemann, A
Female sexuality, marriage and divorce in the fiction of Thomas Hardy, with special reference to the period 1887-1896

The thesis sets out to examine Hardy's representations of women in sexual and marital relationships, and to relate those representations to contemporary developments in sexual ideology and in fiction. An Introduction considers the way in which ideology exerts pressure upon literary form, and discusses the particular appeal of female characters to Hardy's imagination. The first chapter is concerned with the constitution of sexuality as a subject of public discussion, and with its decisive shift from the area of moral discourse to that of the scientific. The influence of Darwinism and of neo-Darwinism upon ideologies of sexual difference and the nature of woman is discussed, together with the ambiguous political status of much contemporary feminist thought. There follows a chapter on Hardy's experimentalism with genre and narrative voice in his early fiction, and its relation to his female characters. An examination of The Return of the Native situates it as Hardy's first attempt at a double tragedy, of a man and of a woman, intellectual and sexual. "Women and the New Fiction 1880-1900" gives an account of the development of the "Fiction of Sex" and the novel of the "New Woman", and discusses the novel of womanliness, liberal feminist fiction, and the fiction of womanhood. The challenge that these new forms and modes of writing posed to the dominance of realism in the period is discussed. The last three chapters examine Hardy's last major novels in this enabling context of the New Fiction, and focus on the experiments with narrative method that bring about a radical break between Tess of the d'Urbervilles and Jude the Obscure. A brief conclusion argues that Hardy's experimentalism must be seen in its relation to contemporary fictional practice, and not as the product of personal temperament or of his own sexual and marital experiences. The thesis ends with a bibliography of works consulted.
Indian hi-tech immigrants in Canada: emerging gendered divisions of labour

In this thesis, I draw on the particular experiences of Indian hi-tech immigrants arriving in a growing Canadian technological cluster, the Waterloo Region, located in south-western Ontario. This bilateral pattern of international labour migration between India and Canada reflects both nationsʼ efforts to enhance their economic competitiveness in a global knowledge economy: India as a global exporter and Canada as an importer of knowledge professionals. The stereotypical association of Indian nationals with technology work brings both restrictions and opportunities for Indian hi-tech immigrants navigating a racialised as well as gendered technology labour market in the Waterloo Region. My main aim is to reveal a microcosm of gendered negotiations involving individual economic migrants, their skilled spouses, their employers and the welfare state, particularly in the guise of officials regulating migration and access to childcare. The complex set of individual behaviours, ideologies, attitudes and practices all contribute to the emergence and maintenance of, as well as challenges to, particular gendered divisions of productive and reproductive work among these new entrants to Canada, as they lose the significant employment, social and familial networks and supports that typically are available in India. These Indian newcomer families view their responsibilities to their family to be as significant as their engagement in the Canadian labour market, as well as the advancement of their individual careers. In practice, however, familial responsibilities remain a more significant aspect of womenʼs lives, reproducing gendered divisions of both paid and unpaid work that mirror traditional gender roles and ideologies. The labour market participation of this particular group of Indian hi-tech immigrants, and especially professional immigrant mothers, is limited by the non-recognition of foreign credentials and cultural and/or racial discrimination but perhaps to an even greater extent by the lack of sufficient provisions for reproductive work under Canadaʼs liberal welfare state.

Keywords: global labour migrations
technology
knowledge economy
India
reproductive work
Canada
Advisor: McDowell, L
Basis for the biocontrol of pythium by fluorescent pseudomonads /Richard John Ellis

The aim of this thesis was to gain an understanding of the molecular and ecological basis for the biological control of Pythium by fluorescent pseudomonads. A fluorescent pseudomonad biocontrol agent (BCA), Pseudomonas fluorescens 54/96, identified as a potential candidate for commercial development, was analysed together with transposon induced mutants in a variety of assays for anti-fungal activity (Chapter 2). It was revealed that 54/96 had a fungistatic effect generated by a number of different mechanisms, which included nutrient competition and antibiosis. The synecology of this organism with Pythium was then compared to a similar organism (P. fluorescens SBW25) demonstrating a similar degree of anti-fungal activity (Chapter 3). The similarity of the population dynamics of these two strains prompted an examination of the genetic basis for the anti-fungal activity of the second strain, with the intention of comparing with 54/96 (Chapter 4). Again this revealed a multifactorial mode of action of SBW25 against Pythium. Whilst some mutants with reduced anti-fungal activity were deficient in growth on seed exudate others were unaffected, but the mechanisms appeared to be different to those utilized by 54/96. The comparison of strains was expanded to a larger collection of pseudomonad BCAs which were contrasted by a number of phenotypic and genotypic methods (Chapter 5). Various markers were identified which showed commonality within the different classes of BCA, the most useful of which was cyclopropanated fatty acids. These may prove to be a useful marker when screening for new pseudomonad BCAs. It was concluded that a greater understanding of the molecular, physiological and ecological basis of anti-fungal activity of bacterial will lead to the development of biocontrol strategies with improved efficacy.
Low-energy N=1 supergravity and N=2 supersymmetry models

Firstly, scalar quark mass matrices are calculated for a non-minimal SU5 N=l supergravity theory with realistic fermion masses. The squark mixing matrices, analogues of the Kobayashi-Maskawa matrices for quarks, are also calculated and have significant off-diagonal entries. Thus, there are non-zero flavour-changing gaugino interactions between 'up' quarks and 'up' squarks in the non-minimal model. This is in contrast to the case for minimal SU5 . It is shown that in the non-minimal model flavour-changing gluino interactions contribute to the proton decay modes p → μ+K0, ῡμK+ at about the same rate as the mode p → ῡμK+ mediated by Wino exchange. Contributions to the KL-KS mass difference from flavour-changing gluino and wino interactions are small.
Secondly, for a finite N=2 globally supersymmetric theory it is shown that the set of finiteness-preserving soft operators previously derived by Parkes and West is incomplete. The complete set of 1-loop finite operators is derived by a graphical analysis, and it is shown that most of these preserve finiteness to all orders. The low-energy N=2 model of Del Aguila et al. is reviewed, and it is shown that new constraints on the τ-neutrino mass require an unnaturally high scale of supersymmebry breaking in the model.

Advisor: Ross, G
Dalitz, R
Dr. G. G. Ross, R
Vibrations of precast and partially prestressed floor systems under moving loads: development of a dynamic fork-lift truck model for vibration serviceability analysis and its application

This project studies the dynamic response of a composite floor system to excitations from moving fork-lift trucks. The floor system analysed is a system of precast and partially prestressed double-tee elements with a cast in-situ topping. Currently, there are concerns whether the vibrations caused by fork-lift trucks might exceed acceptable limits due to an ongoing trend towards structures of higher slenderness. This study investigates the mechanical background of the excitation and the current design of the floor system. The study is divided into three major chapters:
Dynamic fork-lift truck model A dynamic load model of a fork-lift truck is developed which can be used in the analytical verification of the vibration serviceability of structures. The model is based on tests performed on four fork-lift trucks in various configurations. The tests are analysed for the spectrum of accelerations. The analysis results in a simple two-degree-of-freedom model. Its only variables are velocity and time. All other values are constant throughout a simulation and depend on the geometry of the specific fork-lift truck and its payload. The frequencies and phase delays are constants and they are verified as eigen-frequencies of a three-degree-of-freedom model.
FE-simulation of vibrations of a composite floor system The fork-lift truck model is applied to a three-dimensional model of a composite floor system. The finiteelement model is developed to simulate the construction process of the composite floor system and its influence on the in-service properties of the structure. As part of this work a preliminary investigation of the damping potential of the joint between precast and cast in-situ concrete is undertaken. A linear time-step analysis of the structure is performed and the nodal accelerations are analysed for their magnitude, dependence on the excitation and frequency content.
Field test In order to verify the FE-model of the floor system and the results of the dynamic analysis a field test was undertaken: a floor system was monitored under service conditions. The field data comprise the accelerations of the floor and the forklift truck and the position of the truck relative to the points of measurement. A comparison of the field data and the simulation results proves the validity of both the dynamic fork-lift truck model and the FE-model of the floor system.

Keywords: dynamics
Advisor: Williams, MS
Blakeborough, A
An uncooperative community: revisiting water privatisation and commoditisation in England and Wales

Since its inception in 1989, the private water sector of England and Wales has been enlisted as a centrepiece in debates concerning the merits of privatisation. Advocates point to increased environmental performance and increased investment. Critics note a significant retraction of the early free market aspirations and increasingly prescriptive regulation. However, market mechanisms and liberalisation are once again being emphasised in policy, reigniting the debate surrounding the commoditisation of water. This thesis engages directly and critically with Karen Bakker's 'Uncooperative Commodity' approach to the 'reregulation' of the industry, arguing its tenants must be adapted to accommodate these recent developments. While Bakker's earlier accounts of the reregulation of the water industry placed a great emphasis on the geography and biophysical properties of water, later work by both her and her contemporaries have developed more refined and socialised models of how water and society interact to produce temporary regularities in the material world. This thesis argues that an appropriate means of developing Bakker's original thesis would be a greater focus on socio-historical context when exploring the materiality of water, and hence the degree to which water may be transformed into a private commodity.
Bob Jessop's Strategic Relational Approach (Jessop 2008) is deployed as a means of describing and relating: (1) the degree to which research can identify underlying mechanisms which govern the outcomes of attempts to commoditise water under capitalist modes of production, (2) the role of the state and politics in flanking or supporting the commoditisation of water and (3) the role of existing discursive-institutional structures in introducing path-dependencies and uneven power geometries which in turn effect the outcomes of collective action towards the commoditisation of water. The thesis documents historical developments in English and Welsh resource planning, regulation, and policy from 1945 to 2012 in order to explain the current structure of the industry, its response to water scarcity, and the origins of the current reform programme. It then focuses on the conflicts and tensions between actors in the industry generated by the current reform programme and their role in affecting the degree of success of the programme itself.

Keywords: Cultural Political Economy; Political Ecology; Water Privatization; Economic Regulation; Water Utilities; England and Wales
Advisor: New, M