Browsing by master's degree program "Magisterprogrammet i global politik och kommunikation"

This thesis sets out to investigate how the ideas of what it means to be a woman and femininity are constructed and propagated through the film Raya and the Last Dragon, the latest Disney Princess film, in the form of stereotypes. Previous studies show that Disney Princess films, from The Walt Disney Company, produce effects on the behaviour and thoughts of children when it comes to gender roles. As propaganda became associated with totalitarian regimes, studies about media effects rarely coin said effects as caused by propaganda. Therefore, propaganda as a field of analysis lacks a body of literature and a consensual set of analysis rules. This thesis contributes to the establishment of propaganda as a field of analysis, by defining it under Jacques Ellul’s categorisation. The study relies on a qualitative analysis based on the propaganda analysis model proposed by Garth Jowett and Victoria O’Donnell. The empirical material consists of the film Raya and the Last Dragon, and it is available on Disney+, the streaming service of The Walt Disney Company. The findings of this thesis illuminate how the ideas of a woman and of femininity are constructed in Raya and the Last Dragon and allow to understand, against the literature review, if these constructions have changed and evolved when compared to previous Disney Princess films. The results indicate that the film presents a world where women and men are seen as equal, leading it to break previous stereotypes associated with women and femininity. By presenting a female-centric story, with independent characters who have diverse personalities and clothing, who fight and have no romantic interests, the film subverts the trope of a passive woman in a dress waiting to be rescued by a man from a powerful evil woman. Additionally, the film rotates around the relationship between Raya and Namaari, using the patriarchal trope of plotting a woman against a woman to focus on female friendship. Yet, as the filmmakers are conditioned by their positionality, some stereotypes are still oriented by patriarchal logic and a western perspective, namely the omnipresence of a patriarchal figure that guides the protagonist. In the end, besides its contributions to the field of propaganda analysis, the thesis updates the tradition of studies done on the gendered stereotypes present in the Disney Princess films.

Participatory budgeting (PB) is a political process where individual citizens are given the opportunity to express their preferences and interests in public forums, along with the right to vote on specific policies, thereby affecting how the budget is allocated. Participatory budgeting is often seen as a potential solution to the challenges faced by representative democracies. It provides an opportunity for new voices to enter the political arena and promotes social justice by enabling citizens to express their preferences and interests. It also enhances bureaucracies by opening new channels of communication between city experts and citizens and by creating new tools and processes for enacting policies. Since its first appearance in Brazil in 1989, participatory budgeting processes have proliferated, with approximately 8,000 rounds conducted worldwide. In this thesis, I analyzed Helsinki's OmaStadi participatory budgeting process, which took place from 2018 to 2020. It was the first of its scale in Finland, with EUR 4.4 million allocated to various projects proposed by Helsinki residents. Over 1,200 proposals were submitted, and nearly 50,000 people voted for 44 projects to be realized. In the thesis, I first examine the background and theory of participatory budgeting and then discuss the methodological tools used in my analysis. I then move on to the analysis itself, where I compare material coded from the final evaluation and examine it through the lens of the four principles for enacting social change in participatory budgeting programs introduced by Brian Wampler: voice, vote, social justice, and oversight. My goal was to determine to what extent the pilot project succeeded in enacting social and political renewal through this framework. I approached this task by conducting a case study and using content analysis as my tool for analyzing the final evaluation of OmaStadi conducted by BIBU, the research project funded by the Strategic Research Council of the Academy of Finland. In my analysis, I also offer various suggestions and pointers for the development of the next rounds of OmaStadi. My findings suggest that, in addition to its many successes, as a pilot project, there is still a lot of potential for further developing OmaStadi to better achieve the ideals set by the four principles for successful PB programs.

Online disinformation has been identified internationally as a concerning phenomenon due to its potential effects on communication, democracy, and the very conceptions of truth and reality. This thesis aims to examine the question of what factors may make societies resilient to disinformation. Based on the theoretical framework originally outlined in Humprecht et al.’s (2020) cross-country ranking of 18 Western democracies, this thesis analyzes how structural environmental factors at the country level may strengthen resilience to online disinformation in two countries: Finland and Poland. Based on longitudinal mixed methods analyses informed by international indices, reports, and national scholarship, this thesis analyzes the political, media, and economic environments of Finland and Poland to consider how these environments—colored by cultural, historical, and societal contexts—may contribute to each country’s respective resilience to disinformation. This within-case analysis shows the challenges of quantifying and ranking resilience to disinformation and to develop the theoretical framework further. While Finland has historically been found to perform well in resilience studies, its examination alongside the Polish case demonstrates the necessity of nuancing each factor, informed by questioning what each factor actually entails as well as the impact of country contexts. Indicators such as populist communication, public service media, and trust in news were revealed to be more complex than originally outlined in the framework when applied to two different country contexts. This thesis also identified two novel additions to further contribute to the framework: journalistic standards, roles, and ethics and media literacy. By proposing additions to the framework and critically discussing the interactions between factors, this thesis also identifies key areas of future research to contribute to the field of disinformation studies.

The aims of higher education have always been subject to debate and opposing opinions. In an increasingly complex world with many global challenges, the aims of higher education are once more debated. Furthermore, a growing international student body is also challenging what students should be educated for. How does these factors affect the aims of higher education and how should the university prepare students for this complex world? This partly inductive, normative case study of the University of Helsinki consists of 11 qualitative interviews from across faculties with representatives from 11 different international master’s programs. Through dialogical interviews these questions were explored. Martha Nussbaum’s theory of cosmopolitan citizenship and the three abilities of critical thinking, world citizenship and narrative imagination alongside theory on political socialization and the broader scholarly debate on the aims of higher education provide the foundation for the thematic analysis. The findings indicate that the ideals of cosmopolitan citizenship are still prevalent in the interviewees’ thinking about the skills and attitudes that students need. At the same time, many of the interviewees were not sure whether these skills and attitudes were being sufficiently developed, and many said that not enough was being done. This raises questions as to whether these skills, which are often not subject-area specific, can be brushed off as ‘nice to haves’ or whether there are real consequences if not ensuring that these skills and attitudes are approached in the same manner as subject-area knowledge. Based on the alignment between the interviews and Nussbaum’s cosmopolitan citizenship, it can be argued that what makes students good professionals is also central to making them good citizens. This study argues that students need a strong ethical, moral and value-based foundation to make them both responsible professionals and citizens. It should be explicitly planned for. This might be challenged by external pressures pushing for optimization, effectiveness and seeing education as primarily fulfilling companies’ HR needs alongside incentives structures that might not encourage teachers to prioritise teaching these skills. The findings of this study indicates that the skills of Nussbaum’s cosmopolitan citizenship are valued in the program representatives’ thinking, yet there seems to be a lack of awareness as to how these skills are being developed in practice. This study encourages a more active discussion to clearly articulate what the aims of higher education should be in the 21st century and how that should be put into practice.

Thirty years after the fall of communism, the post-socialist countries find themselves in a state of economic dependency. The main argument of the thesis is that the Visegrad Four (V4) countries (the Czech Republic, Poland, Hungary and Slovakia) operate in an FDI-led growth model, characterized by strong presence of foreign capital (especially in export-oriented manufacturing sector), but a low level of knowledge spill-overs from foreign-owned sectors to those in domestic ownership, which constraints the productivity growth of the domestic-owned enterprises (the so-called dual economy). Integration into the global economy, conducted in the V4 countries mainly through ties with Germany, was initially highly beneficial, however, it is increasingly becoming a constraint on further development, illustrated e. g. by the inability to achieve full convergence to EU-15. The aim of the thesis is to describe how did the FDI-led growth model developed in the V4 countries between 1990 and 2019; what was the political discussion of the growth model; and the differences in these two spheres between the V4 countries. This is studied on two levels: the FDI-led growth model itself (described using a set of macroeconomic indicators); and analysis of the political discussion. The conclusion is that the V4 countries differ both in terms of development of the FDI-led growth model (the biggest outlier is Poland, which is less reliant on foreign investment then rest of the group), and in terms of the political approach to the model (especially Poland and Hungary after 2010 take active steps to limit the impact of the FDI dependency; the Czech Republic and Slovakia are more or less aware of the dependency, but take no interventionist measures). Given the high levels of economic growth in Poland and especially Hungary after 2014, there is most probably a causality between the efforts to limit the dependency and the economic development (although other factors, such as the size of the economy, play a role too). However, it is also argued that unlike certain level of economic nationalism, populism is not a prerequisite for limiting the dependent growth and in the long run can actually be harmful to economic development.

Throughout the Putin Era, the memory of the Great Patriotic War became a potent resource for legitimizing the Kremlin’s ideology and political actions. As part of this ‘Call to History’, the Kremlin mobilized cinema’s persuasive appeal to spark patriotism based on the war victory over Nazism. The purpose of this empirical study is to shed light on how history-evoking Russian film propaganda justifies present warfare. Specifically, it explores how the Great Patriotic War myth is evoked in Russian film propaganda about the 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine. This thesis is informed by a theoretical framework that illustrates the interplay of memory politics, political myth, and propaganda. It builds on previous research on the myth of the Great Patriotic War in Russian cinematic memory politics and the Kremlin’s Ukraine war rhetoric. This study relies on a qualitative analysis rooted in interpretivism and adapts Jowett and O’Donnell’s propaganda analysis model as an analytical framework. The research material consists of the film Witness, the first government-funded film on the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, which serves as a case study of film propaganda. The findings illustrate that Witness is a precise cinematic orchestration of Russian war rhetoric. Its ideological constructions echo the primary casus belli: Ukrainian Nazism, Ukrainian genocide, and Western complicity in veiling the war’s ‘true circumstances’. Witness conveys its primary ideological belief of Ukrainian Nazism by evoking the institutional memory of the Great Patriotic War through a myriad of historical references to Nazi Germany’s war atrocities and ideology. This aims to create the veneer of historical authenticity and lend documentary-like truth value to Witness’ fictional story. As the primary propaganda technique, Witness employs the Holocaust as a cinematic master narrative. Besides, Witness uses characteristic propaganda techniques, such as demonizing the enemy, emotional appeals, and the archetypical triangle of victim, villain, and hero. The findings demonstrate that Witness draws on familiar techniques of the war propaganda arsenal. Therefore, this study indicates that historical research on film propaganda of the World Wars is still relevant for understanding films that form part of contemporary information warfare. Furthermore, the findings illustrate how propaganda employs culturally embedded political myths about past wars to frame current wars. Thus, this study addresses the gap in research on the Kremlin’s history-evoking films as part of wartime propaganda efforts.

This thesis examines employee perspectives about the concept of employee engagement and dialogical communication’s role in enacting it. It approaches simplistic and instrumentalist views with scrutiny and explores more complex and profound understandings of the definitions, value, outcomes, and antecedents of employee engagement. Employee voice has been largely absent in engagement discourse, and both engagement and communication research have overwhelmingly ignored communication’s role in enacting engagement. To expand these narrow views, the research questions in this thesis investigate how employees understand the concept of employee engagement, the tensions or problems it may entail, and the role of dialogic communication in enacting it. A case study in a Finnish energy company consisted of semi-structured, individual interviews with 10 employees from different units. Qualitative content analysis combining data-driven and concept-driven strategies functioned as the method of analysis for the interview data. The results of the analysis suggest that in addition to genuine opportunities to influence issues in a work community, employees appreciate transparency and open communication about how their voice had an effect. The interviewees considered features of dialogic communication as important antecedents of engagement, but other antecedents were meaningful as well, such as sufficient resources, clear structures and goals, and formal and informal meetings. In addition, the role of self-determination and autonomy were present in accounts of both the definitions and antecedents of employee engagement. The interviewees recognized both beneficial and adverse outcomes of engagement. Therefore, employee perspectives of engagement are more complex and versatile than suggested by previous research or hyperbolic discourses. However, the multiple meanings attached to the employee engagement concept sustains its previous problems of vagueness and indistinctiveness. The thesis highlights the need for expanding the previously narrow views of employee engagement. Demands for dialogic employee engagement challenges organizations to balance between different priorities, such as providing both agency and guidance, and encouraging diverse views while aiming for unity and shared culture.

A healthy democracy requires citizens to be sufficiently informed in order to be able to vote on the basis of valid information. From the perspective of a Twitter analysis of the 2018 US midterm election, this study is an examination of the relationship between social media and the concept of informed citizens. In the study a hashtag ethnographic method was applied by analysing 350 tweets from the seven days before the election day on the 6th of November, 2018. The tweets were chosen by searching for the hashtag #Midterms2018 on Twitter’s Advanced Search. Both quantitative and qualitative elements were employed in the analysis in order to evaluate whether the tweets about the US midterm election showcased that Twitter can function as a platform for the betterment of informed citizens. Based on the analysis it can be said that Twitter provides citizens many opportunities that allow them to take part in the political arena in ways that were previously unavailable to them. On Twitter citizens have the potential to reach a larger audience, challenge narratives established by traditional media, respond directly to politicians, spread their own political views and encourage others to take part in the democratic process.

This thesis explores state aid’s role in the EU’s political economy. The central research question is: should the EU foster its state aid approach? The thesis focuses on an in-depth analysis of the debate within the EU on the possible relaxation of the state aid framework and its potential impact on fair competition in the single market. The theoretical framework deals with neoclassical economics, Keynesian economics, and geopolitics from a realist perspective assessing states’ power relations. This combination provides a basis for comparing the research problem within the EU and globally. The research methodology is based on qualitative content analysis in an attempt to explain the state aid critique, the motives, and the profitability. Lastly, I apply Mariana Mazzucato’s moonshot-like approach to policy formulation in the light of state aid and harmonise Keynesian thinking into the argument. The findings show the need for the EU to reframe its state aid policy. State aid resources vary across EU Member States and empirical evidence suggests that attitudes towards state aid differ. The clear upward trend in the use of state aid over the last decade suggests an opportunity to move from a ‘temporary’ to a more permanent approach. Such a change should include the creation of a separate body to harmonise state aid and monitor its effective targeting, allaying concerns about possible Single Market violations imposed on the Single Market. The thesis concludes by seeing from a heterodox perspective that there is a strong implication that state aid will continue to be used when situating the EU within great power politics between West and East: USA and China. Hence, the solutions needed are in reframing the approach to how the EU currently considers state aid. It is important to recognize the global challenges that the EU faces when assessing what is normatively worth pursuing. State aid could be a double-edged sword hurting its Single Market while boosting EU’s competitiveness in the global markets, hence the task is to focus on keeping the blade directed to the global markets and silencing the worry of state aid hurting EU internally if it ought to be continued to use.

Sovereignty plays a significant role in the governance, recognition and legitimisation of semi-autonomous jurisdictions. Since the signing of the Peace of Westphalia in the 17th century, sovereignty has played a role in global political and economic affairs, yet for overseas territories and semi-autonomous jurisdictions the lack of independent sovereignty can leave these territorial anomalies without a seat at the table. With technological advancements and the rise of globalisation, the flow of people, capital and information has never been higher. As capital moves across the globe at high speeds, issues of taxation and its regulation arise. This thesis explores Stephen Krasner’s framework of the four types of sovereignty in order to propose a fifth form of sovereignty: economic sovereignty. To introduce an understanding of sovereignty that does not require a jurisdiction to be an independent nation state in order to be recognised, represented and held accountable regarding global economic issues. By illustrating how semi-autonomous jurisdictions can develop a flexible and prosperous system of international participation that does not require full sovereignty, this thesis aims to explore how a new form of sovereignty could potentially aid in improving the global governance of tax regulation. By analysing the positives, negatives and compromises of statehood and sovereignty, it possible to explore sovereignty as a spectrum that falls outside traditional understandings of the nation-state which has the potential to open up new opportunities for international cooperation and communication. The ‘outcome explaining’ variant of process tracing was used for case selection where cases are chosen based on the outcome of a mechanism. As a result, the British Crown Dependencies and in particular the island of Jersey were used as the focus case study, alongside a comparative study of the literature. This thesis highlights the growing role of self-governing semi-autonomous jurisdictions on the global economic stage and finds that independent sovereignty should not be a required criteria in order for a territory to be a recognised stakeholder in international financial and tax governance.