Digital Commons Network^™

Sexual Abuse: A Multi-Faceted Problem, Marcus Venable

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

On average, US citizens have experienced approximately 400,000 sexual assaults per year, which results in enormous immediate and long-term consequences for individuals, as well as society in general.

In the U.S., the principal method of combatting this crime has been the creation of Sex Offender Registries used to notify the public of the identity and location of convicted sex offenders who may be living in proximity to their residence. In addition to the Registry, laws have been passed forbidding convicted sex offenders from residing within buffer zones around areas of high child concentration [schools/parks/etc.].

The efficacy and consequences of these …

Voting In The Mall - Understanding Political Consumerism In The United States And Europe, Kwadwo Poku-Agyemang

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation explores the various traits that predispose individuals or groups to participate in political boycotts by refraining from purchasing goods and services from companies with the goal of promoting their political beliefs and goals. Specifically, this research considers the effects of political ideology, attitudes toward historically-marginalized groups, and identification with grievance groups shape self-reported participation in political consumerism in the United States and Europe. Using data from the 2016 and 2020 American National Election Survey and the eighth, nineth and tenth rounds of the European Social Survey, I find that although political consumerism has been seen as a liberal …

Plato's Republics: A Dramatic Interpretation Of The Early Cities In Plato's "Republic", Simeon Burns

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation will demonstrate a new methodological approach to reading Plato’s Republic. I develop and apply a dramatic, dynamic hermeneutic to Book II and part of Book III in the text. This method holds that each speech is the product of a preceding agreement or disagreement between two speakers. Agreements lead to the argument’s advancement and disagreements result in a regression to a previous agreement from which to restart the exchange. The focus section is largely on the early exchange Socrates has with Adeimantus. I argue that Socrates is an unwilling participant in the famous discussion on the meaning …

Of Language And Thought: American Political Discourse, Normative Reason, And Essentially Contested Concepts, Riley Clare Valentine

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation analyzes progressive liberalism and neoliberalism as forms of normative reason that redefine specific political concepts, which are central to American liberalism – equality, liberty, the role of the State, and the pursuit of happiness. I contend that language is an important expression of normative reason. Language is how political reason and the norms accompanying it are expressed. I move through Presidents Franklin Delano Roosevelt to Barack Obama, exploring shifts in language and interpretations of political concepts through progressive liberal and neoliberal forms of normative reason. I argue that a tension emerges between progressive liberalism and neoliberalism, and a …

Lucidity And Moral Action In The Theater Of Albert Camus, Stephen Savage

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This study addresses a gap in scholarly research on Albert Camus, first by exploring the place of his theater within his corpus. It divides Camus’s corpus into a set of three mythopoeic cycles: an absurd cycle focused on the Myth of Sisyphus, a cycle on revolt centered on the Myth of Prometheus, and a cycle on judgment centered on the Greek goddess Nemesis. This structure is used to examine how his Camus’s original plays (Caligula, The Misunderstanding, State of Siege, and The Just Assassins) and dramatic adaptations of the works of William Faulkner (Requiem for a Nun) and Fyodor Dostoevsky …

Revisiting Reif And Schmitt: Second-Order Effects In European Parliament Elections, 1979-2019, Jordan Kyje Landry

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Are elections to the European Parliament (EP) truly “second-order” reactions to “first-order” national elections and politics? Ever since Reif and Schmitt (1980), the consensus in both academic and journalistic accounts has been a resounding yes. However, comprehensive quantitative confirmation of this consensus has been lacking, and those studies that have been done have been temporally limited, regionally limited, or at least somewhat critical of Reif and Schmitt’s observations. After setting the stage with a historical account of the EP’s creation and evolution, I attempt to fill this lacuna by constructing a new data set of party-election observations (over 1300 in …

Civil War Interventions: An Examination Of The Roles Of The Media, Political Executives, And The Domestic Opposition, Jonathan Charles Nickens

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation examines how media attention and domestic opposition parties affect third-party intervention in foreign civil wars. Previous research defines some of the ways that political executives in democratic states are constrained in their choice of actions, while also pointing out the influences and limitations of outside actors. This dissertation builds on existing research pertaining to opposition parties and the news media by providing new theories on how these outside actors can push a leader in taking an action he otherwise might not take, such as intervening in a foreign civil war. Using newly collected data, I argue that the …

Protestant Experience And Continuity Of Political Thought In Early America, 1630-1789, Stephen Michael Wolfe

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

The debate on the continuity of American political thought from the 17^th century Puritan settlements to the 18^th century American founding assumes a bipolar spectrum, ranging from strong continuity to strong discontinuity. The degree that scholars recognize distinctively Christian, theological, or Protestant ideas operating in the founding era determines where they are placed on the spectrum. The most popular view today is the “amalgam” thesis, which is a moderate view, resulting from decades of debate. Amalgam theorists argue that the founders' political theory relied on a variety of sources, from classical to Protestant. The current debate centers on …

The Differences Between Political Islam And The Hizmet Movement In Turkey, Fevzi Sarac

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This study analyzes the attitudes of two influential social movements in Turkey: the Hizmet movement and political Islam. Historical overview demonstrates that there are continuous and deep attitudinal differences between the movements. I aimed to see the effects of the different attitudes. First, I look how affiliation to a specific movement shape their solution-orientation. Qualitative and quantitative analysis in this research shows that the Hizmet movement follow culture-based solutions while political Islam follows institution-based solutions. Second, I delve into the relationship between affiliation and social capital. The outcomes imply that the Hizmet movement produces bridging social capital whereas political Islam …

The Religious Impact: Understanding The Influence Of Religiosity On Attitudes Toward Policy Issues, Angela Farizo Mccarthy

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

The purpose of this dissertation is to shed light on the influence of religion on Americans’ attitudes toward policy concerns. How do denominational affiliation, religious participation, and religious beliefs influence one’s views on social and/or economic policies? I consider the impact of religious belonging, religious behaving, and religious believing—also known as the “3B’s” – on public opinion toward contemporary issues in the United States. In this comprehensive analysis, I discover the importance of including the religious dimensions in models of public policy attitudes. The first part of this project is to outline the current state of the literature and present …

Political Parties For Protection And Profit: Explaining Opposition Party Competition Under Electoral Authoritarianism, Michael David Toje

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Despite the presence of open elections and contestable political offices, opposition parties in electoral authoritarian regimes face barriers – formal and informal – that prevent them from attaining de facto power. Yet, these parties still decide to spend the time, money, and effort to run candidates in unfair elections. This dissertation seeks to uncover the reasons that opposition parties decide to compete in such an uncompetitive environment, and what sustains opposition parties though cycles of defeat. It proposes that opposition parties compete not for the purposes of unseating the ruling party, but rather for controlling their own local affairs away …

Aristotle's Quarrel With Socrates: Friendship In Political Thought, John Boersma

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Friendship played an outsized role in ancient political thought in comparison to medieval and modern political philosophies. Most modern scholarship has paid relatively little attention to the role of friendship in ancient political philosophy. Recently, however, scholars are increasingly beginning to investigate classical conceptions of friendship. My dissertation joins this growing interest by examining the importance of friendship in the political thought of Socrates and Aristotle. Specifically, I analyze the divergent approaches that Socrates and Aristotle take to politics and trace these distinct approaches to their differing conceptions of friendship. Through an examination of two Platonic dialogues—the Lysis and the …

A State Of Impermanence: Buddhism, Liberalism, And The Problem Of Politics, Cory Michael Sukala

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation explores the relationship of Buddhist political thought and liberal political thought at the level of first principles. I will examine the tension created by the Buddhist view of political life as instrumental and secondary to man's being as a function of the transition of the Buddhist world into the sphere of Western political life, which views the role of politics as primary to man's nature. In Part I, this will be accomplished through a consideration of the origins of political life and the foundation of the political state in each tradition as viewed through the themes of human …

Participation And Representation: Does Risk Acceptance Influence The Decision Making Of Political Actors?, Joshua Daniel Hostetter

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

ABSTRACT

Are political actors influenced by their acceptance of risk? By political actors I mean individuals in society or government that have an influence on political outcomes. By risk acceptance I mean the degree to which an individual is comfortable with uncertainty and willing to challenge the status quo. The purpose of the present dissertation is to further enhance scholarly understanding of the causal psychological mechanisms that influence political behavior by considering individual risk acceptance.

Kam’s (2012) theoretical framework suggests that risk-accepting individuals are more likely to participate in politics because they seek out exciting and novel activities. She does …

Political Giving As Civic Participation: Identifying Donors And Motivating Giving, Robyn Lynn Stiles

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

The study of political donations has previously been limited to surveys of identified donors and analysis of reported giving data, and oftentimes limited to higher-dollar donors. A comprehensive review of the current political giving literature yields two distinct questions: first, what role do resources play in determining who gives, and second, what ultimately prompts people to donate to a political organization? I utilize secondary survey data in my first chapter to examine the role of resources and gender in political giving. This chapter provides insight to whether gender merely represents the availability of resources necessary for participation, or whether it …

A Political Theory Of The Chinese Stock Market, Liang Kong

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

The Chinese stock market crash of 2015 attracted much attention from both the media and academia. Yet it was not a unique incident. The Chinese stock market fluctuates more frequently and drastically than most mature stock markets. The purpose of this work is to explain these unusual stock market fluctuations through a political lens. Traditional financial models and behavioral finance cannot sufficiently explain the unusual fluctuations of the Chinese stock market. Traditional financial models find that economic forces cannot explain all fluctuations in China’s stock market. Behavioral finance attributes the fluctuations to investor’s irrational behavior without explaining why investors behave …

American Crusade: The Political Thought Of Dwight Eisenhower, John Kitch

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Dwight Eisenhower has long been thought of as a president who did not think about politics in a coherent way. This project finds, however, that Eisenhower was a coherent and systematic thinker about politics. The first chapter explores the sources of Eisenhower’s political thought. In this chapter I establish that he had both the resources and inclination to reflect seriously on politics from early adulthood forward. Next, in Chapter 2, I outline his view of freedom in conjunction with how he thought about the state and society. Here, I find that he held that the state must be powerful enough …

Partisanship, Ideology, And The Sorting Of The American Mass Public, Nicholas T. Davis

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation is a story about the divisions that characterize the mass public. Specifically, it explores how Americans think about politics, and, in particular, how citizens connect their attitudes, beliefs, and, vitally, ideological identity to their partisan affiliation—a phenomenon known as sorting. Practically, this project proceeds in two parts. In Part 1, I investigate the nature of partisan sorting in the mass public. Chapter 2 reviews the extant scholarly literature regarding partisanship and ideology, or the raw materials of sorting. Drawing on this research, I operationalize two types of sorting in Chapter 3 and compare how different measurement protocols affect …

Dorothy Day's Distributism And Her Vision For Catholic Politics, William Patric Schulz

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation is a study of Dorothy Day’s political ideas, her creation of the Catholic Worker movement, and her relationship with Distributism, the official socio-economic teaching of the Catholic Church. In order to fully understand Day’s views, it is necessary to review her intellectual development, and the foundational ideas and documents of Distributism. As is noted in the introduction, precious little scholarship has been done on Distributism, and few outside of Catholic academic circles are even aware of its existence. Beyond that, Day, herself, is not especially well-known, as existing scholarship tends to focus on either her early, Socialist activities …

The Bread She Earns With Her Own Hands: An Examination Of Lincoln's Political Economy, Rodolfo K. Hernandez

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation focuses on how Abraham Lincoln’s idea of “liberty to all” affected his political thought about the intersection of government and the economy. It is a search for Lincoln’s political economy. While contemporary economists focus on a single aspect of the person such as self-interest, Lincoln following thinkers such as Francis Wayland viewed economics as a moral science. I do this by examining the speeches and deeds of Abraham Lincoln. I explore topics such as what he meant by “liberty to all”, his valuing of a commercial society over an agrarian one, and his understanding of the importance of …

The Political Imagination Of Cormac Mccarthy, Drew Kennedy Thompson

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation is a study in literature and politics and proceeds by tracing out the major political themes of McCarthy’s body of fiction and analyzing them toward their logical conclusions. The critical approach in this narrative-based anthropology looks at man first in profound isolation and then progresses through his novels in sequence, in an increasingly social context. McCarthy’s later fiction displays an increasingly affirmative view of the sacredness of human life and of the basic impulse toward community in even the most unreflective of characters; an essential characteristic of humans. To call any of McCarthy’s works a “political novel” would …

The Path Not Taken: Martin Heidegger & A Politics Of Care, Andrea Danielle Conque

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This volume addresses two particular lacunae in the scholarship concerning the intersections between Martin Heidegger, politics, and the political. First, it traces the politico-philosophical path that Heidegger took as he moved on to more ontic considerations after publishing his master work – Being and Time – and identifies three significant ‘moments’ in that progression : the Communitarian and Authoritarian moment; the Moment of Place and Polis, and the Defensive Moment. Second, it presents a robust vision of a nascent ‘politics of care’ in Being and Time, dependent upon three key elements: authenticity (Eigentlichkeit), Dasein-with (Mitdasein), and a special type of …

The Thomism Of Bartolomé De Las Casas And The Indians Of The New World, Thomas Francis Xavier Varacalli

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation examines Bartolomé de Las Casas as a Thomistic political philosopher. It argues that Las Casas intentionally drew upon the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas in order to provide a robust philosophical anthropology that was able to defend Amerindian rationality and self-rule. He uses Thomas and the Classical tradition to disprove the notion that the Amerindians are natural slaves, to uphold the inherent goodness of politics, to protect Amerindian kingdoms from imperial claims and the direct power of the papacy, and to condemn the unjust wars of the Spanish Conquest of the Americas. Las Casas’ Thomism is particularly important because …

Walter Lippmann's Search For A Sustainable Liberalism, Eric Schmidt

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Walter Lippmann’s intellectual journey represents the journey of American liberalism in the 20th century: an attempted return from infatuation with the progressive ideals of inevitable historical development and scientific progress to the stability of human rights and freedom. America’s path to defining its brand of liberalism finds expression in the philosophical works of Lippmann, who was at the center of this struggle. Lippmann was a defender of the liberal democratic state whose value as a thinker derives from his attempt to understand the problem of political freedom (are people competent to self-rule in a mass democracy?) throughout this critical time …

Presidentialism: What It Holds For The Future Of Turkey, Serap Gur

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

A transformation from parliamentarism to presidentialism has been an important debate in Turkey since 1980s. After 2010, discussions turned to creating a Turkish-style presidential system which brings many uncertainties for Turkey. Different scholars and politicians focus on the adaptation of presidential system; however, none of these studies provide any empirical work. They only evaluate the literature and conclude that a presidential system will provide political stability and improve Turkey’s economic, political, and social development. In order to fill this gap, this dissertation examines the applicability of a presidential system in Turkey by using quantitative analysis and country-based comparisons. The political …

Liberty, Community, And The Free Man In Magna Carta, Benjamin L. Mabry

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation is an overview of the concept of liberty and community in Magna Carta. The central point is the ethical understanding of liberty which Salisbury calls the habitus of liberty. Liberty is an ethical condition of the individual which exists in tension and parallel to the social status of Liber Homo. This dual characterization of liberty is the causal factor behind the understanding of Magna Carta as both document and event in constitutional history in the related History literature on this topic. Because Liberty is understood in Magna Carta as a habitus, the particular behaviors associated with liberty, referred …

Space Cops And Cyber Cowboys: An Institutional Comparison Of The Governance Of Space Exploration And The Internet, James Luther Gilley

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

A growing concern for human society is the question of technology, how they are to be used and how can they best be governed. The very question of whether technology is governable remains for the most part unexplored. This work will seek to examine these important questions. By utilizing a historical institutional perspective, two case studies of the governance of technologies that have emerged in the last century will be explored. Space Exploration technologies and the advanced networking of computers known as the Internet will serve as the case to illuminate the question of governing technology. Deep qualitative functional analysis …

Liberalism And Globalization: An Essay On Montesquieu, Tocqueville, And Manent, Trevor Shelley

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Many in the West today talk about the emergent unity of humanity, as social scientists examine the world through “global values,” assessing “global opinion”; economists study the “global economy” and “global finance”; historians write of “universal history;” legal scholars speak of “global domestic politics” and “world society,” while advocating “transnational justice”; political pundits announce the death of the nation-state. One could list additional examples illustrating the same apparent fact: a growing sense of global unity, and a universalist perspective on things social, economic, legal, historical, and political. To what extent, however, is this phenomenon—often referred to as “globalization”—an extension of …

Accountable Actors: Politics And Poetic Imagination In Huxley, Lewis, And Orwell, Sarah Beth Vosburg

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

What does it mean, and what does it take, to practice personal responsibility in the face of political oppression? In this dissertation, I trace the essential themes of responsibility through a critical analysis of three stories: Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, C. S. Lewis’s That Hideous Strength, and George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. No comparative study of these important works of twentieth-century political literature exists. Yet, each of these stories merits the attention of students of character and politics because all three unforgettably portray men who strive to live meaningful lives against the contrived meaning imposed on them by those in …

Revealing The Jewishness Of Hannah Arendt, Jennifer Richard

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Hannah Arendt, one of the most important political thinkers of the twentieth century, passed away before finishing her final statement on politics. Because her political theory is incomplete, scholars have adopted many means for interpreting her work. In this dissertation, I adopt a phenomenological approach to understanding Arendt by engaging with the phenomenological method Arendt, herself, used—narrative. I specifically employ the Passover narrative as a metaphorical framework alongside which Arendt’s political theory is traced. In this approach, four elements of Arendt’s theory emerge to distinguish her thought from the Western political tradition: the role of the mental activities, the definition …