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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences

Election Day Registration And Same Day Registration In State Legislative Districts, Rachel Fuentes Dec 2022

Election Day Registration And Same Day Registration In State Legislative Districts, Rachel Fuentes

Doctoral Dissertations

Decades of research into the effects of voter registration requirements on turnout has found that voter registration disproportionately suppresses turnout among marginalized racial and socioeconomic groups that traditionally are represented by the Democratic Party. Research also shows that enacting Same Day or Election Day Registration (EDR/SDR) increases voter turnout for Democratic candidates in national elections. The conclusion drawn has been that EDR/SDR increases the representation of marginalized groups. The study in this paper challenges these findings in three ways. First, although EDR/SDR results in a larger total democratic vote, the claims of increased representation may be overstated. This study of …


Conscientious Acceptance: The Impact Of Public Support On Conscription, Simon Rotzer Dec 2022

Conscientious Acceptance: The Impact Of Public Support On Conscription, Simon Rotzer

Doctoral Dissertations

“What makes a state maintain conscription, especially during peacetime?” – Conventional wisdom argues that forced recruitment is a practical and efficient tool to increase a country’s security, especially during episodes of high threat. However, the policy loses its appeal in times of peace when its downsides become more evident. Consequentially, it should be expected that states would rid themselves of the draft when there are no security-related reasons to keep it. Yet, empirical reality paints a different picture, with more than half of all conscription cases existing under no active threat. This dissertation proposes that it is the support of …


Three Essays On The Political Economy Of The Cfa Franc, Francis Perez Oct 2022

Three Essays On The Political Economy Of The Cfa Franc, Francis Perez

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation is organized into three essays. The second essay provides a historical overview of the CFA franc and explores why the CFA franc has survived for so long. It argues that a historical and dialectical materialist analysis of the CFA’s history can best explain both its extraordinary longevity and the periodic major reforms to its functioning. The third essay assesses whether the Central Bank of West African States (BCEAO) has an independent monetary policy by examining the relationships between BCEAO’s foreign reserves and base money, and between BCEAO and the European Central Banks’s policy rates. The fourth essay evaluates …


Debris Of Progress: A Political Ethnography Of Critical Infrastructure, Ethan Tupelo Oct 2022

Debris Of Progress: A Political Ethnography Of Critical Infrastructure, Ethan Tupelo

Doctoral Dissertations

In this dissertation, I advance a political ethnography of critical infrastructure to better understand terminal capitalism, in which the waste products of commodification and resource depletion are destroying the ecological systems that support life. My object of study is the massive disjuncture between individual knowledge and intention, and these catastrophic collective planetary outcomes. Theoretically, I develop critical infrastructure theory to diagnose these destructive structures. By “infrastructure,” I mean systems of material and discursive flows fundamental to sedentary human organization, connecting local actions with global systems. Such infrastructure is “critical” in three senses: A) denoting the most important forms of infrastructure …


Leader Type And Responses To State-Sponsored Terrorism, Arjun Banerjee Aug 2022

Leader Type And Responses To State-Sponsored Terrorism, Arjun Banerjee

Doctoral Dissertations

State-sponsored terrorism (SST) has for long been used as a tool by countries to inflict costs on rival states without direct confrontation, as the latter risks inviting limited to full-scale war. The literature on SST has so far focused primarily on the motivations, facilitating factors, and the timing of state sponsorship. What has been insufficiently studied, however, are the responses of victim states to SST. Why does state response to SST vary spatio-temporally in different countries, under different governments, and even under different leaders of the same ruling political dispensation in a country? Under what conditions does a state respond …


State Technological Power And Interstate Trade Relations And Conflict, Tianjing Liao Aug 2022

State Technological Power And Interstate Trade Relations And Conflict, Tianjing Liao

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation examines roles of state technology capacity in determining national power, whether and in what ways international trade affects between-state tech power transition, as well as how state tech power position influences their trade policy. This research argues that technology is an increasingly important component of national power in the modern era; state trade dependence on another is likely to cause unfavorable tech power transition; states tend to initiate trade conflict against its trade partner that is technologically catching up toward it, attempting to prevent further dyadic tech power convergence or even surpassing. A variety of analytical methods, including …


Another Postcolonialism: Innovating Sovereignty From Below Through The Responsibility To Protect, Gabriel P. Mares Jun 2022

Another Postcolonialism: Innovating Sovereignty From Below Through The Responsibility To Protect, Gabriel P. Mares

Doctoral Dissertations

I focus on the work of civil society actors, scholars, and diplomats from the Global South, in particular the South Sudanese anthropologist and diplomat Francis Deng, and the ways in which they attempt to remake sovereignty through institutions. Using sovereignty-as-responsibility and the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) as problem spaces, I recover an alternate vision of sovereignty and the community of states that emerged in response to defenses of non-intervention by postcolonial state actors. Focusing on sovereignty allows these agents to simultaneously critique and innovate that which is “above” (the international state system) and that which is “below” (the sovereign state). …


Autocracies As Mediators In Conflicts, Jonathan A. S. Honig May 2022

Autocracies As Mediators In Conflicts, Jonathan A. S. Honig

Doctoral Dissertations

It is puzzling why autocracies, which typically are not renowned for their human rights record or their observance of international norms related to human rights and are frequently inured in their own violent conflicts, would choose to take on the seemingly humanitarian role of peacemaker as often as democracies in the conflicts of other states in the absence of such things as a former colonial relationship or shared geographic proximity with them. I argue that autocracies will offer more often to mediate when they are subjected to international scrutiny, sanctioning, and/or condemnation, as well as materially and immaterially benefitting from …