Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Remembering An Invasion: The Panama Intervention In America’S Political Memory, Dave Nagaji

Senior Theses

In December of 1989, the United States launched Operation Just Cause, a military invasion of the country of Panama, capturing Manuel Noriega and overthrowing his government. This research project examines how Colin Powell, Richard Cheney, James Baker, and George H.W. Bush presented Operation Just Cause in their memoirs. It attempts to determine how these senior leaders’ depictions of this invasion incorporated it into the Bush administration’s overall foreign-policy strategy. The research finds that their general approach was to present the Panama intervention as an isolated incident which had no intentional link to other major events at the time, was not …

Communication Is A Two Way Street: Race, Gender, And Elite Responsiveness In U.S. Politics, Mia Costa

Doctoral Dissertations

At the heart of a representative democracy is the need for open lines of communication between citizens and their representatives. This dissertation is comprised of three stand-alone chapters which examine how responsive American public officials are to constituent communications, Americans' attitudes about elite responsiveness, and how race and gender condition this relationship. In the first chapter, I conduct the first meta-analysis of all experiments that examine how responsive public officials are to constituent communication. I demonstrate at a higher level of precision than any single study the degree to which legislators are biased against racial and ethnic minorities, and find …

Quality Journalism In The Digital Age: Strategies To Adapt And Remain Profitable, Jack Brewster

Honors Papers

In the United States, the news media is commonly referred to as the “fourth estate” because we rely on it to fulfill a variety of functions essential to a healthy democracy. We trust the media to, among other things, tell us what is going on in the world, contextualize and provide historical background on current events, filter politicians’ spin, fact-check, be a “watchdog,” promote robust civil discourse, and enable understanding of complex issues.

Up until the last decade or so, the media could meet this “standard” without sacrificing its financial well-being. The internet and the smartphone, however, changed everything. The …

The Effect Of Unemployment On Democratic Warfare, Andres Rakower

Honors Undergraduate Theses

This study was done to see the effects of a war on the economy and the internal politics of the United States. In selecting the engagement, we would study we agreed the Iraq War would be aided by a large amount of sampling of public opinion that was more nuanced than in previous wars. The Iraq War was a very complicated war, as it was controversial from the beginning and became a political issue while continuing to be a war fought by Americans abroad. Based on the literature, there were many starting effects and assumptions that were accounted for such …

The Great And Widening Divide: Political False Polarization And Its Consequences, Victoria Parker

Theses and Dissertations (Comprehensive)

American politics is becoming increasingly ideologically divided, and this cross-party hostility is reflected in pronounced partisan media outrage. However, while actual ideological polarization has indeed been rising, people estimate an ideological gap as being even larger than reality. We focus on whether part of this cross-party dislike can be explained by illusory perceptions of opposing party attitudes, attitudes the majority of the party members do not actually endorse. This illusory gap is referred to as false polarization; it is an interpersonal bias where a perceiver believes an opponent’s position is much farther away conceptually from where that opponent actually reports …