Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

The Political Mobilization Of The Croatian Diaspora: Analyzing The Impact Of The Croatian Diaspora On Croatian Politics., Regina Cabrera Hernandez

Honors College Theses

This paper examines the relationship between the Croatian diaspora and the Croatian nation with the goal of better understanding this relationship and how diasporas can affect the homeland politically. I attempt to do this by studying and analyzing the history of the diaspora, their identity formation, and their actions throughout the 20th century. I begin with a look at the origins of the Croatian diaspora, and the developing relationship between the diaspora and the government of the homeland. With this, as changes in the makeup of the diaspora affected the relationship with the homeland, changes in the homeland also affected …

International Economic Sanctions Outcome: The Influence Of Political Agreement, Mehmet Onder

Wayne State University Dissertations

Economic sanctions have been dubbed mainly as ineffective foreign policy tools by political scientists. Despite this, countries continue to use economic sanctions given their less intrusive and offensive nature compared to wars. Therefore, policy-makers have a high stake in learning the critical factors behind effective economic sanctions. Overall, it is understood that an effective sanctions episode compels one state to change its attitude or behavior on an issue, the target state, in line with what another state, sender state, desires. This has given rise to literature known as the determinants of economic sanctions in international political economy. This dissertation contributes …

The Role Of Periodic Conventions In Generating And Undermining Constitutional Loyalty, Kevin Gerald Lorentz

Wayne State University Dissertations

In the U.S., popular support is widespread for both the federal and state constitutional charters, although the former enjoys greater support than the latter. Such support is necessary for maintaining a constitution’s legitimacy; popular support for the laws ensures continued obedience to them. However, critics note that blind support, or excessive veneration, may have negative consequences, including saddling a political community with suboptimal institutions. Support must be balanced with the necessity of “periodic repairs,” allowing each generation to review the prior’s work. In modern parlance, critics advocate for periodic constitutional conventions, permitting constitutional revisions irrespective of tradition or presumed legal …

Framing The Debate: The Role Of Gender, Beneficiaries, And Cost In Paid Parental Leave Policy Support, Kimberly Anne Saks Mcmanaway

Wayne State University Dissertations

In 1963, President John F. Kennedy’s Commission on the Status of Women found that the lack of income security during pregnancy and childbearing “one of the major remaining gaps in the protection of workers against losses of income,” (American Women 1963, p. 27). Despite popular support for such a policy, the United States remains one of only three countries that does not have a such a policy (OECD, 2017). Commentators have argued that the Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993 was successful due to the diverse coalition behind it which included feminist groups and conservative religious organizations alike. The …

Predicting The Probability Of Negotiation In Civil Conflicts: An Empirical Investigation Of Intrastate Conflicts Between 1989 And 2008, Ilker Kalin

Wayne State University Dissertations

Since the end of Cold War, more civil conflicts have been settled by negotiated settlements, as compared to previous eras. While the extant literature has offered various explanations of this trend by examining the costs and types of war, scholars’ primary focus has been on researching the determinants of conflict resolution. Yet, what brings the parties of civil conflicts to the negotiation table in the first place has remained largely unexplored. In particular, previous scholarship has failed to grasp negotiation as a process and costly choice in itself. This dissertation lays out the conditions paving the way for negotiations in …

Snowden Is (Not) A Whistleblower: An Analysis Of Ideographs And Anti-Democratic Rhetorical Strategies Within The U.S. Government’S Response To Edward Snowden, Joshua Guitar

Wayne State University Dissertations

This dissertation is a rhetorical criticism of the U.S. government’s response to Edward Snowden, the whistleblower who exposed illegal and unethical surveillance tactics of the National Security Agency and U.S. government. Informed by contemporary theories of democracy, this synchronic ideographic analysis examines the rhetorical strategies of U.S. government officials following Snowden’s disclosures. This dissertation contends that in laboring to absolve themselves of culpability, U.S. officials obfuscated Snowden and operationalized as an ideograph. This reification provides methodological development to ideographic analysis as it demonstrates how a political figure can become a rhetorical abstraction used for ideological purposes. The rhetorical interplay between …

White Supremacy As Class Compromise: The Poverty Of Structural Racism As A Theoretical Paradigm, Cody Robert Melcher

Wayne State University Theses

In this thesis, I develop a theoretical frame through which the perpetuation of racial inequality in the United States can be fruitfully interpreted. This reconceptualization is necessary, I argue, because the now dominant paradigm of so-called “structural racism” is methodologically untenable. I contend that the seminal theoretical and empirical accounts within the paradigm do not provide compelling or methodologically sound explanations for the perpetuation of racial inequality, often (and disturbingly) ignoring the historical record of race relations in the US. Specifically, I show that these accounts rely on the dubious causal mechanisms of structural inertia or ideological racism. Where these …

Place Over Politics: Power, Strategy, Terrain, And Regime Type In Interstate War Outcomes, 1816-2003, Connor Joseph Sprayberry Sutton

Wayne State University Dissertations

While the study of war occurrence is among the primary considerations of the field of international relations, only recently has attention turned towards the study of war outcomes. This attention is best represented by the democratic victory proposition, which suggests that democracies win the majority of their wars by virtue of being democratic. However, elements of this study are currently incipient. In turn, this dissertation generates a novel set of variables to measure the impact of terrain on war outcomes, including measures of spatial extent, topographic heterogeneity, and land cover heterogeneity. These metrics are generated for all 94 interstate wars …

Republicanism In America, Examples Of Self-Government From 1775 Through 1819, John Renard Girdwood

Wayne State University Dissertations

In my three empirical chapters, I provide documentation for my claims that (1) the people did petition the General Government, such as through petitions and resolutions of instruction and, (2) the national representatives did acknowledge and respectively act on the people’s political documents, with attention paid to the defense of republican self-government, during the decades before and after Ratification. The evidence suggests that Americans did peripheralize the General Government before and after Ratification because of a belief in the republican values of freedom, virtue, and equality.

Practically, political scientists researching political culture should consider the conceptualization and application of republican …

A Narrative Study Of Chaldean Refugees And The Myth Of Return: From Chaldean Babylon To The New World, Joseph James Byle

Wayne State University Dissertations

With the removal of Saddam following the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, life for all Iraqis changed for the worse, especially for minorities such as Christians, including Chaldeans. Considering the powerful push factors that have compelled Chaldean Refugees in the Detroit area to leave Iraq, the idea of returning to the homeland would seem like a remote possibility, however, these Chaldeans present an intriguing case, due to the fact that they are among the indigenous people in Iraq. Do their deep rooted ties to the homeland contribute to a desire to return? This research examines this possibility through an in-depth …

Regional Power Politics: The Behavior And Motivations Of Regional Powers In Settings Of Conflict And Coalition, Cagla Mavruk Cavlak

Wayne State University Dissertations

After the Cold War, International Relations has seen a resurgence of interest in the study of regional powers. Scholars have been paying increasing attention to regional powers as important actors in world politics and studying their foreign policy, but few if any studies have discussed the behaviors of regional power comprehensively and comparatively. The purpose of this study is to gain a better understanding of regional power foreign policy strategies and behaviors by analyzing them comprehensively and comparatively. Unlike previous studies on cooperation and conflict within regions, this study focuses on the reasons for the strategic tendencies and motivations of …

Issue Ownership And Framing Of Digital Privacy On Twitter, Ashik Shafi

Wayne State University Dissertations

The issue ownership theory states political parties tend to emphasize the issues they are perceived to own in a bid to gain an advantage in public opinion. Although tested on different established political issues and in mass communicational settings, the theory has not been adequately tested for new and evolving political issues and on social media. This study attempts to test issue ownership theory and examine episodic and thematic media framing in Twitter conversations of US senators regarding the issue of digital privacy. Combination of computerized and manual content analysis is used to download and analyze all US senators’ tweets …

The Political Determinants Of Food Security: Democracy, Decentralization, And Federalism, Catherine E. Schmitt-Sands

Wayne State University Dissertations

Food security is partially determined by politics. This dissertation examines three political determinants of food security: democracy, decentralization, and federalism. Each one is operationalized and tested quantitatively against food security using a dataset of all countries from 1990 to 2011, although each model employs a different subset of the dataset. Democracy is divided along two dimensions: political rights and civil liberties. Both are significant positive predictors of food security. Increases in civil liberties are more consistently and strongly associated with food security than increases in political rights.

Decentralization is assessed along three dimensions: fiscal, administrative, and political. Fiscal and administrative …

Defining The Republic, William Joseph Nichols

Wayne State University Dissertations

Abstract

DEFINING THE REPUBLIC

by

WILLIAM J. NICHOLS

December 2015

Advisor: Dr. Jeffrey Grynaviski

Major: Political Science (Political Theory)

Degree: Doctor of Philosophy

The “Great Divergence” between Alexander Hamilton and James Madison is one of the most well-known events in the early history of the United States. Together, Hamilton and Madison wrote most of The Federalist, and each was pivotal in securing the acceptance of the Constitution in their state ratifying conventions. That within just a few years of the establishment of the new form of government each had worked so hard to achieve, they became bitter political enemies, is …

How Does Exposure To The Internet Affect Political Knowledge And Attitudes Among Rural Chinese?: A Field Experiment, Wenwen Shi

Wayne State University Dissertations

The Internet's political implications reach far beyond an advanced communication device in authoritarian regimes. The heated debate on the Internet's political potential in China is complicated by a lack of causal evidence demonstrated in the literature. Thus far, studies have only examined consequences of the rise of the Internet and the characteristics of netizens (wangmin), but they have failed to account for the possible transformative effect the Internet has on individual citizens. This study attempts to fill this gap by testing the impact of the Internet on rural Chinese villagers' political knowledge and political attitudes through a field experiment over …

Inter-Organizational Networks Among Intergovernmental Organizations In Peace Operations, Isil Akbulut

Wayne State University Dissertations

Notwithstanding the growing consensus on benefits associated with collaborations among intergovernmental organizations (IGOs) in peace operations, academic research has thus far neglected pressing questions of why and how IGOs collaborate within a network context in peace operations and how these inter-organizational collaborations among IGOs, IGO networks, might account for the success/failure of these operations. More specifically, this dissertation concentrates on how structural properties of IGO networks, such as the extensiveness of ties between network partners, and the cohesiveness of such networks, may account for peace operations’ performance in accomplishing their core goals: violence abatement, conflict containment and conflict settlement (Diehl …

The Refugee Convention And The Politics Of Domestic Rule Making In 44 Democracies: Where And How Do Institutions Matter?, Sean Christopher Anderson

Wayne State University Dissertations

I create a revealed preference decision model using markers of structural and ideational input factors informing the writing, passage, funding, and enforcement of domestic legislation in implementation of the 1951 UN Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees and its 1967 Protocol within 44 democratic states. Where are domestic rules responsible for observed displays of compliance, and where are outcomes attributable to structural factors that render the domestic rule-making process effectively irrelevant? Where the outcome of the rule-making process is predicted to matter, elites may use the content of these rules toward the goal of continued policy influence and electoral …

Modern-Day Judicial "Politics": An Analysis Of Federal District Court Decision Making In Contemporary, Politically Divisive Issue Areas, Kyla Kristine Stepp

Wayne State University Dissertations

Recent decisions regarding LGBT rights, reproductive rights, and racial and gender equality by U.S. District Courts have illuminated how these lower federal courts are increasingly becoming important policymakers in our political system. However, research to date has only scratched the surface on district court decision making in cases involving significant constitutional issues such as these. The substantial variation among judges (and among states/regions) in the decisions made and resulting policies indicates the existence of powerful, competing influences on district judges. I conduct a comprehensive analysis of many potential influences on district court judges, including individual ideology, personal characteristics, legal factors, …

Political Content And Political Behavior: Using Functional Theory To Test The Ability Of Political Content To Stimulate Political Interest, Ryan Stouffer

Wayne State University Dissertations

The health of the American democracy is up for debate. Digital natives will decide the future of this democracy. Fewer digital natives--those who have grown up with Internet access--are engaging in formal political participation, compared to their parents. Digital natives lack the information needed to participate. This study examined the effects of interactive political content on digital natives' political information efficacy (PIE) through an experiment. The results revealed a decrease in the participants' political confidence and a decrease in the likelihood they would vote. Exposure to political information harmed most digital natives' PIE and reinforced political attitudes in some. The …

Understanding The Behavior Of States As Their Nuclear Status Changes, Patty Zakaria

Wayne State University Dissertations

Can a state’s nuclear status influence its behavior in dyadic relationships? The present study examines the role played by nuclear status on the proliferating state’s level of hostility and cooperation towards other states in dyadic relationships. The study builds on the existing literature by looking at the behavior of states prior to becoming nuclear weapons states by strictly examining states with nuclear weapons development programs. This phase in the nuclear process is lacking in the current literature on nuclear weapons. Hostile behavior is measured based on the level of hostility in militarized disputes between states attempting to develop nuclear weapons …

Laughing Our Way To Stronger Democracy: Political Comedy's Potential To Equalize Political Interest And Political Knowledge In Community College Students, Lisa Lynne Lawrason

Wayne State University Dissertations

Political comedy is the one off-line news source – albeit soft news – that young adults access in higher rates than older adults. They are tuning into political comedy to be entertained, but while watching, they also get a healthy dose of politics. For otherwise apolitical young people, does exposure to politics in this format heighten their political interest? Does it make them more politically knowledgeable citizens? Through a 4-weeklong experiment, this study tests the effects of exposure to The Daily Show with Jon Stewart on political interest and political knowledge in a sample of community college students in mid-Michigan. …

Efficacy And Voting In The Obama Era, Christian Eli Genesky

Wayne State University Theses

In the past 50 years political science and sociological scholarship has demonstrated a consistent white-minority gap in political attitudes and behaviors. However, recent developments in the national political scene have introduced a new element that likely impacts these well-established trends, and must be taken into account: Barak Obama, an individual identifying with a minority group, ran for the office of the president of the United States. To explore the impact of Obama’s presence on the political behavior of minorities, I performed a secondary data analysis of variables from both the pre-election and post-election modules of the ANES 2008 Time-Series study, …

The Impact Of Voter Suppression Laws On African American Participation In Florida And North Carolina From 1988 To 2012, Anthony Lewis Daniels

Wayne State University Dissertations

A rich body of research presents conflicting accounts describing how contemporary voter suppression laws impact political participation. This study process traces the political development of North Carolina and Florida from 1988 to 2012 to assess four competing explanations of this process. This study compares three measures of participation that strongly support the discouraging voter hypothesis, which finds that voter suppression laws depress black participation.

This study finds that state officials in Florida adopted a much stricter voter suppression regime than those in North Carolina for the period under study. As a result, the two states developed differing levels of democratization. …

Inclusive Representation In Global Decision-Making Processses: Challenges Of Democracy, Sovereignty, And Liberatory Politics For Marginalized Groups, Laurel Dawn Sprague

Wayne State University Dissertations

This project proposes a framework for liberatory representation that institutionalizes processes to remove domination and meaningfully increasing respect and concern toward marginalized groups on issues that substantively affect them. It argues that decision-making processes that do not offer meaningful influence to those people who are most affected by particular decisions turn those who are supposed to be political equals into wards of dominant groups; essentially turning adults into political children. To meet ideals of political equality, liberatory processes for inclusive decision-making are required. The concept of political adulthood provides the foundation for an examination of current processes designed to bring …

Patriotism Among Muslim American Opinion Leaders, Reem Abou-Samra

Wayne State University Dissertations

A significant degree of public opinion research has been conducted on Muslim Americans, but very little has focused on their perceptions. This study explores how opinion leaders address the question of patriotism, Americanness, hyphenated identities, and the implications of such a discourse. The study is confined to Wayne County, MI, because of the significant role Muslim Americans have played in labor struggles, local culture, civil rights, and their visibility. This study is significant because ongoing issues have triggered media attention on Muslim Americans and questioned their patriotism and Americanness, such as the "Ground Zero Mosque" debate, the "anti-Sharia" bill proposals, …

On The Reputation Of The California, Michigan And New Jersey Supreme Courts, Robert Michael Yonkers

Wayne State University Theses

This thesis examines Horizontal Federalism and Policy Dissemination in a federal system by analyzing the state supreme courts of California, Michigan and New Jersey during various terms in their history, using a unique form of citation analysis that builds upon prior efforts. I want to see what, if anything, a raw citation count says about prestige or reputation. For example, what types of cases are cited? Are they followed, not followed, or part of a dissent or concurrence? Are cases expanding the rights of the criminally accused cited frequently by sister courts? The normative literature associates prestige with expanding the …

Robust Regression Methods For Massively Decayed Intelligence Data, Akiva Joachim Lorenz

Wayne State University Dissertations

Homeland Security, sponsored by governmental initiatives, has become a vibrant academic research field. However, most efforts were placed with the recognition of threats (e.g. theory) and response options. Less effort was placed in the analysis of the collected data through statistical modeling. In a field that collects more than 20 terabyte of information per minute though diverse overt and covert means and indexes it for future research, understanding how different statistical models behave when it comes to massively decayed data is of vital importance.

Using Monte Carlo methods, three regression techniques (ordinary least squares, least-trimmed, and maximum likelihood) were tested …

Elections And Asset Pricing: The Politically Sensitive Equity Of Us Military Contractors, Matthew Mark Ross

Wayne State University Dissertations

I quantify the relationship between political uncertainty and equity volatility in the months around US elections from 1989-2012. The Economic Policy Uncertainty Index and Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) data are employed to measure political uncertainty faced by military contractors, capitalizing on the unique monopsony-oligopoly business environment of these firms. I employ a GARCH (1,1) model with cross-sectionally correlated moments to produce daily firm-election volatility measures. Volatility increases 11% for local, 27% for midterm, and 43% for presidential elections. These measures demonstrate that all election categories: local, federal, presidential, and midterm exhibit differential effects on equity volatility. My results …

Truth And Reconciliation Commissions: The Road To Democracy And Rule Of Law?, Julie Ann Keil

Wayne State University Dissertations

TRUTH AND RECONCILIATION COMMISSIONS: THE ROAD TO DEMOCRACY AND RULE OF LAW?

by

JULIE A. KEIL

December 2014

Advisor: Dr. Sharon Lean

Major: Political Science

Degree: Doctor of Philosophy

Every year millions of dollars are spent on Truth and Reconciliation Commissions (TRC) designed to bring about post-conflict resolutions in states through a formal process. This paper explores the major TRCs comparatively to assess the relationship between TRCs and the growth of democracy and rule of law in post conflict societies and compares that performance to a control group of states that experienced a conflict but did not conduct a TRC. …

Individual Differences In Pyschological Evaluations Of Electoral Risk: Furthering The Explanation Of The Gender Gap In Candidate Emergence, Jennie Sweet-Cushman

Wayne State University Dissertations

Despite decades of movement towards gender parity in other aspects of American society (e.g. education, business), women remain significantly underrepresented in the political realm. Electoral bias against women cannot be blamed; when women run, women win. However, women don't seek political office in high numbers. This project builds on previous examinations of the gender gap in political ambition by proposing that a contributing factor to the likelihood someone will seek political office is their perception of electoral risk. While there have been no studies of gender-based differences in psychological response to electoral risk, differences in risk assessment have been documented …