Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Following The Leaders: Issue Attention And Agenda Dynamics In Women’S Health Care Policy, Kara Anne Fisher

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports

This dissertation focuses on shifts in issue attention in the policy process and examines policy changes. Describing agenda setting is important not only for understanding congressional behavior in general but also for understanding the institutional context of other political behavior. I focus on the processes of positive feedback to explain periods of dramatic policy changes observed over a long period of time.

The purpose of this study is to examine the changes in the politics of health policy which opened the door to women’s health care as an important feature of health politics. Thus, my research is motivated by three …

The Politics Of Drug Courts, Jeffrey Chris Moss

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports

This study examined drug courts from a public policy and political science perspective. The first portion of the study focused on the history of sentencing policy from the 1970s through the drug court movement. The second chapter addressed gaps in the policy literature about how drug courts were created and how they evolved. Another focal point was determining how state-level actors such as legislators, state supreme courts, and bureaucratic agencies regulated drug court policy in each particular state. From this data, a continuum was formed to determine which states operated from a top-down management style for drug courts and which …