Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Collective Autonomy Restriction: A Theoretical Model And Empirical Investigations, Adrian Rivera-Rodriguez

Doctoral Dissertations

Collective autonomy refers to a group’s freedom to define and practice their own cultural and social identity without interference from other groups. According to the “threat and defense” hypothesis of collective autonomy restriction, group members are motivated to defend their collective autonomy from outside restriction. However, the psychological processes that influence advantaged vs. disadvantaged group members perceptions of collective autonomy, as well as the specific strategies they use to protect collective autonomy, have yet to be articulated. This dissertation presents three manuscripts that examine the social conditions and psychological processes that shape advantaged and disadvantaged group members’ perceptions of collective …

"The Land That Feminism Forgot": Birthzillas, Madwives, And The Politics Of Chilbirth, Amber Vayo

Doctoral Dissertations

“The Land that Feminism Forgot” is an in-depth exploration of the politics of childbirth that draws together qualitative and quantitative evidence to theorize the connections between treatment in childbirth and maternal mortality. Situating the qualitative research in the larger national context, the second chapter offers a State Reproductive Autonomy Index that provides an overview of the reproductive policy landscape at the national level. The dissertation then explores the role of institutionalized childbirth, medical mistrust, and obstetric violence in the U.S.’s longstanding maternal mortality crisis and offers policy suggestions in key public health areas. Through 120 qualitative interviews with people who …

The New Media Frontier: How Social Media Affects Partisan Attachments, Candidate Evaluations, And Political Emotions, Justin Allen Rose

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation seeks to further our understanding of individual social media use on polarization, evaluation of political candidates, and political emotions. Three separate articles are utilized to illuminate the effects of individual social media use. The first article pushes forward a theory which argues that social media is uniquely positioned to affect partisan feelings due to its propensity to lead individuals into echo chambers—online places that reinforce their existing opinions and attitudes. The second argues that social media plays into the hyper-partisan nature of the American political landscape, and by way, putting forward an atmosphere which will lead individuals to …

The Violence Of Nostalgia: Conspiracy Theorism, White Nationalism, And Restoring American Exceptionalism, Candice K. Travis

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation serves three interconnected ends: (1) highlight the connections between nationalism, nostalgia, mythology, and conspiracy, (2) research and articulate the deeper story behind the resurgence of conspiracy fueled white nationalism, and (3) analyze increasing popular support for racialized hatred across the United States as coalesced through the nostalgic desire to restore “our lost great America.” I adapt John Dewey’s pragmatism to interpret how publics take political action in response to evolving technologies and cultural shifts, and accordingly develop a typology of groups on the right wing of American politics. The Proud Boys are chauvinist white nationalists, Patriot Prayer are …

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 …

Critical Political Thinking: An Analysis Of Undergraduate Students’ Higher-Order Thinking Skills And Preferred Political Values, Labels, And Leadership Traits, Maya Mingo

Doctoral Dissertations

The current study details the political values of students enrolled in an entry-level, multi-section educational psychology course at a large, southeastern United States university during the fall semester of 2017 (N = 167). Survey data were collected to identify the following: which political values and personality traits undergraduate students give the most priority when making political decisions, whether or not the political labels participants identified as most important to them are consistent with those common to their families, close friends, and childhood geographical regions, the quality of respondents’ self-reported label-value congruence, and the relation between the students’ critical thinking …

American Understandings Of U.S. Economic Inequality: Redistribution And Resistance, Jacklyn Stein

Doctoral Dissertations

Why has economic inequality in the U.S. continued to grow despite widespread and strong public opinion in favor of reducing it? In this dissertation, I argue that Americans are upset by current levels of economic inequality and support downward redistribution as a means to reduce it. At the same time, many have hesitations about or resistance to the mechanisms through which such redistribution might be carried out. This resistance, I found, varied across respondents’ class and race (and, to some extent, gender). Across groups, respondents’ desires for change were stymied by a social and political context of differential visibility that …

Latino Race Cards: Negative Racial Appeals In Contemporary Campaigns And The Bounds Of Racial Priming Theory, Rebecca Lisi

Doctoral Dissertations

The Implicit Explicit (IE) model of racial priming (Mendelberg 2001) continues to be the dominant theoretical model for understanding the impact of negative racial campaign appeals on white voter mobilization despite significant demographic change in the United States. The theoretical underpinnings of the IE model rest upon a norm of racial equality which emerged in the wake of the Civil Rights Movement. Given the specific racial and historical context in which this racial norm developed it is unclear whether the IE model can account for the impact of non-Black racial appeals on white voter mobilization. I apply the concept of …

Indebted: American Private Debt And Its Political Consequences, Giancarlo Andrew Gonzalez

Doctoral Dissertations

Private debt, also known as consumer debt, has been increasing exponentially over the past eighty years. Largely spurred by private and governmental action, the growth in consumer debt has allowed Americans to purchase services and commodities that they may not otherwise have been able to afford. However, research has also shown that debt has strong adverse effects on human social behavior. This is especially troublesome given how indebted Americans, and in particular poor and minority Americans, have become in recent years. Thus, I ask if the effects of debt extend to political activity as well as social behavior. In this …

Cyclones, Spectacles, And Citizenship: The Politicization Of Natural Disasters In The Us And Oman, Tyler Schuenemann

Doctoral Dissertations

In the face of such complex, urgent threats of fires, floods, and increasingly powerful storms, many scholars warn that climate change puts us on the path to a technocratic, “rule of experts” for the sake of survival. Others warn that climate change will actually undermine the authority of governments, as they become increasingly unable to meet the basic needs of their citizens. In this dissertation, I draw from interviews, archival research, and ethnographic observations in the US and Oman to examine how power and historical context shape the way that these societies politicize natural disasters. These two countries have fundamental …

Partisan Policymaking: Research And Advocacy In An Era Of Polarization, Zachary Albert

Doctoral Dissertations

In recent decades, partisan polarization has not only grown but also extended to a wide variety of political processes. Despite this fact, we lack a strong understanding of the policy process under conditions of relatively extreme polarization. The roles of interest groups and think tanks in this environment are particularly understudied. How have research producing institutions changed in response to partisan polarization? And which types of organizations are most influential under the current system? Existing theories often lack an appreciation of the role of partisanship and assume relatively unstructured pluralistic competition in the development and debate of public policy. To …

"The Whole Nation Will Move": Grassroots Organizing In Harlem And The Advent Of The Long, Hot Summers, Peter Blackmer

Doctoral Dissertations

“The Whole Nation Will Move” provides a narrative history of grassroots struggles for African American equality and empowerment in Harlem in the decade immediately preceding the era of widespread urban rebellions in the United States. Through a street-level examination of the political education and activism of grassroots organizers, the dissertation analyzes how local people developed a collective radical consciousness and organized to confront and dismantle institutional racism in New York City from 1954-1964. This work also explores how the interests and activities of poor and working-class Black and Puerto Rican residents of Harlem fueled the escalation of protest activity and …

The Paradox Of A Town Meeting: The Influence Of Forms Of Local Government On Citizen Representation, Wouter Marc Van Erve

Doctoral Dissertations

When the federal government fails to provide guidance, or takes positions citizens disagree with, the importance of having strong, responsive local political institutions increases. As a result of either longstanding tradition or political reforms, a number of subnational political institutions now include elements of participatory and direct democracy in an effort to cure perceived democratic deficits. In my research, which uses a comparison of traditional, New England (representative) town meetings to city councils, I address the question of how the choice between using large, participation-oriented representative institutions and smaller legislative assemblies affects citizen participation and representation in local politics. My …

Why Education Matters: Political Participation And Interpretive Experiences At High School, Samuel V. Stoddard

Doctoral Dissertations

Political scientists have long recognized educational attainment as a strong predictor of voter turnout, but the mechanisms through which educational experiences lead voters to the polls remain under-explored. This research begins the process of opening the proverbial black box of education to understand the specific types of scholastic experiences that encourage voting. Grounded in previous findings by scholars of policy feedback and political socialization, I use a mix of qualitative and quantitative data analyses to reveal that nonacademic high school experiences can have powerful and lasting interpretive effects. Results show that participants in performance and service-based extracurricular activities are commonly …

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 …

Free Market Authoritarianism And The Election Of Donald Trump, Sarah Tanzi

Doctoral Dissertations

The 2016 Presidential Election of Donald Trump was unexpected by most mainstream media, political, and academic analysts. In this dissertation, I use a combination of historical analysis of economic data, polling statistics, and discourse analysis to understand Donald Trump’s rise in its historical and political context. I argue that the election of Donald Trump did not indicate a dramatic sea change in political culture, but a continuation of a decades-long process. The path to Trump’s election was laid out in structural changes in our economic, political, and cultural landscape. I argue that the coalescence of right-wing factions that brought Trump …

America’S Imperfect War: The Ethics, Law, And Strategy Of Drone Warfare, Treston Lashawn Wheat

Doctoral Dissertations

This study explores the ethics, law, and strategy of targeted killings by drones in the War on Terror. It starts with an exploration of just war theory, its historical development and criteria, to create a foundational framework by which to analyze the ethics of drones as a tactic. Then it defines terrorism and insurgency, establishing how sub-state actors operate, and the strategies states will use to neutralize them as threats. This shows that the War on Terror is actually an armed conflict because terrorism and insurgency are forms of warfare under the law and in warfare theory. After looking at …

Beyond The City-County Divide: Race, Referenda, And Representation In Consolidated Governments, Christopher Johnson Acuff

Doctoral Dissertations

Despite an abundance of research on the impacts of city-county consolidation, the majority of studies to date have focused on outcomes related to efficiency, effectiveness, and economic development. However, two areas which have gone relatively unexplored, particularly from a quantitative perspective, relate to the impact of consolidation on minority representation, as well as the determinants of successful referenda often required in establishing these forms of government. The existing literature on representation is sparse, and often relies on anecdotes or a small number of individual examples. Further, while several in-depth studies have attempted to assess the factors which contribute to successful …

Voter Turnout Overreports: Measurement, Modeling And Deception, Ivelisse Cuevas-Molina

Doctoral Dissertations

American politics scholarship has in great measure dedicated itself to the study of democratic participation in elections. Texts that are considered the cannon on electoral participation have extended our knowledge of the factors that increase/decrease turnout, however, this work has relied on self-reports of turnout in surveys. The use of selfreported turnout is problematic because a non-trivial proportion of survey respondents say they went out to vote when they actually did not, meaning they overreport turnout. Overreports of voter turnout are false reports of participation in elections by nonvoters when responding to political surveys. Appropriately, scholars of voting behavior have …

Politics At The Intersection Of Sexuality: Examining Political Attitudes And Behaviors Of Sexual Minorities In The United States, Royal Gene Cravens Iii

Doctoral Dissertations

The existing political archetype of sexual minorities in the United States present lesbians, gays, and bisexuals as more ideologically liberal and Democratic than heterosexuals, as well as politically driven by issues specifically related to LGBT life. Ascribing political distinctiveness based solely on identification with a group, however, commits the fallacy of “difference-as-explanation” (Shields 2008:3030), equating a “shared [LGBT] history of sexual oppression and [LGBT] political sympathies” (Duong 2012:381).

Post-modern theories posit that social positions in society, i.e., socially-constructed categories of identity, exist as part of a simultaneously-experienced and mutually-reinforced “matrix of oppression” (Collins 2000:18). The personal meaning and political effects …

Master's Tools And The Master's House: A Historical Analysis Exploring The Myth Of Educating For Democracy In The United States, Timothy Scott

Doctoral Dissertations

Over the past forty-years, neoliberal education reform policies in the U.S. have spurred significant resistance, often galvanized by claims that such policies undermine public education as a vital institution of U.S. democracy. Within this narrative, many activists call to “save our schools” and return them to a time when public schools served the common good. With these narratives in mind, I explore the foundational and persistent power structures that characterize the U.S. as a means to reveal the fundamental purpose of its public education system. The questions that guide my research include: (1) With an understanding that capitalism, white supremacy, …

The Decline Of Agriculture And The Rise Of Republican Party Strength In The South, John Marshall Dickey

Doctoral Dissertations

In recent decades, there has been an extensive examination of the resurgence of the Republican Party in the American South in the period after World War II. There were many events that occurred during this time period that might have helped the Republican Party achieve increased success at getting Republican candidates elected in the South. One of the relationships that should be explored is the relationship between the decline of agriculture as the primary provider of jobs and economic prosperity, and the increased ability of the Republican Party to win election to public office. The purpose of this project is …

American Authoritarianism In Black And White, Matthew C. Macwilliams

Doctoral Dissertations

How can African Americans be described simultaneously by political scientists as one of the most liberal and the most authoritarian groups in the United States? This conundrum frames the puzzle at the core of this dissertation. I argue that the political behavior of many African Americans is caught in a tug of war between their racial identity and their predisposition to authoritarianism. When the issue at hand engages African Americans’ authoritarian predisposition, authoritarianism can trump racial identity, produce attitudes that defy conventional wisdom, and dash the common theoretical assumption that African American political behavior is homogeneous. Counter to some of …

Examining The Civil-Military Divide Through New (Institutional) Lenses: The Influence Of The Supreme Court, Allen Linken

Doctoral Dissertations

Civil-military relations have existed for as long as there has been a military, but only in the last sixty years has research in the field began to examine the relationships between civilian elites and the military. Who controls the military? What level of influence by the military is acceptable in a liberal society, such as the United States? What is the appropriate role of the military? Who serves in the military? What pattern of civil-military relations best ensures the effectiveness of the military instrument? The study of these questions began with examining relationships between the military and the President, and …

Nixon's War On Terrorism: The Fbi, Leftist Guerrillas, And The Origins Of Watergate, Daniel S. Chard

Doctoral Dissertations

In 1969, militant factions within both Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and the Black Panther Party (BPP) began to form the United States’ first clandestine revolutionary urban guerrilla organizations: the Weather Underground and the Black Liberation Army (BLA). These groups carried out bombings, police ambushes, and other attacks throughout the country, prompting responses from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the administration of President Richard M. Nixon. Several historians have analyzed U.S. leftist guerrillas’ motives, and much has been written on FBI operations against the Black Power movement and New Left, including the Bureau’s covert counterintelligence programs (COINTELPROs) …

The Social Corporation: Firms, Networks, And Politics, Michael Kowal

Doctoral Dissertations

Scholars have long looked at business as a source of political power, but have come to differing conclusions about how corporations behave in pursuit of interests. Building on organizational theory and conditional choice literature, I hypothesize that corporations react to the actions of those around them, leading to cooperation and coordination. While others point to the importance of social ties created through corporate board memberships, I locate an additional social tie that takes place through trade association memberships. In addition, I demonstrate that rather than fragmenting in recent years, business has in fact become more cohesive in their giving patterns. …

Financial Deregulation, Income Inequality, And Partisan Politics From The Great War To The Great Recession, Eric Reed Keller

Doctoral Dissertations

This study examines how financial deregulation and partisan politics shaped American market-based income distribution from 1914 to 2012 through a process called market conditioning. By using time-series data analysis, I access the effect of legislative and bureaucratic financial deregulation on market-based income concentration for the very wealthy. Then, I use process-tracing to determine why both political parties converged in the 1980s to support financial deregulation. I find financial deregulation does increase market-based income for top income earners, especially the top .01 percent. In addition, I determine that both parties were captured by neoliberal economic ideology and through the bureaucracy, …

Economic Wealth And Social Welfare: A Longitudinal Analysis Of Transnational Well-Being, Kelly Brooke Martin

Doctoral Dissertations

Macro changes in the financial arena have prompted ongoing research focused on global economic trends. As America emerges from an era of stagnant wages, rising unemployment, and growing class stratification it is necessary to explore differences in cross-national socioeconomic behavior to address the changing needs of our country. Many studies attempt to describe statistical correlations between economic wealth and social well-being domestically and abroad by utilizing methodological perspectives that do not account for longitudinal change. To address the gap in existing research, this study seeks to measure variations in econometric indicators between the U.S. and Nordic countries to further explicate …

Developing A Methodology To Characterize The Use Of Emerging And Converging Technologies In Federal Agencies, Dorian Akerman Stiefel

Doctoral Dissertations

Although some methodologies exist for the systematic and strategic consideration of emerging and converging technologies, they typically do not incorporate agency current use, strategies, or foresight. This research develops a methodology to characterize current and potential United States federal agency use of emerging and converging technologies to fulfill agency strategic plans and serve society.

Phase 1 of this research develops a methodology to fulfill criteria derived from a literature review and an assessment of best practices. Designed to be implemented in four phases—develop, apply, evaluate, disseminate—the steps of this methodology include definition, collection, organization, analysis, synthesis, evaluation, and dissemination. Within …

Interest Groups, Political Party Control, Lobbying, And Science Funding: A Population Ecology Approach, Allyn Katherine Milojevich

Doctoral Dissertations

Science plays an increasingly important role in public policy in a range of issues from national security to public health. Thus, scientists will play an increasingly important role in society. This dissertation first examines how federal science funding changes with partisan control of key political institutions. Next, science-related interests groups, including their formation, specialization, and lobbying activities, are examined. Interest groups are a growing aspect of the American political system. However, they are an understudied aspect of political institutions. While much of their activity occurs within the legislative branch, they also work in the executive and judicial branches to advocate …