Political Science Commons^™

Which Came First, People Or Pollution? A Review Of Theory And Evidence From Longitudinal Environmental Justice Studies, Paul Mohai, Robin Saha

Environmental Studies Faculty Publications

A considerable number of quantitative analyses have been conducted in the past several decades that demonstrate the existence of racial and socioeconomic disparities in the distribution of a wide variety of environmental hazards. The vast majority of these have been cross-sectional, snapshot studies employing data on hazardous facilities and population characteristics at only one point in time. Although some limited hypotheses can be tested with cross-sectional data, fully understanding how present-day disparities come about requires longitudinal analyses that examine the demographic characteristics of sites at the time of facility siting and track demographic changes after siting. Relatively few such studies …

A Comparative Case Study Of Georgia Delegations At The 2012 National Party Conventions, Carolyn S. Carlson, Jeff R. Dewitt, Kerwin Swint

Georgia Journal of Public Policy

From August 26 to September 8, nine political science students and four supervising faculty traveled from Kennesaw State University to the 2012 Republican National Convention and the Democratic National Convention as part of special topics course on a course titled “Party Conventions Field Study”. While in Tampa and Charlotte, the students and faculty immersed themselves in a “real world” educational environment and in doing so gained extraordinary first-hand exposure to a fundamental, yet not well understood, part of the American political process. Students directly engaged with convention proceedings and participants, primarily the Georgia state party delegations, and implemented pre-approved research …

Power, Subjectivity, And Life In Spain: A Continuation Of Elite Power, Matthew Mason

Master's Theses

On December 20, Spain will hold national elections to determine the new prime minister and national and local parliaments. These elections will be another crossroads in the long history of Spain. The elections come about in a political and social atmosphere of ‘change’ and ‘regeneration,’ marked by the rise of two new political parties, Podemos and Ciudanos. These parties are the new forces in the political scene in Spain. This atmosphere of change is the result of the 2008 economic crisis. The economic crisis of 2008 was not only an economic crisis in Spain, but it provoked a political and …

Data To Decisions For Cyberspace Operations, Steve Stone

Military Cyber Affairs

In 2011, the United States (U.S.) Department of Defense (DOD) named cyberspace a new operational domain. The U.S. Cyber Command and the Military Services are working to make the cyberspace environment a suitable place for achieving national objectives and enabling military command and control (C2). To effectively conduct cyberspace operations, DOD requires data and analysis of the Mission, Network, and Adversary. However, the DOD’s current data processing and analysis capabilities do not meet mission needs within critical operational timelines. This paper presents a summary of the data processing and analytics necessary to effectively conduct cyberspace operations.

Institutionalizing Freedom As Nondomination: Democracy And The Role Of The State, David Watkins

David Watkins

This article critically examines neo-republican democratic theory, as articulated by Philip Pettit, with respect to its capacity to address some of the pressing challenges of our times. While the neo-republican focus on domination has great promise, it mistakenly commits to the position that democracy—the primary tool with which we fight domination—is limited to state activity. Examining this error helps us make sense of two additional problems with his theory: an overestimation of the capacity of legislative bodies to identify sufficient responses to practices of domination, and the potential conflict between avoiding state domination of the general citizenry and avoiding state …

Campaign Finance Makes America Go ‘Round: Individual Campaign Contributions And The Effects Of Citizens United On The American Election System, Geneva Sherman

Student Scholar Symposium Abstracts and Posters

How political campaigns are financed directly affects every citizen in the United States. This can be attributed to the fact that campaign money is correlated to the laws that pass through congress and the interests that are taken into consideration. After the passage of Citizens United in 2010, campaign donation caps were lifted to allow for virtual unregulated money in politics with PACs, Super PACs and 501(c)(4)s. Although the 2010 passage of Citizens United has increased the influence of corporate and wealthy interests, individual campaign donations represent a major percentage of funds raised and are heavily relied upon. The present …

Beyond The Mato Oput Tradition: Embedded Contestations In Transitional Justice For Post-Massacre Pajong, Northern Uganda, David-Ngendo Tshimba

Journal of African Conflicts and Peace Studies

Human beings to a great extent are what community stories narrate about them. This paper is informed by an ethnological field research carried in one of the remotest villages of Mucwini Sub-county in Kitgum district, northern Uganda, scrutinizes people’s stories as they echo concerns about justice from different perspectives of victimhood in the aftermath of a Lord’s Resistance Army-commanded massacre which claimed the lives of 56 people in a night, the majority of whom (21) were from the Pajong clan. After a decade, all direct violent confrontations have no doubt ceased, however, the search for peace still is utterly skewed …

La Gouvernance Des Mémoires Au Rwanda Au Travers Du Dispositif « Ingando »: Une Analyse Critique Des Représentations Sociales, Eric Ndushabandi

Journal of African Conflicts and Peace Studies

The objective of this paper is to understand the place of memory in the post conflict society reconstruction. The main objective of this paper is to understand how Rwanda is managing the past and the genocide memory through “Ingando”, this kind of solidarity camps organized for all social categories. This paper builds its argument from findings of a doctoral research conducted on “Ingando”. The Ingando framework constitutes one of major mechanisms through which the post genocide Rwandan government has attempted to create one “common interpretation of the past” or a “national collective memory” as part of the nation building agenda. …

Accord De Paix Et Processus De Transformation Des Conflits Au Burundi, Leonidas Ndayisaba

Journal of African Conflicts and Peace Studies

Après des décennies de conflits et d’instabilité politique, l’escalade du conflit interne burundais conduit aux négociations de paix d’Arusha (Tanzanie) de 1998 à 2000 entre les principales parties au conflit. Le résultat fut la conclusion de l’Accord d’Arusha pour la Paix et la Réconciliation au Burundi (AAPRB) signé le 28 août 2000. Prônant un esprit d’inclusion et de partage du pouvoir entre acteurs politico-ethniques burundais, l’Accord sera complété par un accord additionnel prévoyant une période de transition de 2001 à 2005 suivie de l’organisation d’élections générales en 2005. Il fut donc appliqué progressivement, tandis que des groupes rebelles, le Front …

Russian Anti-Americanism, Public Opinion And The Impact Of The State-Controlled Mass Media, Natalie Manaeva Rice

Doctoral Dissertations

From 2011 to 2015, a rise in anti-Americanism was strongly reflected in Russian public opinion during President Vladimir Putin’s third term. The study examined the phenomenon of anti-Americanism in Russia and the role of state-controlled mass media in promoting anti-American attitudes. Statistical analysis of polls conducted in Russia by the Pew Research Center in 2012 demonstrated that anti-Americanism in Russian society should not be treated as a monolithic phenomenon. A segment of the Russian populace held a strong and deep-seated anti-American ideological bias that affected its perception of everything related to the United States. Other sentiments, however, fit a more …

Understanding Transitional Justice And Its Two Major Dilemmas, Jared Bell

Journal of Interdisciplinary Conflict Science

Transitional justice is an ever growing field and greatly intersects with conflict science and peace studies. With the horrific crimes committed during World War II and the latter half of the 20^th century societies now more than ever before are devising processes, mechanisms, and policies to move past gross human rights violations or communal violence. However, these mechanisms much like anything else are not perfect and come with a variety of dilemmas. In particular two main dilemmas plague transitional justice which this paper aims to deal with: Getting to Truth and Reality versus Expectation. Within the context of …

Blown Away: How China Outsmarts Wto Rulings In The Wind Industry, Seung-Youn Oh

Political Science Faculty Research and Scholarship

Through a study of China’s wind turbine sector, this paper demonstrates how China liberally implements industrial policies and then removes them when the WTO disputes them. China’s convenient compliance with the WTO rulings reflects Beijing’s realpolitik navigation through the organization’s dispute-resolution process, rather than socialization to international norms.

The Calculus Of Consent, John Thrasher, Gerald Gaus

Philosophy Faculty Books and Book Chapters

The Calculus of Consent: Logical Foundations of Constitutional Democracy is a groundbreaking work in democratic theory. This chapter argues that it is of continued relevance today, due both to its methodological innovations and its use of those innovative techniques to solve the fundamental problem of democratic justification. In Calculus, James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock fuse economic methods, political theory, and the normative project of showing how democratic institutions of a particular sort can be justified contractually, creating a unique form of democratic contractualism that came to be known as “Constitutional Political Economy” and the more general research program of “Public …

Climate Change And Interpersonal Violence: A "Global" Estimate And Regional Inequities, Dennis Mares, Kenneth W. Moffett

SIUE Faculty Research, Scholarship, and Creative Activity

This study estimates the predicted impact of climate change on levels of violence in a sample of 57 countries. We sample western and non-western countries and perform a multilevel ARFIMA regression to examine if warmer temperatures are associated with higher levels of homicide. Our results indicate that each degree Celsius increase in annual temperatures is associated with a nearly 6% average increase in homicides. Regional variation in this predicted effect is detected, for example, with no apparent effects in former Soviet countries and far stronger effects found in Africa. This variation indicates that climate change may acutely increase violence in …

Religious Perspectives Being Marginalized In Canada, John Milloy

Consensus

This article was a lecture delivered at Waterloo Lutheran Seminary, Waterloo, Ontario Canada, April 8, 2015 at a reception welcoming John Milloy as Co-Director of the Centre for Public Ethics and Assistant Professor of Public Ethics at Waterloo Lutheran Seminary as well as the inaugural Practitioner in Residence in the Department of Political Science at Wilfrid Laurier University.

Trends In Public Opinion, 1989-1996, John M. Scheb Ii, William Lyons, Grant W. Neeley

Grant W. Neeley

In this chapter, we examine the party identifications and ideological orientations of Tennesseans from 1989 through 1996, as revealed through survey research. We also look at Tennesseans' positions on several issues of public policy that have been salient in state politics during this period. Our intent is to isolate any trends in the partisan and ideological character of the state while examining citizens' positions on key issues.

Early Voting In Tennessee: Removing Barriers To Participation, Grant W. Neeley, Lillard E. Richardson Jr.

Grant W. Neeley

In 1994. the Tennessee General Assembly mandated a new early voting system that allowed voters to cast a ballot in a two-week period prior to any election. Unlike absentee balloting, which requires registrants to justify why they cannot participate on election day, early voting is available to any registered voter who chooses to do so. By enacting early voting in Tennessee, the state legislature hoped to achieve increased turnout and easier access for citizens unable to vote at a regular polling site on election day. The purpose of this chapter is to ascertain whether the program was able to increase …

Turnout And Partisanship In Tennessee Elections, Lillard E. Richardson Jr., Grant W. Neeley

Grant W. Neeley

To understand the forces shaping current Tennessee politics, we discuss two fundamental concepts of Tennessee's electoral system: voting turnout and partisanship. These two concepts are easily illustrated by two questions. First, how many people participate in elections in the state? Second, whom do Tennesseans elect to represent them? While we use a historical perspective to inform the analysis, we are generally more interested in the forces shaping politics in Tennessee today.

Gop Denying Women Basic Economic Rights, Alev Dudek

Alev Dudek

Implementation Of Early Voting, Lillard E. Richardson Jr., Grant W. Neeley

Grant W. Neeley

We examine the early voting process in Tennessee during the election of 1994. By conducting a mail survey of all 95 county registrars, we ascertained the methods and costs of early voting implementation. Generally, the survey reveals a strong belief that early voting encourages greater participation by voters, with turnout data supporting this belief. We find that the ballot type and location of early voting sites play an important role in determining both the costs of early voting and the rate of voter participation.

Explaining Attitudes Toward Binational Cooperation Among Municipal Managers In The U.S.-Mexico Border Area, John Truman, Grant Neeley

Grant W. Neeley

This study examines Texas municipal managers' attitudes toward the benefits of binational cooperation. It tests theories suggesting attitudes are influenced by perceived language, cultural, and resource barriers; differences in U.S. and Mexican public administration; interdependence of policy priorities; and contact with international organizations. Project data are drawn from a mail survey sent to department heads in all municipal governments in Texas border counties. Effects of independent variables are estimated using an ordered logistic regression model. Results indicate more frequent contact between municipal managers in Texas and Mexico has a positive effect on attitudes toward the benefits of cooperation, whereas perceived …

Public Management In The U.S.-Mexico Border Region: Toward Increased Cooperation Between Texas And Mexican Officials?, John Truman, Grant Neeley

Grant W. Neeley

This study examines the degree of local-level cooperation between U.S. and Mexican municipal managers and investigates attitudes about the barriers to effective cooperation. The analysis is extended to all Texas municipal governments in border counties in order to gain a more comprehensive understanding of how local projects have developed under regional integration.

The State Of Surveying Legislators: Dilemmas And Suggestions, Cherie Maestas, Grant Neeley, Lillard Richardson

Grant W. Neeley

State-level research affords scholars a unique opportunity to study legislative behavior because state legislators are accessible in ways that members of congress are not. State legislators' willingness to respond to interviews and questionnaires has provided scholars with a rich array of data about their behavior and perceptions. This survey research has contributed greatly to our theoretical and practical knowledge of legislative behavior and institutions. We examine 73 articles published in top academic journals from 1975 to 2000 to identify common techniques of surveying state legislators and suggest ways in which scholars can enhance the prospects for collecting high quality data. …

Perceived Risk And Citizen Preferences For Governmental Management Of Routine Hazards, Brian Gerber, Grant Neeley

Grant W. Neeley

Risk perceptions are important to the policy process because they inform individuals’ preferences for government management of hazards that affect personal safety, public health, or ecological conditions. Studies of risk in the policy process have often focused on explicating the determinants of risk perceptions for highly salient, high-consequence hazards (e.g., nuclear energy). We argue that it is useful to also study more routinely experienced hazards; doing so shows the relevance of risk perceptions in individuals’ daily lives. Our investigation focuses on the impact perceived risk has on citizens’ preferences over hazard management policies (as distinct from identifying risk perception determinants …

Who Is Early Voting? An Individual Level Examination, Grant Neeley, Lillard Richardson

Grant W. Neeley

Early voting has been suggested as one method of increasing voter turnout. Allowing voters to cast their ballots during a longer time period may ameliorate some barriers to participation that exist. However, the question of whether early voting mobilizes previous nonvoting registrants or simply makes voting easier for those who would have participated anyway remains largely unanswered.

Methods. We test these questions through the use of an individual level survey of voters in one Tennessee county. Using logistic regression, we consider the impact of demographic and attitudinal factors on the propensity to vote on election day or to use …

The Impact Of Early Voting On Turnout: The 1994 Elections In Tennessee, Lillard Richardson, Grant Neeley

Grant W. Neeley

For both election officials and scholars, there are several questions about early voting that remain unanswered. How does the implementation of early voting affect voters' use of early voting opportunities? Furthermore, when controlling for other factors, such as demographic characteristics, does early voting have an impact on overall turnout in the election? To answer these questions, we examined the Tennessee experience with early voting, administered for the first time in 1994. We utilized several sources of information: a survey of all 95 county election officials in the state of Tennessee; voting records from the Division of Elections; and census data. …

The Practice Of Government Public Relations, Mordecai Lee, Grant W. Neeley, Kendra Stewart

Grant W. Neeley

With the recent change of administration in the U.S. executive branch, we have seen increased attention to issues of public information, transparency in government, and government and press relations in the United States and abroad. In addition, rapidly evolving technology and its influence on public communication have left many in government struggling to remain current in this area. Citizens and constituents learn to use interactive tools when searching for information, utilize technology for communications, and now expect government information and services to exist in the same information space as private entities. This book is an effort of leading experts in …

Penny Pinching Or Politics? The Line-Item Veto And Military Construction Appropriations, M.V. Hood, Irwin Morris, Grant Neeley

Grant W. Neeley

Although scholars have studied the item veto and its effects at the state level for years, there is considerable disagreement over the national-level political and fiscal ramifications of the implementation of the item veto. Our analysis is the first empirical examination of the use of the item veto at the federal level. We find that partisan politics and an interest in fiscal austerity played little or no role in the president's decision-making calculus on recent defense appropriations vetoes. Programmatic goals, on the other hand, played a significant role in determining whether or not projects were vetoed.

Toward An Explanation Of Public Interest Group Formation And Proliferation: ‘Seed Money,’ Disturbances, Entrepreneurship, And Patronage, Anthony Nownes, Grant Neeley

Grant W. Neeley

Utilizing data from a survey of 60 national public interest group founders, this paper addresses two related questions: What factors explain the (relatively) recent proliferation of public interest groups? What factors determine in which policy areas public interest group activity is most likely? The results of the data analysis suggest that several factors have contributed to group proliferation. Among the most important are law group start-up costs, the spread of affluence and education, an increase in patron activity, and rapid societal change. The results also suggest that public interest group activity is most likely in issue areas of interest to …

Turnout Differences Among Registered Voters, Lillard Richardson, Grant Neeley

Grant W. Neeley

Much of what we know about turnout in American elections is based on national surveys of voters participating in presidential elections. Much less is known about voter participation in other types of elections. Using verified turnout and registration data, we surveyed registered voters to determine the demographic and attitudinal differences between two groups of voters: those who participated only in presidential elections and others who participated in midterm congressional, state, and local elections as well as presidential elections. We find that age, education, gender, social connectedness, personal contact with local public officials, and satisfaction with government services are significant factors …