Political Theory Commons^™

The Gender Citation Gap In Undergraduate Student Research: Evidence From The Political Science Classroom, Li-Yin Liu, Christopher J. Devine, Heidi Gauder

Political Science Faculty Publications

Previous studies have documented a “gender citation gap” in political science, whereby women are less likely to be cited in published research and course syllabi, especially by male scholars. However, no previous study has examined citation patterns among students in political science courses to determine if similar patterns are evident in their research. This article analyzes an original database of individual, as well as group, research assignments from an undergraduate research methods course. Our analysis indicates that male students are significantly less likely than female students to cite research published by women – whether as first authors, any of the …

What Trump’S Picks For The Presidential Medal Of Freedom Say About Him, E. Fletcher Mcclellan, Christopher J. Devine, Kyle C. Kopko

Political Science Faculty Publications

President Donald Trump awarded his first ever Presidential Medals of Freedom this month to seven recipients: Babe Ruth, Elvis Presley, Antonin Scalia, Orrin Hatch, Roger Staubach, Alan Page and Miriam Adelson. It is the nation’s highest civilian honor.

These ceremonies, which normally occur once or twice per year, provide Americans with an opportunity to celebrate the achievements of various people who have made an important contribution to U.S. culture. Because the president selects recipients with total discretion – American or otherwise, living or dead –- this award also says a lot about the president himself.

What achievements or contributions does …

What If Hillary Clinton Had Gone To Wisconsin? Presidential Campaign Visits And Vote Choice In The 2016 Election, Christopher J. Devine

Political Science Faculty Publications

Hillary Clinton’s failure to visit the key battleground state of Wisconsin in 2016 has become a popular metaphor for the alleged strategic inadequacies of her presidential campaign. Critics who cite this fact, however, make two important assumptions: that campaign visits are effective, in general, and that they were effective for Clinton in 2016. I test these assumptions using an original database of presidential and vice presidential campaign visits in 2016. Specifically, I regress party vote share on each candidate’s number of campaign visits, at the county level, first for all counties located within battleground states, and then for counties located …

Split Tickets? On The Strategic Allocation Of Presidential Versus Vice Presidential Visits In 2016, Christopher J. Devine, Kyle C. Kopko

Political Science Faculty Publications

This article analyzes the strategic allocation of presidential campaign visits in 2016. In particular, we test whether each campaign disproportionately targeted its presidential versus vice presidential candidates’ visits toward voters with whom they shared a salient demographic or political characteristic. Our purpose in doing so is to discern whether—and, if so, among which groups—the campaigns perceived the candidates as having a strategic advantage in appealing to affiliated voters. To this end, we analyze an original database of 2016 campaign visits that includes local population characteristics for each host site. Our results indicate that each ticket’s visits were highly coordinated across …

Faith-Based Resistance, Human Rights, And Emancipatory Practices, Curtis Kline

Biennial Conference: The Social Practice of Human Rights

Progressive political theologies can expand and deepen both the strength and the conceptualization of human rights advocacy. However, not all political theologies are an effort to defend human dignity; neither are all understandings and practices of human rights. The validation of progressive political theologies as well as the validation of human rights conceptualizations comes from their capacity to concretely change the lived reality of poor and oppressed peoples of the world.

As with political theologies, there is a constant struggle over the control of how to conceptualize what constitutes a human rights issue. While many communities of faith find liberating …

Undergraduate Research Needs: Faculty-Librarian Collaboration To Improve Information Literacy In Policy Papers, Michelle C. Pautz, Heidi Gauder

Political Science Faculty Publications

To improve the quality of semester-long policy projects of upper-division political science students, a faculty member and research librarian collaborated to reframe the assignment in hopes of improving students’ research skills and information literacy, revising the traditional one-way model of faculty sending students to the library to get information. The outcomes over the course of two semesters have been promising. Citations in two sets of student papers showed a remarkable increase in the number and quality of sources used. This suggests that when faculty work with librarians throughout the semester, such collaboration can improve students’ information literacy and thus their …

Research Offers Tough Love To Improve Human Rights Practices, Joel Pruce

Political Science Faculty Publications

We know what it means to practice a skill such as juggling or dancing, but what does it mean to "practice" human rights?

Contributions to OpenGlobalRights (OGR), since its inception, have gravitated around critique of human rights practices by focusing on advocacy and activism, cultivating debates that address the contemporary dilemmas facing human rights movements worldwide. The launch of OGR four years ago is a symptom of what I’ve referred to elsewhere as a “practice turn” in the scholarly field of human rights—one that takes human rights practice as its subject, forges space for scholar-practitioner collaboration and communication, and focuses …

What Does Human Rights Look Like? The Visual Culture Of Aid, Advocacy, And Activism, Joel R. Pruce

Political Science Faculty Publications

We live in a highly complex and evolving world that requires a fuller and deeper understanding of how modern technological tools, ideas, practices, and institutions interact, and how different societies adjust themselves to emerging realities of the digital age. This book conveys such issues with a fresh perspective and in a systematic and coherent way. While many studies have explained in depth the change in the aftermath of the unrests and uprisings throughout the world, they rarely mentioned the need for constructing new human rights norms and standards. This edited collection provides a balanced conceptual framework to demonstrate not only …

Introduction: Symposium On The Social Practice Of Human Rights, Richard K. Ghere

Political Science Faculty Publications

This volume of Public Integrity presents a symposium of five articles related to human rights that (a) introduce readers to the general origin and nature of human rights conversation, (b) characterize how these norms are conveyed in the current digital age, or (c) depict how local governments and nonprofit agencies confront matters of human rights. Nonetheless, in publishing this symposium, PI “pushes the envelope” in asserting that human rights questions legitimately qualify as matters germane to the study and practice of public administration. Readers could, after all, maintain that, notwithstanding the aspirational appeal of human rights, international norms fall well …

Evolutionary Paths And Confining Cages: The Genealogy Of American State Constitutions, Nancy Martorano Miller

Political Science Faculty Publications

With this poster, Dr. Miller explained her work to identify how provisions and concepts in state constitutions are related to one another and evolved over time and to understand how the provisions in these documents impact the work of state officials in the policymaking process.

Her goals: 1. Provide a “genealogical” mapping of state constitutional evolution that will allow the testing of path dependency and other theories of institutional development. 2. Create a series of scores that can be used to assess the extent to which a state government’s capacity to act in a specific policy area (e.g., Health, Education, …

Administrative Narratives, Human Rights, And Public Ethics: The Detroit Water-Shutoff Case, Richard K. Ghere

Political Science Faculty Publications

This inquiry focuses specifically on administrative (local official) narratives that speak to contentious issue contexts of social conflict. Specifically, it draws upon a theoretical connection between hermeneutics and the sociology of knowledge to interpret narrative passages of local officials and others related to a contentious public action—the Detroit Water and Sewerage District’s stepped-up water-discontinuation efforts (2014 and 2015) that left thousands of inner-city residents with “delinquent” accounts and no access to water service. Selected narratives from this case are interpreted on the basis of their literary and social functions. The interpretations support a subsequent determination of whether and how the …

Sticky Legacies: Persistence Of State Constitutional Provisions, Nancy Martorano Miller, Maria Aroca, Keith E. Hamm, Ronald D. Hedlund

Political Science Faculty Publications

In this paper, we assess the evolution of 32 state constitutions and the U.S. Constitution over a 100+ year time period (1776-1907). We construct an original sectionlevel dataset containing the text of every section within a constitution for every year between the adoption of the state’s first constitution and 1907. We classify each section by topic and compare the content of each new constitution as well as the impact of amendments. With a subset of these data, we analyze the extent to which sections were added, deleted, modified and remained the same over time using a novel approach that relies …

Justice For Border Crossing Peoples, David Watkins

Political Science Faculty Publications

This chapter seeks to advance the conceptual and normative analysis of what Rogers Smith (2014) calls “appropriately differentiated citizenship” for a particular category of would-be border crossers who have so far been absent from the normative literature on immigration and exclusion: border crossing peoples.

Such peoples are defined by a longstanding history of crossing a particular international border for reasons — cultural, political, and/or economic — central to their collective identity. National territorial rights theorists such as David Miller argue that restrictive immigration policies can be justified via a collectivist Lockean analogy: Private property rights are to individuals as national …

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

Political Science Faculty Publications

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 …

Republicanism At Work: Strategies For Supporting Resistance To Domination In The Workplace, David Watkins

Political Science Faculty Publications

Work, as organized in contemporary workplaces and situated in social and political structures, poses a threat to freedom that has been underappreciated in political theory, especially liberal political theory. The recent revival of republicanism offers an intriguing alternative: Can republicanism do any better, with respect to work and freedom?

An examination of the workplace through a republican lens does a better job of helping us make sense of the way work threatens freedom — by exposing us to the threat of domination — and it can generate at least three plausible proposals that might render resistance to domination in the …

Compared To What? Judicial Review And Other Veto Points In Contemporary Political Theory, David Watkins, Scott E. Lemieux

Political Science Faculty Publications

Many democratic and jurisprudential theorists have too often uncritically accepted Alexander Bickel’s notion of “the countermajoritarian difficulty” when considering the relationship between judicial review and democracy; this is the case for arguments both for and against judicial review. This framework is both theoretically and empirically unsustainable. Democracy is not wholly synonymous with majoritarianism, and judicial review is not inherently countermajoritarian in the first place.

In modern democratic political systems, judicial review is one of many potential veto points. Since all modern democratic political systems contain veto points, the relevant and unexplored question is what qualities might make a veto point …

Working In A Cage: The Evolution Of Constitutional Restrictiveness In U.S. State Legislatures, Nancy Martorano Miller, Keith E. Hamm, Ronald D. Hedlund

Political Science Faculty Publications

The U.S. states have been characterized as “laboratories of democracy” for their ability to formulate public policies aimed at solving some of the most pressing public policy issues. The study of both public policy and legislative politics in the states has been quite robust. However, vitally missing from our understanding of policymaking and the legislative process in the states is the role of constitutional provisions. Many state constitutions contain directives that severely limit the ability of the legislature to act. Some of these directives are procedural while others are more substantive. This is relevant because constitutional rules are more difficult …

Thin Vs. Thick Morality: Ethics And Gender In International Development Programs, Richard K. Ghere

Political Science Faculty Publications

This study examines the ethical dimensions of gender-focused international development initiatives undertaken by nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and similar agencies. Specifically, it presents three case studies that depict how specific development initiatives in, respectively, India, Tanzania, and Senegal address gender disparities and power relationships. These case studies support the general conclusion that ethically committed development NGOs find difficulty in encouraging women (and men) to reverse oppressive power status-quos in messy contexts.

Constrained Behavior: Understanding The Entrenchment Of Legislative Procedure In American State Constitutional Law, Nancy Martorano Miller, Keith E. Hamm, Ronald D. Hedlund

Political Science Faculty Publications

Political analysts have suggested that policy power will begin to shift from the federal government to state governments as gridlock in Congress persists. Therefore, understanding the policymaking process at the state level is more important than ever. Vitally missing from our understanding of policymaking in the states is the role of constitutional provisions. Many state constitutions contain directives that severely limit the ability of the legislature to act. Some of these directives are procedural while others are more substantive. This is relevant because constitutional rules are more difficult for members to alter than chamber rules. In this paper we present …

Policy Brief: Unscr 1325: The Challenges Of Framing Women’S Rights As A Security Matter, Natalie Florea Hudson

Political Science Faculty Publications

While UN Security Council Resolution (UNSCR) 1325 has certainly increased awareness among international actors about women’s and gender issues in armed conflict, opened new spaces for dialogue and partnerships from global to local levels, and even created opportunities for new resources for women’s rights, successes remain limited and notably inconsistent. To understand some of these shortcomings and think creatively about how to move the women, peace and security agenda forward, it is essential to understand the conceptual assumptions underscoring UNSCR 1325.

Ethics In Public Management, H. George Frederickson, Richard K. Ghere

Political Science Faculty Publications

This volume follows two earlier projects undertaken by Frederickson (1993) and Frederickson and Ghere (2005) to present collections of theoretical essays and empirical analyses on administrative ethics. Three years before the publication of the first volume —Frederickson's Ethics and Public Administration — the National Commission on the Public Service released Leadership for America (also known as the Volcker Commission Report) that attested to "the quiet crisis" in government whereby "too many of the best of the nation's senior executives are ready to leave government, and not enough of its most talented young people are willing to join. This erosion in …

Ngo Leadership And Human Rights, Richard K. Ghere

Political Science Faculty Publications

This book provides preliminary understanding of what the term NGO means; explains how "human rights" affect NGO missions; and focuses on the meaning of "leadership" in NGOs in comparison to private sector and government agency leadership. It also encourages readers with vocational aspirations in human rights work to think strategically in preparing for their professional futures.

The Lilliputians Of Environmental Regulation: The Perspective Of State Regulators, Michelle C. Pautz, Sara R. Rinfret

Political Science Faculty Publications

When we think about environmental policy and regulation in the U.S., our attention invariably falls on the federal level and, more specifically, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Although such a focus is understandable, it neglects the actors most responsible for the implementation and maintenance of the nation's environmental laws — the states. Recognition of the importance of the states still ignores an even smaller subsection of actors, inspectors. These front-line actors in state environmental agencies are the individuals responsible for writing environmental rules and ensuring compliance with those rules. They play an important role in the environmental regulatory state.

With …

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

Political Science Faculty Publications

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 …

One Tough Nut: The Development Of Legislative Structure And Procedure In The Constitution Of The Buckeye State, Nancy Martorano Miller, Ronald D. Hedlund

Political Science Faculty Publications

American state legislatures have evolved dramatically throughout their history. In particular, the structures, rules and procedures governing the operations legislatures have changed significantly over the course of the 20th and 21st Centuries. The purpose of this paper is to present a theoretical framework for studying the development and evolution of American state legislatures. We then apply that framework to the case of constitutional provisions impacting the legislative branch in Ohio and conclude that the initial decision to invest significant authority in the legislative branch significantly impacted the evolution of legislative evolution and development in the state.

Network Legitimacy And Accountability In A Developmental Perspective, Richard K. Ghere

Political Science Faculty Publications

Public networks typically function beyond the lines of the hierarchical authorities that hold bureaucracies accountable, as is shown here in the case of a business-dominant network that exhibited ethically questionable behaviors at the expense of its community credibility. Public networks can build external legitimacy by engaging in critical organization learning processes, much the way some nongovernmental organizations respond to a diversity of stakeholders.

Religion, Politics, And Polity Replication: Religious Differences In Preferences For Institutional Design, Joshua D. Ambrosius

Political Science Faculty Publications

This article presents a theory of polity replication in which religious congregants prefer institutions in other realms of society, including the state, to be structured like their church. Polities, or systems of church governance and administration, generally take one of three forms: episcopal (hierarchical/centralized), presbyterian (collegial/regional), or congregational (autonomous/decentralized). When asked to cast a vote to shape institutions in a centralizing or decentralizing manner, voters are influenced by organizational values shaped by their respective religious traditions‘ polity structures. Past social scientific scholarship has neglected to explicitly connect religious affiliation, defined by polity, with members‘ stances on institutional design. However, previous …

Religion And Regionalism: Congregants, Culture And City-County Consolidation In Louisville, Kentucky, Joshua D. Ambrosius

Political Science Faculty Publications

Literature on religious involvement in public affairs typically examines the national scene, particularly public opinion and political behavior in presidential elections. Few scholars examine religious actors in urban politics and policymaking. Those who do study local politics emphasize morality policy and ignore issues of metropolitan governance and institutional design, central concerns of the urban politics field. This dissertation fills that gap by studying Louisville, Kentucky, site of the first large-scale city-county consolidation since 1969. I ask: does religion affect how people vote in a consolidation referendum and shape their opinions about merged government? I employ a survey instrument (N=807), collected …

Are They Ready For Their Close-Up? Civil Servants And Their Portrayal In Contemporary American Cinema, Michelle C. Pautz, Laura Roselle

Political Science Faculty Publications

Norma Desmond famously says in Billy Wilder’s Sunset Blvd. (1950), “All right, Mr. DeMille, I’m ready for my closeup.”1 Since then, this phrase has been uttered countless times to ensure the camera does not start rolling until everyone is ready. But all are not afforded the opportunity to get ready and civil servants fall squarely into this category. We know that government bureaucrats are among those individuals that Americans love to hate and attacks on the civil service come from a plethora of sources.2 And because of the ability of film (as well as other narrative forms) to influence perceptions …

Gender, Human Security And The United Nations: Security Language As A Political Framework For Women, Natalie Florea Hudson

Political Science Faculty Publications

This book examines the relationship between women, gender and the international security agenda, exploring the meaning of security in terms of discourse and practice, as well as the larger goals and strategies of the global women's movement.

Today, many complex global problems are being located within the security logic. From the environment to HIV/AIDS, state and non-state actors have made a practice out of securitizing issues that are not conventionally seen as such. As most prominently demonstrated by the UN Security Council Resolution 1325 (2001), activists for women's rights have increasingly framed women's rights and gender inequality as security issues …