Public Affairs, Public Policy and Public Administration Commons^™

Call For Proposals 2023: The Social Practice Of Human Rights And The And The 6th International Conference On The Right To Development, University Of Dayton

Content presented at the Social Practice of Human Rights Conference

Call for proposals: We welcome contributions that focus on the following sub-themes or any related topic:

• Inclusive development — redistributive models; business and human rights; rights-based economies and financial institutions; global supply chains; inequalities; and Agenda 2030 and the Sustainable Development Goals.
  
  
• Social transformation, movements, and resistance — new forms of civic and cultural engagement, education, and pedagogy; the intersection of theater, art and activism; music, performance, and visual culture; new technologies; resistance to anti-rights movements; and democratic fragility.
  
  
• Climate change and sustainability — climate and environmental justice; ecological disaster; natural resources exploitation; building sustainable futures; corporate interests; and fiscal …

Flyer: 2023 Conference, University Of Dayton

Content presented at the Social Practice of Human Rights Conference

Promotional flyer: The University of Dayton Human Rights Center, the Centre for Human Rights of the Faculty of Law, University of Pretoria, and the University of the Free State Centre for Human Rights, South Africa, jointly convene the 2023 Social Practice of Human Rights Conference and the 6th International Conference on the Right to Development, set for Nov. 2-4, 2023.

The call for proposals is now available, and submissions are open through May 8, 2023.

Call For Proposals 2021: The Social Practice Of Human Rights Conference, University Of Dayton

Content presented at the Social Practice of Human Rights Conference

The global pandemic has rapidly broken down boundaries and structures—from personal to social to institutional. Long-standing practices and norms have changed radically to respond to the current crisis, while some institutional and political dynamics contrary to human rights and democracy have become further entrenched. New pressures on human rights are also heightened by the pandemic, including rights to privacy, access to health, and digital capitalism. This crisis has shown that for human rights, the perils and potentials have increased hand in hand.

The stark upending by the pandemic provides proof-of-concept for the disintegration of silos and the erosion of exclusionary …

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 …

Call For Proposals 2019: The Social Practice Of Human Rights, University Of Dayton

Content presented at the Social Practice of Human Rights Conference

2019 marks 30 years since the end of the Cold War and the beginning of an era pregnant with promise and potential for human rights, democracy, and global governance.

Yet today, global capitalism drives widening and deepening inequalities. Its dependence on natural resource extraction and exploitation is hastening ecological collapse. Authoritarianism and populism have risen from the rubble of liberalism’s inability to deliver on its pledges. Technology, once promoted as a panacea for transnational boundary breaking and democratization, further empowers the powerful to reshape politics and upend notions of privacy, social life, information, employment, and even biology.

Critics have questioned …

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 Civil Society Organizations And The Protection Of Victims Of Human Rights Abuses In Nigeria, Nathaniel Umukoro

Biennial Conference: The Social Practice of Human Rights

Nigeria has witnessed various forms of human rights violations such as extrajudicial killings, rape, and torture during both military and civilian regimes. Amnesty International, the U.S. State Department, and the Political Terror Scale of the Centre for Systemic Peace indicate that Nigeria is a country characterized by generalized human rights violations.

Over the years, several scholars have examined the causes, nature, responses of the state, and reasons for the persistence of human rights violations in Nigeria. A careful consideration of these studies indicates that the role of faith-based civil society organizations in the protection of victims of human rights abuses …

The Power And Pathologies Of Language: How Human Rights Messaging Can Also Affect Support For Violent Non-State Actors, Alexandra Haines, Michele Leiby, Matthew Krain

Biennial Conference: The Social Practice of Human Rights

Are framing strategies that are effective at encouraging pro-social behavior such as participation in human rights campaigns also effective at mobilizing support for “anti-social” and violent causes? Using an experimental research design, we seek to understand under what conditions individuals will express support for retributive violent action.

We hypothesize that a personal story of victimization, wherein the humanity and vulnerability of the victim and the intensity of the violence suffered are described in vivid detail, will be necessary and sufficient to cause the audience to express support for the victim’s subsequent participation in organized, retaliatory violence. We expect that personal …

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 …

State Sovereignty And Human Security: The Migration-Securitization Nexus In The Global South, Eugene R. Sensenig

Biennial Conference: The Social Practice of Human Rights

This paper deals with the issues of state sovereignty and refugee policy in insecure and marginalized regions of the Global South. Using the displaced Syrian populations (UN-recognized and undocumented) in Lebanon as a case in point, the attempt will be made to portray and discuss the responses of underdeveloped host communities to overwhelming increases in the size of their non-national population. Lebanon has faced various waves of refugees since its independence in 1943, making up between 2.5% (Iraqis) and 25% (Syrians) of the entire citizen population, currently estimated to be slightly over 4 million. Almost 500,000 Palestinian refugees are registered …

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 …

America’S Legendary Ignorance About Africa Persists, Julius A. Amin

History Faculty Publications

In an increasingly interconnected and technological global environment, ignorance of Africa is no longer acceptable. This, especially from major political leaders. Yet, examples of such ignorance are evident in the current American presidential campaign. Neither the Republican nominee Donald J. Trump nor the democratic nominee Hillary R. Clinton has articulated any concrete vision for an African policy.

Call For Papers 2017: The Social Practice Of Human Rights, University Of Dayton

Content presented at the Social Practice of Human Rights Conference

The University of Dayton Human Rights Center invites proposals from scholars, practitioners, policymakers, and advocates on a broad array of human rights topics. The Center welcomes both theoretical and applied research proposals that capture important trends in human rights scholarship and research. We encourage the submission of individual papers, complete panels, roundtables, workshops, and practitioner presentations, as well as interdisciplinary and scholar-practitioner collaborations.

To submit a paper or proposal, see the conference's section in the repository: http://ecommons.udayton.edu/human_rights/

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 …

Environmental Regulation, Michelle C. Pautz

Political Science Faculty Publications

The terms environment and regulation are commonplace in political and policy debates about the natural environment, the role of science, and the behavior of government. Indeed, these terms reference a very contentious area of public policy and are emblematic of the growing tensions between science and politics. This chapter overviews the definition, types, and history of environmental regulation before turning to the intersection of science and politics in environmental policy and considering current and future challenges for this aspect of governmental activity.

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.