Models and Methods Commons^™

Guns Of Fortune: How Guns Move To Fulfill Demand, Michael J. Coates

Senior Honors Projects

Legislators face a compelling dilemma, how can they decrease the prevalence of gun violence? Cities and States around the United States have laws intended to prevent violent criminals from acquiring and using weapons, but it remains debatable whether these laws are effective.

This study posits that guns are subject to the laws of supply and demand and the variable gun laws in states across the country decreases the effectiveness of local and state gun legislation. In short, guns are trafficked across state lines to meet demand in states with stricter gun laws.

Data for the study was collected from the ...

Democracy Through Multi-Body Sortition: Athenian Lessons For The Modern Day, Terrill G. Bouricius

Journal of Public Deliberation

Mature Classical Athenian democracy is presented as a representative system, rather than the commonly described form of “direct democracy.” When viewed in this way, the commonly assumed problem of scale in applying Athenian democracy to modern nation states is solved, and principles and practices of the Athenian model of democracy continue to have relevance today. The key role of sortition (selection by lot) to form multiple deliberative bodies is explained. Five dilemmas faced by modern proposals for the use of sortition are examined. Finally, a new model of lawmaking using multiple allotted bodies is presented, which resolves these dilemmas and ...

Synthesising The Outputs Of Deliberation: Extracting Meaningful Results From A Public Forum, Kieran C. O'Doherty

Journal of Public Deliberation

Recent years have seen an increase in empirical studies of public deliberation. This has led to important advances in thinking through issues such as who to include, how best to inform lay audiences about a particular topic, and how to maximise the perceived legitimacy of deliberation. An important issue that has not received much attention is how to define, identify, and report the results of deliberation. The conversations among individuals that occur over the course of a deliberation can be understood as a large and complex set of qualitative data. The deliberative discourse that is produced over the course of ...

An Analysis Of The Effectiveness Of The Director Of National Intelligence (Dni) In Uniting The Intelligence Community, Bethany G. Pico

Senior Honors Papers

September 11, 2001 marks the date of the largest attack on American soil since the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor during World War II. This event not only changed the lives of individuals who suffered intense loss but changed the course of American history in several ways. This paper focuses specifically on the changes in the intelligence community since the attacks. The attacks that 9/11 presented flaws in the system created demonstrating weakness as a direct result of the immense destruction that occurred. The thesis of this paper is to analyze, assess, and draw conclusions on the effectiveness of ...

Participatory Budgeting - The Australian Way, Nivek K. Thompson

Journal of Public Deliberation

For the first time in Australia a local council has used a deliberative democracy approach to obtain citizen advice on key decisions regarding the full range of Council services, service levels and funding. Typically a participatory budget (PB) gives citizens authority in relation to a component of the local government budget. The City of Canada Bay Council, in metropolitan Sydney, went well beyond this. In this paper the Canada Bay Citizens’ Panel (CP), the name given to the PB, is compared to the traditional PB process highlighting three distinctive features of this process: (1) the use of a randomly selected ...

Informational Lobbying And Agenda Distortion, Christopher Cotton, Arnaud Dellis

Christopher Cotton

This paper challenges the prevailing view in the literature that informational lobbying is socially beneficial. Key to our analysis is the fact that policymakers are constrained on the number of issues they can address, which forces them to prioritize issues. Under reasonable conditions, interest groups advocating less-salient reforms produce information, inducing policymakers to prioritize those reforms instead of more-salient ones. Such distortion of the policy agenda reduces social welfare. Our story is consistent with empirical accounts of the lobbying process.

Developing A Georgia Policy Database: A Research Proposal, Paul E. Rutledge

Georgia Journal of Public Policy

No abstract provided.

Barking Up The Wrong Tree: Why Bo Won't Fetch Many Votes For Barack Obama In 2012, Matthew L. Jacobsmeier, Daniel C. Lewis

Matthew L. Jacobsmeier

In “The Dog that Didn't Bark: The Role of Canines in the 2008 Campaign,” Diana Mutz (2010) argues that dog ownership made voters significantly less likely to vote for Barack Obama in the 2008 presidential election. We examine this claim further. While President Obama has owned a dog since shortly after his 2008 election, we argue that Bo’s presence will not do much to improve his owner’s chances of being reelected in 2012. Rather, the apparent significance of dog ownership is due largely to key variables being omitted from the analysis. Using the same data, we show ...

Equal Protection Under The Law? Examining Tennessee's Drug Free School Zone Act (Tndfsza), Jordan T. Smith

University of Tennessee Honors Thesis Projects

No abstract provided.

Religion And Perceptions Of Candidate Ideologies In U.S. House Elections, Matthew L. Jacobsmeier

Matthew L. Jacobsmeier

Using data from the American National Election Studies, Poole-Rosenthal DW-Nominate scores, and data on the religious affiliations of candidates for election to the U.S. House of Representatives, I show that religion has important independent effects on the evaluation of candidates' ideologies. The results suggest that candidates affiliated with evangelical Christianity will tend to be seen as more conservative than ideologically similar candidates from mainline Protestant denominations. Jewish candidates, in contrast, will tend to be seen as more liberal than ideologically similar mainline Protestants. Additionally, the use of religion-based stereotypes varies with frequency of church attendance. Moreover, respondents who share ...