Models and Methods Commons^™

Public Support For Military Interventions Across Levels Of Political Information And Stages Of Intervention: The Case Of The Iraq War, Cigdem V. Sirin

Cigdem V. Sirin

This study examines the effect of political information levels and intervention stages on the formation and continuity of public support for military interventions by analyzing survey data pertaining to the 2003 military intervention in Iraq. The results show that before and immediately after the launch of the intervention, politically uninformed individuals expressed higher support for the war compared to politically informed ones. However, as the intervention proceeded and casualties were incurred, higher rates of decrease in support were observed among the politically uninformed. Politically informed individuals, on the other hand, demonstrated more stable levels of support throughout the course of …

You Say You Want A (Nonviolent) Revolution, Well Then What? Translating Western Thought, Strategic Ideological Cooptation, And Institution Building For Freedom For Governments Emerging Out Of Peaceful Chaos, Donald J. Kochan

Donald J. Kochan

With nonviolent revolution in particular, displaced governments leave a power and governance vacuum waiting to be filled. Such vacuums are particularly susceptible to what this Article will call “strategic ideological cooptation.” Following the regime disruption, peaceful chaos transitions into a period in which it is necessary to structure and order the emergent governance scheme. That period in which the new government scheme emerges is particularly fraught with danger when growing from peaceful chaos because nonviolent revolutions tend to be decentralized, unorganized, unsophisticated, and particularly vulnerable to cooptation. Any external power wishing to influence events in societies emerging out of peaceful …

Understanding The Instruments Of National Power Through A System Of Differential Equations In A Counterinsurgency, Cade M. Saie

Theses and Dissertations

Models that account for the progression of nation-building and the impacts of the instruments of national power -- Diplomacy, Informational, Military, and Economic effects -- are rare. This research proposes the development of such a model. Through the derivation of state indices for the operational variables of Political, Military, Economic, Social, Infrastructure, and Information, a functional form of a system of differential equations is developed to account for the interactions between the state indices and instruments of national power. This methodology is a mean-field inverse problem which solves for the coefficients of the differential equations in a data-driven manner. Publicly …

Anarchy, Play, And Carnival In The Neoliberal City: Critical Mass As Insurgent Public Space Activism, John Andrew Blue

Master's Theses

No abstract provided.

Discourse And Argument In Instituting The Governance Of Social Law, Richard Weiner

Richard R Weiner

Social Rights were initially understood as the rights of a pluralism of instituted associations; and transformed to the rights of distributive justice associated with the politics of access to welfare state corporatism. More recently, they have been understood as the rights of multicultural difference; and now as the rights to complexity (Zolo), and rights to consideration of polycontextural effect vis-�- vis transnational corporations (Teubner). Social rights are no longer subject positions versus political bodies, but also against social institutions, in particular, vis-�-vis centers of economic power.

Complementary Institutions And Reflexive Governance In Autonomous Social Law, Richard R. Weiner

Richard R Weiner

We approach institutions as stabilizing structures with consequences of functional incorporateness. Yet we also imagine, assert and enact claims and warrants as institutionalizable practices. There are functional supports. And there are the warranted claims of categorical normativity. Normativity in itself can be understood in terms of compliance with or acquiescence in legitimating structures. Yet normativity itself can be understood as a solidarism we intersubjectively co-constitute. The challenge in political thought has been dealing with the disincorporateness associated with modernity, specifically how a new order and dialogue may be of heterogeneous social values. A new way of ordering socioeconomic relationships of …

Traces Of The Stillborn? , Richard Weiner

Richard R Weiner

The architect Daniel Libeskind has written a noted lecture, "Traces of the Unborn." We might add, "Traces of the Stillborn." There is a tendency in historical institutionalism (HI) to concentrate on the retrieval of traces of paths taken rather than (1) to consider the processes involved in the selection of paths; and (2) to reflect upon the conditions of institutional emergence and sedimentation of paths, whether taken or untaken. Contrary to the path-dependency obsessed historical institutionalism of a Paul Pierson, this paper stresses the significance of historical case studies of institutional emergence in the earlier 20th century and …

Methods Of Analysis Of Illegal Immigration Into The United States, Vernon Briggs

Vernon M Briggs Jr

"A major barrier to the discussion of the scope and impact of illegal immigration on the American economy has been the inadequacy of existing data. Although data problems are not unique to this topic, the limited availability of macro-data on the size of the annual flows and of the accumulated stock of individuals as well as of micro-data on their influences on selected labor markets has been effectively used to forestall policy reform efforts."

Methods Of Analysis Of Illegal Immigration Into The United States, Vernon Briggs

Vernon M Briggs Jr

"A major barrier to the discussion of the scope and impact of illegal immigration on the American economy has been the inadequacy of existing data. Although data problems are not unique to this topic, the limited availability of macro-data on the size of the annual flows and of the accumulated stock of individuals as well as of micro-data on their influences on selected labor markets has been effectively used to forestall policy reform efforts."

Judgment And Measurement In Political Science, Andreas Schedler

Andreas Schedler

Standard methodological advice in political science alerts against the distortion of measurement decisions by judgmental elements. Judgment is subjective, common wisdom asserts, it produces opaque, biased, and unreliable data. This article, by contrast, argues that judgment is a critical intersubjective ingredient of political measurement that needs to be acknowledged and rationalized, rather than exorcised.

Modern Political Marketing: An Analysis Of Tactics, And The Changing Role Of The Media, Jill Donovan

Journalism

Political marketing is evolving. Campaigns now rely on political marketing for success in elections, without the marketing tactics they employ; their messaging would not be distributed to the voting public. In many of the political marketing models and theories, however, there is a massive omission; the role of traditional media as an overwhelmingly influential factor over the voting public, which can misconstrue and negatively impact the message of the candidate. This study analyses classical marketing tactics a political marketer uses, and examines the changing environment of traditional media with the rise of social networking.

Webs Of Faith As A Source Of Reasonable Disagreement, Gregory Brazeal

Gregory Brazeal

Contemporary political theorists and philosophers of epistemology and religion have often drawn attention to the problem of reasonable disagreement. The idea that deliberators may reasonably persist in a disagreement even under ideal deliberative conditions and even over the long term poses a challenge to the common assumption that rationality should lead to consensus. This essay proposes a previously unrecognized source of reasonable disagreement, based on the notion that an individual's beliefs are rationally related to one another in a fabric of sentences or web of beliefs. The essay argues that an individual's beliefs may not form a single, seamless web, …

A New Index Of Legislative Oversight, Riccardo Pelizzo

riccardo pelizzo

The purpose of this paper is to present a new index of legislative oversight. Building on the work by Stapenhurst (2011), who argued that a proper index of legislative oversight capacity should reflect not only legislatures’ internal oversight capacity but also the impact of contextual factors, we devise and propose a modified version of the Stapenhurst. The results of the empirical analyses presented in the paper sustain the claim that when properly operationalized and measured, legislative oversight capacity is a good predictor of legislative oversight effectiveness and other policy relevant results.

El Tribunal De Los Militantes: El Control Judicial De Los Conflictos Intrapartidistas En México, Javier Martín Reyes

Javier Martín Reyes

The Party Members’ Court: Judicial Control over Intraparty Disputes in Mexico.

This paper explains how the Electoral Court of the Federal Judicial Branch (TEPJF) of Mexico, without a supporting legislation, was able to establish a direct and far reaching control over intraparty disputes such as the election of party leaders, the selection of candidates, or the punishment of party members. Following a strategic behavior approach, I will provide empirical evidence to prove that there was a negative correlation between the level of judicial control over the parties’ internal life, on the one hand, and the vulnerability of the TEPJF from …

Benefit-Cost Analysis Of Enviromental Projects: A Plethora Of Biases Understating Net Benefits, Philip E. Graves

PHILIP E GRAVES

There are many reasons to suspect that benefit-cost analysis applied to environmental policies will result in policy decisions that will reject those environmental policies. The important question, of course, is whether those rejections are based on proper science. The present paper explores sources of bias in the methods used to evaluate environmental policy in the United States, although most of the arguments translate immediately to decision-making in other countries. There are some “big picture” considerations that have gone unrecognized, and there are numerous more minor, yet cumulatively important, technical details that point to potentially large biases against acceptance on benefit-cost …

Decolonizing The Mind: A Comparative Approach To Indigenous Movements And Globalization, Robert Andrew Wallace

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

Indigenous political movements represent an emerging challenge to globalization as embodied by the spread of capitalist free markets and neoliberal reform. Indigenous groups are creating new spaces in which to express agency and propose alternatives to the dominant growth economic model. Although these processes have led to the creation of new and hybrid norms of development, they have also resulted in conflict between indigenous peoples and the nation-states within which they reside. The role of scholarly analysis in exploring and understanding these processes is crucial. However, conventional Western approaches-namely Marxist and Liberal- may prove insufficient for two reasons, one empirical …

Political Participation Over The Life Cycle, Jennifer L. Erkulwater

Political Science Faculty Publications

Although we have paid attention to group differences in political activity on the basis of race or ethnicity, gender, and especially socio-economic status (SES), we have so far ignored such disparities among age groups, disparities that will become especially important in Chapter 16 when we consider inequalities in Internet-based political participation. The participatory deficit of citizens who have recently entered the electorate raises the same kinds of questions we have been bringing to inequalities of political voice on the basis of socio-economic status: How do we account for disparities in political activity on the basis of age? What are their …

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 …

The War Next Door: Peace Journalism In Us Local And Distant Newspapers' Coverage Of Mexico, Katherine Lacasse, Larissa Forster

Faculty Publications

This study explores the relationship between proximity to a conflict and the tendency to use peace journalism rather than war journalism modes of reporting. In the context of the current drug war occurring in Mexico, articles from both local, border region US newspapers and from distant US newspapers were coded according to their usage of war or peace journalism frames. Analyses revealed that local newspapers utilized more peace journalism frames overall, and presented a less pessimistic and negative view of the conflict and parties. Distant newspapers, however, were more likely to showcase complexity of the conflict and many parties and …

Whose Budget? Our Budget? Broadening Political Stakeholdership Via Participatory Budgeting, Celina Su

Publications and Research

In this thought piece, I attempt to contextualize New York City’s inaugural participatory budgeting (PB) process in the larger landscape of American political participation. I discuss how the bottom-up way in which stakeholders wrote the process’s rules in the first place, alongside the core role played by the two lead organizations, helped to broaden notions of stakeholdership among constituents. Ultimately, the first year’s primary achievement regarding political participation was not a specific set of outcomes, but a debut as an unfinished form of governance—one that began to engage traditionally marginalized constituents, to trigger their political imagination, and to prompt them …