Political Science Commons^™

Police And Civilians Fractured Relationship In The Northern Region Of Ghana: A Search For A Common Ground For Internal Security, Mohammed Gadafi Ibrahim

Journal of African Conflicts and Peace Studies

This study investigates the fractured relationship between Police and Civilians in Ghana's Northern Region, leading to a breakdown of trust and cooperation in maintaining internal security. The theoretical basis for this study rests on the Social Dominance Theory (SDT) and the Contact Theory (CT). Through a qualitative approach involving purposive sampling, in-depth interviews, and focus group discussions, the study examines the structural factors contributing to this fractured relationship. Analysis using the constant comparative technique revealed that the legitimacy of the Ghana Police Service, public perceptions, police conduct, youth indiscipline, and low level of knowledge on the Rule of Law are …

The Last Colony: Theoretical Explanations On The Protractedness Of The Western Sahara Conflict, Elisabeth H. Austrheim

Journal of African Conflicts and Peace Studies

“There has never been a protracted war from which a country has benefited” (Tzu 1963: 73).

The forty-eight yearlong Western Sahara conflict over the former Spanish colony between Polisario and the Kingdom of Morocco continues its low prospects of resolution. The future of the territory, with both strategic geopolitical and financial relevance, remains uncertain in which the reasons for the continued prolongation appear to be many. Different conflict theories emphasise various factors causing protractedness, suggesting that many different causes, together, have engendered the current lack of settlement. Whilst the theory of protracted social conflicts emphasises developed high-tensioned, hostile relations between …

A Political Theory Of Engineered Systems And A Study Of Engineering And Justice Workshops, Dominic David Carrese

Dartmouth College Master’s Theses

Since there are good reasons to think that some engineered systems are socially undesirable—for example, internal combustion engines that cause climate change, algorithms that are racist, and nuclear weapons that can destroy all life—there is a well-established literature that attempts to identify best practices for designing and regulating engineered systems in order to prevent harm and promote justice. Most of this literature, especially the design theory and engineering justice literature meant to help guide engineers, focuses on environmental, physical, social, and mental harms such as ecosystem and bodily poisoning, racial and gender discrimination, and urban alienation. However, the literature that …

Democracy And The Unconscious, Ali Aslam, David Mcivor, Joel Alden Schlosser

Political Science Faculty Research and Scholarship

This essay examines the relationship between democracy and the unconscious. It does so by understanding democracy through the repressed desire for shared power by a collective actor that has episodically realized itself, in ways that haunt political languages, practices, and aspirations. Democratic flourishing rests upon erotic practices through which the demos transgressively transforms politics by embracing what we refer to as democratic narcissism. Democratic decline and impasse are symptomatic of repressed desires for power that have required the people’s abjection rather than coalescing into a self-affirming narcissism of the demos.

Inflation Expectations And Political Polarization: Evidence From The Cooperative Election Study, Ethan Struby, Christina Farhart

Department of Economics Working Paper Series

Using a unique, nationally representative survey from the 2022 midterm elections, we investigate the partisan divide in beliefs about inflation and monetary policy. We find that party identity is predictive of inflation forecasts even after conditioning on beliefs about both past inflation and the Federal Reserve’s long-run inflation target. Partisan forecast differences are driven by respondents who express low generalized trust in others and have a high degree of political knowledge; high-trust and low- knowledge partisans make similar forecasts all else equal. This finding is consistent with the literature in political psychology that examines the endorsement of conspiracy theories and …

The Estonian And Latvian Orthodox Churches Of The Moscow Patriarchate Before And After The Russian War In Ukraine, Priit Rohtmets, Valdis Teraudkalns

Occasional Papers on Religion in Eastern Europe

From the beginning of the Russian war in Ukraine the Baltic Orthodox churches subordinated to the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC) have gone through considerable changes in their canonical status, but have also stood out with controversial public statements about the war.

In this article we analyse how the Orthodox churches of the Moscow Patriarchate have reacted to the Russian war in Ukraine and what have been the major canonical changes in Latvia and Lithuania. Additionally, we describe the most important narratives, which the churches have used when speaking about the ongoing war and pay attention to the reaction, which these …

Automated Update Tools To Augment The Wisdom Of Crowds In Geopolitical Forecasting, Amy Summerville, Cara Widmer, Brandon Minnery, Ion Juvina, Subashini Ganapathy

Psychology Faculty Publications

Despite the importance of predictive judgments, individual human forecasts are frequently less accurate than those of even simple prediction algorithms. At the same time, not all forecasts are amenable to algorithmic prediction. Here, we describe the evaluation of an automated prediction tool that enabled participants to create simple rules that monitored relevant indicators (e.g., commodity prices) to automatically update forecasts. We examined these rules in both a pool of previous participants in a geopolitical forecasting tournament (Study 1) and a naïve sample recruited from Mechanical Turk (Study 2). Across the two studies, we found that automated updates tended to improve …

Strategic Narrative And Global Public Opinion On The Russia-Ukraine Conflict, Jason Rhett

CMC Senior Theses

Through analyzing the cases of public opinion in Russia and South Africa, this thesis explores the nature of strategic narratives and the effects that they have on public opinion. Using the Russia-Ukraine conflict as a case study, it is conclusive that while strategic narratives are important and impactful, they are not the only factor that shape domestic and international public opinion. In Russia, while narrative has swayed a large portion of the population, there are those who’s stances can be attributed to the pressure to conform to the Russian nationalist majority. In South Africa, the country’s leadership has taken a …

The People Are A-Changin’: The Political Groupings That Built American Folk And Country Music, Nicholas Taubenheim

CMC Senior Theses

Since the Civil War, American folk and country music have become deeply political cultural mediums. This thesis posits that the history of the folk-country family can be broken down into three distinct “eras.” During the first era, the post-Civil War South gave rise to a new form of “Dixie,” or “hillbilly” folk music derived from traditional European folk ballads. In the second era, the Dust Bowl migrants of Southern California pioneered the “Okie” sound, which built upon Dixie/hillbilly music. And in the third era, the political and cultural dissidents of the 1960s produced a new type of folk music in …

The Impact Of Armed Drones On Human Security Goals, Sarath Kakani

CMC Senior Theses

The rapid proliferation of armed drones around the globe has sparked a debate on their benefits and their tradeoffs. Through a traditional security perspective, drones are the ideal weapon of the future: incredible technological capabilities lend tactical advantages to any military that owns drones. They allow actors to strike at enemy combatants without no risk to their own troops and minimal risk to any civilian bystanders. Yet through a nontraditional human security lens, armed drones have been nothing short of a disaster in protecting civilians and reducing collateral damage. The tactical advantages they lend users are some of their most …

Community-Centric Approaches To Coastal Hazard Assessment And Management In Southside Norfolk, Virginia, Usa, Dalya Ismael, Nicole Hutton, Mujde Erten-Unal, Carol Considine, Tancy Vandecar-Burdin, Christopher Davis, Yin-Hsuen Chen

Engineering Technology Faculty Publications

Urban communities in environmentally sensitive areas face escalating challenges due to climate change and inadequate infrastructural support, particularly in underserved regions like southside Norfolk, Virginia. This area, characterized by its vulnerability to flooding and a predominantly low-income population, lacks equitable inclusion in broader urban flood protection plans. This research focuses on the development of community-centered resilience strategies through active engagement and collaboration with local residents. The methodology centered around building trust and understanding within the community through a series of interactions and events. This approach facilitated a two-way exchange of information, enabling the research team to gather crucial insights on …

Economic Entanglement: The Quantum Race Between The United States And China, Isabella Willhite

Regis University Student Publications (comprehensive collection)

The United States and China are both currently home to the strongest economies and militaries in the world. Despite their interdependence, trade wars have escalated between the two countries in the past few years. While past trade wars have been focused on purely economic protectionism or ideological stances, the trade wars of today signify a shift towards protecting critical emerging technologies. The important emerging technology of today is quantum computing, which will forever change the way that computers encrypt, process, and decode information. The United States and China are on the eve of the “quantum race,” in which they will …

Institutional Design And The Predictability Of Judicial Interruptions At Oral Argument, Tonja Jacobi, Patrick Leslie, Zoë Robinson

Faculty Articles

Examining oral argument in the Australian High Court and comparing to the U.S. Supreme Court, this article shows that institutional design drives judicial interruptive behavior. Many of the same individual- and case-level factors predict oral argument behavior. Notably, despite orthodoxy of the High Court as “apolitical,” ideology strongly predicts interruptions, just as in the United States. Yet, important divergent institutional design features between the two apex courts translate into meaningful behavioral differences, with the greater power of the Chief Justice resulting in differences in interruptions. Finally, gender effects are lower and only identifiable with new methodological techniques we develop and …

Theorising Political Legitimisation: From Stasis To Processes, Paddy Dolan, Stephen Vertigans, John Connolly

Articles

Legitimacy remains a key concept in political sociology, and perhaps even more so in lay understandings of political processes and structures, as evidenced by conflict over territories and regimes around the world. However, the concept suffers from a rather static representation, and even when addressed in processual form, in terms of specific moments in the process, such as conditions favouring legitimacy or its effects. Building from an Eliasian perspective, we argue for a more processual concept of legitimisation to encompass the dynamic social networks (figurations) that constitute the more unintentional context for deliberate legitimation claims. As networks expand and intensify, …

The Body In Pieces: Towards A Feminist Phenomenology Of Violence, Archana Kaku

Arts & Sciences Articles

This article proposes that feminist phenomenology offers an essential set of conceptual tools for analysing forms of violence which destroy the body beyond the point of death. To illustrate the potential utility of this approach, I apply this lens to the 11 September 2001 attack on the World Trade Center in Manhattan, New York City. I identify several distinct modes of bodily transformation from the attack, grouped into three broad categories: vaporised bodies, intermingled remains, and hidden fragments. I describe how these transformations unsettled the relationships between bodies and contexts, and occasioned the formation of new relationships in ways that …

The New Gender Panic In Sport: Why State Laws Banning Transgender Athletes Are Unconstitutional, Deborah Brake

Articles

The scope and pace of legislative activity targeting transgender individuals is nothing short of a gender panic. From restrictions on medical care to the regulation of library books and the use of pronouns in schools, attacks on the transgender community have reached crisis proportions. A growing number of families with transgender children are being forced to leave their states of residence to keep their children healthy and their families safe and intact. The breadth and pace of these developments is striking. Although the anti-transgender backlash now extends broadly into health and family governance, sport was one of the first settings—the …

The Supervisors Are Carrying The Bag: The Nurses' Emergency Council, Settlement Houses, And The 1918 Influenza Pandemic In New York City, Eric C. Cimino

Faculty Publications: History and Political Science

This article examines the combined efforts of the Nurses’ Emergency Council (NEC), settlement houses, and the Department of Health during the 1918 Influenza Pandemic in New York City. To coordinate public health nursing, the NEC united the settlements and municipal agencies into an umbrella organization that was chaired by Lillian Wald of the Henry Street Settlement. Together, the NEC and the Health Department recruited a corps of nurses to treat influenza patients, primarily in their homes. Historical accounts of the 1918 Pandemic often emphasize the incompetence of American cities in dealing with influenza’s spread. New York’s Health Commissioner Royal Copeland, …

Who Are You? The Relationship Between Language And Personality, Gwendolyn Cooley

WWU Honors College Senior Projects

The relationship between language and personality is one that has been ruminated upon for decades, leading to a plethora of often contradictory scholarship. This project examines that relationship from an outsider perspective, utilizing both existing research and original questionnaire data to draw conclusions about how one's second language learning impacts personality.

Senatus Exesa: Explaining The Abuse Of Procedure In The U.S. Congress, Ian Klenk

Soaring: A Journal of Undergraduate Research

Senatus Exesa: Explaining the Abuse of Procedure in the U.S. Congress

Abstract

On October 3^rd, 2023, Rep. Kevin McCarthy became the first Speaker of the House of Representatives to be forcibly removed from his position as Speaker of the lower chamber of Congress. Though dramatic, this episode is indicative of the current state of American politics. At a time when political polarization between the two parties has never been higher, norms that were once considered the nuclear option are now understood as the norm. Cynicism and distrust of Congress is at an all-time high, with many Americans disabused …

The Populist Wave: Unpacking The Global Drivers Of 21st Century Right-Wing Populist Support, Ellie Fallon

Honors Theses

This thesis investigates the underlying causes of the global rise in right-wing populism support in the twenty-first century. I will examine both the origins of these shifts in public opinion and their consequences for political systems and global interactions. My analyses will take two forms: (1) a cross-national analysis of the rise in right-wing populism in 34 of the 38 member states of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) to explore the demographic factors that exhibit a relationship with populist attitudes and (2) case studies of right-wing populism in the contemporary United States (with particular attention to former …