Digital Commons Network^™

Sdrc Biennial Report 2008-2010, Connie Jan Maraan

SDRC Accomplishment Reports

No abstract provided.

2010 Sci-Tech Division Awards, Sheila Rosenthal, Hilary M. Davis

Sci-Tech News

No abstract provided.

Do The Effects Of Corruption Upon Growth Differ Across Political Regimes?, Andreas Assiotis, Kevin Sylwester

Economics Discussion Papers

Many studies find that corruption lowers economic growth. However, most of these studies do not consider whether the effects of corruption upon growth differ across countries. This paper investigates whether the association between corruption and economic growth differs between democracies and authoritarian regimes. Consider illegal corruption and legal lobbying, both forms of rent seeking, as imperfect substitutes. Suppose lobbying is easier to do in democracies. Then, lowering corruption in authoritarian regimes could have greater growth benefits because of the lower substitutability between corruption and lobbying in these countries. Using cross-country, annual data from 1984 to 2007, we regress economic growth …

The Party Edge: Consultant-Candidate Networks In American Political Parties, Jacob Montgomery, Brendan Nyhan

2010

From David Axelrod to Karl Rove, political consultants have come to play a crucial role in American elections, and yet we know little about how they influence the political process. In particular, consultants serve as an important part of the web of informal relationships that play an important role in contemporary parties. Using data from Politics magazine (formerly Campaigns & Elections), we present the first systematic analysis of the networks of Republican and Democratic consultants and their House and Senate general election clients from 1992-2008. After introducing the characteristics of these networks, we estimate a spatial lag model demonstrating that …

An Experimental Study Of Persuasive Social Communication, John B. Ryan

2010

Studies of contextual effects on political behavior are plagued by concerns about internal validity. Perhaps of greatest concern are possible selection mechanisms that appear to present statistical support for contextual influence when social communication has no real effect. This paper presents an experimental framework for testing contextual effects that ameliorates these concerns through exogenous assignment to communication networks. This experiment allows for an analysis of the factors that make discussion partners influential. These factors can be divided into two categories: (1) characteristics of the dyad and its members; (2) characteristics of the residual discussion network. The most robust findings suggest …

Building And Managing Political Consensus Through The Internet: A Projectual Model, Marco Artusi, Andrea Maurizzi

2010

This paper focuses on the digital applications in political communication and for building consensus, assuming that we need to overcome the idea of the Internet as a simple means of mass communication, and instead analyse it as a social medium for acquiring, activating, and involving people in a specific political idea or movement. The social developments under way in Internet networks are leading to an integration between reality and virtual reality, thus making the Internet an increasingly faithful representation of the real world and of different subjects’ social networks. This makes Internet a great opportunity for building consensus.

On the …

“Don’T Let Government Touch My Medicare”: How Media Framing Shapes Public Support For Health Care Reform, Stacey L. Pelika, Jennifer Hayes Clark, Elizabeth Rigby

2010

When covering the policymaking process, the media typically cover both substantive aspects of the issue at hand and the political wrangling that occurs as lawmakers attempt to agree on a course of action. In this paper, we use the recent health care debate to investigate the effects of what we call ‘policy’ and ‘process’ frames on the citizens’ perceptions that reform would benefit the nation. First, we apply social network analysis to articles from 144 daily U.S. newspapers in order to track the changing centrality of each type of frame in media coverage. We then combine the results of this …

Language Skills And Social Integration: Ethnic Disparities In Bilingual Economy, Ott S. Toomet, Jaanika Meriküll

2010

We analyze the relationship between the local language skills and immigrant income in a largely bilingual economy, Estonia. We show that the official language matters little in the private sector, and at the upper end of the income distribution. This is in a striking contrast to what has been found in the literature for single-language dominated economies. Our results point toward importance of co-worker discrimination, possibly through the more subtle aspects of language, or through access to the social networks. This outcome stresses the need of social integration of minorities, and suggest that this does not necessarily happen through the …

Elite Networks, Political Belief Formation And Government Performance: An Agent-Based Approach To A General Political Economy Equilibrium, Christian H.C.A. Henning, Volker Saggau, Johannes Hedtrich

2010

This paper investigates the impact of the embeddedness of politicians in a local elite network on government performance in decentralized and centralized political systems. Formal political decision-making among a set of legislators is modeled via a mean voter decision rule derived from a modified non-cooperative legislative bargaining game of a Baron-Ferejohn type. Legislators’ policy preferences are derived endogenously from political support maximization based on legislators’ beliefs how a rural development policy translates into the welfare of the agrarian and non-agrarian population. Legislators are generally uncertain regarding the political technology, i.e. the welfare changes induced by a policy. Accordingly, legislators communicate …

Dynamic Models Of Mobilization In Political Networks, Navid Hassanpour

2010

The Eastern European color revolutions, and more recently the post-election unrest in Iran pose a pressing question: how can local organization networks facilitate large-scale collective action? The final result of a collective action is contingent upon two factors, the relational structure of the network of the individuals involved, and their mutual learning, imitation, and belief-updating dictated by the network structure. I propose a formalization of the Granovetter threshold model for participation in collective action in networks, which takes both the network structure and belief updating into account. In order to make verifiable predictions, I outline a graph theoretical model for …

Methodological Challenges In The Study Of Social Communication, Scott D. Mcclurg

Publications

This chapter examines how the questions and concepts used in social communications research affect data collection. It begins by offering conceptual definitions of two types of social environments – networks and contexts – that are used to define the boundaries of the field and to highlight its diversity. From this starting point, the implications of these definitions for three methodological issues are discussed: 1) choosing an environmental unit of analysis, 2) selecting cases of social environments for inclusion in a study, and 3) establishing causality. The organizing theme of this chapter is that social communications research is best served by …

Chicana/Latina Undergraduate Cultural Capital: Surviving And Thriving In Higher Education, Maricela Demirjyn

Ethnic Studies Review

This study addressed the retention of Chicana/Latina undergraduates. The problem explored was one; how these women perceive campus climate as members of a marginalized student population and two; which strategies are used to "survive the system." As a qualitative study, this work was guided by a confluence of methods including grounded theory, phenomenology and Chicana epistemology using educational narratives as data. The analysis indicated that Chicanas/Latinas do maintain a sense of being "Other" throughout their college experiences and this self-identity is perceived as a "survival strategy" while attending a mainstream campus. Further analysis also showed that Chicanas/Latinas begin their college …

How Are They Racialized? Racial Experiences Of Chinese Graduate Students, Ying Wang

Ethnic Studies Review

The present study explores the lived experiences of Chinese graduate students at a Southwestern University in order to find out how they experience race in daily life, what their interpretations of the racial experience are and how do racialized experiences shape their perceptions of life chances. The results indicate that the racialization process plays an important role in Chinese students' life through their lived experiences. Most Chinese students have noticed race and some of them have experienced racial discrimination. However, Chinese students still hold up the importance of education and believe that education will blunt the racial edge

Poetic Economics: Phillis Wheatley And The Production Of The Black Artist In The Early Atlantic World, Rochelle Raineri Zuck

Ethnic Studies Review

This essay reads Wheatley as a key participant in the shifting economic and emotional relationships between artists, audiences, and texts that we now associate with romanticism. To recover facets of the role that the black artist played in the romantic movement(s), I examine three "portraits" of Wheatley-the poetic spectacle managed by her promoters, the actual portrait that appeared as the frontispiece for her Poems on Various Subjects, and the portrait that Wheatley herself created through her poetry. These portraits chart the tensions that circulated around the figure of the black African artist 111 the eighteenth-century Atlantic world, tensions between genius …

First Impressions, "America's Paper" And Pre-Primary Black Presidential Candidates: The New York Times Coverage Of Rev. Jesse Jackson (1983), Rev. Ai Sharpton (2003), And Sen. Barack Obama (2007) Campaign Announcements And Initial Days, Ravi Perry

Ethnic Studies Review

Recent research documents how party rules, election reforms, and the growth of primaries and caucuses have greatly changed the presidential nomination process. Acknowledging that most Americans get their information about presidential candidates through the news and that mass media have played a significant role in introducing candidates to potential voters, I conduct an longitudinal content analysis of the New York Times articles to ethnographically explain how language, article placement and content in 'America's Paper' has significantly impacted the framing of black presidential candidates' pre-primary presidential campaigns. In particular, the data reveal how the newspaper's coverage of the candidates appears to …

Structuring Liminality: Theorizing The Creation And Maintenance Of The Cuban Exile Identity, Jaclyn Colona, Guillermo J. Grenier

Ethnic Studies Review

In this article, we examine the exilic experience of the Cuban-American community in South Florida through the dual concepts of structure and liminality. We postulate that in the case of this exilic diaspora, specific structures arose to render liminality a persistent element of the Cuban-American identity. The liminal, rather than being a temporal transitory stage, becomes an integral part of the group identity. This paper theorizes and recasts the Cuban-American exile experience in Miami as explicable not only as the story of successful economic and political incorporation, although the literature certainly emphasizes this interpretation, but one consisting of permanent liminality …

Abstracts

Ethnic Studies Review

Abstracts for Ethnic Studies Review, Vol. 33, No. 2, 2010.

Historical Consciousness And Ethnicity: How Signifying The Past Influences The Fluctuations In Ethnic Boundary Maintenance, Paul Zanazanian

Ethnic Studies Review

Theorists tend to limit 'history's' role in the dynamics of ethnicity to that generally played by collective memory. By bringing the notion of historical consciousness to the fore, new possibilities may, however, emerge for discerning how history, as one cultural mode of remembering among many others, impacts both ethnicity delineations and fluctuations in boundary maintenance. In encapsulating the many forms of commemoration as well as the different dimensions of historical thinking, the contribution of historical consciousness accordingly lies on how group members historicize temporal change for moral orientation in time. By likewise signifying past events for negotiating their ethnicity and …

Table Of Contents

Ethnic Studies Review

Table of Contents for Ethnic Studies Review, Vol. 33, No. 2, 2010.

How Does Race Operate Among Asian Americans In The Labor Market? : Occupational Segregation And Different Rewards By Occupation Among Native-Born Chinese American And Japanese American Male Workers, Chang Won Lee

Ethnic Studies Review

The effect of race in the U.S. labor market has long been controversial. One posits that racial effects have been diminished since the civil rights movement of the 1960s (Alba & Nee, 2003; Sakamoto, Wu, & Tzeng, 2000; Wilson, 1980). Even if some disparities in labor-market outcomes among race groups are found, advocates of this "declining significance of race" thesis do not attribute these disparities to racial discrimination. They, instead, understand the racial gaps as a result of class composition of racial minority groups, classes represented by larger proportions of the working-class population (Wilson, 1980, 1997) as well as unskilled-immigrant …

Chicano/Mexican "Culture" As A Rational Instrument In The Human Sciences, Alexandro José Gradilla

Ethnic Studies Review

The use of "culture" as an analytical category by social scientists presents an opportunity to examine how professional discursive formations are used to make empirical assertions. The social fact of culture is neither uniform nor unitary. Traditionally, culture has been thought of as a product of disciplinary research, not necessarily a variable for empirical study. When culture is used as a tool or instrument of scientific methodology, it loses its fluid nature as a disciplinary discourse. In this essay, I examine the specific discussion of the epidemiologic health paradox that states that the Chicano/Mexican immigrant "culture" serves as a protective …

Orientals Need Apply: Gender-Based Asylum In The U.S., Midori Takagi

Ethnic Studies Review

Every other year I teach a course entitled "The History of Asian Women in America," which focuses on the experiences of East, South and Southeast Asian women as they journey to these shores and resettle. Using autobiographies, poetry, journal writings, interviews and academic texts, the students learn from the women what political, social, cultural, economic and ecological conditions prompted them to leave their homelands and why they chose the United States. We learn of their rich cultural backgrounds, their struggles to create a subculture based on their home and host experiences, and the cultural gaps that often appear between the …

Jacob Riis And Double Consciousness: The Documentary/Ethnic "I" In How The Other Half Lives, Bill Hug

Ethnic Studies Review

"Contradictory" is the watchword in scholarship on Danish-American photojournalist Jacob Riis. "Wildly contradictory, morally schizophrenic": so Keith Gandal describes Riis' work (18). "A deeply contradictory figure [...] a conservative activist and a skillful entertainer who presented controversial ideas in a compelling but ultimately comforting manner": such is the assessment of Riis offered by Bonnie Yochelson and Daniel Czitrom (xv). "The typical Victorian moralist," but also the Progressive-so Tom Buk-Swienty proclaims him (239, XIII).

[Review Of] Joanna Dreby, Divided By Borders: Mexican Migrants And Their Children, Leonard Berkey

Ethnic Studies Review

Most of the recent books on the children of immigrants, whether they focus on new arrivals (Learning a New Land, 2008) or on children born in the United States (Inheriting the City, 2008), have concentrated on these youngsters' adaptation to American society, their performance in school and the workplace, and their attempts to renegotiate ethnic identity in a new land. Joanna Dreby's Divided by Borders is different. She explores what happens to the children of Mexican immigrants to the U.S., and to the migrants themselves, when those children are left behind in Mexico.

Ethnic Studies Review

Ethnic Studies Review

No abstract provided.

Ethnic Studies Review

Ethnic Studies Review

No abstract provided.

A Matter Of Conscience: United States V. Seeger And The Supreme Court's Historical Failure To Define Conscientious Objector Status Under The First Amendment, Claire Marblestone

UC Law Constitutional Quarterly

This Note will explore the Supreme Court's 1965 decision addressing conscientious objectors, United States v. Seeger. The Note will argue that the Court should have addressed the First Amendment and Due Process questions presented in Seeger. In the days leading up to the decision, three Supreme Court Justices circulated dissenting and concurring opinions which addressed the constitutional questions before the Court. I will argue that the traditional reasons for invoking the doctrine of constitutional avoidance did not justify issuing a weak test for lower courts and administrative agencies to administer. I will also attempt to explain why the Justices decided …

Doing Ethnography In An Urban Hospital Emergency Department Setting: Understanding How Culture Was Related To Emergency Physician Habitus, Renady Hightower

Wayne State University Dissertations

This hospital ethnography focused on the relationship between culture and emergency physician habitus. The habitus of these physicians was defined as those routine, patterned forms of behaviors and practices performed by the physicians while in the emergency department and while interacting with the patient during the physician-patient interaction. Pierre Bourdieu's practice theory was used to address how culture was related to the habitus of the emergency physician. The researcher found that culture was not only related to the habitus of these physicians, but it reproduced, and at times created, aspects of the habitus through the practices performed while in the …

Feminine Beauty Norms And The Media: A Content Analysis Of A Popular Tween Magazine, Victoria Velding

Wayne State University Theses

The term “tween” is rather new and has become widely used in mainstream culture. In terms of how this term is constructed, today’s tween is overwhelmingly female rather than male. Girls are expected to look and act a certain way because of societal beauty norms, which they can learn about via mainstream media, parents, teachers, peers, and other sources of socialization. So far, little research has focused on magazines whose target audience is the younger teen and tween; that is, girls who are roughly 8 to 14 years of age. This research consisted of a content analysis of advertisements found …

An Investigation Of Factors That Affect Hipaa Security Compliance In Academic Medical Centers, James William Brady

CCAC Theses and Dissertations

HIPAA security compliance in academic medical centers is a central concern of researchers, academicians, and practitioners. Increased numbers of data security breaches and information technology implementations have caused concern over the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of electronic personal health information. The federal government has implemented stringent HIPAA security compliance reviews and significantly extended the scope and enforcement of the HIPAA Security Rule. However, academic medical centers have shown limited compliance with the HIPAA Security Rule. Therefore, the goal of this study was to investigate the factors that may affect HIPAA security compliance in academic medical centers. Based on a review …