Political Science Commons^™

How Many Barack Obamas Does It Take: An Analysis Of The Effect Of Charter Schools On Real Estate And Crime, Aananditaa Kakkar

CMC Senior Theses

This study looks at the relationship between charter school presence and neighborhood quality in Los Angeles. Using data from the Los Angeles Department of Education, Zillow Real Estate, and the Los Angeles Sheriff, this paper attempts to find whether changes in charter presence influence the price of surrounding real estate or the occurrence of serious and petty crimes. The results find that charter schools tend to be associated with a decrease in home sale prices. The results on crime imply that crime increases upon the opening of charter schools, however they are statistically insignificant.

Presidential Politics: The Social Media Revolution, Alexandra P. Toohey

CMC Senior Theses

Throughout the course of history, presidential campaigning has evolved commensurate with the advancements in technology. FDR mastered the radio, JFK the television and President Barack Obama, the Internet. In both the 2008 and 2012 Presidential campaigns, President Barack Obama used social media via the Internet to understand the voter better than any candidate before his time. Through revolutionary data collection techniques, both offline and online, the Obama campaign obtained vital electorate information. This data was used by the campaign to: target online social media users who were most likely to become politically engaged; and attempt to influence their voting habits, …

More Than Just A Meal: The Economic Utility Of Social Capital In The Lives Of The Poor, Benjamin Higby Strange

Senior Independent Study Theses

No abstract provided.

Women's Gun Culture In America, Laura Browder

English Faculty Publications

A recent article in the New York Times focused on the possible increase in female gun ownership in the United States. This “new” phenomenon of women and guns is of course far from new: as early as the 1870s, trapshooting for women was publicized by gun manufacturers as yet another feminine activity, not far removed from shopping or club work. The ultra-feminine Annie Oakley, who in the 1880s became an international star in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West, personally taught fifteen thousand women to shoot. By the turn of the twentieth century, gun manufacturers were promoting hunting as a healthful activity …

Punishment First: A Study Of Juvenile Pretrial Detention, Richard V. Foster, David Tanenhaus, Heather Lynn Lusty

McNair Poster Presentations

How society and the legal system should respond to youth crime is a volatile issue. Much research exists on this topic broadly. A largely overlooked subset exists regarding the rights of juveniles in the United States who face pretrial confinement, specifically how juveniles accused of delinquency are treated by the courts. Delinquency or a delinquent act, in the context of this study, is “an act that would be considered a crime if committed by an adult.”7. Adults and children are processed by the courts differently, each with their own rights and court mandated procedures to follow. This report analyzes …

Indiana, Bert Chapman

Libraries Faculty and Staff Scholarship and Research

Provides an overview of key Civil War developments in Indiana and how this conflict impacted Indiana.

Morton, Oliver Hazard Perry Throck, Bert Chapman

Libraries Faculty and Staff Scholarship and Research

Biographical portrait and analysis of Indiana Civil War Governor Oliver Morton.

Slaves To Contradictions: 13 Myths That Sustained Slavery, Wilson Huhn

Akron Law Faculty Publications

People have a fundamental need to think of themselves as “good people.” To achieve this we tell each other stories – we create myths – about ourselves and our society. These myths may be true or they may be false. The more discordant a myth is with reality, the more difficult it is to convince people to embrace it. In such cases to sustain the illusion of truth it may be necessary to develop an entire mythology – an integrated web of mutually supporting stories. This paper explores the system of myths that sustained the institution of slavery in the …

Electric Municipalization In The City Of Boulder: Successful Greening Or Path To Bankruptcy?, Kathryn C. Browning

CMC Senior Theses

Climate change will result in variable – but undeniably severe – changes to our natural world. These changes will lead to extreme human and ecosystem consequences if climate change is not mitigated effectively, efficiently, and rapidly. Increasing the use of renewable energies around the world is seen as one of the most effective and promising mitigation strategies. Several communities around the United States have recently denounced publicly their electrical utilities for their failure to offer the choice to increase the percentage of energy that comes from renewable sources. A growing number are taking action to work with – or sometimes …

On Obama Administration Gun Policy With Continual Reference To The Multiple Streams Model, Michael Hristakopoulos

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The Multiple Streams model developed by John Kingdon (1995) and Nikolaos Zahariadis (2007) provides a valuable framework for understanding the nature of policy change. This investigation draws extensively upon the Multiple Streams framework in order to understand the development of gun-control policy initiatives under President Barack Obama. The investigation uses a case-study approach with in-depth analysis of four different mass-shooting events that took place in the United States between 2009 and 2012. Reconstruction of the shooting events and detailed parsing of the Obama administration’s official responses to each incident, when viewed through the Multiple Streams lens, clearly explain why Obama’s …

The President's Party At The Midterm: An Aggregate And Individual-Level Analysis Of Seat Loss And Vote Choice In U.S. House Elections, David Macdonald

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis provides a comprehensive analysis of midterm U.S. House elections using a multi-level research design. At the aggregate-level, multiple regression analysis is used to examine the variables that affect seat loss for the president’s party. This integrates, updates and extends the extant literature of the topic, and offers a means of explaining and predicting seat losses by the president’s party in the U.S. House. To further probe the findings at the aggregatelevel, the thesis develops a pooled cross-sectional model of individual-level vote choice in midterm U.S. House elections using data from the American National Election Studies (1982- 2002) and …

Petitions, Privacy, And Political Obscurity, Rebecca Green

Faculty Publications

People who sign petitions must accept disclosure of their political views. This conclusion rests on the seemingly uncontroversial (if circular) premise that petition signing is a public activity. Courts have thus far shown little sympathy for individuals who take a public stand on an issue by signing a petition and then assert privacy claims after the fact. Democracy, after all, takes courage, as Justice Scalia wrote in the petitioning disclosure case Doe v. Reed. But signing a petition today brings consequences beyond public criticism. The real threat of disclosure for modern petition signers is not tangible harassment, but the loss …

May It Please The Environment?: A Study Of The Role Regional Location Plays In Influencing Federal Court Decisions On Fossil Fuel Cases, Stephen Perrott

Senior Independent Study Theses

No abstract provided.

Institutional Vs. Non-Institutional Sources Of Presidential Influence: Explaining Congressional-Presidential Relations In The Age Of Polarization, Derek Culp

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines the determinants of presidential success with Congress. Seven essential sources of presidential power in the current era of party polarization were derived from the extant literature, and these factors were delineated into the institutional (formal) and non-institutional (informal) policymaking tools of the presidency. Variables that explain presidential legislative success include: intraparty support in Congress, the use of veto bargaining, executive orders and signing statements (institutional factors); as well as public approval, ‘going public,’ and strategic lobbying of Congress (non-institutional factors). Case studies of the presidencies of Bill Clinton and George W. Bush analyze the role of these …

Rethinking Critical Mass In The Federal Appellate Courts., Laura Moyer

Faculty and Staff Scholarship

This article draws from critical mass studies of gender in other political institutions to inform an application to the US Courts of Appeals. The results demonstrate the utility of considering court-level aspects of diversity. As mixed-sex panels become more common within a circuit, both male and female judges increasingly support plaintiffs in civil rights claims, though the magnitude of the effect is larger for women. The presence of a female chief judge is also positively associated with pro-plaintiff decisions by men and women in sex discrimination cases.

[Introduction To] Racism In The Nation's Service: Government Workers And The Color Line In Woodrow Wilson's America, Eric S. Yellin

Bookshelf

Between the 1880s and 1910s, thousands of African Americans passed civil service exams and became employed in the executive offices of the federal government. However, by 1920, promotions to well-paying federal jobs had nearly vanished for black workers. Eric S. Yellin argues that the Wilson administration's successful 1913 drive to segregate the federal government was a pivotal episode in the age of progressive politics. Yellin investigates how the enactment of this policy, based on Progressives' demands for whiteness in government, imposed a color line on American opportunity and implicated Washington in the economic limitation of African Americans for decades to …

Mapping A Post-Shelby County Contingency Strategy, Guy-Uriel Charles, Luis Fuentes-Rohwer

Faculty Scholarship

This Essay was written for the Yale Law Journal Online Symposium on the future of section 5 of the Voting Rights Act after Shelby County v. Holder. Professors Guy-Uriel E. Charles and Luis Fuentes-Rohwer argue that voting rights activists ought to be prepared for a future in which section 5 is not part of the landscape. If the Court strikes down section 5, an emerging ecosystem of private entities and organized interest groups of various stripes—what they call institutional intermediaries—may be willing and able to mimic the elements that made section 5 an effective regulatory device. As voting rights …

Impact Of Social Identity On Rape Legitimacy And Myth Acceptance, Rachael Rosenberg

College of Graduate Studies: Theses & Dissertations

The current research assessed whether a statement by a deviant political ingroup (versus outgroup) member elicited measureable differences on trivialization, cognitive dissonance, rape myth acceptance, or decision to vote for that candidate, and if explicitly “debunking” the statement made by this politician further impacted these variables. Participants were randomly assigned to read a statement made by a Republican or Democratic politician, who would either be an ingroup or outgroup member based on the party affiliation of each participant. Results indicate that while there were no significant differences between Republican or Democratic participants overall, Republicans tended to trivialize the statements made …

Beyond Fear And Loathing: Tea Party Organizers' Continuum Of Knowledge In A Racialized Social System, Meghan Burke

Scholarship

Making use of fieldwork and 25 open-ended interviews with Tea Party organizers in the state of Illinois, I argue that Tea Party organizers draw from a continuum of knowledge, combining personal knowledge and experience with a conservative corporate media and Tea Party network frame. I draw upon the work of Weber to show how this continuum connects to various types of rational social action. Widening this scope of analysis allows not only for a more complex analysis of how corporate interests are connected to the grass roots movement, but also how the core frames of the movement are located throughout …

Jeffersonian Ideals: Practical In The United States Of The 21st Century?, Charles William Gustafson Ii

Honors Program Theses

Thomas Jefferson was President of the United States, a statesman, lawyer, scientist, author of the Declaration of Independence, and a proponent of education in the United States of America. Understandably, his educational philosophy is inextricably linked to his political philosophy, as Gordon C. Lee puts it, " ... liberty without enlightenment seemed to Jefferson a contradiction in concepts, an anomaly," (Lee 1961, 2-3). Thomas Jefferson emphasized the importance of education in the United States, as Roy J. Honeywell puts it, "His educational plans were a very necessary part of his political and social reforms, and his educational ideas were as …

Afterword: The Libertarian Middle Way, Randy E. Barnett

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Libertarianism is sometimes portrayed as radical and even extreme. In this Afterword to a symposium on "Libertarianism and the Law" in the Chapman Law Review, I explain why, though it may be radical, libertarianism is far from extreme in comparison with its principal alternatives: the social justice of the Left or legal moralism of the Right. Social justice posits that everyone should get a certain amount of stuff; legal moralism posits that everyone should act in a certain way. But because there is no consensus about how much stuff each person should have or how exactly everyone should act, …

An Interview With Dr. Theda Skocpol, Sarah Russell

Pursuit - The Journal of Undergraduate Research at The University of Tennessee

No abstract provided.

Arizona’S Senate Bill 1070: A Case Study On State-Sponsored Immigration Policy, Ryan Murphy

Master's Theses

This study assesses the origins of Arizona’s state-sponsored immigration policy. It attempts to identify the social dynamics within Arizona that contributed to the overwhelming public support for SB 1070. Since it has been two years after the law was passed, this analysis determines what impact the law has had thus far within the state. Finally, it postulates the future of Arizona’s immigration policy.

Struggling Recovery And Economic Policy Uncertainty: Testimony Before The Joint Revenue Hearing, House And Senate Ways And Means Committees, Massachusetts State House, Boston, Ma, Christian Weller

Public Policy and Public Affairs Faculty Publication Series

The U.S. economy is in the fourth year of a recovery that started in June 2009. The fact that the economy is in recovery, even modestly, is something of a miracle given how stacked the deck is against it.

This is absolutely unique in American economic history: There has never been a recovery without the housing market expanding substantially as well; There has never been a recovery with state and local governments shrinking for three years in a row; There has never been a recovery with households owing, on average, well more than 100 percent of their after-tax income in …

Magee, J. Harry (Sc 66), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

Manuscript Collection Finding Aids

Finding aid and scan (Click on "additional files" below) for Manuscripts Small Collection 66. Letter, 23 December 1868, written by J. Harry Magee, Washington, D.C., to Dr. Albert Covington, Bowling Green, Kentucky, regarding the record of the U. S. Senate impeachment proceedings against President Andrew Johnson.

Jfk: Covered And Smothered, Donald E. Wilkes Jr.

Popular Media

"If we could run the Zapruder film in reverse, patch up the president’s gruesome head wound, send the bullets flying back to the chambers whence they came, return the assassins to their sinister underworld and back up the Lincoln convertible so that Jack and Jackie are once again waving to the crowds in the Texas sunshine, then we could also walk backwards through the last 30 years, becoming younger and more hopeful, forgetting tragedies one after the other, arriving finally at a point of innocent stasis where we can stand forever watching the American sunrise with immortal delight. But we …

Manager-In-Chief: Applying Public Management Theory To Examine White House Chief Of Staff Performance, David Cohen, Justin Vaughn, José Villalobos

Selected Works Temporary Series

In an effort to examine the causal determinants of performance dynamics for the administrative presidency, we apply empirical public management theory to White House administration to explain managerial performance. Utilizing original survey data that measures the perceptions of former officials from the Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and Clinton administrations, we conduct quantitative analyses to determine the extent to which a chief of staff’s background, relationship with the president, and internal as well as external management approaches shape overall perceptions of White House administrative efforts. We find that managerial dimensions matter considerably when explaining the dynamics of White House organizational performance.

Manager-In-Chief: Applying Public Management Theory To Examine White House Chief Of Staff Performance, David Cohen, Justin Vaughn, José Villalobos

Departmental Papers (PS)

In an effort to examine the causal determinants of performance dynamics for the administrative presidency, we apply empirical public management theory to White House administration to explain managerial performance. Utilizing original survey data that measures the perceptions of former officials from the Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and Clinton administrations, we conduct quantitative analyses to determine the extent to which a chief of staff’s background, relationship with the president, and internal as well as external management approaches shape overall perceptions of White House administrative efforts. We find that managerial dimensions matter considerably when explaining the dynamics of White House organizational performance.

The Rancor Of Republicans, The Diatribe Of Democrats A Social Network Analysis Of Partisan Interconnectivity On Facebook, Sean Langille

Masters Theses

The Internet has played a more active role in shaping modern American political communication. With the increased popularity of social networking through websites like Facebook, more are taking to the Internet to engage in civic dialogue. This study will explore how the exchange of socially networked images, texts, and audio between Democrats and Republicans affect beliefs, behaviors and perceptions. Utilizing qualitative methodologies, the researcher interviewed ten (10) registered democrats and ten (10) registered republicans. The participants were basked ten questions and ten follow up questions. The study applied a social network analysis to evaluate how socially networked dialogue between Republicans …

The 2008 Us Presidential Election And New Digital Technologies: Political Campaigns As Social Movements And The Significance Of Collective Identity, Stephanie Takaragawa, Victoria Carty

Sociology Faculty Articles and Research

The growing role of the Internet social networking sites (SNS) has served as a flash point for debate about the democratization of information, particularly in light of their perceived roles in the 2008 presidential election. This horizontal sharing of information undoubtedly facilitated the revival of the youth vote and volunteerism in many ways mimicking traditional grassroots approaches. While the role of the Internet SNS in mobilization efforts and information-sharing cannot be overstated, its effectiveness in creating a new “public sphere,” or transforming traditional electoral campaign strategies and communicative practices must be closely examined before generalizations about the democratization of media …