Political Science Commons^™

Us-Taiwan Relations And The Future Of The Liberal Order, Christina Lai

The US Army War College Quarterly: Parameters

Strengthening ties with Taiwan is the best chance the United States has to preserve the liberal international order in Asia and improve its security relative to China. This study offers a normative perspective on how Taiwan can contribute to US-led international institutions and the Asian regional order and reduce conflict risk. It concludes with recommendations for the United States and its partners to integrate Taiwan into multilateral institutions in Asia.

Analysis And Application Of The Offense-Defense Theory: Russia, Ukraine, And History., Kirby Ballard

College of Arts & Sciences Senior Theses

Political scientists and government advisors have long sought to understand what influences conflicts and how to predict them. Despite constant war, a commonly used empirical theory that can answer this question has not emerged. The majority of theories created are either conflict-specific or not empirically testable. Considering these factors, I sought out a theory that would help me better understand Russia's choice to invade Ukraine in the spring of 2022. I selected the offense-defense theory due to its many attempts to explain territorial conquest, the likeliness of conflict, and overall losses. The main focus of the theory is to explain …

What Explains Male And Female Decision Making To Enter Law? Evidence From A Survey Of Us-Based Undergraduate Students, Abigail Cohen

University Honors Theses

The research conducted in this thesis aims to explain why fewer females than males choose law and pinpoint the explanation as to why they have disparate experiences in the field. The hypothesis is sex discrimination is to blame for the differences among female and male decision making. Sexual harassment and discrimination plays a very prominent role in male dominated fields and discourages females from joining those workforces. The research method for this experiment was an anonymous survey, sent out via social media and email. The survey method was chosen because it was meant to be a quick, yet effective way …

Containerization Of Seafarers In The International Shipping Industry: Contemporary Seamanship, Maritime Social Infrastructures, And Mobility Politics Of Global Logistics, Liang Wu

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation discusses the mobility politics of container shipping and argues that technological development, political-economic order, and social infrastructure co-produce one another. Containerization, the use of standardized containers to carry cargo across modes of transportation that is said to have revolutionized and globalized international trade since the late 1950s, has served to expand and extend the power of international coalitions of states and corporations to control the movements of commodities (shipments) and labor (seafarers). The advent and development of containerization was driven by a sociotechnical imaginary and international social contract of seamless shipping and cargo flows. In practice, this liberal, …

Migrant Children And Legislation: Integrating Knowledge About Trauma Into Policy, Yolennys E. Albornoz

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This study seeks to integrate some knowledge about trauma into migration policies in the U.S. regarding children. Migration is not a novel concept; it is a dynamic phenomenon that experiences continuous changes and constantly increases in numbers. Globally, the United States has been the primary destination for foreign migrants for a long time, and most of them are Latinos who cross the U.S. and Mexico border. Here, I explore how children face trauma in their home country, which forces them to migrate. Also, while they migrate and after they have migrated, exposing the three stages of trauma for migrant children. …

Critical Race Religious Literacy: Exposing The Taproot Of Contemporary Evangelical Attacks On Crt, Robert O. Smith, Aja Y. Martinez

Journal of Critical Race and Ethnic Studies

No abstract provided.

With Liberty And Justice For All? The U.S. Internment Of Japanese Peruvians During World War Ii, Catherine T. Meisenheimer

Swarthmore Undergraduate History Journal

After the bombing of Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, the United States committed to a policy of interning more than 120,000 Japanese Americans. While Japanese American detention remains the most researched instance of wartime internment, the U.S. incarceration of Japanese Peruvians merits equal attention. The political forces behind Japanese Peruvian internment transcended the more common explanations that haunt so much of literature today. Racism and hysteria played their respective roles in this history of wartime internment, but as the war progressed, other reasons for Japanese internment emerged. On January 4, 1942, the Japanese began interning American civilians in the …

Global Criminal Justice Practices And Public Safety, Rachel Hwang

Posters-at-the-Capitol

Popular political discourse in the U.S. assumes that more funding for law enforcement and prison facilities will make civilians safer, presumably by reducing crime and sense of disorder. However, studies have shown that the relationship between these factors may not be as straightforward. With the killing of George Floyd and increased media coverage of police brutality, existing literature focuses mainly on the relationship between police and crime in the U.S. The impact of incarceration (the result of procedural justice) on the community (for whom procedural justice exists) is less known, especially on a global scale. We argue that cycling people …

Decentralizing The Nigerian Police Force: A Plausible Approach To Hinterland Securities, Amobi P. Chiamogu, Uchechukwu P. Chiamogu

Journal of African Conflicts and Peace Studies

The structure of the Nigerian police has overtime depicted a centralized composition that negate principles of power sharing in a federal system of government. The complexities and diverse nature of policing in Nigeria remains the bane to effective and virile administration and management of the organization. The office of the Commissioner of Police vis-à-vis those of State Governors spell contradictions in power configuration from both the Constitution and the Police Act. The enactment of vigilante services and neighbourhood watches by state governments are indicative of a failing security system especially at the component units of the Nigerian federation. The hinterlands …

Detriments To Effective High School Teaching In Kentucky, Christopher Wallace

Mahurin Honors College Capstone Experience/Thesis Projects

This quantitative study examines Kentucky public high school teachers’ perceptions regarding the detriments they and their students face when striving to effectively educate and learn. Data was collected by surveying public high school teachers from across the Commonwealth (n=453). Using Likert-style scales, the survey captures the barriers most detrimental to their students’ assessment outcomes. Concluding questions sought additional personal experiences to elaborate findings. 2023 Kentucky American College Test (ACT) scores represent the dependent variable in the ordinary least squared regression models. Further information regarding administrative effort and points of view was gathered through interviews with four Commonwealth Superintendents. This study …

She Speaks For Millions: The Emergence Of Female Diplomatic Voices In The Russo-Ukrainian War, Amber Brittain-Hale, Amber Brittain-Hale

Education Division Scholarship

This research critically investigates the public diplomacy strategies deployed by a cohort of influential female European leaders on Twitter during the Russo-Ukrainian War of 2022-2023. The study comprises eight leaders - Kallas (Estonia), Marin (Finland), von der Leyen (President of the European Commission), Metsola (President of the European Parliament), Sandu (Moldova), Simonyte (Lithuania), Zourabichvili (Georgia), and Meloni (Italy) - representing millions of constituents. By mirroring the analytical attention given to Ukraine's President, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, this study scrutinizes the distinct approaches and dif erences in emotional, cognitive, and structural language use between these influential female figures and President Zelenskyy in their …

Originalism & Judicially-Enacted Religious Exemptions: Revisiting Employment Division Of Oregon V. Smith, Eric Russell Coykendall

CGU Theses & Dissertations

In the 1963 case Sherbert v. Verner , the Supreme Court read the First Amendment’s Free Exercise Clause to mean that, in certain cases, religious believers should be exempted from otherwise applicable laws. In 1990, the Supreme Court essentially overturned that framework in the case Employment Division of Oregon v. Smith . The Smith case has proved quite controversial, and numerous public-interest law firms, especially those that defend religious litigants, have regularly asked the Court to overturn it in favor of a re-application of the Sherbert precedent. Their contention is often that the Smith ruling is inconsistent with the original …

Anglo-Saxon Res Judicata Culture For Civil Law Systems, Cesare Cavallini

Northwestern Journal of International Law & Business

One traditional aspect distinguishing the common law system from the civil law one lies in the perceived disparities in the inspiration of the law-making process. The Anglo-Saxon system typically grounds its rules in explicit and discernible policies spanning social, anthropological, and economic realms directly relevant to the circumstances. In contrast, the civil law tradition frequently necessitates a fixed conceptual framework, sometimes detached from the practical needs of society. Or, at least, this dynamic persisted until recent changes prompted by the “doing business” model, which has timidly ascended to the forefront of the State agenda, particularly across Europe, notably in Italy. …

Boiling Behind Bars: Exploring The Hidden Toll Of Extreme Heat On Mental Health In Texas Prisons, Sandra K. Miller

Social Work Theses - Archive

The State of Texas supports the largest prison system in the US and held 132,859 people in 100 units scattered across the state as of December 2023. Approximately 70% of Texas prison beds are not air conditioned, despite the state’s reputation for dangerously hot, humid summers. The State has officially recorded temperatures inside Texas prison facilities as high as 120 degrees with heat index values of over 150. Although there is a growing body of research on the negative physiological and psychological consequences of extreme heat among the general public, little is known about the physical and emotional toll of …

Fourth-Branch Institutions And Political Oppositions, Hernán Gómez Yuri, Fernando Loayza Jordán

Scholarly Articles

Fourth-branch accountability can be characterized as a constitutional trust-type mandate to provide intrastate nonpartisan accountability with a broad repertoire of institutional capacities. Fourth-branch institutions play a significant role in protecting constitutional democracies, and their role in the system of political accountability becomes especially apparent when political oppositions are unwilling or unable to perform a partisan check. These institutions partly emerge from distrust in the political branches’ ability to ensure accountability in a partisan world. Thus, they are designed to be insulated from partisan pressures and anchored to the core principles of legality and impartiality. However, fourth-branch institutions do not exist …

Evidence-Based Transitional Justice: Incorporating Public Opinion Into The Field, With New Data From Iraq And Ukraine, Mara Revkin, Ala Alrababah, Rachel Myrick

Faculty Scholarship

The field of “transitional justice” refers to a range of processes and mechanisms for accountability, truth-seeking, and reconciliation that governments and communities pursue in the aftermath of major societal traumas, including civil war, mass atrocities, and authoritarianism. This relatively new field emerged in the 1980s as scholars, practitioners, and policymakers looked for guidance to support post-authoritarian and post-communist transitions to democracy in Eastern Europe and Latin America. Since then, the field has grown rapidly—so rapidly that it is outpacing its capacity to learn from past mistakes. Recent methodological advances in the study of public attitudes about transitional justice through quantitative …

Bureaucratic Autonomy And The Policymaking Capacity Of United States Agencies, 1998-2021, Nicholas Bednar

Articles

Despite a renewed interest in the health of the US administrative state, the absence of meaningful time-series measures of bureaucratic capacity hinders the testing of core theories of bureaucratic and executive politics. Using over 190 million personnel records, I estimate 5590 yearly policymaking-capacity scores for 261 unique agencies from 1998 to 2021. These measures provide an invaluable tool as either an independent or dependent variable in studies of administrative policymaking. To illustrate the value of these measures, I test longstanding theories about the relationship between bureaucratic autonomy and capacity. In contrast with emerging survey research, this study demonstrates that agencies …

Presidential Investment In The Administrative State, Nicholas Bednar, David E. Lewis

Articles

In this paper, we explain how presidents strategically invest in administrative capacity, noting that presidents have few incentives to invest effort in capacity building in most agencies. We test our account with two analyses. First, we examine the time it took for the Bush, Obama, Trump, and Biden Administrations to nominate individuals to appointed positions. We find that presidents prioritize appointments to policy over management positions and that nominations occur sooner in agencies that implement presidential priorities. Second, we examine the responses of federal executives to the 2020 Survey on the Future of Government Service to see whether perceptions of …

Development Of The Right To Privacy In Montana Discourse And The Montana Constitution, Scott A. O'Donnell

Undergraduate Theses, Professional Papers, and Capstone Artifacts

No abstract provided.

Identifying Youth Appeals In Alcohol Alternative Social Media Content Through Framing, Melina Oneal

West Chester University Master’s Theses

Proposed regulations for alcohol advertising prevent beverage companies from targeting people under the legal drinking age. However, similar regulations for alcohol alternative beverages are less explored, which could allow alcohol alternative products to create awareness for alcoholic beverages among youth. Alcohol alternatives beverages, including no-alcohol and low-alcohol products, are increasing in popularity and can function as compliments to alcoholic products to decrease the total alcohol volume consumed or as substitutes for alcoholic products. Framing theory can be operationalized through the Content Appealing to Youth Index, an index of content elements found in research literature to be appealing to youth, to …

Renewing Study Into The Oldest Hatred: Introduction To The Law Vs. Antisemitism Symposium, David Schraub

Lewis & Clark Law Review

This short essay provides an introduction to the Lewis & Clark Law Review's "Law vs. Antisemitism" symposium, which grew out of the conference by the same name hosted at Lewis & Clark in the spring of 2023. In addition to overviewing the contributions to the symposium, the introduction provides some background on the relative paucity of legal scholarship that has addressed antisemitism, and the importance of including antisemitism in the otherwise robust legal academic conversation occurring around other forms of oppression and social discrimination.

Politicizing Antisemitism Amidst Today’S Educational Culture Wars, Lili Levi

Lewis & Clark Law Review

The traditional narrative of American Jewry emphasizes American exceptionalism with respect to antisemitism. But there have been clear signs of a resurgence of public antisemitism in the United States even before the massive rise in antisemitic expression and incidents associated with the Israel-Hamas war of fall 2023.

One of the notable aspects of the rise and normalization of antisemitic expression is the deployment of antisemitism as a political tool. For example, in addition to Democrats and Republicans accusing each other of complicity in antisemitism, both federal policy since the Trump era and state antiantisemitism legislation have targeted campus antisemitism in …

International Cultural Property Protection And Law: Ukraine And Beyond, Susanna Helms

Undergraduate Honors Theses

This project examines the ongoing destruction and theft of Ukrainian cultural heritage by Russian forces since February 2022 in tandem with international cultural property law, and theory, and case studies. By studying relevant cultural property laws and gathering information from associated theories of cultural property nationalism and internationalism, this project examines how these laws and theories apply to modern Ukraine. This thesis utilizes a qualitative approach to analyze theories surrounding cultural property and heritage and explores how these theories influence international law. For a more comprehensive approach, three case studies are used and examined via qualitative historical analysis: Nazi art …

When Ballots Are Blank: Write-In’S Serving Local Government And The Implications For A Healthy And Vibrant Democracy, Thomas J. Ruter

School of Business Student Theses and Dissertations

Our democracy depends on having a supply of candidates running for elected office, but in some instances, no one wants to run. This phenomenological study asks what the effects on a healthy and vibrant democracy are if ballots are blank and the seat is filled through write-in or appointment. Rooted in democratic theory, this study explores small, rural city elections where write-ins won election. Understudied, local governments are responsible for decisions affecting the lives of millions of people each day. Workforce scarcity, the alienation of young Americans from politics, government bashing, nasty campaigns, threats of physical harm, and other barriers …

Studying Conspiracy Theory After The (Current) Rise Of Right-Wing Populism, Mark Fenster

UF Law Faculty Publications

The American historian Richard Hofstadter intended his still-influential essay on the “Paranoid Style in American Politics,” which initiated the modern study of conspiracy theories, as a response to the mid-1950s rise of right-wing populism in the US. Reflecting on the lessons we can learn from the insights and weaknesses of Hofstadter’s timely intervention into contemporary politics, as well as the author’s three decades studying conspiracy theories, the chapter asks how current academic work, which takes place within and responds to another rise in rightwing populism, should understand and intervene in the present and prepare for the future.

Effects Of Dehumanization And Disgust-Eliciting Language On Attitudes Toward Immigration: A Sentiment Analysis Of Twitter Data, Katherine S. Wahrer, Cynthia J. Najdowski, John V. Passarelli

Psychology Faculty Scholarship

Attitudes towards immigration have been shown to be driven by dehumanization and disgust. The more people dehumanize immigrants and the more disgusted they feel, the more negative attitudes they tend to have toward immigrants. However, little is known about how exposure to social media content that links dehumanization, disgust, and immigration influences users’ attitudes on this issue. This is important to consider because the majority of adults in the United States are on social media. We used Twitter data, machine learning, and sentiment analysis to investigate whether exposure to dehumanizing or disgust-eliciting tweets about immigration impacts users’ own sentiment toward …

Partisan Panel Composition And Reliance On Earlier Opinions In The Circuit Courts, Stuart M. Benjamin, Byungkoo Kim, Kevin M. Quinn

Faculty Articles

Does the partisan composition of three-judge panels affect how earlier opinions are treated and thus how the law develops? Using a novel data set of Shepard’s treatments for all cases decided in the U.S. courts of appeals from 1974 to 2017, we investigate three different versions of this question. First, are panels composed of three Democratic (Republican) appointees more likely to follow opinions decided by panels of three Democratic (Republican) appointees than are panels composed of three Republican (Democratic) appointees? Second, does the presence of a single out-party judge change how a panel relies on earlier decisions compared to what …

Separation Of Structures, Alex Zhang

Faculty Articles

This Article makes three main contributions. First, it fleshes out the theory of separation of structures as distinct from contemporary scholarly approaches. Second, it writes the intellectual history of separation of structures, which has been an integral part of the separation of powers enterprise since its inception, including at the Founding. Third, it explores the scholarly and doctrinal implications of structural separation of powers. In particular, adjudicating the constitutionality of agency structures requires methodological pluralism that incorporates the normative values underlying the structural design. That is, under separation of structures, current doctrine should evolve beyond the formalism heavily criticized by …

When Is Legal Methodology Binding?, Jonathan R. Nash

Faculty Articles

Common-law interpretive methodologies are mostly nonbinding, but some interpretive methodologies are seen as binding precedent. This Article offers an explanation for this state of affairs. Whereas the extant scholarship on common-law interpretive methodologies offers descriptive accounts (often assuming that common-law methodologies are per se nonbinding) and normative analysis, this Article fills a gap in the literature by providing a realist explanation for the legal landscape of binding interpretive methodologies. It identifies whether a methodology is rule-like, and whether it increases judicial legitimacy and/or court power as “pull factors”—that is, incentives that might attract judges to recognize interpretive methodologies as binding. …

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 …