Political Science Commons^™

The Myth Of The Second Amendment, Laura Muna-Landa

CGU Theses & Dissertations

This dissertation traces the evolution of the United States Supreme Court’s interpretation of the Second Amendment, which shifted from a constitutional provision grounded in collective security and concerns about tyranny to a modern doctrine emphasizing an individual right to possess firearms. It contends that post-Heller (District of Columbia v. Heller (2008) decisions do not simply “apply” founding-era intent to modern circumstances but instead reflect a significant doctrinal reconstruction that now shapes both gun policy and public perceptions of constitutional meaning. This research first reconstructs the founding-era context, then tests explanations of judicial behavior, and finally applies that framework to Heller, …

Shared Words, Divided Worlds: Moral Language And The Struggle For Meaning At The Claremont Colleges During The Vietnam War, 1965-1969, Haley Freeth

CGU Theses & Dissertations

This thesis examines the Vietnam War-era campus conflicts at the Claremont Colleges as a profound struggle over the meaning and ownership of moral and political language. Rather than interpreting antiwar and prowar activism as expressions of fundamentally opposed value systems, this study argues that students and administrators alike engaged in an ongoing contest to define ideals such as democracy, responsibility, and conscience. Through a micro-historical lens, the project analyzes how these contested vocabularies were invoked, reinterpreted, and performed in protests, counter-protests, and administrative policies. Drawing from a wide array of archival sources—including student newspapers, protest ephemera, administrative records, and visual …

American Spirits: The Impact Of Social Setting On Voter Turnout, Annika Lindberg

Scripps Senior Theses

Low voter turnout has characterized American elections for the past century, raising ongoing concerns about democratic representation. Although scholars agree that low turnout is problematic, they differ on which factors most strongly influence participation. This thesis examined whether creating a celebratory, patriotic Election Day environment modeled after Fourth of July festivities increased voter engagement.

Using two complementary methods, the research evaluated the effects of celebratory Election Day settings on voting behavior. Study 1 used a partial field case study, comparing turnout after Election Day parties held for three student organizations at a small California liberal arts college with turnout from …

Stitched In Precarity: Labor Exploitation, Immigration Policy, And Resistance In The L.A Garment Industry, Reyna Guadalupe Silva Carrillo

Scripps Senior Theses

Los Angeles hosts one of the largest garment manufacturing industries in the U.S., built on the labor of undocumented immigrants who often work under exploitative and unsafe conditions. This paper explores how the intersection of broken labor laws and punitive immigration enforcement creates systemic vulnerability for these workers. Despite recent reforms—such as California’s SB 62, which bans piece-rate wages and holds brands accountable—enforcement remains weak, and wage theft continues to persist. State-level protections for undocumented immigrants clash with federal policies that prioritize detention and deportation, leaving workers in a state of constant precarity. While grassroots movements have secured important legislative …

The Judicial Containment Of Adivasi Rights Across India's Mineral Belt, Sajni S. Sheth-Voss

Scripps Senior Theses

This thesis examines how Adivasi resistance to mining-induced dispossession across India’s mineral belt is increasingly channeled into the judiciary, arguing that this shift functions as a mechanism of containment rather than a pathway to justice. Despite a robust legal framework designed to protect Adivasi land and consent rights, systematic non-enforcement and political closure have hollowed out policy and electoral channels, pushing communities into litigation as a last resort. Drawing on scholarship in political economy, legal studies, and political ecology, alongside primary sources including court documents and activist statements, this study follows how disputes move across institutions and are ultimately reshaped …

Pork, Parties, And Power: Money Politics In Japanese Political Parties, Maya Maranto

HMC Senior Theses

This thesis examines the proposition that the LDP utilizes money politics more than opposition parties in Japan, which could explain why the LDP has remained largely dominant since 1955. Focusing on the House of Representatives elections in 2017, 2021, and 2024, I analyze eight case studies, examine the University of Tokyo-Asahi Shimbun Elite Candidate Survey covering over 90 percent of candidates, and quantitatively analyze party manifestos. I operationalize money politics as reliance on support organizations, support for infrastructure and agriculture, forestry, and fisheries, and support for regional funding. I find that, all measures taken together, the LDP remains the most …

No Coup, No Conscience: Coup-Proofing In The Armenian Genocide, Rachel Svoyskiy

CMC Senior Theses

The Armenian Genocide functioned as a form of coup-proofing under the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP). Existing scholarship emphasizes nationalism, wartime radicalization, and security dilemmas, but does not fully account for why the military complied, why dissenters were removed, or how Armenian property became tied to political loyalty. Applying Hicham Bou Nassif’s framework of coup-proofing, this study examines four tactics the CUP used to secure military obedience while carrying out mass violence. First, the regime framed Armenians as an existential threat to align the officer corps ideologically with the state. Second, it promoted the material interests of military and …

News Media Sentiment Toward Chinese Ai: A Comparative Analysis With Belt And Road Initiative Involvement And Public Opinion On China, Asya Vaisberg

Pomona Senior Theses

This study evaluates different countries' news media’s sentiment towards Chinese AI, between May 2023 and May 2024, by using Microsoft Azure NLP Sentiment Analysis. The results are then compared with the country’s public opinion on China and its involvement in the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). For this study 12 countries have been selected which are USA, Australia, Pakistan, Peru, Russia, Romania, Italy, Greece, Portugal, Philippines, Brazil, and Egypt. For each one, GNews Application Programming Interface (API), which has access to more than 60,000 global news sources, was used to aggregate relevant news articles based on queried keywords. The collected …

The Return Of Donald Trump: A Multidisciplinary Analysis Of The 2024 Presidential Election, Joan Hanson

Scripps Senior Theses

Donald Trump’s 2024 victory made him only the second president in American history to win a nonconsecutive reelection bid. This thesis serves as a preliminary investigation into why a decisive share of American voters chose Trump for a second time, drawing on voter behavior theory, analysis of digital political advertising and social media content, as well as recent election data. Theoretical frameworks including retrospective and prospective voting, as well as ideological innocence each offer plausible explanations for Trump’s repeat victory. Analysis of digital advertising and social media content leading up to the 2024 presidential election further suggests that these platforms …

The Politics Of Fatness And The Demand For Our Collective Joy, Sky Caldwell

Scripps Senior Theses

The Politics of Fatness and the Demand for Our Collective Joy aims to assess the political-economic reasonings behind the return of overt anti-fatness and its coincidence with the re-normalization of the far right. My research looks at the sudden mass marketing of GLP-1 drugs and the use of the body as a spatial fix during recession-era economic conditions. First, this interdisciplinary project asks why the body positivity movement has not been successful in the greater fight against anti-fatness. Then, through archival research, discourse analysis, ethnographic interviews, and photography, my project explores various case studies of successful spaces and collectives working …

Redling And Soil Contamination In Los Angles County: Mapping The Influence Of Polutants And Regulatory Landscapes On Enviromental Justice Outcomes, Gillian G. Maynard

Scripps Senior Theses

This thesis examines soil contamination in Los Angeles as a pervasive yet underexamined environmental justice issue, rooted in the region’s history of industrialization, racialized land-use policy, and regulatory failure. It argues that soil operates as both a long-term repository and an active pathway of toxic exposure, embedding environmental risk directly within residential landscapes. Through an analysis of key contamination sources, including legacy lead pollution, urban oil extraction, wildfire-related toxins, and industrial sites such as the Santa Susana Field Laboratory and the Exide battery recycling facility, this study demonstrates how contaminants persist across generations, often long after their original sources have …

More Than Meets The Eye: Operation Blue Star & Us-India’S Deadly Exchange, Jannat Verma

Scripps Senior Theses

Operation Blue Star is often memorialized as an independent action carried out by India's Congress Party. While such an understanding is not entirely historically inaccurate, it fails to account for the role played by US influence in the operation. An examination of CIA files and America's involvement in the subcontinent during the Cold War calls for a re-interpretation of Operation Blue Star, not as a solo campaign, but rather as a product of counterinsurgent and deadly exchange between the US and India.

Appalachia In Presidential Campaign Rhetoric Since 1964, Meredith Morello

Scripps Senior Theses

This thesis examines how presidential candidates have invoked Appalachia in campaign rhetoric from Lyndon B. Johnson's 1964 election through 2024, arguing the region functions not as a geographic reference but as a strategically deployable political symbol. Through mixed-methods analysis of 83 campaign-period sources archived in the American Presidency Project, a structured thematic coding schema traces how candidates frame the region across six decades using two analytically distinct modes: objective-economic and moralized-culture framing.

Five major structural patterns emerge: Johnson's institutionalization of the region as bounded domestic poverty; strategic silence during national instability; reframings enabling rhetorical reentry; symbolic portability across ideological projects; …

L'Affaire Baby Loup : Nouvelle Laïcité Ou Laïcité Coloniale ?, Grace Gorden

Scripps Senior Theses

La saga juridique de la crèche Baby Loup, où une directrice-adjointe était licenciée pour avoir porté le voile au travail, est souvent proclamée comme l'instauration de la « nouvelle laïcité » en France.  L'arrêt Baby Loup fait partie d'une série de changements sur la laïcité depuis les années 1980 en France, où le principe de laïcité devient de plus en plus associé au domaine privé. Le jugement final de la saga Baby Loup établit que la discrimination religieuse doit être jugée selon des normes de proportionnalité et de justification. Ce renoncement au principe de laïcité dans les tribunaux et ensuite …

Just War Theory In The Hunger Games: Suzanne Collins’S Critique Of Violence, Power, And Rebellion, Laila Hannum

Scripps Senior Theses

This thesis applies just war theory to Suzanne Collins's The Hunger Games trilogy, arguing that while the districts' rebellion satisfies the principles of jus ad bellum (justice in going to war), it systematically violates jus in bello (justice in the conduct of war) and jus post bellum (justice after war), and ultimately replicates the oppressive structures of the Capitol it sought to overthrow.

Drawing primarily on Michael Walzer's Just and Unjust Wars and on Brian Orend's ideas on post-war justice, this thesis traces the rebellion's moral arc across all three novels. Chapter One shows that the rebellion meets the criteria …

Politics Of A Silent Pandemic: Antimicrobial Resistance And State Capacity In India And Nigeria, Mia Kelly

CMC Senior Theses

Antimicrobial Resistance (AMR) has emerged as one of the most pressing yet widely underestimated health threats of the 21st century; this thesis explores the potentially devastating global impact of this “silent pandemic”, exposing how deeply health outcomes depend on political choices, regulatory capacity, and economic constraints. Although the danger of spreading drug-resistant pathogens is now widely acknowledged in both the scientific and political communities, states differ in their abilities to contain the issue, with low- and middle-income countries facing the greatest obstacles to national action plan implementation. This thesis investigates these disparities through a comparison of India and Nigeria, two …

Keeping America Ahead: The Global Chip Conundrum, Ethan Chen

CMC Senior Theses

Semiconductors underpin nearly every aspect of modern economic, military, and technological power. Yet while the United States pioneered chip innovation and design, it now heavily depends on foreign manufacturing, particularly Taiwan and the Taiwanese Semiconductor Manufacturing Company who produce more than 90% of the world’s leading edge chips. This thesis investigates how the U.S. lost its fabrication leadership, what risks its current dependence creates, and what strategies can most effectively restore domestic capacity and resilience in both the short term and long term. By going through historical analysis of industrial development, recent policy evaluation such as export controls and the …

From Endowment To Extraction: Critical Mineral Governance And Supply-Chain Integration In The Arctic, Charles Bollwerk

CMC Senior Theses

Annexing Greenland, making Canada the 51st State – what’s it all about? Critical minerals are often treated as a geological and national security problem that can be fixed through strength and coercion. This thesis argues that, in the Arctic, governance structures are what determine whether critical mineral wealth becomes strategically useful. Through a comparative qualitative analysis of Greenland, Canada, Alaska, Russia, and the Nordic countries, it examines what drives variation in critical mineral extraction and supply-chain integration across Arctic states, an especially relevant topic as Western states seek to reduce dependence on Chinese-controlled supply chains. The analysis applies four variables …

Revenge Of The Interceptors? The Dod, Congress, And The Return Of Space-Based Missile Defense During Trump 45, Chad Mcelroy

CMC Senior Theses

The initiation of the Golden Dome for America program has brought space-based missile defense (SBMD) to the forefront of American national security policy and rekindled debates that had laid dormant since the administration of President Ronald Reagan. How, forty-two years after President Reagan first proposed the Strategic Defense Initiative, did SBMD return as a national priority? In lieu of public information about the ongoing Golden Dome initiative, this thesis explores the first Trump administration, otherwise known as Trump 45, in order to analyze the development of SBMD proposals by its proponents in Congress and the Department of Defense. I used …

Authoritarian Development & Political Economy Of East Asia: The Making Of South Korea’S Developmental Regime, Christopher J. Chung

CMC Senior Theses

This thesis investigates the historical evolution of South Korea's developmental trajectory during the Park Chung-hee era (1961-1979), a period that left an indelible mark on the country's political economy and industrial landscape. Rather than treating Park's regime as its own starting point, this thesis situates it within a longer historical arc beginning with Japanese colonial rule and continuing through Syngman Rhee's aid-dependent republic, arguing that Korea's developmental success was neither institutionally inevitable nor externally engineered, but the product of a historically specific and ideologically driven state-building project. Four primary questions guide this research: what historical conditions shaped the institutional landscape …

A Reevaluation Of South Korea’S Economic Rise: The Defense Industrial Base, Timothy Lee

CMC Senior Theses

This paper seeks to reexamine how the Republic of Korea (ROK) was able to rise from one of the world's poorest economies after the Korean War to a leading international defense exporter today. Existing development theories—such as dependency theory, export-led industrialization, and world-systems theory—each offer partial explanations but none fully accounts for the ROK's rapid economic growth. To address this gap, the paper analyzes U.S. foreign aid data, U.S. national security documents, and the economic data of the ROK’s chaebols, family-owned business conglomerates, to reevaluate two key variables: the United States' strategic imperative to contain communism during the Cold War, …

The Vestiges Of The German Democratic Republic: Memory Politics And Xenophobia In Former East Germany, Diana Zhou

CMC Senior Theses

From the 2015 migration influx onward, xenophobic and nationalist sentiments permeated Germany’s national political discourse. The former socialist territories in eastern Germany have proven particularly susceptible to far-right, anti-immigration, and anti-integration rhetoric. This thesis explores the mnemonic foundations of xenophobic sentiments in former East German states, tracing the development of an antifascist yet ethnically nationalist mnemonic framework to the state-sanctioned myths and invented traditions of the German Democratic Republic (GDR). As the loss of a collective GDR identity produced a reactionary rehabilitation of this framework post-unification, the racial and ethnic “other” — migrants, asylum seekers, and refugees — became constructed …

Lessons Unlearned: Cultural Competence And The Limits Of U.S. Army Doctrine In Iraq And Afghanistan, Kylie W. Ha

CMC Senior Theses

This thesis examines how the absence of comprehensive cultural and linguistic competence within U.S. Army doctrine contributed to operational and ethical failures during the wars in Iraq (2003–2011) and Afghanistan (2001–2021). It focuses on the gap between doctrinal recognition of culture and language and the failure to institutionalize these elements as measurable, force-wide competencies. The thesis analyzes doctrinal publications spanning the period from 2001 to 2014 and finds that, while these publications increasingly acknowledged the importance of cultural awareness, language, and local context—particularly in counterinsurgency operations—these elements were not embedded as standardized requirements across training, planning, or evaluation. Iraq and …

Eurovision As A Platform For Cultural Diplomacy In Times Of Conflict, Lucy Meza

CMC Senior Theses

This thesis examines how states utilize the Eurovision Song Contest as a platform for soft power, focusing on the conditions under which cultural performance translates into reputational gains. Drawing on Joseph Nye’s concept of soft power, Biasioli’s theory of songwashing, Zamorano’s typology of cultural diplomacy, Anholt’s competitive identity framework, and Feklyunina’s analysis of identity and narrative, it argues that Eurovision’s effectiveness as a soft power platform is fundamentally contingent on the alignment between a state’s cultural narrative and dominant international perceptions of its legitimacy. Through a qualitative comparative case study approach, the thesis examines two nations whose Eurovision participation during …

The Jamaica That Dreams: A Normative Application Of Developmental Theory, Tamoy Pitt

CMC Senior Theses

This thesis examines Jamaica’s persistent underdevelopment through Martha Nussbaum's normative application of the capabilities approach as per her conception in Creating Capabilities. Through this approach, the paper will argue that Jamaica’s underdevelopment is a result of the failure of its domestic institutions to provide all citizens with the substantive freedoms and capabilities necessary to live lives of dignity. Originally detailed by Amartya Sen in his book Development as Freedom, the capabilities approach posits freedom as both the means and ends to development while rejecting contemporary approaches to development such as GDP, Utilitarianism, or Rawlsian resource-based approaches as insufficient frameworks for …

Assessing The Feasibility Of Small Modular Reactor Deployment On Islands In Southeast Asia And The Pacific, Hayden C. Beauchemin

CMC Senior Theses

This study looks at the feasibility of using Small Modular Reactors (SMRs) to provide island microgrids in Southeast Asia and the Pacific with clean, reliable electricity. SMRs are compared to current methods of electricity generation, namely diesel generators, as well as to renewable alternatives. Policymakers will face geopolitical, technical, economic, and domestic political challenges to SMR deployment. The key considerations of SMRs, including economic viability, safety approaches, public attitudes, and diplomatic relations are considered, and solutions are identified for issues such as financing and nuclear waste disposal. The analysis reinforces the conclusion that SMR deployment is feasible for islands in …

Understanding The Flow: Deconstructing The Link Between Immigrants And Fentanyl, Madeline F. Nesbitt

CMC Senior Theses

This thesis explains how a false link between undocumented immigration and fentanyl becomes widely accepted in the United States. Empirical data show that most fentanyl enters through legal ports of entry and that U.S. citizens account for the majority of those caught transporting it. Why, then, do 41% of Americans attribute overdose deaths to migrants trafficking fentanyl? This project examines how this myth is built, repeated, and sustained, and what policy consequences follow from it.

When complex social problems lack clear culprits, political actors often manufacture them through scapegoating. Current literature documents how political actors link immigrants to drug crimes, …

Tilting The Playing Field: Executive Attacks On Big Law Firms As A Mechanism Of American Competitive Authoritarianism, Sajah Ali

CMC Senior Theses

This thesis examines how President Donald Trump’s executive campaign against elite law firms, collectively known as “Big Law,” serves as a concrete case study of competitive authoritarianism in action. Drawing on Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way’s framework in their work The Path to American Authoritarianism, this thesis applies their four pillars of competitive authoritarianism to the administration’s executive orders targeting major law firms and maps those pillars onto three distinct firm responses: fighting back, capitulation, and quiet retreat. Situating this case study within the broader political context of Trump’s second term, this thesis finds that while the United States has …

Morals Without Movement: Veganism, Contentious Politics, And The Lifestyle Politics Constraint, Luke M. Carfaro

CMC Senior Theses

This thesis examines whether veganism constitutes a social movement through Social Movement Theory frameworks, emphasizing Sidney Tarrow's Power in Movement. Through analysis of veganism's empirical properties (collective challenge, common purpose, collective identity, and sustained interaction) and key procedural mechanisms (framing, mobilizing structures, and repertoires of contention), this thesis determines that veganism fails to meet the empirical criteria of a social movement and is more accurately classified as a lifestyle movement—a movement in which political participation is expressed through private consumption rather than sustained collective contention. Using the Make America Healthy Again movement as a counterexample, this thesis comparatively illustrates …

Cultural Dissonance: Western Hierarchical Structures In Unesco’S Representative List Of The Intangible Cultural Heritage Of Humanity, Chumnan J. Sangsvang Iii

CMC Senior Theses

This paper explores how the heritage ideologies of the academic and legal traditions of the “West” have exerted influence over the modern conception of heritage in order to fulfill their own ideas of value. It uses a combination of anthropological theory, ethnographic research, and international law to analyze this phenomenon, first identifying the theory and history behind culture, heritage, and civilization in international law. The paper then goes on to analyze UNESCO’s ICH designation and the consequences of Western heritage construction from 4 case studies, each variably removed from the West: Cases from Greece, Uruguay, Malawi, and Tonga will identify …