Political Science Commons^™

U.S. Foreign Policy For The Middle Class: Perspectives From Nebraska, Salman Ahmed, Allison Gelman

Yeutter Institute Publications

U.S. foreign policy has not come up often in the 2020 presidential campaign. But when it has, candidates on both sides of the aisle frequently have stressed that U.S. foreign policy should not only keep the American people safe but also deliver more tangible economic benefits for the country’s middle class. The debate among the presidential contenders is not if that should happen but how to make it happen. All too often, this debate takes place within relatively small circles within Washington, DC, without the benefit of input from state and local officials, small business owners, community leaders, local labor …

In The Aftermath Of A Racialized Incident: Exploring International Students Of Color’S Perceptions Of Campus Racial Climate, Christina W. Yao, Kaleb L. Briscoe, Jennifer N. Rutt

UNL Office of Research and Innovation, Social/Behavioral Sciences Research Consortium

The purpose of this study is to illuminate international students of Color’s experiences with a campus racial incident at a predominantly White institution (PWI). This study emerged after the release of a YouTube video from a self-proclaimed White supremacist at the participants’ institution, who made comments such as “I am the most active white nationalist in [the state].” In this study, we seek to answer the question: How does a campus racialized incident affect international students of Color’s experience and perceptions of the campus climate at a PWI? The experiences of this population must be considered, especially because of the …

Political Uncertainty Moderates Neural Evaluation Of Incongruent Policy Positions, Ingrid J. Haas, Melissa N. Baker, Frank J. Gonzalez

Center for Brain, Biology, and Behavior: Faculty Publications

Uncertainty has been shown to impact political evaluation, yet the exact mechanisms by which uncertainty affects the minds of citizens remain unclear. This experiment examines the neural underpinnings of uncertainty in political evaluation using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). During fMRI, participants completed an experimental task where they evaluated policy positions attributed to hypothetical political candidates. Policy positions were either congruent or incongruent with candidates’ political party affiliation and presented with varying levels of certainty.Neural activitywas modelled as a function of uncertainty and incongruence. Analyses suggest that neural activity in brain regions previously implicated in affective and evaluative processing (anterior …

Agricultural And Food Security Impacts From The 2010 Russia Flash Drought, Eric D. Hunt, Francesco Femia, Caitlin Werrell, Jordan Christian, Jason A. Otkin, Jeff Basara, Martha Anderson, Tyler R. White, Christopher Hain, Robb Randall, Katie Mcgaughey

Department of Political Science: Faculty Publications

The flash drought and its associated heat wave that affected western Russia in the summer of 2010 had significant cascading agricultural and socioeconomic impacts. Drought indicators sensitive to soil moisture and evapotranspiration (ET) showed that the flash drought began in June 2010, then intensified rapidly and expanded to cover much of western Russia. By early July, almost all of the major wheat producing regions of Russia were experiencing extreme water stress to the winter and spring wheat crops. The timing of the onset of the flash drought was particularly devastating as the period of most rapid intensification overlapped with the …

Litigating Socio-Economic And Women’S Rights In Benin’S Constitutional Court, Alice J. Kang, Susanna D. Wing

Department of Political Science: Faculty Publications

Scholars debate the role of legal institutions in promoting human rights in Africa. Much of the discussion focuses on Anglophone countries and does not examine the gender of litigants. We propose a constitutionalism constrained perspective that argues that which and whose rights are adjudicated are shaped by the context of constitutional reform. Where reformists are primarily concerned with safeguarding civil and political rights, high courts may protect civil and political rights claims more often than socio-economic ones. Examining hundreds of human rights decisions issued by Benin’s Constitutional Court, we ask, which and whose rights does the court protect? We find …

What Makes Green Parties Successful: A Comparative Analysis Of Germany, Austria, And France, Macy Miller

Honors Program: Senior Projects (Public)

Starting in the 1980s, green parties began to make their debut. Their establishment was considered to be largely in response to environmental and anti-nuclear movements. Although their history has been quite brief, these parties have been making waves throughout the world. Throughout this research, a pattern arises between economic stability and quality of life, mainstream party competition, policy positions, and green voters themselves when examining the success of the green parties. In particular, they have demonstrated great success in the European Union. In an attempt to explain this success, this research explores three specific green parties: the German, the Austrian, …

Alliance Cohesion: Connecting The Disconnect In Alliance Reliability, Noelle Troutman

Department of Political Science: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Alliances are important to understanding international peace and conflict, but disagreement exists among scholars regarding alliance reliability with findings of allies fulfilling alliance obligations 25-75% of the time (Sabrosky, 1980; Leeds, et al., 2000; Berkemeier and Fuhrmann, 2018). What mechanism ultimately lies at the center of this puzzle? I argue that alliance cohesion, specifically differences in cohesion relating to internal dynamics of alliance structure and power distribution, lie at the center of this empirical disconnect. I define alliance cohesion as the ability of allies to agree on security preferences and appropriate methods to meet these ends. In this study I …

Backlash To The European Court Of Human Rights: The Case Of Russia, Cole Kovarik, Courtney Hillebrecht

UCARE: Research Products

Since the end of World War II, the international community has forged human rights accountability systems that have since become increasingly important. The good work done by these international tribunals has come under threat more and more by a process of backlash called tribunal capture, or “the politics of states and individual political leaders seeking to undermine the tribunals by working within the judicialized and legalized landscape of international human rights law” (Hillebrecht). The European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) is no exception; since its foundation, it has been largely utilized. However, lack of compliance with its rulings remains to …

Institutional Form And Its Influence On Instability Following The Assassination Of A Head Of State, Ashlee Mcgill

Honors Program: Senior Projects (Public)

The period following an assassination is one of fear and uncertainty for citizens of a nation after their leader has been assassinated. However, different nations experience assassinations differently; while some collapse and result in failed states, other nations have seen leaders rise to power. Thus, I examine how institutional forms—democracy, autocracy, and anocracy—influence and structure how a country experiences instability following the assassination of a head of state. I do this through a qualitative case study of three assassinations: John F. Kennedy of the United States in 1963; Rafael Trujillo of the Dominica Republic in 1961; and José Antonio “Chichi” …

Can Continuous Campaigns Cause Conscientious Citizens To Cower?, Melissa Hall

Honors Program: Senior Projects (Public)

The following study examines the relationship between campaign season length and voter turnout. Campaign season length is defined as the period between either the legal beginning of the campaign season as specified by the government or the announcement of the first candidate’s candidacy and the date of the election. Voter turnout is defined as the percentage of eligible voters that voted in the election. Eligible voters include all people of voting age in the country, regardless of whether they are registered to vote. There is no existing literature on the effects of campaign season length on voter turnout. My hypothesis …

The Rising Risk Of Terrorism In The Philippines And Natural Resource Corruption, Blair Mills

Honors Program: Senior Projects (Public)

As foreign fighters, who had previously traveled to the Middle East to conduct operations under the flag of ISIL (Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant), return to the Philippines and other countries in Southeast Asia, they are bringing their ideologies and knowledge of terrorist operations with them. In addition to tracking the growing trend of terrorist attacks being conducted in the Philippines in the name of ISIL, it is crucial to determine how these returning fighters are gathering the funds and resources necessary to carry out these attacks and establish new terrorist cells. This question of how returning terrorists …

State Policy Outcomes On Refugee Integration And Success, Emily Johnson

Honors Program: Senior Projects (Public)

Though U.S. refugee resettlement is primarily managed by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, the process of ensuring refugee success upon arrival often relies on state-level policy. In this research, I analyze the relationship between state resettlement policies, including welfare distribution, ESL education, and publicly-funded resettlement programs, and refugee social and economic outcomes, including employment, home ownership, and English proficiency. My findings indicate that there is a slight positive relationship between state resettlement service accessibility and refugee employment, home ownership, and English proficiency. However, analysis results regarding state welfare policy and ESL education produced null results. Ultimately, I …

German Immigration And Its Ties To Landscape Change In Nebraska, Lindsey Labrie

Honors Program: Senior Projects (Public)

This thesis uses a multidimensional approach to frame the different waves of German immigration within the context of land use change in Nebraska. By recounting the historical challenges and struggles Germans faced in their homelands, this thesis provides similarities between historical immigration patterns throughout the state. Observing the timing of these movements of people paints a clearer picture of how these immigrants might have helped change the farming and cultural landscapes of Nebraska. Knowing and recognizing historical immigration in Nebraska cultivates a deeper appreciation for the current relations between immigrants and Nebraska’s physical landscape.

Lincoln: A Hidden Refugee Hotspot In The United States, Rhiannon Cobb

UCARE: Research Products

This case study examines refugee integration in Lincoln, Nebraska, one of the 63 identified cities who are promoting integration, improved economic mobility, and enhanced civic participation by immigrants and refugees. The United States settles more refugees than any other country and has created diasporas throughout the country. Lincoln is known for the largest Yazidi population outside of the Middle East. I use two major research strategies (1) a qualitative analysis of refugee resource centers and (2) secondary sources on refugee integration. Information and secondary sources have been collected from archives, newspapers, and published journals. This case study further examines the …

An Examination Of Nebraska’S Law Setting The Age Of Majority At Nineteen, Lauren Mcneal

Honors Program: Senior Projects (Public)

My proposed research covers the actions of the Nebraska legislature surrounding the age of majority. During the summer of 2019, I interned with Senator Adam Morfeld to draft a bill lowering the age of majority in Nebraska from nineteen to eighteen for healthcare services. Many eighteen-year-olds, especially students, face complications when they seek healthcare services but need parental consent. This is because young adults tend to move away from their homes at this age but are still not considered independent from their parents under Nebraska state law. In this thesis, I use the information I gathered from my interim research …

Do People Really Become More Conservative As They Age?, Johnathan C. Peterson, Kevin Smith, John Hibbing

Department of Political Science: Faculty Publications

Folk wisdom has long held that people become more politically conservative as they grow older, although several empirical studies suggest political attitudes are stable across time. Using data from the Michigan Youth-Parent Socialization Panel Study, we analyze attitudinal change over a major portion of the adult life span.We document changes in party identification, self-reported ideology, and selected issue positions over this time period and place these changes in context by comparing them with contemporaneous national averages. Consistent with previous research but contrary to folk wisdom, our results indicate that political attitudes are remarkably stable over the long term. In contrast …

The Congressional Review Act (Cra): Frequently Asked Questions, United States Congressional Research Service

United States House of Representatives: Documents

Summary

The Congressional Review Act (CRA) is an oversight tool that Congress may use to overturn rules issued by federal agencies. The CRA was included as part of the Small Business Regulatory Enforcement Fairness Act (SBREFA), which was signed into law on March 29, 1996. The CRA requires agencies to report on their rulemaking activities to Congress and provides Congress with a special set of procedures under which to consider legislation to overturn those rules.

Under the CRA, before a rule can take effect, an agency must submit a report to each house of Congress and the comptroller general containing …

Googly Eyes And Yard Signs: Deconstructing One Professor’S Successful Rebuffing Of A Right-Wing Attack On An Academic Institution, Theresa Catalano, Ari Kohen

Department of Teaching, Learning, and Teacher Education: Faculty Publications

Right-wing populism is on the rise worldwide, and political attacks against universities have increased in the United States since the election of Donald Trump. In 2017, an incident occurred at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln which resulted in accusations of hostility toward conservative students. Just over a year later, political forces again attempted to denigrate the university’s reputation, but this time they did not succeed. This (multimodal) positive discourse analysis/ generative critique combines collaborative auto-ethnography to describe the way these events were represented in the media, deconstructing a professor’s methods of countering a right-wing attack on an academic institution. Findings demonstrate …

Motivated Viewing: Selective Exposure To Political Images When Reasoning Is Not Involved, Clarisse Warren, Stephen Schneider, Kevin Smith, John Hibbing

Department of Political Science: Faculty Publications

Motivated reasoning is an important element of politics especially in these highly polarized times. People selectively expose themselves to information in a fashion that makes it possible to embrace arguments consistent with their existing biases and ignore arguments inconsistent with those biases. Often overlooked in the research on motivated reasoning and selective exposure to information, however, is that a substantial portion of politics is about affective responses—that which makes people feel good and that which makes people feel bad. In this paper, we introduce a novel indicator of people's tendency to prolong exposure to favored political images or to truncate …

Ideological Asymmetries In Social Psychological Research: Rethinking The Impact Of Political Context On Ideological Epistemology, Ingrid J. Haas

Department of Political Science: Faculty Publications

Ideological asymmetries in social psychological research: rethinking the impact of political context on ideological epistemology.

Conclusion

In sum, while I agree with many of the arguments raised by Clark and Winegard (this issue), we should continue to de-bate the degree to which liberals and conservatives are equally motivated by tribalism, especially in the context of contemporary American politics. While there is no doubt that personal political views influence the questions that scientists deem important, I do wonder to what extent the ideological biases recently observed in the field of social psychology generalize to the social sciences as a whole (and …

Racial Bias And The Death Penalty In Nebraska (2005-2019), Natalie Bielenberg

Honors Program: Senior Projects (Public)

Ample evidence exists to suggest that the death penalty in the United States is affected by racial bias. Nebraska has a complex history with the death penalty, and in this study I investigate whether or not that racial bias is present in Nebraska’s capital punishment. Using a list of every Nebraska Department of Correctional Services inmate since 1982, I test for a relationship between race of inmate and sentencing outcome and a relationship between race of victim and sentencing outcome. No significant relationship was found between either race of inmate and receiving the death penalty nor race of victim and …

Donald J. Trump And The Rhetoric Of Ressentiment, Casey Ryan Kelly

Department of Communication Studies: Faculty Publications

This essay contributes to and reframes the preliminary scholarly assessments of President Donald J. Trump’s appeals to rage, malice, and revenge by sketching the rhetorical dimensions of an underlying emotional-moral framework in which victimization, resentment, and revenge are inverted civic virtues. I elaborate on the concept of ressentiment (re-sentiment), a condition in which a subject is addled by rage and envy yet remains impotent, subjugated and unable to act on or adequately express frustration. Though anger and resentment capture part of Trump’s affective register, I suggest that ressentiment accounts for the unique intersection where powerful sentiments and self-serving morality are …

Ethical Concerns Of Heroism Training, Brian R. Riches, Matt Langdon, Ari Kohen

Department of Political Science: Faculty Publications

Heroism training programs originated in the mid-2000s with the goal to “Train everyday heroes” (Heroic Imagination Project, 2017). Most participants of these programs are students between the ages of 10 and 20. Anecdotal and empirical evidence suggests that these programs may create more courageous and prosocial people (Heiner, 2018; Kohen & Sólo, 2019), however there is very little discussion in the emerging academic field of heroism science about the potential ethical concerns of training minors to be heroes (Beggan, 2019; Franco & Zimbardo, 2016; Franco et al., 2017). With the growth of heroism science scholarship, it would be wise to …

Ideology And Predictive Processing: Coordination, Bias, And Polarization In Socially Constrained Error Minimization, Nathan E. Wheeler, Suraiya Allidina, Elizabeth U. Long, Stephen P. Schneider, Ingrid J. Haas, William A. Cunningham

Department of Political Science: Faculty Publications

Recent models of cognition suggest that the brain may implement predictive processing, in which top-down expectations constrain incoming sensory data. In this perspective, expectations are updated (error minimization) only if sensory data sufficiently deviate from these expectations (prediction error). Although originally applied to perception, predictive processing is thought to generally characterize cognitive architecture, including the social cognitive processes involved in ideological thinking. Scaling up these simple computational principles to the social sphere outlines a path by which group members may adopt shared ideologies and beliefs to predict behavior and cooperate with each other. Because ideological judgments are of specific interest …

Territorial Threat And Women’S Legislative Representation, Alice J. Kang, Nam Kyu Kim

Department of Political Science: Faculty Publications

Why do some countries have fewer women in parliament than do others? Recent studies find that women have less access to positions of political power in countries facing external threats. Exist-ing studies, however, do not differentiate between types of threat. We theorize that territorial threats are a particular driver of gender inequality in national parliaments. When a country’s land is under threat, people prefer having “tough” representatives in the national legislature who are competent on the military and defense moreso than when a country faces other threats. Moreo-ver, when countries face territorial threats, they build larger standing armies and adopt …

Diverse And Inclusive High Courts: A Global And Intersectional Perspective, Alice J. Kang, Miki Caul Kittilson, Valerie Hoekstra, Maria C. Escobar-Lemmon

Department of Political Science: Faculty Publications

Critical race feminists call attention to the ways in which multiple and overlapping forms of privilege and discrimination shape individual experiences and perspectives. In this article, we argue that judiciaries cannot be fully inclusive if their composition does not reflect a society’s intersecting sources of disadvantage. We consider intersectional inclusion on high courts from a compar-ative perspective. Most existing practices of representation on high courts promote the inclusion of groups as if they are internally homogenous. We explore the attempts at and successes of promoting intersectional inclusion in the context of the high courts of Canada and South Africa. Although …

The Impact Of State Legislative Term Limits On Descriptive Representation, Matt Baldwin

Honors Program: Senior Projects (Public)

Do term limits make state legislatures more descriptively representative of their population? If the composition of a state legislature is a function of its ruleset and design, then term limits—a major shift in the rules—would change who is running for office and who is getting elected. In order to explore this question, a dataset was created by contacting a number of states to solicit responses on the demographics of their state legislatures from 1990-2018. In addition, information regarding some control variables (partisanship, time, economy) was gathered. A gap variable was created to see what difference existed between the proportion of …

Resolution Impeaching Donald John Trump, President Of The United States, For High Crimes And Misdemeanors, Jerold Nadler, House Judiciary Committee

United States House of Representatives: Documents

Resolved, That Donald J. Trump, President of the United States, is impeached for high crimes and misdemeanors and that the following articles of impeachment be exhibited to the United States Senate: Articles of impeachment exhibited by the House of Representatives of the United States of America in the name of itself and of the people of the United States of America, against Donald J. Trump, President of the United States of America, in maintenance and support of its impeachment against him for high CrImes and misdemeanors.

ARTICLE I: ABUSE OF POWER

ARTICLE II: OBSTRUCTION OF CONGRESS

Political Polarization And Long-Term Change In Public Support For Environmental Spending, Eric W. Johnson, Philip Schwadel

Department of Sociology: Faculty Publications

Public support for environmental protection has evinced declines in recent years that are widely attributed to growing antipathy among self-identified Republicans. Fractures in what was long considered broad and enduring support for the environment in the United States have called attention to the broader sociopolitical context in which individual opinion on the environment is formed, and especially the role of political parties and their leaders in shaping opinion. Empirical analyses of environmental support, however, remain strongly focused on individual-level correlates of support. We apply recent methodological advances in age-period-cohort models to scrutinize changes in Americans’ willingness to pay more for …

Resolution Directing Certain Committees To Continue Their Ongoing Investigations As Part Of The Existing House Of Representatives Inquiry Into Whether Sufficient Grounds Exist For The House Of Representatives To Exercise Its Constitutional Power To Impeach Donald John Trump, President Of The United States Of America, And For Other Purposes., Jim Mcgovern

United States House of Representatives: Documents

RESOLUTION Directing certain committees to continue their ongoing investigations as part of the existing House of Representatives inquiry into whether sufficient grounds exist for the House of Representatives to exercise its Constitutional power to impeach Donald John Trump, President of the United States of America, and for other purposes.

Resolved, That the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and the Committees on Financial Services, Foreign Affairs, the Judiciary, Oversight and Reform, and Ways and Means, are directed to continue their ongoing investigations as part of the existing House of Representatives inquiry into whether sufficient grounds exist for the House of Representatives …