Political Science Commons^™

“There’S Nothing Wrong With Fun”: Unpacking The Tensions And Challenges Of Human Centered Design For Learning With Pre-Service Teachers, Zoe Falls, Justin Olmanson

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

Research into practices of making within formalized education has primarily focused on K12 settings, inservice teachers in professional development, and pre-service teachers facilitating a maker experience for K12 students. Less is known about the professionalizing impact making and human centered design can have on pre-service teachers, especially in relation to how or if the experience deepens their understanding of content, pedagogy and human centered design. This study traces a group of pre-service social science teachers’ development of a meme generator to support learning history. By studying their process from inception to conclusion, we found students were less inclined to engage …

Coalitions Matter: Citizenship, Women, And Quota Adoption In Africa, Alice J. Kang, Aili Mari Tripp

Department of Political Science: Faculty Publications

We provide new theory and evidence of the role of domestic women’s coalitions in the adoption of gender quotas. Previous research has shown the importance of women’s movements to policy change. We show that specific types of mobilization, often multiethnic in character, are a more precise way of describing these influences. Using a new dataset of coalitions in 50 countries in Africa (1989–2014), we first examine where coalitions are likely to emerge. Controlling for factors that correlate with their formation, we find that when domestic women’s organizations form a coalition for quotas, governments are more likely to adopt them and …

An Evaluation Of The 2016 Election Polls In The United States, Courtney Kennedy, Mark Blumenthal, Scott Clement, Joshua D. Clinton, Claire Durand, Charles Franklin, Kyley Mcgeeney, Lee Miringoff, Kristen M. Olson, Douglas Rivers, Lydia Saad, G. Evans Witt, Christopher Wlezien

Department of Sociology: Faculty Publications

The 2016 presidential election was a jarring event for polling in the United States. Preelection polls fueled high-profile predictions that Hillary Clinton’s likelihood of winning the presidency was about 90 percent, with estimates ranging from 71 to over 99 percent. When Donald Trump was declared the winner of the presidency, there was a widespread perception that the polls failed. But did the polls fail? And if so, why? Those are among the central questions addressed by an American Association for Public Opinion Research (AAPOR) ad hoc committee. This paper presents the committee’s analysis of the performance of preelection polls in …

Stealth Democracy: Authoritarianism And Democratic Deliberation, Peter Muhlberger

University of Nebraska Public Policy Center: Publications

In Stealth Democracy, Hibbing and Theiss-Morse seek to show that much of the American public desires "stealth democracy"--a democracy run like a business with little deliberation or public input. The authors maintain that stealth democracy beliefs are largely reasonable preferences, and the public does not want and would react negatively to a more deliberative democracy. This paper introduces an opposing "authoritarian stealth democrats thesis" that suggests that stealth democracy beliefs may be driven by authoritarianism and a variety of related orientations including poor political perspective taking and low cognitive engagement. These orientations may be ameliorated through democratic deliberation. Hypotheses are …

Why The U.S Should Not Deport Immigrants, Pedro Serrano

Nebraska College Preparatory Academy: Senior Capstone Projects

Illegal immigrants are people who come the the U.S illegally or come in legal through visa and stay over their stay period. There are many reasons why one would cross the boarder such as wanting a better life for themselves and families but some people, such as the President, do not see that. An estimated 381.5 billion between 623.2 billion dollars would be lost within the country if they were all deported. Illegal immigrants make up 65% of the agricultural production. It will cost millions and millions of dollars to deport every single illegal immigrant and also take about 20 …

European Spaces And The Roma: Denaturalizing The Naturalized In Online Reader Comments, Theresa Catalano, Grace E. Fielder

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

With the entry of several Eastern European nations into the European Union (EU), a “third” space has developed in the discourse for nations perceived as not fully integrated “inside” the EU system. This article investigates the construction of this “third space” in the resultant “moral panic” about undesired immigration from other EU countries and its potential drain on the social services of the United Kingdom and links it to Euroskeptic discourse in British media. The article uses construal operations from cognitive linguistics combined with critical discourse studies as a way of denaturalizing the discourse in online comments that focus on …

The Judicialization Of Peace, Courtney Hillebrecht, Alexandra Huneeus, Sandra Borda

Department of Political Science: Faculty Publications

As international courts gain in influence, many worry that they will impoverish domestic politics— that they will limit democratic deliberation, undermine domestic institutions, or even thwart crucial political initiatives such as efforts to make peace. Indeed, many states are in the midst of withdrawing, or actively considering withdrawal, from international commitments presided over by international courts. The Article focuses on the currently unfolding Colombian peace process, the first to be negotiated under the watch of not one but two international courts, to show that these concerns misconstrue the way international courts actually work.

Throughout four years of peace talks, many …

Genetic Attributions: Sign Of Intolerance Or Acceptance?, Stephen P. Schneider, Kevin B. Smith, John R. Hibbing

Department of Political Science: Faculty Publications

Many scholars argue that people who attribute human characteristics to genetic causes also tend to hold politically and socially problematic attitudes. More specifically, public acceptance of genetic influences is believed to be associated with intolerance, prejudice, and the legitimation of social inequities and laissez-faire policies. We test these expectations with original data from two nationally representative samples that allow us to identify the American public’s attributional patterns across 18 diverse traits. Key findings are (1) genetic attributions are actually more likely to be made by liberals, not conservatives; (2) genetic attributions are associated with higher, not lower, levels of tolerance …

An Examination Of Political Attitudes And Behavior Using Regulatory Focus Theory, Kristen D. Deppe

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

Using Regulatory Focus Theory (RFT, Higgins 1997), I take a broad look at the manner in which political behaviors and attitudes are impacted by the promotion and prevention motivational systems. I first look at how behavior in life generally and political life specifically are similar in terms of regulatory focus. Second, I look at how RFT is related to political attitudes. Specifically, I look at whether there is a connection between regulatory focus and ideological attitudes, whether there is a relationship between policy context and motivational systems, and whether the status quo of a policy leads to a relationship between …

Literature Review Group Exercise For Undergraduates, Brandon Bosch

Department of Sociology: Faculty Publications

I use this literature review activity for two capstone classes (Sociology and Political Science) where students must write a 15-20 research paper. The presentation and group activity below helps students better understand how to write an effective literature review and topic sentences. Working in teams, students reassemble an existing literature review (from an actual published article) and write new topic sentences for each paragraph. By the end of this activity, students are more confident and capable about writing their first literature review. In addition to being a useful learning exercise, students also tend to really enjoy doing this group activity.

Who Can Deviate From The Party Line? Political Ideology Moderates Evaluation Of Incongruent Policy Positions In Insula And Anterior Cingulate Cortex, Ingrid J. Haas, Melissa N. Baker, Frank J. Gonzalez

Department of Political Science: Faculty Publications

Political polarization at the elite level is a major concern in many contemporary democracies, which is argued to alienate large swaths of the electorate and prevent meaningful social change from occurring, yet little is known about how individuals respond to political candidates who deviate from the party line and express policy positions incongruent with their party affiliations. This experiment examines the neural underpinnings of such evaluations using functional MRI (fMRI). During fMRI, participants completed an experimental task where they evaluated policy positions attributed to hypothetical political candidates. Each block of trials focused on one candidate (Democrat or Republican), but all …

Using Free Speech To Stifle Free Speech, David Moshman

Department of Psychology: Faculty Publications

People often use their freedom of speech to disrupt the speech of others, especially on college campuses in recent years. Of course people have a right to protest, provided they are sufficiently quiet, brief, or distant so as not to prevent the speaker from being heard. On August 25, University of Nebraska–Lincoln sophomore Kaitlyn Mullen set up a literature table outside the student union to promote Turning Point USA, a libertarian/conservative campus-based organization. TPUSA proclaims its support for free speech but maintains Professor Watchlist, a blacklist of professors who have expressed leftist ideas, in or out of class. Before long, …

The Seeds Of Change: Attitudinal Stability And The Direction Of Attitudinal Change Across The Lifespan, Johnathan C. Peterson

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

Folk wisdom has long held that people become more conservative as they grow older. The empirics behind this claim, however, are not definitive. Utilizing panel data from the Michigan Youth-Parent Socialization Panel study and a longitudinal sample of Australian twins, my dissertation answers this question and many others as I examine patterns of attitudinal stability and the direction of attitudinal change when it does occur. These data allowed me to longitudinally track attitudinal change at the individual level. I first uncovered latent classes defined by patterns of attitudinal stability across the lifespan. The majority of people in these latent classes …

Thinking About Race: How Group Biases Interact With Ideological Principles To Yield Attitudes Toward Government Assistance, Frank John Gonzalez

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

When are people more likely to evaluate race-targeted government assistance based on ideological principles rather than racial prejudice? In order to answer this question, it is necessary to understand the mechanisms by which prejudice influences political attitudes. In this dissertation, I develop a theoretical model for explaining how deep-seated, automatic group biases interact with higher-order, ideological principles in order to influence attitudes toward race-targeted government assistance. I suggest group-based principles are more important than individualistic values or ingroup favoritism in explaining race-targeted policy attitudes. I argue that when people evaluate race-targeted policies, controlled neural processes translate automatic neural processes into …

Congruence And Participation: Does The Discrepancy Between The Elite's And The Public's Ideology Come At The Cost Of Reduced Participation?, Balazs Feher-Gavra

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

Why do some people choose to engage in politics while others opt out? My core thesis is that two features of contemporary politics have a detrimental impact on participation in the electorate. The first of these two features is the discrepancy between the political agenda of the individual (what issues they consider important) and that of the political ruling class. The second stems from work suggesting that the conservative-liberal dimension represents the structure behind the issue stances of the political elite well; but that the same is not quite true for the general population (e.g. Carmines, Ensley, and Wagner 2011). …

Women, Rights And Power: Review Of Alice Kang, Bargaining For Women’S Lives: Activism In An Aspiring Muslim Democracy., Jill Vickers

Department of Political Science: Faculty Publications

Alice Kang’s Bargaining for Women’s Lives is an impressive study of the competition between women activists and religious conservatives in Muslim-majority, francophone Niger. In this emerging democracy, Kang focuses on debates about women’s rights at the time when freedom of speech and assembly were being established. She explores how Niger handles women’s issues: who puts them on the national agenda, how they get framed and who decides. In a chapter discussing (unsuccessful) efforts to reform family law, Kang identifies the inability of colonial and post-colonial rulers to create central state structures as the problem since it left traditional Muslim authorities …

The Making Of A Hero: Cultivating Empathy, Altruism, And Heroic Imagination, Ari Kohen, Matt Langdon, Brian R. Riches

Department of Political Science: Faculty Publications

Heroes are not born; they’re made. This article examines the commonalities in the backgrounds of people who take heroic action on behalf of others to theorize the ways in which our society can encourage citizens to prepare themselves to act heroically. In looking closely at a variety of people who have acted heroically, in a single moment or over time, we argue they have at least four crucial commonalities: They imagined situations where help was needed and considered how they would act; they had an expansive sense of empathy, not simply with those who might be considered “like them” but …

Mass Political Behavior, Ingrid J. Haas, Stephen P. Schneider

Department of Political Science: Faculty Publications

Mass political behavior is the study of how average citizens form and express opinions about politics and decide how to engage with the political system through voting or other forms of political participation. Political scientists interested in mass political behavior have drawn on a variety of disciplinary approaches to understand the topic, including history, economics, sociology, and more recently, psychology, biology, and neuroscience. Political psychologists interested in understanding mass political behavior have applied social psychological theories of attitudes, emotion, social cognition, and social identity to help improve our understanding of political behavior. This entry provides a brief overview of how …

Nsst 475: Security In The 21st Century—A Peer Review Of Teaching Project Benchmark Portfolio, Tyler R. White

UNL Faculty Course Portfolios

This benchmark course portfolio is the culmination of a year’s long planning and execution process to improve an existing capstone course NSST 475. This course has two goals: to teach students about subject matter and to expose them to structured analytic techniques (SATs) before they graduate. This course is a minor capstone which means that the students come from a diverse set of disciplinary backgrounds. I targeted two course objectives to examine for this project with the intention of employing backward course design to think through what students should be learning and how I can improve that process. This portfolio …

Heroism Research: A Review Of Theories, Methods, Challenges, And Trends, Zeno E. Franco, Scott T. Allison, Elaine L. Kinsella, Ari Kohen, Matt Langdon, Philip G. Zimbardo

Department of Political Science: Faculty Publications

Heroism as an expression of self-actualization and a pinnacle social state is of fundamental interest to humanistic psychology and the field more broadly. This review places the growing discussion on heroic action in a humanistic perspective, as heroism aligns with ethical self-actualization in its highest form, personal meaning making, and social good, and can also involve profound existential costs. This review is organized in four major sections: First, the historical and philosophical underpinnings of heroism are examined, moving from ancient Greco-Roman perspectives, to more modern interpretations of Continental philosophy, and to Freud and Le Bon. Second, the article summarizes in …

Place Matters? Place And Legislative Behavior In Nebraska, Melissa Lee Trueblood

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

The dissertation is a three-part analysis of the impact of place and place attachment on legislative behavior in the 2011-2012 session of the Nebraska Unicameral. The first analysis explores whether place or type of legislative district has an effect on roll-call voting. In the second analysis, the dissertation analyzes the relationship between place attachment (defined as the emotional bond between a person and a place) and roll-call voting. Finally, in the third analysis, the dissertation investigates through content analysis how often senators refer to their place attachment, and then, it examines the link between geographic scale of place attachment and …

Can International Criminal Law Deter Rebel Groups? The Case Of Uganda, The Lord's Resistance Army, And The International Criminal Court, Julia Reilly

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

How does a state’s commitment to international criminal accountability mechanisms affect the tactics of rebel groups fighting against it? I examine the conflict between Uganda and the Lord’s Resistance Army, spanning four phases from 1996 until 2015, and parse out whether Uganda’s stance on the Rome Statute and the International Criminal Court affected the LRA’s propensity to target civilians. I use descriptive statistics of civilian and military casualties and qualitative case studies, drawing largely on newspaper and NGO reports of events in the conflict. I find that the affect of Uganda’s signaling on justice on the LRA’s civilian targeting is …

Truth And Justice? Towards Comprehensive Transitional Justice In Uganda And The Democratic Republic Of Congo, Alicia Weaver

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

The field of transitional justice currently views retributive and restorative justice as a means of reconciliation dichotomously. With practice becoming increasingly legalistic, the restorative approach is seen as not forcing accountability. This is a mistake. This article will attempt to show that prosecutions and truth and reconciliation commissions can complement one another to attain the most justice for the most people. Using the case studies of Uganda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, I will examine under what conditions retributive and restorative justice will be used, and how they can be used to promote national reconciliation.

Advisor: Ariel Kohen

Physiology And Political Beliefs: A Response To Knoll, O’Daniel, And Cusato, Johnathan C. Peterson, Kevin Smith, John Hibbing

Department of Political Science: Faculty Publications

n a recent paper in this journal, Knoll et al. question three studies from our laboratory. In this response to that paper, we address deficiencies in their “reproduction.” Notably, we demonstrate that their data provide little evidence of a negativity bias among research subjects, suggesting a failure not only to reproduce findings from our earlier studies, but also a failure to find a widely acknowledged universal human physiological response trait. This situation raises a number of questions regarding the data on which their analyses are based. We explore these questions below and speculate that Knoll et al.’s data collection procedures …

Are Military Regimes Really Belligerent?, Nam Kyu Kim

Department of Political Science: Faculty Publications

Does military rule make a state more belligerent internationally? Several studies have recently established that military autocracies are more likely than civilian autocracies to deploy and use military force in pursuit of foreign policy objectives. I argue that military regimes are more likely to resort to military force because they are located in more hostile security environments, and not because they are inherently aggressive. First, I show that rule by military institution is more likely to emerge and exist in states facing external territorial threats. Second, by examining the relationship between military autocracies and conflict initiation, I find that once …

Anti-Regime Uprisings And The Emergence Of Electoral Authoritarianism, Nam Kyu Kim

Department of Political Science: Faculty Publications

This paper explores the role of threats from below in the emergence of electoral authoritarianism. Mass uprisings for democratic regime change undermine closed authoritarian regimes by making it difficult for autocrats to maintain their regimes through repression and co-optation. Anti-regime uprisings also promote the establishment of electoral authoritarianism by toppling existing closed regimes or by compelling autocrats to offer political reform as a survival strategy. My analysis of closed authoritarian regimes, from 1961 to 2006, reveals that anti- regime mass uprisings are significantly associated with transitions to electoral authoritarianism. I also find that nonviolent uprisings are more likely than violent …

Just The Facts? Media Coverage Of Female And Male High Court Appointees In Five Democracies, Maria C. Escobar-Lemmon, Valerie Hoekstra, Alice J. Kang, Miki Caul Kittilson

Department of Political Science: Faculty Publications

In this article, we examine gender differences in news media portrayals of nominees to high courts and whether those differences vary across country and time. Although past research has examined gender differences in news media coverage of candidates for elective office, few studies have looked at media coverage of high court nominees. As women are increasingly nominated to courts around the world, it is important to examine how nominations are covered by the news media and whether there is significant variation in coverage based on gender. We analyze media coverage of high court justices in five democracies: Argentina, Australia, Canada, …

Differences Between Actors And Leaders In Terrorism, Allie C. Curttright

UCARE: Research Products

This project examines the difference between those that leader terrorist organizations and those who carry out acts of political violence. The two main differences examined here are age and education level. The findings of this research are that leaders of terrorist organizations are older and more educated than those who carry out political violence.

Research Advisor: Dr. Kevin Smith

Active Shooter Security At The University Of Nebraska: The Case For Training And Door Locks, Randall Bowdish

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

Active shooter security at the University of Nebraska is lax. Simple fixes in the way of training and the installation of classroom door locks can help provide a safer environment for students and faculty.

Political Psychology (Annotated Bibliography), Ingrid J. Haas

Department of Political Science: Faculty Publications

The field of political psychology explains political behavior as a function of both individual- and group-level psychological processes. While the field is interdisciplinary, political psychologists tend to work in either psychology or political science departments. Although the overall aim is often similar, researchers from each discipline approach the same questions in different ways, and interested scholars are encouraged to examine literatures from both fields. The general approach to research is to focus on individual political attitudes, emotion, beliefs, and behavior, and attempt to explain these phenomena using psychological research and theory. Historical approaches to research in this field often relied …