Political Science Commons^™

A Sliding Scale: Nuclear Proliferation Among States, Jessica Liu

UReCA: The NCHC Journal of Undergraduate Research and Creative Activity

Why do states engage in nuclear proliferation? Nuclear proliferation is a major security issue affecting the international arena. Existing studies debate both the strength and direction of determinants of nuclear proliferation and the effect of domestic and international circumstances on proliferation. A clear understanding of why states choose to pursue nuclear arms is critical to promoting and maintaining international security. By analyzing what factors may make a state less prone to proliferation, the international community may incentivize disarmament. My research question considers membership in the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) as a potential correlate of nuclear proliferation. Are countries that …

Is The First Amendment At Risk?, Devin Darrow

Nebraska College Preparatory Academy: Senior Capstone Projects

Since the establishment of the Bill of Rights on December 15th 1791, Freedom of Speech has been one of the more controversial topics found within the first ten amendments. The Supreme Court has changed their interpretation of the 1st Amendment, Freedom of Speech clause, due to the cultural shifts of each generation. Recent cases have made technology a major factor for laws needing to be changed in order to protect people’s rights.

In conclusion, the definition of freedom of speech will continuously change due to the progress in technology. The last 10 years have demonstrated the need for changes. There …

Unaccompanied Children Migration, Ronald Alvarado

Nebraska College Preparatory Academy: Senior Capstone Projects

The way people view immigration has changed over the past few years. Children fleeing to the United States without their parents has been a huge issue lately. Unaccompanied children are kids younger than 18 who are sent alone, in this case to the United States. These kids migrate because of the extreme violence that occurs in their home countries.

Statistics prove that children in their home countries are exposed to much violence. Most are coming from the northern triangle of Central America. I believe they should have more rights here in the United States, and be treated just the same …

Review Of Alice Kang, Bargaining For Women’S Rights: Activism In An Aspiring Muslim Democracy, Jaimie Bleck

Department of Political Science: Faculty Publications

In Alice Kang’s Bargaining for Women’s Rights: Activism in an Aspiring Muslim Democracy, readers are introduced to the contentious debates about the inclusion of women’s rights policy in Niger. Based on fourteen months of fieldwork, the author provides a vivid exploration of domestic politics as the Muslim-majority state negotiates its transition to democracy. Kang shows that political actors adopt some women’s rights policy, while simultaneously rejecting comparable legislation on women’s rights.

This book offers an important step forward for research trajectories that seriously consider domestic determinants of policy outcomes in sub-Saharan Africa, but also Muslim-majority democracies more broadly.

Review Of Muslim Women In Postcolonial Kenya: Leadership, Representation And Social Change By Ousseina D. Alidou, And: Bargaining For Women’S Rights: Activism In An Aspiring Muslim Democracy By Alice J. Kang.", Lisa Mueller

Department of Political Science: Faculty Publications

Alidou offers an important lesson for scholars who study Muslim women in contemporary Africa: gender and religion are transnational identities, but “being a Muslim in a predominantly Muslim area has different implications for Muslim women and men than being a Muslim in a predominantly non- Muslim area” (103). This is an implicit invitation to read Muslim Women in Postcolonial Kenya alongside literature on regions of Africa where Muslim women are in the religious majority.

Enter Bargaining for Women’s Rights: Activism in an Aspiring Muslim Democracy by Alice J. Kang, who studies women in the context of Niger, a country whose …

Review Of Joe Renouard, Human Rights In American Foreign Policy; From The 1960s To The Soviet Collapse (Philadelphia: University Of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), Isbn 9780812247732, 324 Pages., David P. Forsythe

Department of Political Science: Faculty Publications

There are historians who do dense narrative history with great attention to documenting the details. And there are other historians who use history to paint a big conceptual picture whose accuracy often leads to much debate. Joe Renouard is in the former camp, with his new book on human rights in US foreign policy during the middle and late stages of the Cold War. Samuel Moyn is in the latter camp, with his stimulating and widely read but controversial interpretations in The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History.

Representation And Governance In International Organizations, David P. Rapkin, Jonathan R. Strand, Michael W. Trevathan

Department of Political Science: Faculty Publications

What does representation mean when applied to international organizations? While many scholars working on normative questions related to global governance often make use of the concept of representation, few have addressed specifics of applying the concept to the rules and practices by which IOs operate. This article examines representation as a fundamental, albeit often neglected, norm of governance which, if perceived to be deficient or unfair, can interfere with other components of governance, as well as with performance of an organization’s core tasks by undermining legitimacy. We argue that the concept of representation has been neglected in the ongoing debates …

Christians Under Covers: Evangelicals And Sexual Pleasure On The Internet, Kelsy Burke

Department of Sociology: Faculty Publications

American evangelicals have a rich history when it comes to promoting sexual pleasure within marriage, having drawn upon multiple mediumslike books, workshops, and radio shows-since the 1970s.4 Today, evangelicals encourage sexual expression through all of these channels, as well as through a wide range of digital media, including online sex toy stores, online message boards, blogs, podcasts, and virtual Bible studies that discuss a plethora of topics related to marital sex. The content of these digital resources reflects the ideas presented in print literature written by well-established and respected evangelical authorities, but unlike a book that is already written, the …

Revolutionary Leaders And Mass Killing, Nam Kyu Kim

Department of Political Science: Faculty Publications

This article argues that revolutionary leaders are more willing to commit mass killing than nonrevolutionary leaders. Revolutionary leaders are more ideologically committed to transforming society, more risk tolerant, and more likely to view the use of violence as appropriate and effective. Furthermore, such leaders tend to command highly disciplined and loyal organizations, built in the course of revolutionary struggles, that can perpetrate mass killing. This study uses time series cross-sectional data from 1955 to 2004 to demonstrate that revolutionary leaders are more likely to initiate genocide or politicide than nonrevolutionary leaders. The violent behaviors of revolutionary leaders are not limited …

Review Of Bargaining For Women’S Rights: Activism In An Aspiring Muslim Democracy By Alice J. Kang, Susanna D. Wing

Department of Political Science: Faculty Publications

Many people consider women’s rights and Muslim democracy as antithetical to each other. Conventional wisdom would have us believe that a Muslim majority country would be an unlikely place to see the adoption of women-friendly policies. In her terrific book, Bargaining for Women’s Rights, Alice Kang dispels this idea through her thoughtful research and richly nuanced analysis of negotiation over women’s rights reforms in Niger. She explains the variation in policy-making in Niger over time and argues that Islam per se is not the fundamental constraint to the adoption of women-friendly policies. Instead, mobilisation for or against policies, and the …

Political Neuroscience, Ingrid J. Haas

Department of Political Science: Faculty Publications

The field of political science has traditionally had close ties to disciplines like economics, history, and sociology. While political science has always been somewhat interdisciplinary in nature, in recent years this interdisciplinary approach has expanded to include biology, psychology, and neuroscience. This interest in the human sciences has led to the development of new subfields within political science, including biopolitics, political psychology, and political neuroscience (also called neuropolitics). What these new subfields have in common is an interest in individual human behavior and decision-making as an approach to understanding political behavior. While political science has traditionally focused on understanding politics …

The Impact Of Uncertainty, Threat, And Political Identity On Support For Political Compromise, Ingrid J. Haas

Department of Political Science: Faculty Publications

This work examines the impact of uncertainty and threat on support for political compromise. In Study 1, uncertainty, threat, and support for compromise were measured. Uncertainty increased support for compromise only when paired with positive or neutral affect. Studies 2 and 3 used an experimental design to examine the impact of incidental affect on support for political compromise as a function of political identification. Uncertainty was more likely to increase support for compromise in positive or neutral contexts and for political moderates and liberals. The combination of uncertainty and threat led conservatives to express reduced support for compromise.

Pols 459: International Political Economy—A Peer Review Of Teaching Project Benchmark Portfolio, Nam Kyu Kim

UNL Faculty Course Portfolios

This Peer Review Course Portfolio documents my teaching practices in International Political Economy (POLS 459) and analyze student learning in the course. POLS 459 is an upper-division course designed to introduces students to the study of international political economy. The most important goal of the course is that students should be able to demonstrate substantive knowledge of the political economy of international trade, investment and development. To this end, I mainly employ classroom lectures, classroom discussions, and small group work. Students work on six in-class quizzes, three exams, and one group presentation. My analysis of student learning reveals that many …

Pols: 450: Research In Biology, Psychology, And Politics—A Peer Review Of Teaching Project Benchmark Portfolio, Ingrid J. Haas

UNL Faculty Course Portfolios

This benchmark course portfolio provides an overview of student learning in Research in Biology, Psychology, and Politics (Political Science 450). This is an upper-level undergraduate course focused on training students to conduct research in the interdisciplinary area of political psychology. Enrollment in the course is primarily advanced political science majors, or students from related majors (i.e., psychology) with an interest in politics. This course focuses on developing understanding of research methods and application of appropriate methods to small group research projects. In addition, the course helps to improve student confidence in ability to engage in the research process and understand …

Pols 430: Political Communication—A Peer Review Of Teaching Project Benchmark Portfolio, Brandon Bosch

UNL Faculty Course Portfolios

This course portfolio was created to articulate, assess, and reflect upon my course objectives for a political communication class that I taught in Spring 2016. Of particular note was my objective in trying to use a Verbal Exam to assess student learning. Although I encountered some difficulties in implementing the Verbal Exam, students seemed to be either neutral or somewhat supportive of having a Verbal Exam, with students generally inclined to thinking that they learned something about interviews from the process and showing some mild support for them being used in other classes. It is worth noting that the Verbal …

Competing For Attention: A Comparative Study Of Social Movements And News Media In Abortion Debates, Katherine Eugene Lebreton Hunt

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

Why do some social movements in abortion debates get more attention from the news media than others? Do movements that support the status quo receive more attention than those opposing the status quo? Through quantitative content analysis of eight major newspapers in South Korea, Ireland, and Canada and fieldwork in South Korea and Ireland, I theorize that antistatus quo groups – whether they are for or against abortion rights – may reopen debate conditions in their countries by strategically using international human rights norms and frames and gaining standing in the news media in environments that tend to be hostile …

Voting At Home Is Associated With Lower Cortisol Than Voting At The Polls, Jayme Neiman, Karl Evan Giuseffi, Kevin B. Smith, Jeffrey French, Israel Waismel-Manor, John R. Hibbing

Department of Political Science: Faculty Publications

Previous research finds that voting is a socially stressful activity associated with increases in cortisol levels. Here we extend this research by investigating whether different voting modalities have differential effects on the stress response to voting. Results from a field experiment conducted during the 2012 presidential elections strongly suggest that traditional “at the polls” voting is more stressful, as measured by increases in cortisol levels, than voting at home by mail-in ballot or engaging in comparable non-political social activities. These findings imply that increased low-stress voting options such as mail-in ballots may increase political participation among individuals who are sensitive …

Reflective Liberals And Intuitive Conservatives: A Look At The Cognitive Reflection Test And Ideology, Kristen D. Deppe, Frank J. Gonzalez, Jayme Neiman, University Of Nebraska-Lincoln, Jackson Pahlke, Kevin Smith, John R. Hibbing

Department of Political Science: Faculty Publications

Prior research finds that liberals and conservatives process information differently. Predispositions toward intuitive versus reflective thinking may help explain this individual level variation. There have been few direct tests of this hypothesis and the results from the handful of studies that do exist are contradictory. Here we report the results of a series of studies using the Cognitive Reflection Test (CRT) to investigate inclinations to be reflective and political orientation. We find a relationship between thinking style and political orientation and that these effects are particularly concentrated on social attitudes. We also find it harder to manipulate intuitive and reflective …

Dirty Money, Irvin Ramirez-Benavides

Nebraska College Preparatory Academy: Senior Capstone Projects

The United States is a nation of immigrants. Contrary to popular beliefs, there are many positive impacts that immigration has on daily life. I will be focusing on the economic impact of Hispanic immigration. People tend to believe that the new wave of immigration is the cause of the economic problems in our country. With the research I’ve acquired, I’ve come to the conclusion that this is the wrong view of Hispanic immigration. I will be showing key facts that will support my perspective.

Our Dystopian World, Kellee Nguyen

Nebraska College Preparatory Academy: Senior Capstone Projects

If we do not heed the warnings in Margaret Atwood’s dystopian novel the Handmaid’s Tale, we, similar to handmaids will lose ourselves to society’s conveyor belt: go to school, graduate, attend college, graduate once more, raise a family, and then work away the rest of our lives. Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid's Tale acts as an in depth metaphoric replication of modern society. The society in which Offred resides in, through historical events, reasoning, and the decrease in birth rates, the government's action is justified as the people's moral values are suppressed and their rights taken away from them. Likewise, in …

George Orwell’S 1984 Becoming A Reality, Sabrina Mercado

Nebraska College Preparatory Academy: Senior Capstone Projects

Over the years our society’s need for privacy has increased tremendously. George Orwell’s 1984 provides an in-­‐depth look at a totalitarian society where there is no privacy and where ciOzens are under constant surveillance. Our society is slowly devolving into a totalitarian state. This research invesOgates the ways our world has changed and how it now resembles the society found in George Orwell’s 1984.

Re(Public)An Reasons: A Republican Theory Of Legitimacy And Justification, Christopher Mccammon

Department of Philosophy: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

There is a kind of power no one should have over anyone else, even if they don’t do anything with this power, or even if they only use this power for good. The republican tradition of political philosophy calls this kind of power domination. Here, I develop a theory of domination, and use this theory to advance our understanding of political legitimacy and justification.

My account of domination refines recent neo-republican attempts to identify dominating social power with the capacity to interfere arbitrarily with the choices of others. I argue that this capacity is not sufficient for domination. Instead, …

Challenging The Political Assumption That “Guns Don’T Kill People, Crazy People Kill People!”, Heath J. Hodges, Mario Scalora

Department of Psychology: Faculty Publications

Every time an infamous mass shooting takes place, a storm of rhetoric sweeps across this country with the fury of a wild fire. “Why are we letting these people carry guns?” “Why were they not hospitalized?” “The government needs to crack down on this issue!” What is the government’s response to these cries of concern? Politicians and the media attempt to ease public fears by drawing tenuous connections among a handful of poorly understood tragedies. The salient commonality is that these high-profile shooters had some history of mental illness. A cursory review of the Internet will paint a troubling picture …

Love Thy Neighbor? Trust In Foreigners And Support For Transnational Policies, Sergio Wals, Elizabeth Theiss-Morse, Frank J. Gonzalez, Tess Gosda

Department of Political Science: Faculty Publications

This study assesses the extent to which individual levels of trust in foreigners relate to preferences about regional transnational policies. We use a nationally representative survey from Mexico (2003), an emerging democracy with relatively high levels of nationalism and several multinational trade agreements. We argue that clarifying the target of social trust is essential for understanding the attitudes of citizens of less powerful countries toward the international policy realm. Statistical analysis strongly suggests that in fact trust in foreigners, above generalized trust, is key to understanding such attitudes. Our results indicate that trust in foreigners among Mexican respondents is positively …

Her Ladyship Chief Justice: The Rise Of Female Leaders In The Judiciary In Africa, Josephine Dawuni, Alice J. Kang

Department of Political Science: Faculty Publications

In recent years, women have been selected as leaders of African judiciaries. This article identifies where and when women have become chief justices and presidents of constitutional courts from 1990 to 2014. We profile women from three civil-law and three common-law countries and find that the women selected meet or exceed the requirements for holding the highest position in the judiciary. We then explore why some African countries, but not others, have had female judicial leaders. We initially find that the selection method may be less important than the type of legal system, the commitment of gatekeepers, the end of …

The Genetic And Environmental Foundations Of Political, Psychological, Social, And Economic Behaviors: A Panel Study Of Twins And Families, Peter K. Hatemi, Kevin Smith, John R. Alford, Nicholas G. Martin, John R. Hibbing

Department of Political Science: Faculty Publications

Here we introduce the Genetic and Environmental Foundations of Political and Economic Behaviors: A Panel Study of Twins and Families (PIs Alford, Hatemi, Hibbing, Martin, and Smith). This study was designed to explore the genetic and environmental influences on social, economic, and political behaviors and attitudes. It involves identifying the psychological mechanisms that operate on these traits, the heritability of complex economic and political traits under varying conditions, and specific genetic correlates of attitudes and behaviors. In addition to describing the study, we conduct novel analyses on the data, estimating the heritability of two traits so far unexplored in the …

Determinants Of Rural Latino Trust In The Federal Government, Nathan Munier, Julia Albarracin, Keith Boeckelman

Department of Political Science: Faculty Publications

Trust in government is essential to democratic practice. This article analyzed the factors shaping trust in the federal government using a survey of 260 Mexican immigrants living in rural Illinois and in-depth interviews with 32 participants. To analyze these data, we drew a distinction between support for the regime (system of government that is relatively stable in a political system) and support for authorities (those who temporarily occupy positions of power) to test whether regime or authorities’ considerations shaped respondents’ political trust. The results showed that both considerations influenced trust in the federal government. We also found that a perception …

Nonpolitical Images Evoke Neural Predictors Of Political Ideology, Woo-Young Ahn, Kenneth T. Kishida, Xiaosi Gu, Terry Lohrenz, Ann Harvey, John R. Alford, Kevin B. Smith, Gideon Yaffe, John R. Hibbing, Peter Dayan, P. Read Montague

Department of Political Science: Faculty Publications

Political ideologies summarize dimensions of life that define how a person organizes their public and private behavior, including their attitudes associated with sex, family, education, and personal autonomy [1, 2]. Despite the abstract nature of such sensibilities, fundamental features of political ideology have been found to be deeply connected to basic biological mechanisms [3–7] that may serve to defend against environmental challenges like contamination and physical threat [8–12]. These results invite the provocative claim that neural responses to nonpolitical stimuli (like contaminated food or physical threats) should be highly predictive of abstract political opinions (like attitudes toward gun control and …

Creatures Of Incoherence: Dissecting The Drivers, History, And Cognition Of Attitudinal Incongruence In The American Body Politic, Timothy Collins

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

Most American conservatives and liberals wield contradictory political attitudes. This dissertation explores what drives this “attitudinal incongruence.” First, I define and operationalize my terminology and situate the topic within social and political psychology to formulate my central model and theory of ideologically asymmetrical application of (1) individuals’ psychological and cognitive traits, and (2) individuals’ social identity and environmental traits. This leads to the overarching hypothesis that conservatives’ incongruities are more strongly driven by internal forces, and liberals’ by external forces. The central model is then demonstrated in a broad historical overview of attitudinal incongruence in America. The central tenets of …

An Interpretive Plan Guide For Wilderness Park In Lincoln, Nebraska, Rachel J. Ward

Community and Regional Planning Program: Professional Projects

Wilderness Park, located in Lancaster County, Nebraska, is a public park of unique ecological and historical value to the city of Lincoln and to the surrounding region. The natural and historical features of the park present an opportunity to communicate environmental and historical topics that are relevant on local, national, and global levels, as well as inspire a lively sense of pride in the community. The problem is that many topics relevant to Wilderness Park are not currently being interpreted at the park, and that there are relatively few interpretive resources available to park visitors.

The purpose of this project …