Political Science Commons^™

The Mirage Of Non-State Governance, Ralf Michaels

Faculty Scholarship

In this Essay, I offer three theses, all of which are critical. First, non‑state governance is conceptually unattractive; it is a concept that makes little sense. Second, non‑state governance is empirically unattractive; meaningful non‑state governance rarely exists. Third, meaningful non‑state governance is normatively unattractive; we would rarely want it, and people postulating it usually expect the state to play an important role. However, I also have something constructive: a proposed trajectory. Talk about the state and the non‑state can only be an intermediary stage in a trajectory of a theory of governance that might lead to a new paradigm of …

The Blind Leading The Blind: Who Gets Polling Information And Does It Improve Decisions?, Cheryl Boudreau, Mathew D. Mccubbins

Faculty Scholarship

We analyze whether and when polls help citizens to improve their decisions. Specifically, we use experiments to investigate 1) whether and when citizens are willing to obtain polls and 2) whether and when polls help citizens to make better choices than they would have made on their own. We find that citizens are more likely to obtain polls when the decisions they must make are difficult and when they are unsophisticated. Ironically, when the decisions are difficult, the pollees are also uninformed and, therefore, do not provide useful information. We also find that when polls indicate the welfare-improving choice, citizens …

The Rule Of Law Unplugged, Daniel B. Rodriguez, Mathew D. Mccubbins, Barry R. Weingast

Faculty Scholarship

The "Rule of Law" is a venerable concept, but, on closer inspection, it is a complex admixture of positive assumptions, inchoate political and legal theory, and occasionally wishful thinking. Although enormous investments have been made in rule of law reformism throughout the world, advocates of transplanting American-style legal and political institutions to developed and developing countries are often unclear about what they are transplanting and why they are doing so. The concept of rule of law has become unplugged from theories of law. Scholars clearly have more work to do in understanding the rule of law and designing institutions to …

Othering Obama : How Whiteness Is Used To Undermine Authority, David S. Owen

Faculty and Staff Scholarship

In this paper, I argue that the sociocultural structuring property of whiteness has been utilized to marginalize President Obama and effectively undermine his presidential authority. Whiteness functions in a largely invisible and ostensibly deracialized way to normalize the interests, needs, and values of whites, while at the same time marginalizing and devaluing the voice of people of color. Analyzing the health care debate through this theoretical lens generates insights into how the debate reproduced the system of racial oppression, and how whiteness functions in political discourse.

Ni De Aquí Ni De Allá: Transnationalism And Political Participation In Latino/A Communities, Sergio I. Garcia-Rios

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

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El Paso, Texas, And Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua, 1880-1930: A Material Culture Study Of Borderlands Interdependency, Gladys Arlene Hodges

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

ABSTRACT

Material culture theory informs this study of urban history and borderlands interdependency at El Paso, Texas, and Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, Mexico, from 1880-1930. Features incised into and structures built onto the natural environment by the first arriving colonists after the mid-seventeenth century endured for more than two centuries. Over that period, the humanly-created material environment, a social product, fed back into the development of social forms--institutions, rituals, practices, modes of interaction, activities, and beliefs. A significant number of these social forms endured into the late nineteenth century and beyond, even after mechanization and industrialization arrived in the region known …

The Impact Of Structural Adjustment Loans On Civil Conflict, Lue Anda Francis

LSU Master's Theses

This paper examines the impact of structural adjustment loans of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank on Civil Conflict. The paper argues that there are three major shortcomings to previous research on this topic. Previous research has focused more on grievances with little focus on the opportunities that may influence rebel behavior. In addition, previous research has placed little focus on the role of state capacity can play in affecting rebel behavior. As such previous research has not fully explained how both opportunities and willingness (Most & Starr 1989) are necessary conditions needed for civil conflict to occur …

Overlapping Human Rights Jurisdictions In Europe: An Application Of Constructivism To Regional Studies, William Thompson Yon

Honors Papers

In December 2009, the Lisbon Treaty expanded the European Court of Justice's jurisdiction into regional human rights protection. In the 27 EU member states this jurisdiction would overlap with the European Court of Human Rights. This paper describes how this situation developed through a historical analyses of each institutions' constitutional and functional developments, and attempts to extrapolate future action based on how actors' use and define symbols. It concludes that the European human rights regime is likely to see the ECJ establish itself in a monist hierarchy underneath the ECtHR in the area of human rights, while maintaining a supremacy …

Political Environment And Transnational Agency: A Comparative Analysis Of The Solidarity Movement For Palestine, Sam Cassanos

Honors Papers

The arguments presented in this paper attempt to fill particular gaps in the scholarly knowledge of the transnational solidarity movement for Palestine. Chapter One is a descriptive history of transnational solidarity for the Palestinians since the beginning of the second intifada (fall 2000). The next chapter puts the US based component of the Palestine solidarity movement in a comparison with recent US solidarity movements for East Timor and Central America. Chapter Three connects the subjective transnational framing tactics of the movement to the objective, structural conditions of the international system. Chapter Four extends the analysis in Chapter Three by examining …

Contesting Recognition: A Critique Of Hegelian Theories Of Recognitive Freedom, Devin Russell Goure

Honors Papers

This thesis conducts a close reading of G.W.F. Hegel's theory of mutual recognition and Charles Taylor's contemporary reworking of the theory. It is argued that theories of mutual recognition contain a problematic bias toward unity and harmony that obscures the ways in which struggles for recognition are often incomplete and open to contestation. More specifically, what is subject to critique in this thesis is what I term a “genus-species” model of difference, which treats particular differences—-of individuals or of specific cultures—-as stable subsets of a broader genus. I contend that this model of difference, when applied to theories of recognition, …

Three Worlds Of Western Punishment: A Regime Theory Of Cross-National Incarceration Rate Variation, 1960-2002, Matthew Demichele

University of Kentucky Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation offers an explanation of cross national incarceration rate variation for 17 industrialized countries for the second half of the 20^th century. Both historical case studies and time-series cross-section analyses are used to provide an institutional explanation of incarceration rate differences. Borrowing from Weber’s Sociology of Law and comparative legal scholarship, it is suggested that three types of legal thinking exist among western democracies—Common, Romano-Germanic, and Nordic law. A regime approach commonly applied in political economic explanations of welfare state development is used to quantify the legal and criminal justice institutional differences between 1960 and 2002 to assert …

Globalization And The Politics Of The Welfare State, Hanbeom Jeong

University of Kentucky Doctoral Dissertations

The theoretical argument of this study is that economic globalization, by default, exerts a downward pressure on the social policies of states largely through the operations of transnational corporations. However, since globalization’s effect on social policy is conditional on endogenous political forces such as regime type, democratization, electoral competition and political participation, its proclivity to retrench the welfare state is averted by the preferences of political actors and institutions to expand social spending. This argument found consistent empirical support via a series of cross-section regressions that estimated the interactive effects of economic globalization and various measures of domestic political institutions …

Rashomon Comes To The Courtroom: The Adoption Of The Lay Judge System In Japan, Its Impact On Jurisprudence, And The Implications For Civic Engagement, Bryan Matthew Thompson

Dissertations and Theses

In May of 2009, Japan began formal operations of the "saiban-in seido" or "lay judge system," a quasi-jury means of criminal trial adjudication that represents the first occasion since 1943 that average Japanese citizens will be required to fulfill a role in the criminal jurisprudential process. While the lay judge system promises to affect the methods and procedures of criminal trials in Japan, recent scholarship in the United States has raised an interesting question: to what degree can the lay participatory adjudication process facilitate greater levels of civic engagement in past citizen jurists once their service has completed?

It …