American Politics Commons^™

Tribal Gaming And The Political Contributions Strategies Of Native American Tribes In Minnesota, Thomas Sorenson

Political Science Theses and Capstones

The Indian Gaming Regulatory Act has made a big impact on tribal-state relations since it was enacted in 1988 by the federal government. Tribes have started to make campaign contributions to state and federal politicians to help try to mold lawmakers to vote for Tribal interests. My research looks at Minnesota tribes and their campaign contributions to House members during the 2005 election, and whether these lawmakers voted for tribal issues during their term. For control variables I also gathered a variety of information related to legislative districts. What my analysis has shown is that the tribes in Minnesota donate …

Gender, Human Security And The United Nations: Security Language As A Political Framework For Women, Natalie Florea Hudson

Political Science Faculty Publications

This book examines the relationship between women, gender and the international security agenda, exploring the meaning of security in terms of discourse and practice, as well as the larger goals and strategies of the global women's movement.

Today, many complex global problems are being located within the security logic. From the environment to HIV/AIDS, state and non-state actors have made a practice out of securitizing issues that are not conventionally seen as such. As most prominently demonstrated by the UN Security Council Resolution 1325 (2001), activists for women's rights have increasingly framed women's rights and gender inequality as security issues …

Reducing Recidivism In The State Of California: An Evaluation Of California's Prison And Parole Programs, Heidi C. Wolfgruber

CMC Senior Theses

Studies in the past few years have found that California has the highest recidivism rate in the nation. Until just a few decades ago, many did not believe that the rate of recidivism could be decreased for Robert Martinson’s 1974 study stated that “nothing worked” when trying to rehabilitate criminals. However, a renewed interest has proven that criminals can be rehabilitated. Thus, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR), as well as various independent researchers have begun to study the effects of programming on inmates. This thesis evaluates various California in-prison and parole programs in order to determine if …

Leaflet: Barack Obama

Saffy Collection - All Textual Materials

A flyer for Barack Obama's presidential campaign. Obama, 2010 Inc. No date given. Box 15 Folder 25

Fairness, Justice And An Individual Basis For Public Policy, Douglas R. Oxley

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

Prior models of the policy process have examined how human characteristics can affect policy decision-making in such a way that it leads to aggregate effects on policy outcomes as a whole. I develop a model of the policy process which suggests that emotions related to fair and unfair experiences in the same policy domain are utilized by decision-makers as policy criteria. In the lab, I empirically tested this, and find that emotions and experience related to fairness do influence the policy decision to move away from the status quo alternative. Based upon this result, I simulated the evolution of a …

New York’S Inbred Judiciary: Pathologies Of Nomination And Appointment Of Court Of Appeals Judges, James A. Gardner

Journal Articles

The practice of selecting judges by popular election, commonplace among the American states, has recently come in for a good deal of criticism, much of it well-founded. But if popular election of judges is a bad method of judicial selection, what ought to replace it? Opponents of judicial election typically treat gubernatorial appointment as self-evidently better. New York’s experience with gubernatorial appointment to its highest court, the Court of Appeals, suggests that greater caution is in order. Although New York’s current method of selecting Court of Appeals judges was designed to be wide open and based entirely on merit, the …

Anti-Regulatory Absolutism In The Campaign Arena: Citizens United And The Implied Slippery Slope, James A. Gardner

Journal Articles

Perhaps the most striking feature of the Supreme Court’s constitutional campaign jurisprudence is its longstanding, profound hostility to virtually any government regulation whatsoever of campaign speech and spending. Such an approach is highly unusual in constitutional law, which typically tolerates at least some level of regulatory intervention even with respect to strongly protected rights. The Court’s behavior in this respect is consistent with – and, I argue, is best understood as – the kind of behavior in which a court engages when it fears a slide down a slippery slope. But what lies at the bottom of the slope? And …

The Dignity Of Voters—A Dissent, James A. Gardner

Journal Articles

Since the waning days of the Burger Court, the federal judiciary has developed a generally well-deserved reputation for hostility to constitutional claims of individual right. In the field of democratic process, however, the Supreme Court has not only affirmed and expanded the applications of previously recognized rights, but has also regularly recognized new individual rights and deployed them with considerable vigor. The latest manifestation of this trend appears to be the emergence of a new species of vote dilution claim that recognizes a constitutionally grounded right against having one’s vote “cancelled out” by fraud or error in the casting and …

0777: Kenneth Hechler Papers, 1958-1976, Marshall University Special Collections

Guides to Manuscript Collections

Personal family papers, photographs and correspondence. Includes research material for Hechler's book, "The Bridge at Remagen". Also includes campaign material for Congressional races, West Virginia Secretary of State and a bid for the governorship of West Virginia.

How The Peace Was Lost: Ignoring The Presidential Oath In 1964 And 2002-2003, Kenneth M. White

Faculty Articles

On February 16, 2001, while George W. Bush, President of the United States (U.S.), attended a news conference in Mexico hosted by Vicente Fox, President of Mexico, a distinct difference between the two men became apparent when reporters asked questions about Iraq. President Fox hesitated to make a declaration regarding Iraq saying: “this is not the meeting in which decisions or details are going to be reached, because they do not belong in the power of—the executive power, as such, because they have to have the participation of other groups.” When another reporter asked about the then recent bombing of …

Moving Away From Regulation And Legislation: Solving The Network Neutrality Debate During Obama’S Presidency, Cara J. Daley

CMC Senior Theses

This paper examines the Net neutrality, or argument that the Internet should remain and open and equal platform, debate in the United States up to November 2010. After critically examining the past regulatory and legislative efforts, the feasibility of alternate solutions invested in protecting citizens' interests is examined.

The Untold Story Behind California's Scapegoat: An Analysis Of Proposition 13, Corinne Williams

CMC Senior Theses

The California experience previous to the passage of Proposition 13 taught the citizens of California that even with representation, the freedoms of individuals could be threatened. This lesson is especially true when we see the assessment scandals, a rapidly increasing real estate market and the failure of California’s representative officials to respond to the threat to individual liberty. In addition to watching corrupt tax assessors take advantage of the system, individuals were tired of paying inflated property taxes that were changing drastically from year to year. People’s homes were literally being taken from them by the power of the tax …

The Effects On A State When They Lose Their Senior Senator, Adam J. Morris

CMC Senior Theses

The Primary purpose of this paper is to examine the role and importance of Senior Senators in the US Senate. Many states rely on Senators to bring in federal spending in the form of pork. When states lose their Senior Senator and the power they accumulated through increased tenure, they risk losing certain benefits in terms of pork. We use federal expenditures per dollar of tax and analyze how it is affected by Seniority in the Senate. Population, Income, and unemployment rates in each state were controlled for in our regression analysis. It is concluded that increased tenure significantly increases …

War, Race, And Gender In American Presidential Elections In 1964 And 1972, Baxter Norcross

CMC Senior Theses

This paper examines the partisan shift that took place in American Presidential elections during the Vietnam War. Specifically, I examine the landslide elections of 1964 and 1972 and how race, gender, and American casualties played a part in the shift.

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.

Ua37/29 Gary Ransdell - Fed. Reserve Board - Bernanke Speech To Economic Club Of Washington, St. Louis Federal Reserve Board

WKU Administration Documents

Email sent to members of the St. Louis Federal Reserve Board of speech given by Ben Bernanke at the Economic Club of Washington.

Who Was Fritz Kraemer? And Why We Should Care, Luke A. Nichter

Presidential Studies Faculty Articles and Research

"Whether Vietnam, Iraq, or now Afghanistan, wars come and go, but the real battle is a philosophic one between two sects of conservatives. In The Forty Years War: The Rise and Fall of the Neocons from Nixon to Obama, authors Len Colodny and Tom Shachtman challenge readers to examine the role of a little-known Pentagon figure named Fritz G.A. Kraemer. Colodny and Shachtman argue that Kraemer was the leading intellectual behind what became known as the neo-conservative movement, witnessed by the fact that Kraemer influenced so many high-ranking conservative figures over the course of six decades."

Ua37/29 Gary Ransdell - Fed. Reserve Board - Ben Bernanke's Confirmation Hearing Testimony, St. Louis Federal Reserve Board

WKU Administration Documents

Email sent to members of the St. Louis Federal Reserve Board regarding Ben Bernanke's confirmation hearing testimony.

Hope Over Experience?, Cath Collins

Human Rights & Human Welfare

Writing about US human rights policy from the outside is always a disconcerting experience. All bets are off, and all assumptions are turned on their head. Assumptions from the South looking North are that, rhetoric aside, US interests rarely if ever feature human rights protection and promotion in first place. What’s more, they have very frequently featured the opposite: dirty tricks, torture and rendition were sadly familiar to students of Latin American history long before Guantanamo. The Clinton years went some way towards reining in the more blatant contradictions of the 1980s, but they also set in train the easy …

From Inspiring Hope To Taking Action: Obama And Human Rights, Stephen James

Human Rights & Human Welfare

While President George H. Bush spoke of a new world order, and his “misunderestimated” son mangled the English language at countless press conferences, with Barack Obama the USA now has a talented orator as a president. There is a new word order. But does the new and skillful rhetoric match the reality when it comes to human rights?

The Statesman's Dilemma: Peace Or Justice? Or Neither?, Henry Krisch

Human Rights & Human Welfare

Just as I sat down to comment on President Obama and human rights, I glanced today's (November 19, 2009) The New York Times and found several opinion essays-careful in fact, thoughtful in tone, reasonable in argument-critical of Obama's approach during his recent visit to China toward Chinese human rights violations (mainly concerning Tibet but including also imprisoned lawyers, internet censorship, and persecution of Falun Gong.) The essayists considered various tactics for exerting American pressure on China regarding human rights. Common to all of them was a tone of rueful admiration for the political and diplomatic skill with which China fended …

Not Quite A Full House: The Case For Enlarging The House Of Representatives, Brian Frederick

Bridgewater Review

No abstract provided.

Suboptimal Executive Privilege, Stephen C. N. Lilley

BYU Law Review

No abstract provided.

Media Gender Bias In The 1984 And 2008 Vice Presidential Elections, Katherine Shaunesi Reeves

Undergraduate Honors Capstone Projects

Media coverage in political campaigns helps shape public opinion and can be a factor in people determining how to vote. Thus, bias evident in the coverage of political candidates should be a concern for a society which values fair elections. In the 2008 general election, for the first time in 24 years, a woman was on a major party ticket. The treatment of female candidates historically has been sexist. To understand the media coverage of Sarah Palin I chose to look at editorials in The New York Times. I compared her editorial references to Joe Biden’s in The Times. Then, …

Change We Can Believe In?, Katherine Hite

Human Rights & Human Welfare

We were warned to temper our high hopes for a bold new Obama era of human rights. After all, President Obama would have “a lot on his plate”: a serious economic crisis, high unemployment, over forty million people without health insurance, “two wars,” global volatility. But it’s very hard not to be dismayed by some of the continuities from the Bush to the Obama administration, as well as by some Janus-faced policy decisions with damning human rights implications. When it comes to US-Latin America relations, such decisions include: professing support for progressive immigration reform while expanding regressive anti-immigration measures; claiming …

December Roundtable: Introduction

Human Rights & Human Welfare

An annotation of:

Obama's speech to the United Nations General Assembly (September, 2009).

and

Does Obama believe in human rights? By Bret Stephens. The Wall Street Journal. October 19, 2009.

The Obama Administration's Challenges After The 'War On Science': Reforming Staffing Practices And Protecting Scientific Integrity In The Executive Branch, Justin Vaughn, José Villalobos

Selected Works Temporary Series

In this article, we examine the difficult leadership position President Barack Obama inherited as he took office with respect to science and technology policy making and implementation, particularly following the Bush administration and years of the so-called "war on science." We contend that the Obama administration's challenge is not only to take substantive policy action, but also to reform certain administrative practices, particularly in light of the previous administration's practice of the politics of strategic vacancies, a managerial technique that rearranges an agency's ideological inclinations not through the usual forms of active politicization (i.e., by filling the appointee ranks with …

The Obama Administration's Challenges After The 'War On Science': Reforming Staffing Practices And Protecting Scientific Integrity In The Executive Branch, Justin Vaughn, José Villalobos

Departmental Papers (PS)

In this article, we examine the difficult leadership position President Barack Obama inherited as he took office with respect to science and technology policy making and implementation, particularly following the Bush administration and years of the so-called "war on science." We contend that the Obama administration's challenge is not only to take substantive policy action, but also to reform certain administrative practices, particularly in light of the previous administration's practice of the politics of strategic vacancies, a managerial technique that rearranges an agency's ideological inclinations not through the usual forms of active politicization (i.e., by filling the appointee ranks with …

A Columnist's View Of Capitol Square: Ohio Politics And Government, 1969-2005, Lee Leonard

University of Akron Press Publications

This carefully-selected collection brings together his columns about the major figures, seminal events, and legends from 1969 through 2005. Leonard, the man with no agenda but the truth, covers campaigns and national political conventions, including the famous Democratic primary battles between John Glenn and Howard Metzenbaum in the 1970s. Fully described is the era of the four-term Governor James A. Rhodes, who controlled the Ohio Republican Party for two decades. Among the cast of characters are colorful lobbyist, Tom Dudgeon, who described the legislative process as “The Dance of the Stomping Buzzards,” state Senator Oakley Collins, a southern Ohioan who …

Folklore Collection, 1964-1972 (Fa 471), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

Folklife Archives Finding Aids

Finding aid and scans (Click on "Additional Files" below) for Folklife Archives Collection 471. Miscellaneous folklore collection relating to legends and beliefs about subjects such as lost gold, Daniel Boone, Indian raids, venomous snakes, and ghosts. Items collected chiefly in the Kentucky counties of Green, Taylor and Lincoln.