Public Policy Commons^™

Regulating The Care Boom: Labor Standards Enforcement And Paid In-Home Care Work, Isaac Jabola-Carolus

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In the United States, population aging has driven explosive growth in care-sector occupations, especially among low-wage home care aides who provide long-term assistance to older adults. These aides, predominantly women and disproportionately people of color, now represent one of the country’s largest and fastest-growing occupational groups. In recent decades, economic inequality and meager social policies have also spurred demand for nannies, housecleaners, and other domestic workers—occupations heavily reliant on immigrant women, many undocumented. While scholarly and public discourse has addressed labor shortages and job quality in such occupations, a related problem is the widespread violation of labor standards, including minimum …

Happiness And Policy Implications: A Sociological View, Sarah M. Kahl

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The World Happiness Report is released every year, ranking each country by who is “happier” and explaining the variables and data they have used. This project attempts to build from that base and create a machine learning algorithm that can predict if a country will be in a “happy” or “could be happier” category. Findings show that taking a broader scope of variables can better help predict happiness. Policy implications are discussed in using both big data and considering social indicators to make better and lasting policies.

Building For Culture: How Municipal Ownership Of Cultural Facilities Influences Annual Arts Funding In American Cities, Adam M. Sachs

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis explores how local government support for arts and culture varies across 24 American cities. It has proven to be challenging for researchers to accurately measure municipal arts support. Research on cultural policy has also often focused on the federal level, despite total city expenditures far exceeding national or state government support. This thesis attempts to take an accurate pulse of city expenditures in 2017 and correlates those spending levels to the variation in city ownership of arts facilities. Rooted in the historical perspectives of the ‘new institutionalism’ and path-dependency, this paper argues that past decisions about taking ownership …

Reclaiming Indiana: The Politics Of Crisis Amid The Failures Of Liberal Capitalist Modernity, Chris Grove

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This ethnography examines grassroots political responses to the economic crisis that began in 2008, foremost in the US Midwest, which arguably laid the groundwork both for the election of President Donald Trump and presidential candidacy of Senator Bernie Sanders. President Obama launched his $787 billion stimulus plan in Elkhart, Indiana, in early 2009. At the height of the crisis, unemployment skyrocketed from four to 20 percent in Elkhart, and it became central to struggles over the political direction of the US. With few safety nets, Elkhart residents struggled to meet their basic needs, creating conditions for political organizing on both …

Investigations Of Fraud, Waste, Abuse, And Corruption In The Public Sector: A Survey Of Organizational And Software-Based Aids And Obstructions, Lawrence Kom

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Fraud, Waste, Abuse, and Corruption present significant challenges to the efficient use of public resources and stifle government service improvement by detracting from policy development and undercutting funding for important initiatives. The purpose of this study is to better understand the aids and impediments to investigations of these offenses and provide a generalizable definition for the mission of Inspectors General, the group tasked with monitoring and addressing these offenses. This study also sought to identify the material role of software in investigations of Fraud, Waste, Abuse, and Corruption. Through a purposive sampling, 18 Inspectors General from the federal, state, and …

Rezoning, Real Estate, And The Dynamics Of Displacement In Inwood, Damaly Gonzalez

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis asks how New York City’s rezoning process combine with the dynamics of real-estate sales to create displacement pressures for low-income communities of color. A case study of the recent rezoning of Inwood, a neighborhood in upper Manhattan, in August 2018, will help to illustrate these dynamics. Through an analysis of building sales and extreme rent inflation embedded in a historical and contemporary analysis of zoning and the influence of real-estate developers and owners on these processes, this thesis paints a dire picture of the risks faced by the mostly-Dominican-American renters in Inwood. The principal contribution of the …

The Ferguson Effect In Contemporary Policing: Assessing Police Officer Willingness To Engage The Public, Christopher Mercado

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Researchers suggest that as public scrutiny and video recording of violent/tumultuous police encounters increase, police would back away from proactive enforcement, resulting in an increase in crime—the Ferguson Effect. Recent scholarship refined these concerns over police disengagement with the study of de-policing, while other scholars explored police self-legitimacy, in order to explain law enforcement behavior, given the immediacy and ubiquity of social media and digital communication. This study surveyed 792 law enforcement officers from 10 different police agencies in the United States, to ascertain if police officers’ personal and contextual characteristics influence their decision to either take enforcement action (i.e., …

Bias-Motivated Homicides: Toward A New Typology, Lindsey Sank Davis

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Despite significant progress towards equal protection under the law for women, LGBT individuals, and people of color in the United States, hate crime remains a pervasive problem, and rates appear to have increased in recent years. Bias-motivated homicide – arguably the most serious form of hate crime – is statistically rare but may have far-reaching consequences for marginalized communities. Data from the Uniform Crime Reports and the National Crime Victimization Survey have suggested that, on average, fewer than 10 bias-motivated homicides occur in the United States per year; however, data from open sources indicate that the rate of bias-motivated homicide …

Local Immigration Enforcement Entrepreneurship In The Punishment Marketplace, Daniel L. Stageman

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The contemporary neoliberal economic order plays a significant role in American social organization and policy-making. Most importantly, neoliberal ideology drives the creation and imposition of markets in public goods and services and the valorization of free market ideology in cultural life. The neoliberal ‘project of inequality’ is in turn delimited and upheld by an authoritarian system of punishment built around mass incarceration, surveillance, and an unprecedented level of social control directed at the lowest strata of American society – a group that includes both the urban underclass, and unauthorized immigrants.

This study lays out the theory of the punishment marketplace …

Undocumented Youth Living Between The Lines: Urban Governance, Social Policy, And The Boundaries Of Legality In New York City And Paris, Stephen P. Ruszczyk

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation compares the transition to adulthood of undocumented youth in New York and Paris, along with analysis of the construction of illegality in each city. In both the United States and France, national restrictions against undocumented immigrants increasingly take the form of deportations and limiting access to social rights. New York City and Paris, however, mitigate the national restrictions in important but different ways. They construct "illegality" differently, leading to different young adult outcomes and lived experiences of "illegality." This project uses seven years of multi-site ethnographic data to trace the effects of these mitigated "illegalities" on two dozen …

Inmate-, Incident-, And Facility-Level Factors Associated With Escapes From Custody And Violent Outcomes, Bryce E. Peterson

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Introduction: Preventing escapes from custody is a critical function of prisons, jails, and the individuals who run these correctional facilities. Escapes are a popular topic in the news, among lawmakers, and in public discourse. Much of this interest stems from the widespread notion that escapees pose a serious threat to public safety, as well to the safety of correctional staff and law enforcement officers tasked with preventing and apprehending them. However, despite the importance of preventing escapes and minimizing violence, there has been very little empirical research on these issues in the past several decades. Extant research has also been …

Consuming Poverty: The Unexpected Politics Of Food Aid In An Era Of Austerity, Maggie Dickinson

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation tracks the remarkable growth of food assistance in the U.S. over the past fifteen years and asks what this expansion of food aid means for poor people living in New York City. Much of the scholarly literature on welfare policy in the U.S argues that social programs have become more stingy and punitive, particularly since the passage of welfare reform in 1996. On the surface, this does not seem to be the case for the food stamp program or for emergency food providers like soup kitchens and food pantries. Since 2001 food stamp rolls have risen 120% in …

Is Burglary A Violent Crime? An Empirical Investigation Of Classifying Burglary As A Violent Felony And Its Statutory Implications, Phillip Kopp

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Under the common law, burglary is defined as a crime committed against the property of another, and is listed as a property offense for purposes of statistical description by the Uniform Crime Reports (UCR) and the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS). However, burglary is prosecuted and sentenced as a violent crime under habitual offender laws at the federal level, and can be regarded as violent in state law, depending on varied circumstances. Using a mixed methods approach, the current study compared state and federal burglary and habitual offender statutes to an empirical description of the offense. First, a comprehensive content …

National Child Maltreatment Response And Foster Care Entries: 2005-2010, Zeinab Chahine

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This study involves secondary analysis of the national administrative data contained in two major federal child maltreatment and foster care data systems, the National Child Abuse and Neglect Data System and the Adoption and Foster Care Analysis and Reporting System for 2005 to 2010. The study examines the data related to screening in and determination of maltreatment reports (child maltreatment response), as well as the provision of services to children referred for maltreatment. The purpose is to determine how the child welfare services/child protective services systems responses to child maltreatment contributed to the 17% decline in foster care entries from …