Other Political Science Commons^™

Evangelizing Neoliberalism Through Megachurches In Latin America And The United States, William O. Collazo

Dissertations and Theses

The most prominent and influential feature of worldwide Evangelicalism, is the megachurch. In Latin America megachurches have proliferated and grown in political influence when they first came into contact with neoliberalism during Pinochet's dictatorship in Chile. As Latin America's poor first migrated out of rural areas into Latin American cities, then north, to the United States, they have brought with them their religion. Increasingly, this religion is Protestant, evangelical, and for many, it is Pentecostalism. Misunderstood by the early literature on Pentecostalism, is the strain of neoliberalism that has become infused in the religion's most powerful institution - the megachurch. …

The Subjective Well-Being Of Ethnic Albanians In Macedonia, Peggy Brozi

Senior Honors Projects, 2010-2019

Macedonia is a multiethnic country that gained independence peacefully from Yugoslavia. Tensions between the Albanian minority (which represents approximately a quarter of the population) and Macedonians led to an eight-month insurgency in 2001 started by a group of Albanian insurgents. The conclusion of the Ohrid Framework Agreement, designed to improve minority rights, ended the conflict. Besides ethnic tension, Macedonia has faced other challenges like grand corruption, unemployment, brain drain, and more. This study examines demographic and socio-economic variables affecting the subjective well-being (SWB) of eight well-educated and well-connected Albanians from Macedonia. Through a qualitative (i.e. Skype interviews) and quantitative (i.e. …

The Effects Of Moral Message Framing On Political Ideology, Matthew Christiansen

All Master's Theses

There is disagreement as to whether and to what extent the American public is becoming more polarized, but certain issues such as climate change have been found to be polarizing. However, ideologically congruent moral message framing has been shown to moderate attitudes towards climate change and may provide a method to reduce polarization and moderate extreme attitudes. The current study attempted to broaden previous findings to investigate whether moral message framing could result in not only shifting relevant attitudes, but political ideology as a whole. Operating under Moral Foundations Theory (Haidt & Graham, 2007) two proenvironmental messages were constructed using …

Water Demand, Adaptive Capacity, And Drought: An Analysis Of The Upper Klamath Basin, Oregon And California, Patricia Snyder

All Master's Theses

Freshwater demand and scarcity issues are an issue of global concern, in particular for the American West as global climate models suggest precipitation regime changes and an increase of drought. This research conducts a case-study of the Upper Klamath Basin, located in south-central Oregon and northern California, a microcosm of the arid and semi-arid American West that experienced an economically, socially, and ecologically impactful drought in the early 2000s. Through a mixture of qualitative and quantitative methods this research: 1) identifies key stakeholders, their goals and key policies; 2) conducts an adaptive capacity assessment of water management within the basin; …

An Investigation Of The Violation Of Human Rights In Yemen, Abigail Watson

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

This research paper aims to investigate the persistence of human rights violations in Yemen from 2008 to 2018. It examines whether this persistence of human rights violations is related to Yemen’s regime type, external actors such as the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), Iran, and the United States, Yemen’s state of wealth and economic growth, and civil wars. This research paper uses data from various sources to examine different propositions related to the investigation of human rights in Yemen. The findings of this paper include that Yemen’s regime type, external actors such as the GCC, Iran, and the United States, Yemen’s …

Figures Of Wwi, Grant Morgan

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

This is a paper about three things: the connection between The University of Oxford and Akron; T.E. Lawrence's exploits in the WWI Hejaz; and the fall of the British Liberals after WWI.

Partisan Conflict, Policy Uncertainty And Aggregate Corporate Cash Holdings, Chak Hung Jack Cheng, Ching Wai (Jeremy) Chiu, William B. Hankins, Anna Leigh Stone

Research, Publications & Creative Work

This paper distinguishes political uncertainty from policy uncertainty shocks and uncovers new empirical facts about how each impacts the aggregate cash holdings of US firms. Our baseline structural vector autoregression model shows that an exogenous one standard deviation shock to political and economic policy uncertainty is followed by 1 and 1.8% increase in aggregate corporate cash-to-total assets after five and eight quarters, respectively. The baseline result also shows that policy uncertainty shocks tend to raise financial market volatility while political uncertainty shocks tend to lower financial market volatility. Moreover, we find evidence that political uncertainty exerts asymmetric effects on aggregate …

The Role Of Indicators In Promoting Gender Equality Through The Millennium And Sustainable Development Goals, Sara Rose Taylor

Theses and Dissertations (Comprehensive)

With the global rise of evidence-based policy, indicators have become an increasingly important part of governance. Indicators are statistics that represent social experiences, turning complex norms into simplified representations. Although seemingly objective, indicators reflect the values and beliefs of the actors who create them. An indicator’s normative underpinnings have significant consequences for social governance and policy because of an indicator’s power to shape understanding. This multi-manuscript dissertation analyzes the impact of governance by indicators as seen in the Millennium and Sustainable Development Goals (MDGs and SDGs), two major United Nations initiatives in the field of global social governance. The focus …

Contesting Early Childhood Professional Identities: A Cross-National Discussion, Sonja Arndt, Mathias Urban, Colette Murray, Kylie Smith, Beth Swadener, Tomas Ellegaard

Articles

In this collective article, the authors explore constructions of early childhood practitioners and how they disconnect and reconnect in a global neo-liberal education policy context. The contributions to the conversation provide windows into shifting professional identities across five national contexts: New Zealand, the USA, Ireland, Australia and Denmark. The authors ask who benefits from the notion of distinct professional identities, linked to early childhood education as locally and culturally embedded practice. They conceptualize teachers’ shifting subjectivities, drawing on Kristeva’s philosophical conception of identity as constantly in construction, open and evolving. Arguments for the urgency to counter the global uniformity machine, …

Taxation For Whom?:A Diachronic Analysis Of Taxation In Ireland And The United Kingdom From 1970-2015., Ewan Macdonald, John Hogan, Brendan O'Rourke

Other

This paper explores the discursive development of taxation within budget speeches in two countries, the Republic of Ireland and the United Kingdom, from 1970 to 2015 by means of a corpus-assisted discourse analysis. We ask the following questions; how have discourses of taxation developed diachronically in both countries, what are the similarities and differences in the observable discourses across both countries, and for whom and how are these discourses legitimised? In answering these questions, this paper makes use of Corpus linguistics, a methodological approach which utilises computational analysis of large bodies of text to draw statistically significant conclusions about the …

Wine About It: How Climate Change Is Affecting International Wine Markets, Krysta Suzanne Gingue

Honors Theses and Capstones

The purpose of this study is to understand the social context surrounding wine and how consumers and producers will act within the existing market structures to physical changes to wine due to climate change. After defining the socially embedded structure of market values, this paper questions how they will survive with the visible and invisible changes being made to wines and wine regions. Through various case studies the paper uncovers climate events happening across the world and how they will potentially change the economic landscape of wine markets. The different lenses required to understand the market lead to competing conclusions. …

Response: Labour And The Varieties Of Feminism, Monique Charles, Natalie Thomlinson

Sociology Faculty Articles and Research

"In our last issue, Charlotte Proudman offered a strongly critical account of the Labour leadership’s engagement with the feminist tradition. Here, two scholars of feminism and race offer their reflections on the arguments she raised."

Stasi Brainwashing In The Gdr 1957 - 1990, Jacob H. Solbrig, Jacob Hagen Solbrig

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines the methods used by the Ministerium für Staatssicherheit (MfS), more commonly known as the Stasi, or East German secret police, for extraction of information from citizens of the German Democratic Republic for the purpose of espionage and covert operations inside East Germany, as it pertains to the deliberate brainwashing of East German citizens. As one of the most efficient intelligence agencies to ever exist, the Stasi’s main purpose was to monitor the population, gather intelligence, and collect or turn informants. They used brainwashing techniques to control the people of the GDR, keeping the populace paralyzed with fear …

Libertarianism, Bas Van Der Vossen

Philosophy Faculty Books and Book Chapters

Libertarianism is a theory in political philosophy that strongly values individual freedom and is skeptical about the justified scope of government in our lives. Libertarians see individuals as sovereign, as people who have a right to control their bodies and work, who are free to decide how to interact with willing others, and who cannot be forced to do things against their will without very strong justification.

For some, the argument in support of this view hinges on the principle of self-ownership. To them, individual rights are morally foundational, the basic building blocks of their theory. Many others, however, take …

The 'Nayirah' Effect: The Role Of Target States’ Human Rights Violations And Victims’ Emotive Images In War Support, Joseph Braun, Kiyoung Chang

Biennial Conference: The Social Practice of Human Rights

When a target state violates human rights, how does the identity of the victims and the presence of emotive imagery affect the level of public support for interventionist war? How does the perceived race and gender of victims affect this relationship? We employ a survey experiment to study whether and when information about a target state’s human rights violations affects public attitudes toward the use of force. Specifically, we manipulate a fictional victim’s race (light-skinned vs. dark-skinned) and gender (male vs. female), and explore how these variations affect support for interventionist war. In our experiment, we find that war support …

The Power And Pathologies Of Language: How Human Rights Messaging Can Also Affect Support For Violent Non-State Actors, Alexandra Haines, Michele Leiby, Matthew Krain

Biennial Conference: The Social Practice of Human Rights

Are framing strategies that are effective at encouraging pro-social behavior such as participation in human rights campaigns also effective at mobilizing support for “anti-social” and violent causes? Using an experimental research design, we seek to understand under what conditions individuals will express support for retributive violent action.

We hypothesize that a personal story of victimization, wherein the humanity and vulnerability of the victim and the intensity of the violence suffered are described in vivid detail, will be necessary and sufficient to cause the audience to express support for the victim’s subsequent participation in organized, retaliatory violence. We expect that personal …

Faith-Based Resistance, Human Rights, And Emancipatory Practices, Curtis Kline

Biennial Conference: The Social Practice of Human Rights

Progressive political theologies can expand and deepen both the strength and the conceptualization of human rights advocacy. However, not all political theologies are an effort to defend human dignity; neither are all understandings and practices of human rights. The validation of progressive political theologies as well as the validation of human rights conceptualizations comes from their capacity to concretely change the lived reality of poor and oppressed peoples of the world.

As with political theologies, there is a constant struggle over the control of how to conceptualize what constitutes a human rights issue. While many communities of faith find liberating …

Lessons Unlearned: Army Transformation And Low-Intensity Conflict, Pat Proctor

The US Army War College Quarterly: Parameters

This article examines the US Army’s experiences and lessons learned during military interventions in Bosnia and Herzegovina and Kosovo. It explores why these lessons did not affect the Army transformation, directed in the late-1990s by James M. Dubik, John W. Hendrix, John N. Abrams, and Eric K. Shinseki.

Debating Humanitarian Intervention: Should We Try To Save Strangers?, Fernando R. Tesón, Bas Van Der Vossen

Philosophy Faculty Books and Book Chapters

"When violence breaks out in a country, foreign governments face a difficult dilemma: should they intervene on behalf of the victims, or should they remain spectators? Each choice offers its own perils, and philosophers Fernando R. Tesón and Bas van der Vossen offer contrasting views of intervention by employing modern analytic philosophy, particularly just war theory. Tesón and van der Vossen refer to and weigh the consequences of past, present, and future interventions in Syria, Somalia, Rwanda, Bosnia, Iraq, Lybia, Egypt, and more."

The Importance Of Transportation, Broadband, And Intellectual Infrastructure For Entrepreneurship, James E. Prieger, Heng Lu, Habi Zhang

School of Public Policy Working Papers

This empirical study uses a unique panel dataset to investigate the link between regional entrepreneurship and infrastructure. This topic is vital for understanding the factors that facilitate entrepreneurship, yet it receives scant scholarly attention. It is of particular value to policy makers because entrepreneurship is crucial for economic growth. We therefore examine how broadband infrastructure (internet connectivity), intellectual infrastructure (human capital), and transportation infrastructure (roads, bridges, and intermodal facilities) affect the establishment of new businesses in the United States. We primarily focus on broadband infrastructure, which is the least explored of these factors in the literature. We find that all …