Political Science Commons^™

Timeless Strategy Meets New Medium: Going Negative On Congressional Campaign Web Sites, 2002-2006, James N. Druckman, Martin J. Kifer, Michael Parkin

Faculty & Staff Scholarship

In a few short years, the World Wide Web has become a standard part of candidates' campaign tool kits. Virtually all candidates have their own sites, and voters, journalists, and activists visit the sites with increasing frequency. In this article, we study what candidates do on these sites in terms of the information they present by exploring one of the most enduring and widely debated campaign strategies: going negative. Comparing data from over 700 congressional candidate web sites, over three election cycles (2002, 2004, and 2006), with television advertising data, we show that candidates go negative with similar likelihoods across …

Athens And Byzantium: Platonic Political Philosophy In Religious Empire, Jeremiah Heath Russell

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

It is traditionally understood that there is a gap, which spans well over one thousand years, between Plato’s own political philosophy and its successor in medieval Islamic philosophy. A most likely bridge between Plato and these later philosophers is Neoplatonism. However, scholars argue that this philosophic school abandoned its predecessor’s emphasis on political philosophy. This dissertation challenges the traditional interpretation by reconstructing a political philosophy based on a Neoplatonic commentary on Plato’s Gorgias. The first two chapters place this commentary within its historical context, as well as its place within the larger Neoplatonic pedagogy. The remainder of the dissertation reconstructs …

Pliny's Defense Of Empire, Thomas Raymond Laehn

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Despite perennial interest in Pliny the Elder’s Natural History as a record of the prodigious, the quotidian, and the useful in Rome in the first century AD, for over half of a millennium Pliny has been considered little more than an inept compiler of facts and marvels intellectually incapable of formulating a cogent argument supported through the selective marshalling of his materials. It is my contention that Pliny’s encyclopedic text is in fact a first-rate work of political philosophy constituting an apology for Roman imperial expansion grounded in a sophisticated conception of man as the only being capable of passing …

Ethnic Composition And The Dynamics Of Civil War: A Subnational Analysis Of India And Pakistan, Caroline Lee Payne

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Scholars, policymakers, and the media present a conflicting picture of the relationship between ethnicity and civil conflict. In order to clear up the confusion and better establish this relationship, I argue that it is necessary to: (1) distinguish between different types of ethnic composition; (2) conceptualize and measure ethnic composition as not only a static phenomenon but a dynamic one in which population changes alter group security calculations and therefore their decision making; (3) consider the unique mobilization capacity of ethnic groups; and (4) examine the effect of ethnic composition at the subnational level of analysis. In doing so, this …

Experiential Learning Of U.S. Presidents In The Foreign Policy Decision-Making Context, Samuel Berwyn Robison

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation examines U.S. presidential learning—defined as a change in presidential operational code beliefs due to their experiences in office—in the foreign policy decision-making context. These beliefs are teased out from presidents’ representations of power relationships via verb usage in their speeches. A database of more than 4,000 foreign policy-related speeches obtained by the author was employed for this project, and with this data, I examine several potential dynamics of and influences on learning.

I look at trends in belief change over time, and examine the relative stability and interconnectedness of “core” versus “peripheral” beliefs. I then test the influence …

Obedience, Schooling, And Political Participation, Davin Chor, Filipe R. Campante

Research Collection School Of Economics

This paper proposes a framework for understanding the joint evolution of cultural norms and human capital investment, and how these affect patterns of political participation. We first present some empirical evidence that cultural attitudes towards obedience systematically influence an individual's propensity to engage in different political activities: obedience discourages more confrontational modes of political activity (such as public demonstrations), while raising participation in non-confrontational civic acts (such as voting). These cultural attitudes further appear to be determined in part by cultural transmission across generations. Motivated by this evidence, we develop a dynamic model in which human capital and obedience are …

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 …

The Role Of Old-Fashioned Racism: Disaggregating Symbolic Racism In The United States, Leslie Curtis Cox

LSU Master's Theses

Old-fashioned, biological, or "Jim Crow" racism is viewed by many in the political science and psychology literature to be largely a relic of the past. In the post-segregation era it has been replaced as a political force by symbolic racism, although its residual effect still operates within symbolic racism as negative racial affect. Symbolic racism is thought of as a coherent belief system that describes whites‘ attitudes not only in the United States, but in some European democracies as well. This conceptualization of symbolic racism ignores the differences in the historical legacy of racism across different regional and demographic contexts. …

The Islamists Are Not Coming, Charles Kurzman, Ijlal Naqvi

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Do Muslims automatically vote Islamic? That's the concern conjured up by strongmen from Tunis to Tashkent, and plenty of Western experts agree. They point to the political victories of Islamc parties in Egypt, Palestine, and Turkey in recent years and warn that more elections across the Islamic world could turn power over to anti-democratic fundamentalists.

Mobilizing For Human Rights: International Law In Domestic Politics [Book Review], Jiyoung Song

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Review of Mobilizing for human rights: international law in domestic politics by Beth A Simmons, Cambridge, United Kingdom, Cambridge University Press, 2009, ISBN 9780521885102 (hbk), ISBN 978-0-521-71232-3 (pbk), 451 pp. And Clifford Bob (ed.), The international struggle for new human rights, Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009, ISBN 9780812241310, 195 pp.

Arab/American Relations And Human Security, Post-9/11: A Political Narrative Inquiry, Charlotte Moats-Gallagher

Antioch University Dissertations & Theses

This study explored eighteen women's views and experiences in the arena of Arab/American relations, post-9/11. The study engaged three groups of women: Arab women in Qatar, Arab American women in the U.S., and non-Arab women in the U.S. Qualitative narrative inquiry methodology was used complemented by an innovative use of freewriting to help prepare participants for interviews. Clarke’s (2005a) situational analysis was used to open up and analyze the data. Findings surfaced around the interconnected themes of identity, racism, discrimination and Othering, the role of the media, and how these ultimately influence a collective sense of and experience of human …

Countering The Majoritarian Difficulty, Stefanie A. Lindquist, Amanda Frost

Scholarship@WashULaw

Most state court judges are elected to office, and thus must be attentive to voter preferences just like other elected officials. Critics of judicial elections fear that subjecting judges to majoritarian pressures jeopardizes the rights of disfavored groups and undermines the rule of law, and accordingly call for their abolition. The reality, however, is that judicial elections are firmly entrenched in thirty-eight states, and thus appear to be a permanent part of the legal landscape.

This article suggests that the so-called “majoritarian difficulty” posed by elected judges can be tempered by regular interactions with appointed, life-tenured federal judges, who are …