Political Science Commons^™

Opening Up To Oers: Electronic Original Sourcebook Vs. Traditional Textbook In The Introduction To American Government Course, Shawna M. Brandle

Publications and Research

Traditional American Government textbooks are expensive and often unpopular with students. New technologies and Open Educational Resources (OERs) open up the potential for change, but questions of quality are ever present: can OERs really help students learn better, or are they just cheaper? I developed an OER based on original sources and compared student learning outcomes with the OER section to those in a free digital textbook section. While the OER I created did not work as well as I had hoped, I nonetheless developed a redesign of my course and my approach to teaching, which is the true benefit …

The Politics Of Human Well-Being, Nisha Bellinger

Political Science Faculty Publications and Presentations

Why are there large disparities in the quality of life people lead? What are the factors that account for the general well-being of mankind? How do we improve human lives? These questions are substantively important as they are policy relevant.

Review, The New Era Of Secret Law, Patrice Mcdermott

Secrecy and Society

In a recent Brennan Center report, The New Era of Secret Law, Elizabeth (Liza) Goitein articulates, examines, and evaluates the claims for and objections to secret law. Under this banner, the report includes any law that is withheld from the public, regardless of whether it may be shared among agencies or with certain members or committees of Congress.” Goitein’s underlying goal is to propose procedural and substantive reforms. Secret Law is a deeply-researched and highly valuable policy brief with an aim of making specific policy recommendations. And readable to boot.

Murky Projects And Uneven Information Policies: A Case Study Of The Psychological Strategy Board And Cia, Susan Maret

Secrecy and Society

This case study discusses the Truman and Eisenhower administration's (1951-1953) short-lived Psychological Strategy Board (PSB). Through the lens of declassified documents, the article recounts the history and activities of the Board, including its relationship with the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and clandestine projects that involve human experimentation. Primary documents of the period suggest that institutional secrecy, coupled with inconsistent information policies, largely shielded CIA's BLUEBIRD, ARTICHOKE, and MKULTRA from the Board. This subject has not been previously reported in the research literature, and supplements existing historical understanding of the PSB's mission under the broad umbrella of psychological warfare.

Trivialized Content, Elevated From: Aesthetics Of Secrecy In Turkish Politics In The 2000s, Doruk Tatar

Secrecy and Society

This essay will first provide a brief history of the Islamist party's coming to power by means of its effective use of a populist imagery. The paper will then focus on the emergence of a new regime of secrecy in Turkish politics by looking at two high-profile legal cases, Ergenekon and the “Cosmic Room,” in which one can observe the blueprints of a struggle between different factions for taking over the state. During the investigations, secret documents about the wrongdoings of the secular establishment were leaked to and widely covered by the media. Sober debates on the contents of such …

The Platform Strategy: Concession To Win Elections, Jon R. Antonsen

Scholarly Horizons: University of Minnesota, Morris Undergraduate Journal

This paper sought to provide one answer to the question: when do parties incorporate centrist ideas in a platform? This question came about from the 1988 election: the Democrats controlled the Congress, but they wanted to regain footing in the presidency. Their previous election performance was fraught with inter-partisan conflict: the liberal House of Humphrey had fallen victim to the Vietnam War and Ronald Reagan had effectively poisoned the word “liberal.” Centrist Democrats fought with liberal Democrats over trivial issues, and the 1984 convention ended in fiery disunity. After being out of power for a long time, to reconcile their …

Champions Of Democracy: Libraries' Essential Contributions To A Civil Society, Elizabeth Ramsey

Library Faculty Publications and Presentations

Librarians are rolling up their sleeves, taking off their glasses, and pulling no punches in their efforts to ensure that Americans understand Democratic processes and the essential nature of community participation in those processes. By making the most of their positions as community centers and trusted information providers, libraries are bringing people together to learn about and discuss political issues face to face, empowering them to work collectively for their civil rights and the rights of others.

How To Find God (On Youtube), James K.A. Smith

University Faculty Publications and Creative Works

Review of The Rise of Network Christianity by Brad Christerson and Richard Flory

Evaluating The Evaluators, Jakob Puckett

The University Honors Program

Various news shows use different methods to report the same stories. In an attempt to understand this better, I watched and compared three news shows airing simultaneously on various networks, as well as viewing the front page of the New York Times, all from the same day – October 5, 2017. ABC World News Tonight, Fox News Special Report with Bret Baier, and PBS NewsHour were the shows under scrutiny, and while each show covered a large amount of the same material, they allotted varying amounts of time to certain subjects. Interestingly, while three of them largely focused on the …

The Energy Covenant: Energy Dominance And The Rhetoric Of The Aggrieved, Jen Schneider, Jennifer Peeples

Public Policy and Administration Faculty Publications and Presentations

The Trump Administration has adopted “energy dominance” as its guiding ideology for energy policy, marking a notable shift from decades of “energy security” rhetoric. This paper analyzes how Secretary of Interior Ryan Zinke, one of the administration’s key spokespeople for energy dominance, uses “energy covenant renewal” to frame the importance of energy dominance for the conservative base. Covenant renewal is a modified form of the jeremiad; Zinke uses it to unite conservative identities around energy politics and policies. Energy dominance thus invites those who feel aggrieved under Obama administration regulatory policy and the multicultural identity politics of the left to …

Engaging Democracy: The Trouble With Trump, Jeff Vanderwerff

Northwestern Review

In its original version, this brief essay was delivered as a talk on the Northwestern College campus. The author reflects on Christian evangelical engagement in politics in “The Age of Trump”—as a believer, a political scientist, and a former candidate for state legislative office. Love, he argues—God’s love for us, and our love for God—is the key. As God’s love for each and all was made manifest in Christ on the cross, evangelicals should not lose sight of such love in engaging in public debate and policy-making. Insofar as uncritical evangelical support for Trump is the case, that is politics …

Assessing Judicial Empowerment, Thomas Keck

Political Science - All Scholarship

Drawing on an ongoing international data collection effort, this paper examines the free expression jurisprudence of the Supreme Court of Canada and the European Court of Human Rights in an effort to assess the political beneficiaries of judicial empowerment. Free expression is a universally recognized fundamental right, and it is a right that is regularly invoked in court by a rich diversity of political actors. As such, free speech law provides an illuminating window onto how constitutional courts respond to similar claims from differently situated claimants. This paper compares the response by two influential constitutional courts to free expression claims …

The “Quebec Values” Debate Of 2013: Minority Vs. Collective Rights, Rhoda E. Howard-Hassmann

Political Science Faculty Publications

This paper investigates the debate in the province of Quebec, Canada in 2013 over a Charter of Quebec Values introduced by the separatist ruling party, the Parti Quebecois. It relies in particular on government documents, debates in Quebec’s National Assembly, and editorials in the French press. It relates the Charter to the preceding Bouchard-Taylor Commission Report in 2008 on accommodation by public bodies of particular religious requests. The debates concerned the right to manifest one’s religion, the rights of (particularly Muslim) women, and the rights of the collectivity as opposed to the minority. Part of the debate was about Quebec’s …

Lighting The Beacon: Presidential Discourse, American Exceptionalism, And Public Diplomacy In Global Contexts, Jason A. Gilmore, Charles Rowling

Languages, Philosophy, and Communication Studies Faculty Publications

The idea of American exceptionalism has shaped American politics and captivated audiences for centuries. This study examines the global contexts in which U.S. presidents have invoked the idea of American exceptionalism when addressing foreign audiences since the end of World War II. Our results reveal: (a) differences in how U.S. presidents invoke American exceptionalism when speaking to a global audience (e.g., the United Nations) versus more localized, foreign audiences within individual states; (b) significant variation regarding which countries are more likely to be targets of American exceptionalism in U.S. presidential discourse; and (c) the profound impact that the end of …

Roli I Organizatave Ndërqeveritare Në Lidhje Me Shtetin Dhe Sistemin Ndërkombëtar, Samire Sadiku

Theses and Dissertations

Sot një një rol të jashtëzakonshëm në sistemin ndërkombëtar përveç shteteve luajnë edhe disa aktorë tjerë siç janë organizatat ndërkombëtare në përgjithësi, por me theks të veçantë organizatat ndërqeveritare.

Ky punim ka si qëllim shqyrtimin e rolit që kanë luajtur dhe kontributit që kanë dhënë organizatat ndërqeveritare në sistemin ndërkombëtar, për shtetet anëtare me fokus të veçantë mbi rëndësinë që ato kanë për vendin tonë, përkatësisht mbi ndikimin e tyre në orientimin e zhvillimit të tij.

Fillimisht është pjesa teorike përshkruese e përkufizimit rreth asaj se çka janë organizatat ndërqeveritare dhe ndarjet e tyre sipas fushave ku veprojnë dhe, më …

Civil Liberties And The Dual Legacy Of The Founding, John W. Compton

Political Science Faculty Books and Book Chapters

"This chapter will argue that the framers’ dual legacy in the area of civil liberties has cast a long historical shadow. Since the early republic, Americans have invoked constitutional civil liberties provisions to challenge customary forms of authority. Yet establishing the abstract legitimacy of one's claim – that it comports with a particular conception of religious liberty or the freedom of speech, for example – has typically been insufficient to prevail in the courts."

An Evaluation Of The 2016 Election Polls In The United States, Courtney Kennedy, Mark Blumenthal, Scott Clement, Joshua D. Clinton, Claire Durand, Charles Franklin, Kyley Mcgeeney, Lee Miringoff, Kristen M. Olson, Douglas Rivers, Lydia Saad, G. Evans Witt, Christopher Wlezien

Department of Sociology: Faculty Publications

The 2016 presidential election was a jarring event for polling in the United States. Preelection polls fueled high-profile predictions that Hillary Clinton’s likelihood of winning the presidency was about 90 percent, with estimates ranging from 71 to over 99 percent. When Donald Trump was declared the winner of the presidency, there was a widespread perception that the polls failed. But did the polls fail? And if so, why? Those are among the central questions addressed by an American Association for Public Opinion Research (AAPOR) ad hoc committee. This paper presents the committee’s analysis of the performance of preelection polls in …

The State Of Hate In America: A Study Of Hate Group Permeation In The United States By State, Michelle Rogers

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This paper will analyze some of the statistics regarding hate groups. The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) has studied hate groups in the United States in depth for decades, developing tools and providing some useful statistics. They have developed a hate map that describes the quantity of hate groups in America individually by state and helps specifically identify trends in year over year comparisons. However, the hate map does not offer per capita breakdowns for a state or reasons for hate group permeation unique to the demographics and culture of each state. Factors and elements in conjunction with the hate …

Economics, Politics And The Environment, Ron Mandelbaum

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Classical economists were interested in macroeconomic issues, i.e. how the economy worked as a whole and how it grew over time. This is opposed to neo-classical economists, which focus on decision-making processes of individuals and individual firms. This thesis sets out to examine how that change occurred and what it means for the way that economics studies the environment. In order to provide a partial answer to this question, this paper describes the different outlooks between classical and neo-classical economists regarding value. It also examines and contrasts the economic approaches of Marx and Mill, whose way of thinking about social …

The Politics Of United States Army Doctrine, David C. Rasmussen

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The US Army made four significant shifts in the content of its capstone operations doctrine, Field Manual (FM) 100-5 / FM 3-0, along a spectrum of war since the end of WWII: 1) in 1954 it made a shift from a doctrine focused almost exclusively on mid-intensity conventional warfare to a doctrine that added significant emphasis to high-intensity nuclear warfare; 2) in 1962 it made an even greater shift in the opposite direction toward low-intensity unconventional warfare doctrine; 3) in 1976 it shifted back to an almost exclusive focus on mid-intensity conventional warfare content; 4) and this is where Army …