Political Science Commons^™

Health Aid In Africa: Placement, Service Utilization, And Benefit, Carrie Dolan

Theses and Dissertations

While the health sector has attracted significant foreign aid, evidence on the effectiveness of this support is mixed. This dissertation examines the allocation of health aid within the context of placement, service utilization, and benefit. The first paper examined the sub-national allocation of Chinese development aid projects across Africa. I determined how political preferencing of Chinese aid specifically, allocating aid to the birth region of the current political leader differs across sectors such as health, education, and transportation. I find some evidence that aid, more broadly defined, is subject to political preferencing in recipient countries, which could potentially limit its …

Baseball And The U.S.-Cuban Diplomatic Relationship: Why Did Baseball Serve As An Ineffective Diplomatic Tool For The United States And Cuba?, Abbygale Sarah Martinen

Honors Theses and Capstones

No abstract provided.

The Great Divide: The Political Implications Of Southern Regional Identification In Kentucky, Joel Turner

Commonwealth Review of Political Science

Kentucky occupies a unique place on the American political landscape. The Commonwealth has never been fully embraced as Southern by most observers, but at the same time it is not necessarily a Northern state. As the intersection of North and South in the United States, Kentucky presentes a unique opportunity to study the impact of regional identity on public opinion. Utilizing data from a 2014 survey of a random sample of Kentucky residents, we are able to demonstrate that Southern regional identification is fairly high in Kentucky, and that this identification has a significant influence on opinion regard politicians and …

A Case Study On American Social Media Privacy: Facebook And Government Oversight, Sarah Fink

Commonwealth Review of Political Science

As we move further into the age of technology, there is no reason to expect the use of social media and the internet will decline. The government's inability to create a uniform technological landscape across offices and departments around the nation along with the shifting view of privacy in America has created openings for non-governmental companies, like Facebook, to collect the information freely given by citizens. This makes the privacy policies of social media companies civil rights and liberties issues for individual citizens as well as a national security concern. This paper argues that until the public, and policy makers, …

The Paradox Of The Progressive Presidency: How The Democratization Of The Presidential Selection System Has Degraded The Office, Jeffrey T. Syck

Commonwealth Review of Political Science

Every U.S. president leaves a lasting mark on the institution, few more significantly than the small number who have impacted the way presidents are selected. This paper examines how the presidential selection system has evolved over time and the negative effects this evolution has produced. The Framers created a complicated selection process hoping the Electoral College would attract and elevate "men of first character." Although the system failed to operate as its architects intended as a result of the early and inevitable development of political parties, Martin Van Buren helped to adapt the selection system to the new environment in …

Collaborative Governance And Anticorruption In Postwar Monrovia, Tewroh-Wehtoe Sungbeh

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Public sector corruption is a major problem in Monrovia. Successive national

governments have instituted anticorruption measures in the 1970s and 2000s, and anticorruption agencies were established to eradicate corruption. However, there appears to be a significant lack of resources and political willpower to prosecute corrupt government officials. A failure to curb political corruption indicates that current policies are not working. Government works when there is a perception that it delivers results and that the needs and safety of the citizenry are protected. The purpose of this qualitative phenomenology study was to gain a deeper understanding of public sector corruption at …

Exploring Strategies Of American Small Business Owners In United Arab Emirates, Shelley D. Mosley

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

The International Trade Administration reported that 70% of worldwide revenue for American businesses comes from consumers in emergent markets such as India, the Middle East, and Northern Africa. However, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) is a country that many American small business owners are not operating in and capitalizing on the financial opportunities that are available. The purpose of this multiple case study was to explore strategies American small business owners use in successful international entrepreneurship for increased revenue and operational longevity. The study population consisted of 5 American small business entrepreneurs who had succeeded operating in the UAE for …

Dorothy Day's Distributism And Her Vision For Catholic Politics, William Patric Schulz

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation is a study of Dorothy Day’s political ideas, her creation of the Catholic Worker movement, and her relationship with Distributism, the official socio-economic teaching of the Catholic Church. In order to fully understand Day’s views, it is necessary to review her intellectual development, and the foundational ideas and documents of Distributism. As is noted in the introduction, precious little scholarship has been done on Distributism, and few outside of Catholic academic circles are even aware of its existence. Beyond that, Day, herself, is not especially well-known, as existing scholarship tends to focus on either her early, Socialist activities …

Partisanship, Ideology, And The Sorting Of The American Mass Public, Nicholas T. Davis

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation is a story about the divisions that characterize the mass public. Specifically, it explores how Americans think about politics, and, in particular, how citizens connect their attitudes, beliefs, and, vitally, ideological identity to their partisan affiliation—a phenomenon known as sorting. Practically, this project proceeds in two parts. In Part 1, I investigate the nature of partisan sorting in the mass public. Chapter 2 reviews the extant scholarly literature regarding partisanship and ideology, or the raw materials of sorting. Drawing on this research, I operationalize two types of sorting in Chapter 3 and compare how different measurement protocols affect …

Neoliberal Governance And ‘Responsibilization’ Of Agents: Reassessing The Mechanisms Of Responsibility-Shift In Neoliberal Discursive Environments, Jarkko Pyysiäinen, Darren R. Halpin, Andrew M. Guilfoyle Dr

Research outputs 2014 to 2021

The ‘governmentality’ approach has been influential in analyzing how neoliberal governance transfers responsibility to individual agents through an ‘appeal of freedom’ mechanism. This productive conceptualization of power has generated a solid body of research on the workings of (neo)liberal governance and contemporary Western capitalism. However, such research has largely ignored a complementary mechanism characteristic of situations where ‘appeal of freedom’ lets actors down, that is, dynamics of ‘threat to personal control’. Studies focusing and elaborating on this aspect, and ‘control constructs’ more generally, have remained mostly within the disciplinary boundaries of (social) psychology. In this paper we aim to bring …

Holding School Leaders Accountable: Estimating The Effects Of Retrospective Evaluations Of Kentucky School District Superintendents, Martin Battle, James C. Clinger

Commonwealth Review of Political Science

This research represents an attempt to apply the theory of retrospective voting to the issue of turnover among Kentucky school district superintendents. The analysis tests the hypothesis that poor school district performance should increase superintendent performance. The hypothesis is tested using accountability data compiled by the Kentucky Department of Education. The analysis reveals somewhat mixed support for the hypothesis. Different performance measures have different kinds of impact. Schools with students scoring high on math and writing were more likely to experience superintendent turnover than other school districts were. The index scores for science and social studies had a negative, statistically …

Women In District Assemblies In Ghana: Gender Construction, Resistance And Empowerment, Janet Serwah Boateng

Theses: Doctorates and Masters

Calls for more female participation in politics have featured strongly in developed and developing countries since 1975 when the UN made women’s issues a priority. Ghanaian society’s underlying patriarchal structure has made some progress towards gender equity in politics. Whilst there has been a significant improvement in levels of female participation and representation rates, targets have not been reached and the least amount of progress has taken place in local government. The thesis draws upon theories of gender and development (GAD) that emphasises on gender relations in development and proposed the empowerment of women as central to gender equality. Also, …

The Phantom Segregationist: Kentucky's 1996 Desegregation Amendment And The Limits Of Direct Democracy, D. Stephen Voss

Commonwealth Review of Political Science

Decades after Kentucky abolished de jure racial distinctions in education, the state legislature asked voters to strip segregationist language from their venerable constitution. Political elites were stunned when a third of the state's voters, and majorities in five countries, rejected the change. However, the prime culprit for Kentucky's 1996 constitutional amendment vote was not white racism, because African-American voters endorsed segregation at rates similar to whites. Rather, the Kentucky vote offers a particularly clear and particularly dramatic example of the limits of ballot-box policy making. It should alert scholars that highly publicized referenda in high-profile states - the focus of …

Resilient Communists: How Fidel Castro Survived The Soviet Collapse And Cuba's Uncertain Road To Democracy, Max J. Prowant

Commonwealth Review of Political Science

It is easy to conclude that Fidel Castro was nothing more than a pawn of the Soviet Union, and Cuba, a communist satellite throughout the Cold War. The island received an annual subsidy of four billion dollars from the U.S.S.R. and hosted Soviet troops; its economic dependence was so extensive that when the Soviet Union collapsed more than 25 years ago, Cuba experienced a GDP contraction of between 30 and 40 percent. Despite this, Cuba's communist regime survived, even as many formerly communist countries in Eastern Europe embraced new democratic constitutions. This project seeks to explain how--in spite of the …

Consequences Of Sexual Violence During Civil Conflicts For Post-Colonial Democratization, Kathleen Clark

Commonwealth Review of Political Science

Countries face large obstacles in the post-civil conflict period, including democratization. The nature of the warfare during the civil conflict may have important implications for the prospects for future democratization. Specifically, the experience of sexual violence during civil conflicts may hinder democratization. I argue that countries that experience prevalent sexual violence during civil conflicts have lower chances for post-conflict democratization than those without. This occurs through the psychological consequences of sexual violence on victims and communities. Sexual violence negatively impacts victims, but it can also have more widespread negative consequences for society. Communities of the victims may collectively respond to …

Institutions Of Environmental Democracy And Environmental Justice: The Case Of Chile, Sherrie Baver Ph.D.

Publications and Research

As a comparativist, searching for a framework for “comparative environmental politics” (as opposed to policy), I began studying the three “Principle 10 (P10)” environmental access rights (also known as the pillars of environmental democracy)i, first promulgated in the 1992 Rio Declaration. Since the late 1990s, these P10 rights, “access to environmental information,” “access to participation,” and, “access to justice in environmental matters,” are globally seen as promoting transparent, inclusive, and accountable governance. Their greatest adoption success to date is the European Union’s (EU) 1998 Aarhus Convention, which the EU saw as a way to deepen democracy and sustainability, especially in …

Emancipatory Rural Politics: Confronting Authoritarian Populism, Ian Scooner, Marc Edelman, Saturnino M. Borras Jr., Ruth Hall, Wendy Wolford, Ben White

Publications and Research

A new political moment is underway. Although there are significant differences in how this is constituted in different places, one manifestation of the new moment is the rise of distinct forms of authoritarian populism. In this opening paper of the JPS Forum series on ‘Authoritarian Populism and the Rural World’, we explore the relationship between these new forms of politics and rural areas around the world. We ask how rural transformations have contributed to deepening regressive national politics, and how rural areas shape and are shaped by these politics. We propose a global agenda for research, debate and action, which …

Assessing Electoral Process Challenges Through Poll Workers' Performance In Sub-Saharan Africa-Togo, Kokouvi Momo Amegnran

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Contenders disputing electoral results in Sub-Saharan African countries often attribute defects in presidential electoral processes to the implementation of rules and procedures. Yet despite the considerable decision-making authority poll workers are entrusted with and the significance of the tasks performed by therm, scholars have not closely investigated poll workers'contributions to elections' management in Sub-Saharan Africa. Using principal-agent theory as the foundation, the purpose of this case study was to examine the challenges encountered in the organization of the presidential election in Togo, held on April 25, 2015, with a particular emphasis on poll workers' job performance. Research questions focused on …

“What Sort Of Communists Are You?” The Struggle Between Nationalism And Ideology In Poland Between 1944 And 1956, Jan Ryszard Kozdra

Theses: Doctorates and Masters

The period between 1944 and 1956, also known as the “Stalinist period”, is one of the most controversial and turbulent in Polish history. The Polish communist party launched the project of restructuring Polish society, whose historically wellestablished national identity seemed incompatible with the communist project. Firstly, the communists effected a demographic change that resulted in a near monoethnic state. Simultaneously, they introduced a centrally planned economy, transformed state symbolism, initiated a national education system, attempted to reshape popular attitudes to religion, and launched a massive propaganda campaign to reinforce and popularize their objectives.

This study seeks to investigate the communists’ …

Does Isis Satisfy The Criteria Of An Apocalyptic Islamic Cult? An Evidence-Based Historical Qualitative Meta-Analysis, Diane Maye Zorri, Bruce Barron

Publications

The U.S. has been battling ISIS and its forerunners for over two decades; however, ISIS continues to endure and expand. While described as a death cult by some political leaders and other key stakeholders, this assertion received little consideration in the scholarly literature. The purpose of this study was to ascertain whether ISIS satisfied the criteria of an apocalyptic Islamic cult through the application of a historical qualitative research design and meta-analysis. Based on the results, the null hypothesis that ISIS does not satisfy the criteria of an apocalyptic Islamic cult was rejected, and the hypothesis that ISIS satisfies the …