Although federal circuit and district court judges are placed within a federal hierarchy, and receive legal and judicial training that emphasizes the importance of the judicial framework and its structure, such judges are also subjected to other pressures such as the types of litigants within the courtrooms as well as their local political environment. Furthermore, such judges are apt to form their own views about politics and legal policy and are often appointed by presidents who approve of their ideological leanings. Thus, federal courts are caught between competing goals such as their willingness to maximize their preferred legal policy, and their place within the judicial hierarchy. This dissertation applies hierarchy and impact theory to assess the importance of the judicial framework and its socialization, by analyzing both the judicial opinions and votes of federal circuit and district court judges in obscenity cases during a four-decade period (1957-1998). The research presented here finds the influence of higher court precedent to correspond in part with the conception of a judicial hierarchy. An analysis of citations of Supreme Court precedent (Roth v. United States (1957) and Miller v. California (1973)) in lower court majority opinions suggests low levels of compliance: lower courts at …

It has become something of a cliché for contemporary scholars to assert that Madison turned Montesquieu on his head and thereafter give little thought to the Frenchman’s theory that republics must remain limited in territorial size. Madison did indeed present a formidable challenge to Montesquieu’s theory, but I will demonstrate in this dissertation that the authors of the Federalist Papers arrived at the extended sphere by following a theoretical pathway already cemented by the French philosopher. I will also show that Madison’s “practical sphere” ultimately concedes to Montesquieu that excessive territorial size and high levels of heterogeneity will overwhelm the citizens of a republic and enable the few to oppress the many. The importance of this dissertation is its finding that the principal mechanism devised by the Federalists for dealing with factions—the enlargement of the sphere—was crafted specifically for the purpose of moderating interests, classes, and sects within an otherwise relatively homogeneous nation. Consequently, the diverse republic that is America today may be exposed to the existential threat anticipated by Montesquieu’s theory of size—the plutocratic oppression of society by an elite class that employs the strategy of divide et impera.

This research incorporates a decision-making theory which defines the linkage between the public, the media, the president and the Congress. Specifically, I argue that the public holds widely shared domestic and international goals and responds to a number of external cues provided by the president and the media in its evaluation of presidential policies. Although most studies examine overall presidential popularity, there are important differences in the public's evaluations of the president's handling of foreign and domestic policies. Additionally, I am concerned with how the Congress responds to these specific policy evaluations, the president's public activities, and the electoral policy goals of its members when determining whether or not to support the president. Finally, I link together the theoretical assumptions, to examine the influence of varying levels of support among the Congress and the public, and the president's own personal power goals on the type, quantity, and the quality of activities the president will choose. Ultimately, the primary focus of this dissertation is on the sources and consequences of presidential support and the influence of such support on presidential decision-making.

This study attempts to explore the factors that contributed to the rise and fall of military regimes in the Sudan from independence in 1956 to 1989. Further, the study tries to identify the factors that led to the collapse of either or both civilian and military regimes. Most of the studies on military politics have focused their research on either military coups or, more recently, on military withdrawal from politics. This work tries to synthesize the study of military coups and military withdrawal from politics into a single theoretical framework.

The purpose of this dissertation is to examine and evaluate the role of the Organization of African Unity as an international organization in the solution of intra-African conflicts. For the purpose of this paper, eight conflicts from 1963 to 1980 were investigated. Utilizing these cases, the paper (a) examines four assumptions: (1) that regional actions promote settlements by isolating soluble local conflicts from more complex ones; (2) that intrastate conflicts are more difficult to resolve by regional organizations than interstate or border disputes; (3) that most of the boundary disputes in Africa are due to the arbitrary colonial boundary demarcations; and (4) that most of the causes of the ineffectiveness in its conflict resolution is as a result of poor administrative set-up, lack of resources, and failure of its commissions to operate effectively; (b) it answered the following questions: (1) Did the O.A.U. stop, help stop, or fail to stop the fighting; (2) Did the O.A.U. settle, help settle, or fail to settle the conflict; and (3) Was there super power intervention, and if so, to what effect? The methodology used is primarily case study method. Most attention is given to the way the O.A.U. handled the conflicts.

The mass media's role in informing the American public is critical to public support for government policies. The media are said to set the national agenda. This view is based on the assumption of selective coverage they give to news items. Media coverage also influences the salience the public attaches to issues. However, media agenda effect has been challenged by Lang and Lang (1983). These scholars, in their media agenda-building theory, argued that the success of media effect on national agenda is dependent on group support. In order to test this theory, time-related data on South Africa crises, media coverage"of South Africa, American public reactions, congressional, and presidential apartheid-related activities, between 1976 and 1988, were analyzed. Congressional anti-apartheid policies were the dependent and others, the independent variables. The theory made analysis of the data amenable to the additive adopted to test for the significance of the interactive variables, indicated that these variables were negatively related to congressional anti-apartheid policies. The additive model was subsequently analyzed. The time series multiple regression analysis was used in analyzing the relationships. Given autocorrelation and multicollinearity problems associated with time series analysis, the Arima (p, d, q) model was used to model the relationships. This …

This dissertation examines how parties respond and adapt their behavior to political violence. Building a theoretical argument about strategic party behavior and party capture, I address the following questions: How do parties select and recruit their candidates in regions with high levels of violence and the pervasive presence of VNAs? Do parties respond to violence by selecting certain types of candidates who are more capable of fighting these organizations? Do parties react differently at different levels of government? And finally, how do VNSAs capture political selection across at different levels of government? I argue that in regions where there is high "uncertainty," candidate selection becomes highly important for both party leaders and DTOs. Second, I argue that as violence increases and the number of DTOs also, criminal organizations, as risk-averse actors, will capture candidate selection. I posit that as violence increases, there is a greater likelihood that candidates will have criminal connections. To test my theory, I use the case of Mexico. Violence in Mexico and the presence of criminal organizations across the country has experienced a great deal of variation since the 1990s. In Chapter 2, I find that violence affects the gubernatorial candidate selection of the PRI, PAN …

How do religions and nationalism interact in secular democracies? With its history of nationalism based on religious ideologies, and the subsequent forced separation of state and religion, Japan provides a valuable case to examine how religion and nationalism interact and affect the politics of a secular state. The purpose of this dissertation is to understand and synthesize the divide within the literature regarding the idea that Shinto is fundamentally nationalist in nature. Due to Shinto's historical ties to Japanese nationalism, it is clear that religion and nationalism played a role in Japanese politics in the past. However, with Japan's transition to democracy and the constitutional provision of the separation between religion and state, religion's effect on nationalism in Japan has become blurred contemporarily. In order to explore these relationships between Shinto, nationalism, and Japanese politics, I investigate how political groups and religious organizations influence nationalist sentiment in political institutions and public opinion in Japan using the Japanese Value Orientations survey and an original dataset. I find that even though the evidence is mounting against the accuracy around the idea of State Shinto and the fundamentally nationalist nature of Shinto, the narrative persists. The existence of nationalist circles perpetuates these narratives, …

Executive orders are a significant source of presidential power although scholars disagree on the nature of that power. It has been argued that executive orders are an indication of a president's failure to persuade others to act as he desires; others contend that executive orders offer "power without persuasion." This dissertation introduces the conditional model of executive order issuance and duration in order to offer a synthesis to these competing views, and to offer a better understanding of the opportunities and constraints faced by the president when choosing to act unilaterally through executive orders. The conditional theory holds that both the issuance and duration of executive orders is a function of the president's ideological proximity to Congress and the Supreme Court, and the availability of fresh policy space.

The objective of this study is to describe and analyze the management of communal conflict in the Middle East, focusing on the Kurds. To this end, an effort is made to examine (1) the means that have been used to manage the Kurdish conflict by Middle Eastern countries; (2) the degree of success or failure of applied measures and (3) possible explanations for the first two questions.

This dissertation seeks to test the proposition that public opinion is a driving force in integration, and thus examines the effect of euroscepticism on EU integration. Utilizing an understanding of integration as the process of European states achieving similar legal, social, cultural, political and economic policy outcomes while ceding greater policy power to European institutions, the relationship between aggregate level euroscepticism in EU member states (the United Kingdom, Germany, Ireland, Greece, Spain, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Austria, and Sweden) and speed of compliance with EU policies is examined. More specifically, this dissertation examines the relationship between aggregate level euroscepticism in an EU member state, and the speed at which that state transposes EU directives. In testing this relationship a number of contextual conditions are examined, including the role of issue salience, domestic party systems, and electoral conditions. The findings of this dissertation suggest that the widely held belief that public opinion is driving European integration may be false.

This study focuses on economic development and political turmoil in post-independence Sub-Saharan Africa. There has been a resurgence of interest in the region following the end of the Cold War. In 1997 U.S. president Bill Clinton took a 12-day tour of the region. In 1999 the U.S. Congress (106th Congress) passed the Growth and Opportunity Act and the Hope for Africa Act, designed to encourage political stability and economic development in the region. Although most Sub-Saharan African countries attained independence from colonial rule in the 1960s, more than 30 years of self-government have brought little economic development and political stability to the region. This study attempts to analyze, theoretically and empirically, the relationship among economic development, social dislocation and political turmoil. Social dislocation, as defined in this study, means "urbanization," and it is used as an exogenous variable to model and test the hypothesized causal relationship between economic development and political turmoil. This study employs pooled cross-sectional time-series and seemingly unrelated regression analyses, as well as Granger-causality, to examine the hypothesized relationships and causality in 24 Sub-Saharan African countries from 1971 to 1995. The results confirm the classical economic development theory's argument that an increase in economic development leads to …

This study is an attempt to contribute to the emerging theoretical literature on state repression. A time-series model was developed to test the hypothesis that state violence in Argentina and Chile is largely a function of four internal political factors and their interactions: 1) the inertial influence of past restrictive policies on the formulation of current policies, 2) the annual incidence of political protest demonstrations, 3) the perceived effectiveness of repressive measures on unrest, 4) and the institutionalization of military rule.

Francis Bacon (1561-1626) is recognized as a founder of the modern scientific project and a forerunner of the modern era of political thought. He advocated the development of an active science that would enable human beings to control nature in order to relieve man's estate. To accomplish this, Bacon argues that we must reconstruct all arts and sciences upon a more solid foundation. In reconstructing the arts and sciences, Bacon subtly changes the meaning of foundational religious, political, and scientific notions in order to better suit his project of progress. As the inheritors of his vision, turning to Bacon helps recover foundational considerations that have been forgotten as a result of his success. This dissertation approaches Bacon's thought through an analysis of his New Atlantis, a fable that envisions the completion of his project. I also turn to his other political, scientific, and religious works as appropriate to supply what is omitted in the fable. I find that although his revision of religious, scientific, and political foundations is conducted subtly they are nevertheless revolutionary, and essential for preparing the various outlooks that characterize the modern world.

This study focuses on how perceived security environment affect U.S. unilateral, military intervention in civil conflicts, using the concept of Bayesian learning to illustrate how threat perceptions are formed, how they change, and how they affect the U.S. decision to intervene militarily in civil conflicts. I assess the validity of two primary hypotheses: (1) the U.S. is more likely to intervene in civil conflicts with connections to a threatening actor or ideology; and (2) the U.S. is more likely to intervene in civil conflicts for humanitarian motives in a less threatening security context. To test these hypotheses, I compare U.S. military intervention in three temporal contexts reflecting more threatening security contexts (Cold War and post-9/11) and less threatening security contexts (1992-2001). Results of logit regression analysis reveal that a conflict’s connection to a threatening actor or ideology is the most statistically and substantively significant determinant of U.S. military intervention in civil conflicts, both in more and less threatening security contexts. They also indicate that humanitarian motives are not a statistically significant determinant of U.S. military intervention in civil conflicts, even in a more benign security environment. These findings imply that U.S. unilateral military intervention is reserved for more direct national …

This dissertation attempts to uncover systematic patterns regarding elite management in dictatorships. To do so, it describes how dictators manage their elites and what factors determine the outcomes of their decision. Although considerable literature has examined the various structural features of dictatorships and has identified different elite management strategies to explain the persistence of dictatorships, few, if any, have empirically tested any of the theoretical propositions generated by this increasingly large body of literature. This dissertation is the first empirical attempt to explore the elite management strategies of various dictatorships, ranging from the individual case of the most extreme dictatorship (North Korea) as well as different kinds of military dictatorships (South Korea), and global patterns of autocratic regimes. To address the main research question, "what determines the choice of the dictator's elite management strategies?" this dissertation identifies three key factors - dictator, elites, and structure. The relationship between dictators and elites is basically hostile. Conflicts between actors over power acquisition often emerge in violent ways. Nevertheless, dictators do not always treat elites with repression. They sometimes make efforts to embrace and cooperate with the other elites. The variation of their strategies toward elites is determined by various conditions. The results …

I examine the passage of alternative teacher certification policies in the states between 1975 and 2000 using event history analysis and supplementing the event history analysis with an ordinary least squares regression analysis of the strength of the alternative teacher certification policies. In order to test both teachers unions political strength external to state legislatures and teachers unions political strength internal to state legislatures, I use two variables to measure teachers union political strength. One variable measures the percentage of teachers in a state who work under union-negotiated contracts. The other variable measures the percentage of legislators in a state who list their non-legislative occupation as K-12 education. Control variables include teacher shortages, per pupil spending, legislative professionalism, divided government, democratic governor, percentage of minority students, change in percentage of minority students, an electoral threat index, and a time counter. Although the event history model results were inconclusive with respect to the teachers union political strength variables, the policy strength model results reveal that states with large percentages of teachers who work under union-negotiated contracts are more likely than other states to pass weak alternative teacher certification policies. This result supports the notion that teachers unions operate in the education …

The objective of this research is to explore the influence of military service on political behaviors and attitudes. Existing studies of the military have long recognized the existence of a predominantly conservative political ideology with a resulting propensity for strong Republican Party support within the military community, but have failed to explain the likely causal mechanism for this. Drawing on multiple sources of data from the 2008 Presidential election cycle, I utilized a descriptive analysis of campaign contribution data and bivariate and multivariate analyses of data from the 2008 Military Times Survey and the 2008 American National Election Survey. Much of the data also permitted me to analyze the effect of an individual's service branch on their attitudes as well. I examined the behavior and attitudes of the military across several dimensions, including candidate support and positions on policies of particular relevance to the military, including the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. This analysis found that people who serve in the military tend to be conservative but in many ways their political attitudes are reflective of those of the general population. An individual's race, ethnicity and gender appear to have more influence than military factors, with the exception of service …

This dissertation examines the effects of micro-level inequality on political preferences and voting behavior.

This study examines the relationship between ecological sustainability and violent conflict at both the interstate and intrastate level. In particular, this study explores the effect of ecological sustainability of a society on the initiation and the occurrence of violent conflict. By developing a theory, which is named "Eco-peace," this study hypothesizes that the more ecologically sustainable the socioeconomic system of societies, the less likely the society is to initiate interstate conflict. Regarding intrastate conflict, it is hypothesized that the more ecologically sustainable the mode of development pursued by the Third World society is, the more likely that society is to experience intrastate conflicts. To test the hypotheses, this study conducts cross-national time-series analyses for 97-127 countries. Negative binomial and Poisson models are used for interstate conflict during 1960-2001, and logit and rare event logit models are used for intrastate conflict during 1960-1999. Militarized interstate dispute dataset and Uppsala Armed Conflict Program dataset are employed for interstate and intrastate conflict. For ecological sustainability, Ecological sustainability factor index and Environmental sustainability index are used. Through the analyses, this study found the supports for the theoretical argument that the ecologically unsustainable modes of development cause the initiation of interstate conflict and the incidence …

Two recent developments dominate the political economy of Sub Saharan Africa -- the adoption of economic structural adjustment reforms and the emergence of pressures for the democratization of the political process. Economic reform measures have spawned civil society, made up of anti-authoritarian, anti-statist, non-governmental organizations, that demand political liberalization. This study is an attempt to analyze, theoretically and quantitatively, the unanticipated association between these developments. Democratic institutions inherited by Sub Saharan Africa at independence were subverted either through military coups or by the abuse and misuse of the institutions by an inordinately ambitious political elite. Thus, about a decade into independence more than three quarters of the sub continent virtually came under authoritarian rule. Contemporaneously there was a decline in the economies of these countries, forcing them to borrow from international financial institutions, in order to offset their balance of payment difficulties. By the mid-1980s most of Sub Saharan Africa had also instituted structural adjustment programs. Using a pooled cross-sectional time series model of analysis, data gathered from Sub Saharan African countries are analysed to test the explanatory power of the three extant contending theories of development: classical, dependency, and neoliberal. Then, most importantly, the analysis examines the relationship between …

This dissertation examines how the state-building process relates to civil-military relations and how political influence of the military affects state's conflict behavior. By doing so, this study aims to introduce a nuanced consideration of the well-known civil-military problematique, which might be summarized as the threat the military can constitute to the polity that it is created to protect. I treat this paradox by addressing the following research questions: Why do some militaries have a qualitatively higher level of influence in politics than others? Second, how does the military's influence in politics affect a state's domestic conflict behavior? And third, how does it affect state's international conflict behavior? I develop a theory that when the military is heavily involved in the state-building process, it gains an unusual place within politics, gets itself imprinted in the DNA of the state, and gains undue political power. I name such militaries as state-builder militaries and argue that such states experience qualitatively different civil-military relations, in which the military acts as an extremely Praetorian institution. I argue that state-builder militaries would be able to insulate their political power from the democratization process that the country might experience and behave as persistent interveners in politics. I …

Post-civil war democratization is a critical element of building sustainable peace in the post-civil war states. At the same time, studies of democratic transition and survival suggest that the post-civil war environment is not hospitable to either the transition to or survival of democracy. The post-civil war environment is contentious. Former protagonists are fearful about their security and at the same time they want to protect their political and economic interests. The central argument of this study is that former rivals can agree to a transition toward democracy to the extent that a stable balance of power exists between the government and rebel groups, a balance that eliminates the sort of security dilemma that would encourage one or both to resume armed conflict. And the balance should ensure access to political power and economic resources. This study identifies factors that contribute to the establishment of such a balance of power between former protagonists and factors that affects its stability. These factors should affect the decision of former protagonists on whether or not they can achieve their political and economic interests if they agree to a transition toward democracy once civil war ends. Factors that are conducive to a transition toward …

In this study, I examined the Supreme Court's agenda from 1801 to 1993 to determine the composition and dynamics of the issues that have dominated the business of the Court. Specifically, I set out to test empirically Robert G. McCloskey's (now standard) characterization of the Supreme Court's history, which sees it as dominated by nationalism/federalism issues before the Civil War, by economic issues just after the War through the 1930s, and by civil rights and liberties since the 1930s. The question that drove my investigation was "Is McCloskey's interpretation, which appears to be based on the great cases of Supreme Court history, an accurate description of the agenda represented in the Supreme Court's total body of reported decisions?" To test McCloskey's historical theses I employed concepts adapted from Richard Pacelle's (1991) important work on the agenda of post-Roosevelt Court and used the methods of classical historical analysis and of interrupted time-series analysis. Data for my research came from existing datasets and from my own collection (I coded the manifest content of thousands of Supreme Court's decisions from 1887 back to 1801). The most important finding from my analyses is that McCloskey not withstanding, the pre-Civil War Supreme Court's agenda was …