The purpose of this study is to explore the administrative setting of the Office for Civil Rights, treating especially the functional requisites of agencies: namely, the development of a viable role within its set and the internal necessity of developing among its functionaries a degree of cohesion and sense of common purpose. This case study is designed, moreover, to challenge the naturalistic assumptions of the pluralist model of administrative theory. Chapter I develops the theme of "social engineering agencies" as a distinctively new genre of public agency in the American political setting and adumbrates the theoretical challenges which these organizations present to the conventional pluralist paradigm.

This study tested theoretical propositions concerning agenda-setting by minority political groups in the United States to see if they had the scope to be applicable to American Indian tribes or if there were alternative explanations for how this group places its agenda items on the formal agenda and resolves them. Indian tribes were chosen as the case study because they are of significantly different legal and political status than other minority groups upon which much of the previous research has been done. The study showed that many of the theoretical propositions regarding agenda-setting by minority groups were explanatory for agenda-setting by Indian tribes. The analyses seemed to demonstrate that Indian tribes use a closed policy subsystem to place tribal agenda items on the formal agenda. The analyses demonstrated that most tribal agenda items resolved by Congress involve no major policy changes but rather incremental changes in existing policies. The analyses also demonstrated that most federal court decisions involving Indian tribes have no broad impact or significance to all Indian tribes. The analyses showed that both Congress and the federal courts significantly influence the tribal agenda but the relationship between the courts and Congress in agenda-setting in this area of policy …

Early voting studies before television predominance determined that mass media had a "limited effect" on American voting behavior. This work reassesses the limited-effects notion. The thesis is that the mass media do have significant impact on voting decisions. A trend study, the work utilizes the Center for Political Studies national presidential election surveys 1952-1976, and multiple regression analysis to examine the impact of media, social, and political variables on the dependent variable, time of voting decision.

The purpose of this thesis is to examine the voting trends in Mobile, Alabama, which have developed since 1948; particular emphasis is placed upon the role of the Negro vote in Mobile politics before and after the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

This study seeks to advance the understanding of appellate promotion in the senior judiciary of Great Britain . It describes the population and attributes of judges who served in the British High Courts, Court of Appeal, and Appellate Committee of the House of Lords (i.e., Law Lords) from 1850 to 1990. It specifically builds upon the work of C. Neal Tate and tests his model of appellate recruitment on a larger and augmented database. The study determines that family status, previously asserted as having a large effect on recruitment to the appellate courts, is not as important as previously believed. It concludes that merit effects, professional norms, and institutional constraints offer equally satisfactory or better explanations of appellate recruitment patterns.

Why is black partisan identification so one-sidedly Democratic forty years past the Civil Rights movement? A black/non-black political dichotomy manifests itself through one-sided African-American partisanship. Racial consciousness and Republican hostility is the basis of the black/non-black political dichotomy, which manifests through African-American partisanship. Racial consciousness forced blacks to take a unique and somewhat jaundiced approach to politics and Republican hostility to black inclusion in the political process in the 1960s followed by antagonism toward public policy contribute to overwhelming black Democratic partisanship. Results shown in this dissertation demonstrate that variables representing economic issues, socioeconomic status and religiosity fail to explain partisan identification to the extent that Hostility-Consciousness explains party identification.

Since its creation in 1875, the Canadian Supreme Court has undergone several institutional transitions. These transitions have changed the role of the Court toward a more explicit and influential policy making role in the country. Despite this increasingly significant role, very limited attention has been given to the Court. With this perspective in mind, this study presents several analyses on the decision making process of the Canadian Supreme Court. At the institutional level, the study found that within the stable workload, the cases composition has shifted away from private law to public law cases. This shift is more significant when one concentrates on appeals involving constitutional and rights cases. The study found that this changing pattern of the Court's decision making was a result of the institutional changes shaping the Supreme Court. Statistically, the abolition of rights to appeal in civil cases in 1975 was found to be the most important source of the workload change.

Previous scholarship has long concentrated on the behaviors of belligerents during regime-dissident interactions. While much of the progress in the literature concentrated on the micro-level processes of this relationship, little research has focused on providing a theoretical reasoning on why belligerents choose to act in a particular manner. This project attempts to open the black box of decision making for regimes and dissidents during regime-dissident interactions in order to provide a theoretical justification for the behaviors of the belligerents involved. Moreover, this project argues that there is a relationship between the lower level events of political violence and civil war as the events at earlier stages of the conflict influence the possible outcome of civil conflict. Regimes and dissidents alike are strategic actors who conduct themselves in a manner to ensure their survival while concurrently attempting to succeed at achieving their respective goals. Although all authoritarian regimes are similar in their differences to democracies, there are significant differences between the regimes, which influence the decision making of the regime leader to ensure the survival of the political institution. In addition to influencing the decision calculus of the regimes, the behavior of the regimes impacts the probability of civil war at …

In a civil war, conflict management practitioners are concerned with bringing the conflict to an end and providing security for civilians. Similarly, human rights advocacy groups are also concerned with minimizing civilian harm. Given the similar intentions of these actors in civil war states, this dissertation explores under what circumstances conflict management practitioners and human rights advocacy groups collaborate. First, I compare to what extent mediation and peacekeeping cases differ with regards to showing signs of interaction; second, I compare how the level of interaction changes depending on whether peacekeeping missions are deployed by the United Nations or regional intergovernmental organizations. I find that human rights groups are more likely to interact with peacekeeping missions, especially when the missions are deployed by the United Nations. Moreover, I analyze to what extent the interaction between human rights groups and peacekeeping operations impacts how human rights groups carry out their advocacy efforts. The findings reveal that the way human rights groups use their advocacy efforts depend on whether the third parties providing peacekeeping operations respond to their requests.

This study assumes that political terrorism results from conscious decision-making by groups opposing a governing system, policy or process. The kinds of terrorist activity employed depend upon such factors as the philosophy, goals, objectives, and needs of the terrorist group. This presents a comparative analysis of three types of terrorists in southwest Asia: Palestinians, Marxist-Leninists, and Muslims. The first section summarizes and compares the three groups' motivational causes, philosophies, histories and sources of inspiration. The second section compares their behavior from four perspectives: trends and patterns, level of violence, tactical preferences, and lethality. The third section identifies and categorizes socioeconomic, political and military variables associated with tactic selection and acts of terrorism.

This research examines the political implications of the Millennial generation on American politics by exploring the interaction of generational cohort with race, social issues, and civil liberties. Relying on the 2016 Collaborative Multiracial Post-Election Survey and the 2018 General Social Survey, I examine (1) Millennial attitudes toward race and ethnicity by looking specifically at racial linked fate, (2) how Millennials interact with race and evangelical Christianity and how this interaction influences social policy preferences, and (3) how generational factors influence Millennial attitudes toward American civil liberties. I find that there are measurable effects of generational cohorts on the predicted value of Linked Fate for racial minority groups in the United States. My results suggest that Millennials are significantly more likely to have higher levels of linked fate for Latino and Asian Americans. However, I do not find sufficient evidence to suggest that African Americans' level of linked fate is affected either positively or negatively for Millennials. Second, for the investigation on social policy, the results suggest that those who sit at the intersection of the three groups- the Latino-Millennial evangelicals- hold policy preferences that contrast from those who are solely either Latino, Millennial, or evangelical. Latino-Millennial evangelicals are significantly more …

The major purpose of this dissertation is to explore the determinants of interest cost for state bonds. Various kinds of variables pertaining to issue characteristics, market characteristics, economic conditions, and political variables were statistically tested to assess their impact on the interest cost of state bonds. This research examines the variables found to be significant for local bonds, as well as some factors unique to state bonds, e.g., the types state agencies issuing debt and the effect of different state income tax policies.

In this project a theory of adaptive differential insurgency growth by the mechanism of repression driven contagion is put forth to explain variation in the membership and spatial expansion of insurgencies from 1981 to 1999. As an alternative to the dominant structural approaches in the civil war literature, Part 1 of the study proposes an interactive model of insurgency growth based on Most and Starr's opportunity and willingness framework. The findings suggest that state capacity, via its impact on state repressive behavior, plays an important gatekeeping function in selecting which minor insurgencies can grow into civil war, but contributes little to insurgency growth directly. In Part 2 of the study, I directly examine variation in insurgency membership and geographical expansion as a function of repression driven contagion. I find that repression increases the overall magnitude of insurgency activity within states, while at the same time reducing the density of insurgency activity in any one place. Despite an abundance of low intensity armed struggles against a highly diverse group of regimes around the world, I find an extremely strong and robust regularity: where repression is low - insurgencies don't grow.

This dissertation analyzes several topics related to political life in ethnically divided societies. In chapter 2, I study the relationship between ethnic social conflict, such as protests, riots, and armed inter-ethnic violence, and bloc partisan identification. I find that protests have no effect on bloc support for political parties, riots increase bloc partisan identification, and that armed violence reduces this phenomenon. In chapter 3, I analyze the factors that influence the targeting of ethnic groups by ethnic parties in social conflict. I find some empirical evidence that conditions favorable to vote pooling across ethnic lines reduce group targeting by ethnic parties. In chapter 4, I analyze the effects of ethnic demography on ethnic party behavior. Through a qualitative analysis of party behavior in local elections in Macedonia, I find that ethnic parties change their strategies in response to changes in ethnic demography. I find that co-ethnic parties are less likely to challenge each other for power under conditions of split demography. In fact, under conditions of split demography, I find that co-ethnic parties have political incentives to unite behind a single party because intra-group competition jeopardizes the group's hold on power.

This dissertation surveys electoral change in Great Britain during the period between 1979 and 1996. It analyzes the long-term factors and the short-term dynamics underlying the evolution of three aspects of the electorate: party identification, voting intentions and party support in inter-election periods. Drawing on cross-sectional and panel data from the British Election Studies and public opinion polls, I investigate the impacts of long-term socialization and short-term perceptions on voters' political decisions. I hypothesize that, over the last four elections, perceptual factors such as evaluations of party leaders and issues, particularly economic concerns, emerged as the major forces that account for the volatility in electoral behavior in Britain. Accordingly, this study is divided into three sections: Part I probes into the evolution in party identification across age cohorts and social classes as illustrated in trends in partisanship. Part II focuses on changes in voting intentions as affected by perceptual factors and party identification. Part III investigates the public's support for governing parties by analyzing the dynamics of aggregate party support during inter-election periods.

This study focuses on clarifying the relationships among decentralization, privatization, and economic development in developing countries.

According to Alexis de Tocqueville, humanity is entering a new age of political and social equality, a new epoch in which the human race has no historical example or experience. As a result, he holds humanity's future will be largely determined by the political and moral choices made in this transitional time. For Tocqueville, the new egalitarian era is a forgone conclusion, but for him, the pressing question is whether humanity will choose a future in which it enchains itself to new forms of tyranny, or, whether the human race can establish the political and moral institutions designed to assure human freedom and dignity. In Tocqueville's view, liberty or slavery are the two choices modern men and women have in front of them, and it is the intent of this dissertation to explore Tocqueville's warning in regard to the latter choice. Tocqueville warns us that modern democratic peoples must beware of the moral and political effects of a new type of political philosophy, a political theory he terms democratic pantheism. Democratic pantheism is a philosophic doctrine that treats egalitarianism as a "religion" in which all social and political striving is directed toward realizing a providentially ordained strict equality of conditions. …

There is some controversy which centers around the question of whether a particular government policy or program may be Judged successful. This dissertation takes the position, with due respect to the difficulties of such a task, that policy success can be evaluated and that it is important that such evaluations be made. Traditionally, health care in the United States has been delivered by the solo medical practitioner on a fee-for-service basis. A relatively new concept in the health care delivery system combines group practice with prepayment for services. These types of practices were designated as Health Maintenance Organizations in 1970 by the Nixon Administration.The major question of this dissertation is whether or not the HMO policy of the federal government has been a success. Along with this question the primary focus of this dissertation is upon the development and evolution of the federal HMO program.

This dissertation is a cross-national investigation of the relationship between cultural heterogeneity and regimes' respect for basic human rights. The quantitative human rights literature has not yet addressed the question of whether high levels of cultural diversity are beneficial or harmful. My research addresses this gap. I address the debate between those who argue that diversity is negatively related to basic human rights protection and those who argue it is likely to improve respect for these rights. Ultimately, I propose that regimes in diverse countries will be less likely to provide an adequate level of subsistence (otherwise known as basic human needs) and security rights (also known as integrity of the person rights) to their citizens than regimes in more homogeneous countries. Using a data set of 106 non-OECD countries for the years 1983 and 1993, I employ bivariate, linear multivariate regression, and causal modeling techniques to test whether higher levels of ethnolinguistic and religious diversity are associated with less regime respect for subsistence and security rights. The analysis reveals that higher levels of cultural diversity do appear to lead to lower respect for subsistence rights. However, counter to the hypothesized relationship, high levels of diversity appear to be compatible …

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 dissertation considers how district-level demographic factors favorable to women congressional candidates facilitate substantive representation of women's interests. I contribute to the existing research by linking the literature on women candidate emergence and electoral success with that on descriptive and substantive representation. Beyond simply asking whether and how women in Congress represent women's interests, I argue that the demographic characteristics of districts in which women are more likely to run and win public office also put women representing those districts in Congress in better position to cultivate feminist homestyles and substantively represent women's interests through legislative behavior. I examine whether women representatives in women-friendly districts are more likely than men representing similar districts, or women in less women-friendly districts, to sponsor legislation in women's issue areas, sponsors women's issue earmarks, and defect from party in women's issue roll-call votes. Overall, I find general support for my theory that district-level factors contribute to observed gender differences in legislative behavior in women's issue areas.

This research addressed two main issues that have become evident in studies of interstate cooperation. The first issue has to do with the relationship between cooperation and conflict. Can they be represented on a single, uni-dimensional continuum, or are they better represented by two theoretically and empirically separable dimensions? Granger causality tests were able to clarify the nature of cooperative events. The second issue is related to factors that might facilitate or discourage cooperation with other countries as a foreign policy tool. Factors used to explain cooperation and conflict include domestic variables, which have not been fully accounted for in previous empirical analyses. It is hypothesized that economic variables, such as inflation rates, GDP, and manufacturing production indices affect the likelihood of cooperative event occurrences. The effect of political dynamics, such as electoral cycles, support rates and national capability status, can also affect the possibility of cooperative foreign policies. The domestic factors in panel data was tested with Feasible Generalized Least Square (FGLS) in order to take care of heteroscedasticity and autocorrelations in residuals. The individual case analysis used linear time series analysis.

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 …

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 …