Texas leads the nation in the number of executions carried out since capital punishment was reinstated in 1976. Race was a key factor in the 1972 moratorium, and though the Supreme Court allowed for its return under new statutes, race continues to plague the capital punishment legal system. In this study, I examine the influence of race on case clearances in capital and non-capital homicides in Texas, using the extra-legal and non-discretionary theories from existing clearance literature. I find that race influences the probability of cases being cleared in non-capital cases but has no statistically significant effect in clearing capital cases.

This study has attempted to explain the dramatic challenges to the existing party system that occurred in Canada and the United States in the early 1990s. The emergence of new political movements with substantial power at the ballot box has transformed both party systems. The rise of United We Stand America in the United States, and the Reform Party in Canada prompts scholars to ask what forces engender such movements. This study demonstrates that models of economic voting and key models of party system change are both instrumental for understanding the rise of new political movements.

This comparative study assesses the state of democracy and examines the process of democratization in the Arab World between the years 1980-1993. It addresses shortcomings in the mainstream democracy literature that excluded the Arab World from the global democratic revolution on political cultural grounds. To fulfil the objectives of this study, I employ both the qualitative and quantitative research approaches to test a number of hypothesized relationships. I hypothesize that transition to democracy is negatively associated with economic development, militarism, U.S. foreign policy, the political economy of oil, and dependency. I contend that emerging civil society institutions so far have had no significant effect on democratization in the Arab World. Finally, I hypothesize that the level of democracy in the Arab World is influenced greatly by the issue of civil rights. In order to investigate the hypothesized relationships, the following data sets have been used: Gastil's Freedom House Data set, "Repression and Freedom in the 1980s" data set, and Vanhanen's 1990 data set. The findings of this study support the aforementioned hypothesized relationships. I find that Arab countries, in general have made modest progress toward democracy, making the Arab World part of the global revolution.

This study develops and empirically tests a model of the determinants of federal spending for crime-fighting policies. An inter-disciplinary approach to building the model is utilized that merges ideas from budgeting, policy analysis and criminology. Four factors hypothesized to impact federal spending for the administration of justice are operationalized as eight variables and tested using ordinary least squares regression analysis on time series data. The factors hypothesized to impact federal spending in this area are economic constraints imposed on government spending, the ideological makeup of Congress and the president, the actual crime rate, and the public's attitude toward crime. Five of the eight variables demonstrated statistical significance at the.10 level or better.

The main purposes of this study are to elaborate on the concept of ethnic military mobilization and to identify the factors that contribute to its occurrence.

This study examines the agenda setting and decision-making behavior of the United States Supreme Court from 1888 to 1989.

Women have been part of modern revolutions since the American Revolution against Great Britain. Most descriptions and analyses of revolution relegate women to a supporting role, or make no mention of women's involvement at all. This work differs from prior efforts in that it will explore one possible explanation for the successes of three revolutions based upon the levels of women's support for those revolutions. An analysis of the three cases (Ireland, Russia, and Nicaragua) suggests a series of hypotheses about women's participation in revolution and its importance to revolutions' success.

This dissertation addresses a question fundamental to democratic government: Under what conditions are bureaucrats responsive to citizens and elected officials?

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 …

The International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) has been both contentious and successful. By examining the ICTY from a Levinasian ethical standpoint, we might be able to understand how the court uses language to enforce ethical and moral standards upon post-war societies. Using linguistic methods of analysis combined with traditional data about the ICTY, I empirically examine the court using ordinary least squares (OLS) in order to show the impact that language has upon the court's decision making process. I hypothesize that the court is an ethical entity, and therefore we should not see any evidence of bias against Serbs and that language will provide a robust view of the court as an ethical mechanism.

This study has as its central focus an investigation into the existence and nature of the apprenticeship norm in the United States Senate. Over its history, the Senate has been frequently portrayed as a body guided by rather restrictive, informal rules of behavior for its members. The apprenticeship norm has been identified by some as the most important of these rules; contributing to the Senate's centralized and conservative policy orientation. More recently, however, it has been argued that the Senate has become a more decentralized and fragmented body within which the apprenticeship norm is no longer important. The present study offers for the first time an empirical test of the existence and nature of the apprenticeship norm for selected sessions of the Senate for the time period 1940-1976. The frequency of performance of various types of floor activity by members of the Senate were correlated and regressed with years of service in the Senate as well as with other background characteristics of Senators to test both for the existence of the apprenticeship norm as well as to identify its relevance relative to other potential explanations of Senate floor behavior. Several definitions of apprenticeship were advanced and tested.

Many studies have been completed on factors affecting judicial decisions. Studies have focused on civil rights cases, economic cases, criminal cases, sexual discrimination and obscenity cases, but no work has specifically looked at religious liberty cases. This work examines the factors affecting United States Courts of Appeals judges' decision-making in religious liberty cases. I hypothesize that gender, race, religious background, prior judicial experience, circuit, region and litigant status will all influence the way judges vote in religious liberty cases. The explanatory power of this study is relatively low, but the results indicate that judges follow the law when making decisions in religious liberty cases.

The purpose of this study is to identify King Hussein's belief system, or operational code as it is called by George and Holsti, and to test its influence on foreign policymaking in Jordan. The research has three related goals: to identify King Hussein's operational code through analysis of his writings and speeches during the period between 1967 and 1980, to review four major foreign policy decisions in an attempt to understand the factors affecting the decision making process in Jordan, and to analyze these decisions to ascertain the impact of the king's personality and beliefs on them in order to discover whether the operational code construct can be used to predict or explain Jordan's foreign policy behavior.

This study examined the effects and expectations of external economic dependence on foreign investment policy outputs with particular reference to the Nigerian experience between 1954 and 1980. Three basic kinds of external economic dependence were studied: foreign investment, the penetration of the Nigerian economy by foreign capital through the agency of the multinational corporations (MNCs); foreign trade, a measure of the Nigerian economy's participation in the world market; and foreign aid (loans and grants), a measure of Nigeria's reliance on financial assistance from governments and international financial inst itutions. For the most part, the level of Nigeria's economic dependence was very high. However, economic dependency is not translated into changes in foreign investment policy in favor of the foreign investors in Nigeria as is predicted by the dependency paradigm. The Nigerian case casts doubt on the dependency paradigm as a framework for fully explaining factors that may determine foreign direct investment policy changes that occur in a less developed Third World country. In other words, the dependency paradigm has a limited explanatory power; there is a factor independent of the economic factor operating out of the control of global capitalism (the center of the center in alliance with the center …

This study examines the political and administrative role of planning and budgeting in Saudi Arabia. It demonstrates how they have contributed to lessening the political crises of distribution, participation, and penetration that confront developing countries. The study also investigates how these two bureaucratic processes have helped adapt rapid changes in a manner acceptable to the cultural milieu. In addition, the study explores the politics of planning and budgeting and identifies the roles various actors play. The evolution and institutionalization of planning and budgeting are examined through printed materials and interviews with planners and budgeters in the Ministries of Planning and Finance. In addition, a number of the Ulama, businessmen, former government bureaucrats, officials of key ministries and agencies, and media were interviewed in an attempt to understand how they interact in the politics of planning and budgeting.

The purpose for undertaking this case study of the Shi'a in Lebanon is threefold. First, as a hypothesis-generating case study, its objective is to formulate relevant hypotheses about religious resurgence and religious terrorism. This study achieves this objective by formulating 14 general and nine special hypotheses, and testing and confirming the latter. Second, the purpose of this study is also to explore the trajectory of the Lebanese Shi'a's sectarian mobilization. This exploration permits the conceptualization of geocultural immobility and its effect upon a religious minority. It deduces that the Lebanese Shiga's geo-cultural immobility is directly related to their active religious resurgence. The third purpose is to study the changes in the objectives and tactics of a religious minority, that of the Muslim Shi'a in Lebanon. This research is able, via its primary and secondary data, to show a relationship between the Lebanese Shiga's religious resurgence and their use of religious terrorism. This study introduces the concept of geo-cultural immobility. A minority's geo-cultural immobility is identified as an imposed low geographic mobility within a nation with low cultural pluralism. It establishes the Lebanese Shi'a's geo-cultural immobility, to which it attributes their religious resurgence. This Lebanese Shi'a religious resurgence is proven in …

This study tests hypothesized causal relationships between predictor variables and voter turnout. Attention is focused on the psychological and attitudinal dimensions of turnout. Using data from the 1980 National Election Study of the Center for Political Studies, recursive and nonrecursive causal models are constructed to test the effects of election specific factors, social psychological factors, and rational choice based factors on voter turnout. Self-reported turnout is used as the primary dependent variable in all models. Validity tests support use, despite acknowledged limitations.

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 study deals with the National Defense College of Thailand and its alumni, who are senior military and civil service officers of the government of Thailand. The study examines the proposition that the political attitudes of military and civil service officers in developing countries are likely to be similar and negative. The second proposition examined in this study is that the attitudes of government officials toward the people are likely to be similar and negative. The study also attempts to examine the official attitudes on the basis of cluster. Each of the three clusters consists of seven classes of the National Defense College. It is argued that the political contexts of each cluster were different and that these differences may result in the different attitudes of officials in each cluster. The study found that military and civil service officers in Thailand hold similar attitudes toward politics and that the attitudes are predominantly negative. Official attitudes were similarly negative. Attitudes toward politics vary, depending upon the time in which the officials were in government service. Officers who worked within the environment of the military government are the most distrustful of politics while officials who worked under a more relaxed, more democratic …

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 …

A dearth of pre-existing research in the field prompted this thesis on whether traditional econometric analyses of war deterrent alliances are applicable to modern alliances for counter terror purposes. Apparent foundational and contextual differences between the two types of alliances and the costs and benefits member nations derive from each lead the author to theorize that factors contributing to the formation of each alliance are fundamentally similar. Multiple types of statistical models are used to measure variables from the Correlates of War and Polity datasets combined with custom variables in a new dataset concerning major transnational terrorist attacks and the resultant alliances in testing the effect of traditionally contributing formation factors on alliances against terrorism. The results indicate that some contributing factors are similar, extant analysis tools have utility and that further investigation is justified.

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 …

Peacekeeping is a means by which international or regional organizations control conflict situations that are likely to endanger international peace and security. Most scholars have viewed the contributions of peacekeeping forces only in terms of failures, and they have not investigated fully the political-military circumstances" under which conflict control measures succeed. This dissertation is an attempt to bridge this gap and to show how the OAU compares with the UN in carrying out peacekeeping missions. The method of research was the case study method in which primary and secondary data was used to describe the situations in which six peacekeeping forces operated. The content of resolutions, official reports and secondary data were examined for non-trivial evidences of impediments to implementation of mandates. Findings from the research indicate that peacekeeping missions not properly backed by political efforts at settlement of disputes, cooperation of the superpowers, and financial and logistic support were ineffective and usually unsuccessful. Lack of consensus and pursuit of national interests have resulted in ambiguous or unrealistic mandates and have reduced the effectiveness of peacekeeping operations. Moreover, parties to a conflict were interested only in solutions that favored their interests and were often skeptical about the role and credibility …

In this study of A Midsummer Night's Dream, The Merchant of Venice, and Measure for Measure I argue that the surface plots of these comedies point us to a philosophic understanding seldom discussed in either contemporary public discourse or in Shakespearean scholarship. The comedies usually involve questions arising from the conflict between the enforcement of law (whether just or not) and the private longings (whether noble or base) of citizens whose yearnings for happiness tend to be sub- or even supra-political. No regime, it appears, is able to respond to the whole variety of circumstances that it may be called upon to judge. Even the best written laws meet with occasional exceptions and these ulterior instances must be judged by something other than a legal code. When these extra-legal instances do arise, political communities become aware of their reliance on a kind of political judgment that is usually unnoticed in the day-to-day affairs of public life. Further, it is evident that the characters who are able to exercise this political judgment, are the very characters whose presence averts a potentially tragic situation and makes a comedy possible. By presenting examples of how moral and political problems are dealt with by …