Black Lives Matter gained elevated levels of support following the death of George Floyd at the hands of the Minneapolis Police Department. Despite temporary elevated levels of support, large segments of the populous are still reluctant and critical of the movement. This work aims to assess what role notions of respectability politics play in Black American support of Black Lives Matter. Respectability politics is consistently weaponized against members of oppressed groups including racial minorities, women, the LGBTQ community, and their related social movements. Analyzing the role of respectability politics in this context is a needed addition to the scholarly literature regarding social movement mobilization, as well as the interdisciplinary literature that has previously examined respectability in myriad forms. I hypothesize that unwillingness to support Black Lives Matter will be dependent on respectability politics as it relates to the perceived comportment and behavior police violence victims. This work included experimental analysis of the perceived respectability of a police brutality victim's "respectable" behavior being varied in the experimental treatment. I found support for my primary hypotheses that adherence to respectability politics correlated with diminished support for Black Lives Matter.

Climate disasters are on the rise, with devastating effects on communities around the globe. Scientists have provided evidence that severe weather events due to climate change will continue to increase in frequency and severity. Extreme weather events are often referred to as the great equalizers, disregarding the socioeconomic status and race of those affected during widespread destruction. However, the literature suggests that people of color are disproportionately exposed to and affected by climate change and extreme weather events. In this study, I examine how exposure to extreme weather events will influence climate change policy support amongst different races. I argue that people of color will support climate change policy more than white people. I run regression models using data from Collaborative Multiracial Post-Election Survey and National Centers for Environmental Information. I do not find support for my hypothesis, but I do find that among the Black population, climate change policy support increases as respondents get older.

Audience costs, which are defined as political costs for a leader generated when the leader fails to follow through on international commitments, are an important concept in international relations to understand the causes of war and peace. However, despite its prominence, evidence for audience costs is mixed at best. In this dissertation, by conducting a series of survey experiments in the United States, I examine a variety of causal mechanisms and observable implications of audience cost models. In Chapter 2 I explore the role of the media. The result of a survey experiment shows that the media's negative framing of a leader's backing down from a threat increases audience costs, but only after subjects are informed of the leader's justification. Chapter 3 tests the idea that the magnitude of audience costs depends on an individual's personality traits. A pilot experiment using a sample of undergraduate students does not support this expectation. Lastly, I compare the credibility of public versus private threats in Chapter 4. A conjoint survey experiment demonstrates that as many proponents of audience cost theory suggest, public threats are perceived as more credible, and the sources of their credibility are domestic audience costs.

Tabletop role-playing games (TRPGs) present a unique opportunity to study political behavior. In educational settings, role-playing games (RPGs) of all kinds have proven to be valuable educational tools, and even when played for fun, participating in role playing games has been shown to increase one's level of confidence. Knowing this, I designed an experiment to attempt to increase internal political efficacy through the use of a politically-themed TRPG. I took inspiration from the original TRPGs of the 1970s and 1980s which were used purely for entertainment purposes to create my own game in a traditional TRPG setting with current issues woven into the story of the game (also called a campaign), and utilized quantitative and qualitative methods to analyze participants' reactions to the campaign and levels of efficacy. In doing so, I seek to determine whether players will recognize real-world issues when presented in a science fiction or fantasy-themed campaign. Furthermore, given that TRPGs have the potential to shape players' understanding of how the world works and their place in it, will players be more motivated to act on said issues presented in-game, even if they do not consciously make the connection between the real-life issues presented in the science …

It is generally accepted among scholars that increases in descriptive representation result in increases in substantive representation. Although women's descriptive representation has increased in recent years, women are still underrepresented in politics. One reason for women's underrepresentation is that female candidates must overcome additional barriers in order to get elected, including on the low number of women in the pipeline to elected office, party gatekeeping, women's lower levels of political ambition, and voters' negative gender stereotypes about female candidates. Changes in women's descriptive representation and recent salience of women-friendly policies, such as abortion and paid maternity leave, has caused me to investigate whether implementation of these women-friendly policies result in an increase in women's descriptive representation. I assert that women-friendly policies reduce the barriers women must overcome to get elected to office. Specifically, the presence of more women-friendly abortion and paid maternity leave policies will result in an increase in women's descriptive representation at the state level. I find partial support for a relationship between these women-friendly policies and higher levels of women's descriptive representation. State-level abortion protections are associated with higher levels of women's descriptive representation in the state legislature.