This thesis examines how drug policy and enforcement affect drug manufacturers. The approach taken is a comparative institutional analysis of cannabis and methamphetamine production. I focus on the effects of prohibition, privacy, and clandestine markets on producer behavior for these two drugs and the unintended consequences that result. I demonstrate that cannabis and methamphetamine producers both face substantial transaction costs and that producers alter their behavior to manage these transaction costs. I conclude that cannabis producers can adopt indoor, small-scale operations to hide their activity, which are capable of yielding continuous, high-potency crops. Methamphetamine producers also adopt small-scale, decentralized strategies, but commodity control increases their exposure and leads to greater overall transaction costs during the manufacturing process.

The purpose of this thesis is to examine the impact of International Monetary Fund (IMF) loans since the adoption of the governance mandate on overall government capability. The study will explore whether the presence of IMF loans in developing countries enhances state capacity. Administrative capacity is of particular importance because it is a requisite for the integration of state and society in the national political arena and encourages joint involvement of government and citizenry in overall representation of societal interests. The model designed to test the two primary hypotheses is comprised of a simultaneous system of equations. Despite criticisms of IMF conditionality arrangements, it appears that these programs are largely effective at increasing administrative capacity, an important factor in achieving economic growth and national ownership of IMF development programs.

Research concerning ‘basic needs' in the Human Rights literature has consistently found a positive and significant relationship between measures of wealth and basic needs provision. This study utilizes a relatively new measure of economic freedom to test hypotheses regarding general macro-economic policy decisions and basic needs outcomes. A pooled dataset of 138 countries over four years is examined using OLS panel regression controlling for both' year' and ‘country,' in a standard basic needs model. Consistent and systematic differences between economic freedom effects in OECD nations and non-OECD nations are revealed. The Economic Freedom Index has both theoretical and empirical advantages over previous measures of wealth and economic freedom, allowing human rights scholars to test specific economic policy decisions as they affect basic needs outcomes.

There has been much scholarly attention directed at the Iraq war's role in determining voter choice. I attempt to extend that research into voter turnout to determine what role the Iraq war played in 2006 voter turnout. This paper argues that turnout at the state level could be explained by the number of US deaths each state had sustained from the Iraq occupation at the time of the election. A theory of voter activation based on information availability is put forth to explain the relationship between national events and voter turnout wherein national events like the Iraq war will raise the amount of information voters have at their disposal, which will increase the likelihood of their voting on election day. Regression analysis comparing the turnout rates of the 50 states to their casualties in Iraq revealed no relationship between the two factors, indicating that something else is responsible for the high turnout of the midterm.

This is a study of Korean presidential elections. Its purpose is to determine how Koreans voted in the 1992 and 1997 presidential elections and to examine the factors that contributed to winners. In addition, the study compares the two elections by developing three models: candidate choice, voter turnout and political interest models. Using post election data from the Korean Social Science Data Center a multinomial logit regression was used in the candidate choice model. It shows that Korean voters selected their candidates mainly in terms of interest in the elections, age, orientation toward the governing or opposition parties, the regional effects of the Southwest (Honam) and the Southeast (Youngnam), and the evaluation of merged parties in 1992 or a united candidacy of parties in 1997. A Monte Carlo simulation was also employed to test the traditional assumption of candidate strength. It indicates that Kim Young-Sam had a more cohesive support from his older supporters in the 1992 election while Kim Dae-Jung had a greater cohesive support from his older supporters in the 1997 election. Both Kim Young-Sam's and Kim Dae-Jung's loyalists were crucial to the winning candidates in the 1992 and 1997 elections respectively. How did people vote? To address …

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.

This study attempts to explain why some countries experience multiple civil wars while others who have experienced a civil war build long-term stability from the rubble of conflict. The explanation of why civil war recurs focuses on the collective action problem, centering on the rebel leaders' ability to solve the Rebel's Dilemma. I further argue that once the Rebel's Dilemma has been solved once it is much easier for rebel leaders to solve it again and again. The empirical finds suggest that the political situation resulting from the first war plays a strong role in the solutions to the collective action problem and thus the long-term stability following a civil war. Namely, the level of democracy, partition and third party enforcement of the peace all affect the ability of the rebel leaders to solve the collective action problem and the likelihood of another civil war.

This study develops a model of collaboration choice among city governments. The theoretical model suggests that collaboration is a function of transaction costs that vary with different institutional arrangements utilized in cities, as well as the degree of competition between cities. This study argues that cities facing high transaction costs and high competition are less likely to participate in collaboration and to participate less deeply. Underlying these environmental factors are resource factors that create incentives for cities to collaborate for efficiency gains, which affect both the decision to collaboration and the depth of collaboration. Eleven hypotheses are presented to explain why cities choose to participate in collaboration in the first stage of the analysis and how deeply they collaborate in the second stage. Utilizing a Heckman model of this two-stage process, I find broad support for a number of variables that measure each of these theoretical constructs.

The purpose of this thesis is to establish what specific forces influence whether or not a democratic setback within one nation will diffuse to peripheral states. Past studies devoted to this topic have largely suggested that diffusion essentially functions like a contagious disease, where the likelihood of "infection" is primarily based upon the level of interaction between states. This thesis however proposes that the interaction of the signal generated from a democratic state's collapse and the receptiveness of neighboring nations to this signal ultimately determines when and where diffusion will occur. In order to test the validity of this thesis' claims, the level of democracy within the neighboring states of all failed democratic governments spanning the years 1842-2002 are examined during the first years following such system breakdowns within a large-N quantitative research design. Ultimately this study leads to the conclusion that the interaction of signals and receptivity play a major role in the diffusion of democratic setbacks.

The hypothesis that language discrimination contributes to protest and/or rebellion is tested. Constitutional language policy regarding administrative/judicial, educational and other matters is measured on three separate scales developed for this study; the status of each minority group's language under its country's policy is measured by another set of scales. Protest and rebellion variables are taken from Gurr's Minorities at Risk study. Findings include an indication that group language status contributes positively to protest and rebellion until a language attains moderate recognition by the government, at which point status develops a negative relationship with protest and rebellion, and an indication that countries with wider internal variations in their treatment of language groups experience higher levels of protest and rebellion on the part of minority groups.

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 …

Partisanship is found in voter and Congressional behavior. Members of the federal judiciary should behave similarly. I utilize cases involving the Republican and Democratic parties from 1966 to 1997 and examine the voting behavior of federal Courts of Appeal judges. I utilize both cross tabulations and a Logit regression model to determine the likelihood appellate judges will vote for their own party and against the opposition.

Numerous authoritarian states use institutions usually associated with democratic regimes like a constitution, elections, and a legislature. This seems to be counterintuitive. Authoritarian regimes should rather shrink away from democratic institutions. Elections can be won by the opposition and legislatures can make decisions against the interests of the ruler. So, why do autocratic regimes install institutions which limit their power and threaten their survival in office? Assuming actors behave rationally, one should expect authoritarian rulers only to introduce procedures working in their favor. This study looks at the effect of institutions in authoritarian regimes. The findings suggest that legislatures significantly lower the chances of regime breakdown in the long run. However, particularly in election years, authoritarian regimes are facing a higher likelihood of failure.

The global emphasis on human rights has generated a surge of studies into what causes regimes to abuse the basic rights of their citizens. Causes of abuse can be internal or external in nature, based on economics, politics or cultures. This study examines the effects of foreign aid and foreign direct investment on three types of human rights: personal integrity, civil and political, and subsistence. I perform ordinary least squares regression analyses with panel-corrected standard errors on a pooled cross-sectional time series design incorporating 127 countries from 1976 to 1996. While my results are not significant, it is important to observe that there is a tendency toward negative relationships for the majority of the analyses.

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 …

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 …

Countries with rich natural resource endowments suffer from lower economic growth and various other ills. This work tests whether the resource curse also extends to the quality of regulation and the level of corruption. A theoretical framework is developed that informs the specification of interactive random effects models. A cross-national panel data set is used to estimate these models. Due to multicollinearity, only an effect of metals and ores exports on corruption can be discerned. Marginal effects computations show that whether nature corrupts or not crucially depends on a country's institutions. A broad tax base and high levels of education appear to serve as inoculations for countries against the side-effects of mineral wealth.

Existing literature on foreign aid does not indicate what type of political regime is best to achieve human development outcomes or use aid funds more efficiently. I contend that political leaders of different regime types have personal incentives that motivate them to utilize foreign aid to reflect their interests in providing more or less basic social services for their citizens. Using a data set of 126 aid-recipient countries between the years of 1990 and 2007, I employ fixed effects estimation to test the model. The overall results of this research indicate that foreign aid and democratic institutionalization have a positive effect on total enrollment in primary education, while political regime types show little difference from one another in providing public health and education for their citizens.

In the last thirty years, there has been a significant increase in the globalization process, or as other refer to it, the internationalization, free trade, or liberalization. This trend was reflected in the increasing number of newly formed international organization (economic and security) as well as in the increased membership in the already existing ones. The evidence of this trend has been particularly visible since the end of the Cold War, when the race of the Eastern European countries to enter international organizations has been as competitive as ever. Nonetheless, a number of countries, upon careful evaluation and consideration of membership, has opted out of the opportunity to enter such international agreements. The question that this paper addresses is how do countries decided whether to enter or not international organizations? In other words, what elements, processes, and motives lie behind the decision of countries to commit to a new membership? Most of the studies that have addressed this topic have done so from an international perspective as they addressed the politics between countries, as well as the costs and benefits in terms of power, sovereignty, and national income once in the organizations. This paper, on the other hand, approaches the …

This study examines the factors that have contributed to the success of some Central and Eastern European countries to improve their health care sector in the post communist period, while leaving others to its demise. While most literature has been focused on the political and economic transition of Eastern Europe, very little research has been done about the welfare aspects of the transition process, especially the health care sector. While the focus on political consequences and main macroeconomic reforms has shed light on many important processes, the lack of research of health care issues has lead to consequences on our ability to understand its impact on the future of the new democracies and their sustainability. This model looks at the impact of international (World Bank) and domestic institutions, corruption and public support and how they affect the ability of some countries to improve and reform their health care sector in the post-transition period.

Post-force congressional rally effects are presented as a new incentive behind presidential decisions to use diversionary behavior. Using all key roll call votes in the House and Senate where the president has taken a position for the years 1948 to 1993, presidents are found to receive sharp decreases in both presidential support and success in Congress shortly after employing aggressive policies abroad. Evidence does suggest that presidents are able to capitalize on higher levels of congressional support for their policy preferences on votes pertaining to foreign or defense matters after uses of force abroad. But, despite these findings, diversionary behavior is found to hinder rather than facilitate troubled presidents' abilities to influence congressional voting behavior.

Mexico's cultural norms have been the subject of repeated inquiries because democratic and authoritarian patterns appear concomitantly. However, few have focused on the potential demographic and contextual sources of these divergent results. This study attempts to clarify the sources of Mexico's political culture, and then determine the extent to which these factors affect political participation. Statistical analysis of a LAPOP dataset from 2006 makes limited progress to this end. The sources of Mexican political culture remain somewhat a mystery, although some intriguing results were found. Most notably, demographic traits appear to have little influence on political culture variables and political participation rates in Mexico. In fact, political culture norms and political participation appears consistent across Mexico's infamous social and economic lines.

The focus of this research was to ascertain the indirect effects upon activism of intervening variables and recognized exogenous influences upon activism. In addition, this research also focused upon the differences and similarities of a recruited activist model and spontaneous activist model. Regression and path analysis were used to measure the direct and indirect effects of the exogenous and intervening variables. This research found that when the intervening variables, political interest, political awareness, exposure to media, altruism, and self-interest were introduced to both the recruited and spontaneous models, the direct effects of the variables were enhanced.

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.