Browsing by Department "Political Science"
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Item Open Access A Decentralized Iron Cage: Do Chinese Local Officials Comply with the Central Government?(2016) Ge, HaosenThis paper contributes to the literature in nancial aid and authoritarian institutions.
For a long time, scholars are debating whether nancial aid is able to facilitate
development and governance. Though abundant evidence is provided, the answer is
still inconclusive. On the other hand, scholars investigating China argue that the
leadership uses various institutions to ensure local ocials' compliance. In this paper,
we nd that the nancial aid does not bring a positive impact and the central
government in China does not have enough monitoring capacity to force local o-
cials to comply. We study a redevelopment program established by Chinese central
government after the 2008 Wenchuan earthquake. By adopting a geographic regression
discontinuity combining with a dierence-in-dierences design, we show that
the redevelopment program does not signicantly develop the disaster area. On the
contrary, the evidence implies that the economy in the disaster area is worse after
receiving the aid. The results imply that local ocials do not follow the central government's
regulations and misuse the aid money for other purposes. In the future, we
expect to further investigate through which mechanism do local ocials undermine
the existing institutions.
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Item Open Access A New Chinese First Lady: Is There Systematic Development?(2016) He, ZiweiExamining the full set of leaders and their spouses in both China and the U.S. during the last quarter century, this paper explores how the first lady of China has become a more important position, why she has become a more public figure, how this compares with the American first lady, and why her position in China is similar to, but different from that in the U.S., in determining whether the recent change in Chinese First Ladyship is due to systematic development or just the relationship between Mrs. Xi and her husband. After investigating the current relationship in China, furthermore, this paper also intends to discuss what we can expect with the new First Ladyship in the future.
Item Open Access A New Scramble for Africa? Chinese Aid and Africa’s Civil Conflict 2004 – 2013, An Instrumental Variable Approach(2017) Cheng, SiyaoDoes Chinese aid cause more civil conflicts in Africa? Doubts have been cast about Chinese development assistance finance. In this article, I argue that Chinese aid is likely to arouse more civil conflicts in Africa because Chinese aid’s non-conditionality on the recipient country tends to cause the moral hazard problem—— the recipient country may use the aid to strengthen its capacity to repress the dissents and rebels, while the unfair aid allocation could intensify the grievances in that country. Focusing on Chinese aid and African conflicts nexus from 2004 to 2013, I collect data from multiple databases and websites, and conduct a series of negative binomial regression analyses. In order to evade aid’s endogeneity problem, I employ Confucius Institutes’ development level as my instrumental variable to predict Chinese aid. I find that Chinese official aid money and Chinese official aid projects have explanatory powers for a recipient country’s civil conflicts. This study attempts to contribute to the scholarship by clarifying Chinese aid’s effects on African conflicts through an instrumental variable approach and by extending the time range for research from 2004 to 2013.
Item Open Access A Party in the Conference Room: Partisan Politics and the Modern Conference Committee(2009) Brady, Michael ChapmanDespite the crucial role that conference committees can play in the legislative process, relatively little is understood about the forces that influence conference outcomes and the priorities of conferees. In particular, the literature on conferences rarely considers the importance of parties, while prominent theories of party government in Congress do not engage the role of conferences in the legislative process. Given the unique features of the conference reports (i.e., they are subject only up-or-down votes, they are generally protected from further amendments, they enjoy a high probability of passage, and they provide a means to make controversial changes/additions to legislation with minimal scrutiny) conferences can be a useful means for majority conferees to further the legislative goals of their party. To the extent that one of the goals of a legislative majority is to pass legislation that better reflects the interests of its members, then partisan politics should play an active role at the conference stage and in the decisions of conferees. This dissertation serves to connect the conference and party government literatures by considering the claim that majority parties in Congress can and do use the conference process to pursue a partisan legislative agenda.
This broad claim is considered in three separate chapters that test hypotheses about the role of party politics in different aspects of the conference process. Chapter two tests the hypothesis that more partisan conference delegations are associated with changes in policy that are more consistent with the majority party's preferences. Since the Speaker of the House has sole discretion over the composition of the House's delegation it is possible that strategic selection of conferees could advantage the preferences of the majority in the House. Using original data that includes information on every conference committee from 1981-2008 the empirical analysis shows that changes in House minority support in roll call vote before and after conference are smaller for conferences where the percentage of the House majority delegation is larger. Increases in minority shifts of support within both chambers is also predicted by increased support for the report by minority conferees and more bipartisan support in the opposing chamber. Though the analysis cannot directly test whether strategic selection by the House Speaker is effective, the results do show that if a conference delegation is dominated by the majority party that conference reports are more partisan. Thus the results indicate that the decision to appoint conferees can be used to influence the partisan content of conference outcomes.
Chapter three looks at whether compromises made in conference reflect a bias towards the interests of majority members. Using newly available data from the first session of the 110th Congress, which allow for a comparison of earmarks before and after conference, the chapter provides one of the first analyses of how earmarks are changed during bicameral negotiations. Specifically, this chapter tests hypotheses on whether the earmarks of majority, well-connected, and electorally vulnerable members are advantaged in how conferees decided to change the value of pork barrel projects in conference. Lastly, since earmarking is generally considered to be free of partisan conflict, the data provides a demanding test of the existence of a majority bias. The results show evidence of majority bias for Representatives and Senators in conference earmarking during the 110th Congress.
Chapter four focuses on decision making in conference at the level of individual conferees. Using original data collected on every conferee's decision to sign a report from 1981-2008 the analysis this chapter tests the extent to which party loyalty is a factor in conferee decision making. Through descriptive, multivariate, and multilevel analyses of signature decisions the results show that majority affiliation, relative to committee and individual preferences is increasingly the dominant factor in predicting whether a conferee signs a conference report. This results also establish that contextual features of a conference, such as whether the bill was referred to multiple committees before conference, whether the bill considered was an appropriations measure, and whether the House was in a position to act first on the conference report, are all significant predictors of disagreement. Lastly, the results provide evidence that partisan conflict in support of conference reports generally increased over this period and that unified governments accentuate this conflict. These results support the overarching claim of the project in that conflict over the content of conference reports is increasingly divided along party lines to the advantage of the majority party.
Together the different analyses of the three chapters provide evidence of the claim that majority parties can and do pursue partisan goals in the contemporary conference process. Furthermore the results advance scholarly understanding of the many forces at play in conference committee bargaining and how they contribute to legislative outcomes through the complexities of the conference process.
Item Open Access Addressing the "Elephant in the Room": Rumor Rebuttal in China during the COVID-19 Outbreak(2021) Chi, YingThis study aims to explain the logic behind rumor rebuttal, a form of responsivepropaganda, in authoritarian countries during COVID-19, the story of which initially unfolded as ”rumor”. Taking China at the beginning stage of the outbreak as an example, I generate an original data of unverified and undesirable information on social media set, by combining both refuted and censored posts through keyword matching. I find that when faced with a dilemma between being responsive to the social need of accurate information to control the pandemic and securing authoritarian rule by not repeating rumor so as to increase its spreading power, the Chinese government chooses to refute rumors that have no political implications. When refuting rumors with political implications, censorship is also adopted. This study contributes to an understudying of information politics in authoritarian regimes. I analyze how an authoritarian government carries out a campaign against undesirable information using multiple techniques simultaneously, and I make a clear distinction between rumor content and political implications, which is noted in the literature but has not been used to understand authoritarian government communication behavior so far.
Item Open Access Agents with Agency: How Subnational Officials Exercise their Autonomy Under Authoritarianism(2022) Zhu, HongshenSubnational officials in strong authoritarian states are often depicted as passive agents under central command or opportunists resisting central control. This dissertation rejects the former characterization by recognizing the substantial autonomy of subnational officials and challenges the latter characterization by spotlighting the central-local alignment of interests as a common situation. The more the interests of the central government and the local level coincide, the more autonomy is granted. In particular, how subnational officials exercise their autonomy depends on whether the center supervises policy outcomes. Using rigorous quantitative methods, this dissertation examines how subnational officials exercise autonomy in unsupervised and supervised policy areas, respectively, using China’s social security system and the COVID-19 lockdown. Without top-down supervision, China’s subnational officials delivered different redistributive outcomes that reflected their perceived threat of local collective action. With top-down supervision, I show that China’s subnational officials delivered similar pandemic control outcomes but chose different lockdown measures that reflected their perceived top-down political priority. In sum, subnational officials in authoritarian states are actors with strong agency whose preferences have important implications for policy decisions. The lack of variation in policy outcomes does not necessarily mean a lack of autonomy.
Item Open Access "All of My Business": Governmental Social Media and Authoritarian Responsiveness(2017) Liu, ChuanHow would authoritarian regimes react to the emergence of social media compared to traditional media? What role(s) would media play in authoritarianism? This study focuses on China, the largest existing authoritarian regime, to answer the questions above. A formal model first indicates that entering the era of social media would be a challenge for dictators if they still regard social media as a tool for propaganda as traditional media; instead, they would choose other strategies in response to the challenge. The content analysis between Weibo (Chinese Twitter) and People's Daily in China confirms that traditional media and social media serve as different tools: The former are still tools for propaganda, whereas the latter show more responsiveness, especially about the public's daily life, even though this is none of the government's business. This results may indicate a new way by which authoritarian regimes maintain the rule making use of media.
Item Open Access Ambidextrous Regimes: Leadership Survival and Fiscal Transparency(2012) Corduneanu-Huci, CristinaHow do political leaders strategically manage fiscal policy formation to enhance their political survival? What are the implications of the fiscal mechanics of survival for theories of redistribution and democratic transition? This dissertation examines the complex relationship between political regime types and fiscal information asymmetries. I focus on budgetary policies (taxation and public spending) as major strategic tools available to the executive for co-optation and punishment of opponents. I argue that allowing some degree of contestation and transparency on the fiscal contract in electoral authoritarian regimes helps the executive identify distributive claims and co-opt the opposition. Paradoxically, in new democracies, political survival depends more on lower levels of budget transparency than existent theories would have us expect. Chapters 1 and 2 present a general formal model from which I derive the major hypotheses of the study. Second, Chapters 3, 4 and 5 use new cross-national measures of fiscal transparency and test empirically the theoretical implications. The statistical models confirm the main theoretical intuitions. Finally, Chapter 6 compares in greater detail the evolution of fiscal transparency in Morocco, Turkey and Romania between 1950 and 2000. I argue that fiscal taboos closely followed the shifting political alliance and their distributional consequences for leader's survival.
Item Open Access American Cyber Insecurity: The growing danger of cyber attacks(2014-05-23) Strunk, Daniel; Colin, Scott; Chris, Brown; Desmond, LeeThis paper aims to advise American policy makers on a correct course of action regarding the advent of cyber warfare. Cyber-attacks have become ubiquitous in the 21st century and pose a direct threat to the safety of American interests abroad and domestically. Beginning with an analysis of the history and lessons from past cyber conflicts this paper moves on to proscribe a set of actions to protect American security in the 21st century. We conclude that the current legal framework for evaluating cyber-attacks needs to be re-framed in a manner more conducive to American interests.Item Open Access An Evolutionary Theory of Democracy: Dynamic Evolutionary Models of American Party Competition with an Empirical Application to the Case of Abortion Policy from 1972-2010(2011) Montgomery, Jacob MichaelIn this dissertation, I challenge the unitary-actor assumption of contemporary theoretical models of American politics and re-conceptualize party competition as an evolutionary process. I begin by discussing the assumptions of Darwin's theory and their applicability to American party competition. Building on these assumptions, I then develop a formal evolutionary model of party competition that I test against empirical data regarding the two parties' shifting stances on abortion policy from 1972-2010.
Chapter 2 presents several single-party models that focus on explaining the conditions that must hold for parties to emerge as populations in an evolutionary sense. I show that only when candidates experience common selection pressures will population dynamics arise.
Chapter 3 extends this model to two-party competition wherein population dynamics are sustained by inter-party competition for votes and intra-party competition for activist resources. Two-party competition provides the necessary selection pressures needed to foster the emergence of coherent and distinct party populations. However, this will only be the case when: (1) party resources are valuable for winning elections, (2) the distribution of party resources are biased towards ideologically extreme candidates, and (3) parties have sufficient resources.
In Chapter 4, I extend the model to a multi-dimensional setting. Previous theoretical work on multi-dimensional party dynamics has been divided between (1) analytical models that provide stable equilibria results and (2) qualitative theories that seek to explain the dynamic process of party change. In this chapter, I present a formalized model that makes precise predictions regarding both the environmental conditions that lead to locally stable policy positions and the dynamic process that occurs as the parties drift from one stable configuration to another in response to changing environmental conditions.
Finally, in Chapter 5, I apply my model to the case of abortion policy in the United States from 1972-2010. Using data from public opinion surveys and Congressional roll-call votes, I show that party polarization on abortion was driven by changing activist preferences and that this shift occurred almost entirely as the result of incumbent replacement. These results support my ecological party model and demonstrate its ability to account for the kinds of gradual party movements -- driven by incumbent replacement -- that characterize many important historical shifts in party platforms.
Item Open Access An Internalized Spectator: Judgment in Arendt’s Kant Lectures(2022) Zhang, DingIn this paper I revisit a perplexing question about Arendt’s theory of judgment: what is the relationship between the normative function of judgment and the perspective of the vita contemplativa in her Kant Lectures. Pace the scholars who conceive the perspective of the vita contemplativa as a perspective irrelevant to guiding our activities and appraisal, I suppose that the perspective of the vita contemplativa is intrinsic to Arendt’s project to study the normative function of judgment. I will argue that Arendt’s quest for intersubjectivity is not adequate if it is not completed by a robust criterion to tell the justified right to demand universal assent from the spurious ones. Therefore, she has to find a perspective with reference to which this condition could be specified. Now the perspective of the vita contemplativa plays this role.
Item Open Access Antitrust Enforcement as a Cause of Google’s Innovation (2001-2013)(2015-06-30) Fischer-Zernin, MaximeIn this paper I consider the role of antitrust enforcement as a driver of innovation at Google. My hypothesis is that President Obama increased antitrust enforcement relative to his predecessor, George W. Bush, leading Google to increase its rate of innovation. I review literature regarding the role of antitrust as a driver of high-tech innovation, and use regression analysis to determine to what extent, if at all, Google’s innovation can be linked to antitrust enforcement. A holistic appraisal of the data finds mixed support for my hypothesis, varying by measurement method. This demonstrates the importance of measures of enforcement and innovation, as well as measurement method selection, which play a role in the outcome of the tests.Item Open Access Asian-Black Political Relationships: Policy Voting of State Legislators in California and Maryland(2014) Song, DaeunAsian-black political relations in the United States have been most frequently examined in the arena of urban/local politics and especially in terms of the degree of conflict and competition. No previous study on Asian-black relations outside of the local realm has been pursued. Given the small but growing numbers of Asian American elected officials, Asian Americans' political and social relations with other minority political elites are becoming an especially salient and relevant concern, and will likely become even more significant over time. By moving beyond the urban arena, this study attempts to systemically assess Asian-black relations in the state level politics with the central aim of analyzing their nature whether those relations take the forms of conflict or cooperation. Analyzing state legislative roll call votes from California and Maryland on selected issues from 1999 to 2014, I show that black representatives have very supportive/cohesive voting records on the most salient concerns of Asians and that Asian representatives also have supportive voting records on the most salient concerns of blacks but slightly less than the blacks'. The findings indicate that Asian and black state legislators support each to a higher degree than party affiliation might alone suggest, and also suggest the absence of conflict that is often found in urban-level politics.
Item Open Access Assessing China’s Economic and Political Power Play(2022) Wang, YuelinHow effectively has China utilized its economic power to gain political support worldwide? This paper aims to answer this question, which is vital to understanding the new dynamics of the international order, through a more appropriate quantitative analysis. To this end, it first discusses why the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) Voting Data, which is commonly used to measure a country's foreign policy alignment, is a relatively ineffective method. Thereafter, it proposes a new set of measurements that better represent China's core political intentions under its overseas economic efforts: other countries' support for China's sovereign standing and China-built new international institutions. I also argue that different types of economic interactions may influence other countries' political support for China in varying patterns. By creating novel datasets to measure other countries' alignment with China on Hong Kong, Xinjiang, and the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), I find that China has partly translated its economic power into its global political influence with different mechanisms. First, countries that receive more aid from China are more inclined to align with China's sovereign standings. Second, countries that trade more with China are more likely to show explicit political support for China-built new institutions. These findings advance our understanding of China's economic power and the complex interaction between global politics and economy.
Item Open Access Assessing Credibility: A Qualitative Analysis of Public and Private Signals in the Cuban Missile Crisis(2023) Framel, PaulCredibility has long been a subject of interest in international relations. However, recent works minimize some of the earliest and most intriguing credibility questions. To what degree is accuracy related to credibility, do private signals exist solely in the shadow of their public counterparts or do they have credibility of their own? Moreover, how do leaders weigh concurrent public and private signals during a crisis? In this thesis, I examine the nature of public and private signals in the Cuban Missile Crisis in an inductive, qualitative manner. I find that in the context of the Cuban Missile Crisis, despite some rationalist assertions, private signals are at times meaningful. Moreover, the divergences between public and private signals are limited. As such, the two exist in an interactional, almost double-helical state. This finding has distinct importance for the future of credibility scholarship.
Item Open Access At the Threshold with Simone Weil: A Political Theory of Migration and Refuge(2012) Gonzalez Rice, David LaurenceThe persistent presence of refugees challenges political theorists to rethink our approaches to citizenship and national sovereignty. I look to philosopher Simone Weil (1909-1943), who brings to the Western tradition her insight as a refugee who attended to other refugees. Deploying the tropes of Threshold, Refuge, and Attention (which I garner and elaborate from her writings) I read Weil as an eminently political theorist whose practice of befriending political strangers maintains the urgent, interrogative insight of the refugee while tempering certain "temptations of exile." On my reading, Weil's body of theory travels physically and conceptually among plural, intersecting, and conflicting bodies politic, finding in each a source of limited, imperfect, and precious Refuge.
I then put Weil into conversation with several contemporary scholars - Michael Walzer, Martha Nussbaum, and Kwame Anthony Appiah - each of whom takes up a problematic between duties to existing political community and the call to engagements with political strangers. Bringing Weilian theory to bear on this conversation, I argue that polity depends deeply on those who heed the call to assume variously particular, vocational, and unenforceable duties across received borders.
Finally, by way of furthering Weil's incomplete experiments in Attention to the other, I look to "accompaniment" and related strategies adopted by human rights activists in recent decades in the Americas. These projects, I suggest, display many traits in common with Weil's political sensibility, but they also demonstrate possibilities beyond those imagined by Weil herself. As such, they provide practical guidance to those of us confronting political failures and refugee flows in the Western hemisphere today. I conclude that politico-humanitarian movements' own bodies of theory and practice point the way to sustained, cross-border, political relations.
Item Open Access Automated Learning of Event Coding Dictionaries for Novel Domains with an Application to Cyberspace(2016) Radford, Benjamin JamesEvent data provide high-resolution and high-volume information about political events. From COPDAB to KEDS, GDELT, ICEWS, and PHOENIX, event datasets and the frameworks that produce them have supported a variety of research efforts across fields and including political science. While these datasets are machine-coded from vast amounts of raw text input, they nonetheless require substantial human effort to produce and update sets of required dictionaries. I introduce a novel method for generating large dictionaries appropriate for event-coding given only a small sample dictionary. This technique leverages recent advances in natural language processing and deep learning to greatly reduce the researcher-hours required to go from defining a new domain-of-interest to producing structured event data that describes that domain. An application to cybersecurity is described and both the generated dictionaries and resultant event data are examined. The cybersecurity event data are also examined in relation to existing datasets in related domains.
Item Open Access Behavioral Traits and Political Selection in Authoritarian Ruling Parties: Evidence from the Chinese Communist Party(2018) Lu, FengmingThis dissertation investigates the role of behavioral factors in the personnel selection in authoritarian ruling parties. First, I argue that authoritarian ruling parties increase the weight of dispositional and behavioral criteria in personnel selection as a response to structural changes. Namely, the reasons behind this shift are that an authoritarian ruling party faces similar problems in personnel selection (such as heterogeneities in agents’ tasks and the multitask problem) and the party can no longer observe members’ and cadres’ loyalty based on a single indicator. Subsequently, I argue that risk attitudes, a key dispositional concept in applied psychology and behavioral politics, explain cadres’ propensities to engage in policy innovation and their obedience to the party leadership's authority and orders. I further examine two mechanisms that might explain the relationship between risk attitudes and obedience, namely sensation-seeking and loss aversion. Finally, I contend that authoritarian ruling parties employ a diversified strategy of personnel selection when they assign cadres to different offices. To test the arguments, the author employs a mixed-method approach and utilizes archival evidence, original cadre survey experiments, original survey data, and interviews in the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), the largest authoritarian ruling party in the world.
Item Open Access BEHIND THE RUNWAY: A Global Theoretical and Empirical Analysis of Apparel Export Competitiveness in the Last Fifteen Years(2011-12) Estefan, SilvanaThis Senior Honors Paper examines the recent and current changes in the fascinating and volatile apparel industry. Why have some countries increased their export market share while others have lost their competitive edge in the global arena of apparel manufacturing? Are low wages the only indicator of apparel export competitiveness? What is the impact of international trade regulations and worldwide governance indicators such as regulatory quality? I explore the effect of international trade regulations and non-trade variables. More specifically, I theoretically and empirically analyze the effects the Multi-Fiber Arrangement, wages, and regulatory quality on apparel export competitiveness across countries since 1995. A cross-national empirical analysis had never been pursued covering a year-by-year analysis of the last decade and a half, a period where vast changes have shaped the apparel export market. Additionally, most of the research conducted in this topic is based on either a managerial, social and environmental, or strictly trade-related sphere. The significance of this Senior Honors Thesis lies in its contribution to the literature as a whole by enlarging the number of countries and years studied, by expanding the analysis across fields, and by taking the methodology of the existing research one step further. This study is also significant for policy-makers, as it will allow them to further understand regulatory versus non-regulatory impacts in export competitiveness. In the case of apparel manufacturing in developing countries, this analysis will enlighten policy-makers on the industry’s current situation and its impact on their economies. Additionally, it is also valuable for fashion company executives in order to learn about the effect of indicators outside the factors of apparel production. Lastly, this study is valuable for students of political science, economics, business, fashion management, and anyone interested in better understanding the political and economic implications of the one of the most competitive, global and rapidly changing industries.Item Open Access Belief Updating in a Biased Information Environment: Evidence From Hierarchical Government Satisfaction in Vietnam(2020) Song, YangPeople tend to hold more positive attitude to central government relative to local governments in east Asian single-party regimes. Drawing from political psychology literature, I argue the information environment biased against local governments shaped people’s political attitude, and ultimately contributed to this hierarchical structure of governmental satisfaction. By exploiting a quasi-exogenous variation of intensity of censorship in rural Vietnam, this article shows that an information environment more biased against local governments may lead to a larger difference in satisfaction to central relative to local governments. It is also displayed that people with higher-level of education are more susceptible to this biased information environment.