Browsing by Subject "Democracy"

This dissertation examines the relationship between architecture and democratic politics in late-modernity. It identifies the refusal of architects to consider the political dimensions of their work following the failures of 20th century High Modernism and the scant attention that the intersection between architecture and politics has received from political theorists as a problem. In order to address these deficiencies, the dissertation argues for the continued impact of architecture and urban planning on modern subject formation, ethics, and politics under the conditions of de-centralized sovereignty that characterize late-modernity. Following an opening chapter which establishes the mutual relation architectural design and political culture in the founding text of political science, Aristotle's Politics, the dissertation offers a genealogical critique of modern architectural design and urban planning practices. It concludes that modern architecture shapes individual and collective political possibilities and a recursive relationship exists between the spaces "we" inhabit and the people that "we" are. In particular, it finds that there is a strong link between practices of external circulation and the interior circulation of thoughts about the self and others. The dissertation concludes by proposing a new understanding of architecture that dynamically relates the design of material structures and the forms of political practices that those designs facilitate. This new definition of architecture combines political theorist Hannah Arendt's concept of "world-building action" with the concept of the "threshold" developed and refined by Dutch architects Aldo van Eyck and Herman Hertzberger.

Are civic democracy and Catholic authority at odds? Do the aspirations of modern democratic politics imply theological claims that are in essential conflict with Catholic claims about civic authority? Does democratic tradition cultivate a self-reliant, skeptical stance toward authority that is incompatible with a cultivation of deference to authority in orthodox Christian tradition? Are we confronted with two traditions in conflict, such that the Catholic tradition must be rendered more democratic if it is to provide support for modern democratic politics? Is an approach to theological ethics that emphasizes the church, with its authoritative teachings and offices, and its claim to be a unique means of grace as a form of Christ’s body, necessarily at odds with an approach that emphasizes the civic nation and lends support to struggles for democratic progress?

These questions are prompted by Jeffrey Stout’s Democracy and Tradition, as well as D. Stephen Long’s Augustinian and Ecclesial Ethics in his characterization of the debate between two schools of theological ethics, largely Niebuhrian and civic liberal or Yoderian and ecclesial in orientation, which he labels “Augustinian” and “ecclesial.” This dissertation will present Yves Simon’s political philosophy as providing significant elements of a way forward for this discussion. Following Alasdair MacIntyre, I present Simon as an adherent of both the Catholic and the modern democratic traditions, who as a Thomist is able to provide an account of civic politics wherein liberty and authority, authority and autonomy, and Catholicism and democracy are friends instead of enemies. Simon as a Thomist is able to do this, as I present him, while rival restorationist Augustinian and Enlightenment liberal accounts tended to see such pairs as antinomic.

In chapters one and two, I begin to assess Simon’s contribution, following MacIntyre by seeking to understand him within the “complex political and moral history” out of which he emerged. In chapter one, I give an account of the tradition of Catholic social teaching Simon inherited, characterizing it as taken up by two approaches, Augustinian and Thomist, to confronting the challenge of practical atheism raised by Enlightenment liberalism. Simon took up the mantle of Leonine Thomism, in its deep criticism of liberalism’s social contract, its rejection of restorationist Augustinian views of authority, and its articulation of civic authority as a created natural good with a divine origin, a positive aspect of our social nature in service of the common good.

In chapter two, I draw out the rootedness of Simon’s political thought in the crises of the early twentieth century, showing how his critique of liberalism went along with firm support for democratic liberation, and how his developing theory of authority went hand in hand with opposition to authoritarian regimes. Here, I examine Simon’s early political essays, books, and letters to his mentor Jacques Maritain. Simon emerges as a committed Leonine neo-Thomist who placed the Thomist tradition in conversation with the democratic tradition stemming from the French and American revolutions. Simon found resources in the Thomist and democratic traditions to support a politics in which authority and liberty were not opposites, but in service of common goods in which the liberty, equality, and fraternity of persons-in-community were secured.

In chapter three, I present Simon’s mature political philosophy as a project that indicates how the Thomist preconciliar tradition of Catholic social thought can contribute to contemporary theological ethics. Simon’s ontologically realist conception of the common good helps us understand that authority is a correlative concept, that which enables a community to enjoy goods in common. Starting here, Simon is able to show that democratic aspirations for freedom and equality are better served within an authoritative community that pursues goods in common than by an Enlightenment liberal polity that does not. Moreover, it is better able to form people in the civic virtues needed for such a polity to flourish, and is capable of openness to God’s grace.

In my conclusion, I place Simon’s work into conversation with contemporary theological ethics. Simon’s Thomist acceptance of the acquired or civic virtues, his Thomist account of authority in service of the common good (rather than an Augustinian account for which authority serves as a check against sin), his vigorous defense of democratic freedom and equality joined to his defense of civic authority, and his openness to the further ends of the theological virtues, all provide helpful tools for contemporary discussion. Today’s conversation, largely Augustinian in character, can be moved forward by Thomist insights drawn from the preconciliar tradition of Catholic social teaching. Democratic freedom and equality need not be in conflict with Catholic authority. With Simon’s Thomist account of civic authority and the common good, we are enabled to pursue both the civic national and the ecclesial projects at the same time.

The turn of the nineteenth to twentieth century saw unprecedented growth and change in the demographics of United States urban environs. Not only did U.S. cities grow bigger, they grew increasingly multicultural and multiracial. American architects, urban planners, and social reformers responded to this change by attempting to instill democratic values in American cities through zoning, gridding, and housing reform that sought to alternately include immigrant populations while excluding populations seen as not white (in particular, black communities). Designing Community: Architecture, Race, and Democracy in American Life Writing, 1900-1950 examines autobiographies produced in this era that use architectural metaphors in order to either enforce or challenge this democratizing project. Narrations of the self granted space for members of minoritized populations to show the limits of the architectural project to build democracy.

In a critical introduction and three subsequent chapters, I use methods of literary analysis to study life writing as well as novels, essays, newspaper articles, and poetry. Through my analysis of three life writing texts, I center autobiography as a genre critical to the production of community formation in the United States. Each chapter examines both a particular writer as well as a particular autobiographical technique. In my first chapter, I primarily examine the 1924 autobiography of Louis Sullivan titled The Autobiography of an Idea. I argue that Sullivan uses techniques lifted from the Bildungsroman in order to show his readers who they, too, can develop into democratic subjects. In my second chapter, I examine the 1950 memoir of the Jewish immigrant writer Anzia Yezierska titled Red Ribbon on a White Horse. I argue that her use of the confessional produces space for her to generate self-determination as a critical component to the production of multi-ethnic community. In my third chapter, I examine Richard Wright’s 1945 memoir Black Boy. I argue that his use of the testimonial enables readers to see human life as innately interconnected. In my conclusion I show that architectural metaphors continue to govern contemporary visions of democratic life in the United States, particularly as Donald Trump’s administration has campaigned to build a wall on the United States’s southern border. I argue that this is a moment in which those invested in racial justice should listen to minoritized voices.

This dissertation considers the role of the critic in democratic political culture by engaging Socrates. Since Socrates so often stands as an exemplar for many different styles of critical activity, both in political rhetoric and in popular culture, I address the roots of these many figures of Socrates by examining the multiple aspects of Socrates as they appear in Plato's dialogues. Starting from the different metaphors that Socrates uses to describe himself - the stingray, the master of erotics, the midwife, the practitioner of the true political art, and the gadfly - I parse these different strands of Socrates' character and assess their coherence. While each of these descriptions captures a different angle of Socrates' activity vis-à-vis Athenian democracy, I argue that together they also hold one essential aspect in common: Socrates' strange relationship to Athens as both connected and disconnected, immanent in his criticism and yet radically so. As strange both in the context of Athens and in relation to his interpreters, I further advance that the figure of Socrates suggests a kind of political activity committed to disturbance and displacement while also working across, with, and against conventional boundaries and languages. Moreover, I maintain that the Socrates suggests new forms of critical associations that take up his practice of philosophy in democratic culture today.

The problem of violent oppression is a persistent one. Every regime - autocratic or democratic - has an obligation to prevent the violent oppression of its citizens. My dissertation "Good Arms and Good Laws: Machiavelli, Regime-Type, and Violent Oppression" uses Machiavelli's understanding of different regime-types and their political dynamics to explore the means by which democracies and autocracies alike can prevent violent oppression within their borders. My exploration produces a standard for praiseworthy political regimes and action, based on what Machiavelli identifies as the people's desire "not to be oppressed."

Machiavelli's analysis of this problem of political violence leads to the conclusion that all types of regimes are united in needing an interdependent, yet competitive political relationship between their leading political figure(s) and the people at large. Different kinds of regimes vary, however, in the roles that their primary political classes must play in order to prevent oppression within their borders. After using the Florentine Histories to identify the lines of thinking central to Machiavelli's work, in chapter 1 I turn to Machiavelli's discussion of the citizen-militia in The Art of War. In chapters 2 and 3, I detail Machiavelli's recommendations for praiseworthy principalities in the Prince, where Machiavelli actually exhorts princes to arm their people (chapter 2) while simultaneously crafting for them the political ethics for which the text is notorious (chapter 3). In Chapters 4 and 5, I detail Machiavelli's recommendations for praiseworthy republics in the Discourses on Livy, where Machiavelli charges the people with policing the elites that would engage in projects of oppression if left to their own devices (chapter 4) while simultaneously praising elites who help to create and maintain mechanisms of violence (chapter 5). Machiavelli's analysis compels us to recognize that it is the particulars of these interdependent, yet competitive relationships between the people and their leading political figure(s) that define a regime and that our praise of that regime ought not depend categorically on whether the people rule, but rather whether the a regime's political classes effectively cooperate to prevent violent oppression.

This dissertation traces the evolution of Whitman's democratic thinking across the first four editions of Leaves of Grass, covering the auspicious years 1855, 1856, 1860 and 1867. While democracy is the master political term within Whitman's later editions, it was nearly devoid from the original one, in which republican political concepts were still regnant. The argument put forth is that in the space of twelve years, Whitman's relationship to democracy went through a strikingly classic dialectic trajectory: emergence, consolidation and fissure. The immediate engine driving this progression was the Civil War, but behind this immediate cause was the slower, broader motor of modernization, particularly modernization's expansion of markets, for in the market's circulation and interconnection of people and commodities Whitman saw a model for an expansive and integrative democratic collectivity. The first chapter explores the importance to Whitman of the physical print room as a uniquely hybrid site in the course of modernization, for while it was one of the first to exploit the expanding industrial market, it also maintained pre-industrial forms of artisanal labor late into that progression. The print room thus became a site where the industrial market's reach and pre-industrial labor's affective relationship to the product and its consumers could be combined, and the print room therefore plays a central role, in ways both subtle and profound, in Whitman's poetry, in his understanding of the emerging democratic nation, and in his own literary productive practice. The second chapter turns from an investigation of democratic social space to an investigation of democratic time, noting how a nearly forgotten event, a loan between Whitman and James Parton, ended the "afflatus" under which the early editions were produced and prompted Whitman to revamp Leaves' relationship to history. Whitman's experience of personal debt failure led him to reconsider the ways in which his political project was susceptible to similar collapse, for the circuits of affective connection upon which his democratic project was based depended not only on their reach through space but on their forward projection through time, particularly the continual recycling of death into life, what Whitman called the "perpetual payment of the perpetual loan." Whitman sought to reduce this contingency by abstracting the political project of the work from his immediate social world (America) to a political philosophy (democracy) which stood above and outside of time. The 1860 edition thus marked the emergence of democracy as the book's central political philosophy. Yet this strategy proved insufficient when Whitman confronted the one barrier to affective exchange that his verse could not bridge: the dead bodies of the Union soldiers. This unbridgeable difference reverberated outward through the circuits of Whitman's poetry, dismantling the political and affective structures he had been building up to 1860. A text which previously declared the absence of both the past and death - "the greatest poet ... places himself where the future becomes present," "the smallest sprout shows there is really no death" - now becomes doubly haunted by ghosts, once by the dead bodies of Union soldiers which, as much as Whitman declares he "will henceforth forget," he cannot, and again by the strange emergence of new "Phantoms, gigantic, superb." These phantoms represent for Whitman the inversion of democracy's promise, democracy become nightmarish and zombie-like, and his fundamental triangle is haunted by its inverse: a melancholic Whitman; the overmastering re-emergence of the "bards of the past" and explicitly antiquated poetic forms; and a threatening, sovereign federal power autonomous from the people. The revisions Whitman introduced to the post-war edition of 1867 tell the story of a crisis in democratic confidence on behalf of democracy's former champion. Taken all together, the first four editions of Leaves form a chronicle of the archetypal democratic poet's struggle with democracy during U.S. democracy's most critical decade.

This dissertation, Inhabiting the City: Citizenship and Democracy in Caracas, asks how multiple modalities of citizenship arise in order to facilitate working-class and middle-class strategies to negotiate formal and informal structures of rights and obligations among individuals, local communities, and the nation-state. By examining mobile and locally fixed practices in multiple sites of Caracas, Venezuela, this work explores the ways that individuals assert claims to political and social rights that are bound to particular spaces of the city.

Based on a year of ethnographic fieldwork in one middle-class and two working class communities, this dissertation explores the discursive formation of citizenships that are based on divergent conceptions of democracy. Although the notions of this mode of political organization are based on understandings of equality in the capital's working-class communities, many middle-class ideas are quite different. In more affluent communities, democratic ideals grounded in equality do not take into account popular notions of meritocracy that reinforce class hierarchy. Although many individuals in Caracas work to produce democratic spaces throughout the city, exclusions persist--and some go largely unnoticed.

Finally, I argue that the modes of belonging that many residents employ to negotiate spaces of citizenship vary according to factors such as race, class, gender, age, and geographic location. By analyzing citizenship in a city space that is as divided as Caracas--especially along class lines--I argue that studies of citizenship require attention to cultural transformations that are tied to social, geographic, and political relationships in local spaces. To conceive of the citizen as an individual with ties to the nation-state is too broad a scope to begin understanding the nuances of social and political belonging that ensure active participation within contemporary societies.

The dissertation is an ethnographic study of the role of monitoring standards on democratic governance reform in El Salvador since the 1992 end of a 12-year civil war. The study looks at the development and implementation of monitoring and evaluation models for rule of law, citizen participation and accountability reforms, in order to understand the impact of standards on the local adaptation and global circulation of democratic reform programs. Through practices of standardization, law and technology together construct the expertise that democratic institutions increasingly require for political participation. The legacy of democratic reform in El Salvador is particularly important because the country served as a laboratory and poster-child for democratization models most recently applied to U.S. efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan.

In-depth qualitative study of the development and use of monitoring standards reveals a formalization of ways of producing and contesting knowledge deemed crucial for political communities - be they rural hamlets or national economic sectors. As with any institutional form, certain political possibilities are enabled while others are marginalized or constrained. However, beside the establishment of dominant frameworks for knowing about social realities and participating in decision-making governing those realities, monitoring standards provide means for the mobilization and advocacy of alternative perspectives and agendas. The dissertation presents a historical account of the institutionalization of monitoring standards that have become typical components of what international agencies promote as democratic governance. Ethnographic accounts of how these standards circulate and are used by governments, NGOs, citizens and social movements illustrate their ubiquity, flexibility and dynamism - from municipal finance and state decentralization, to human rights struggles over water privatization, mining, crime and pharmaceuticals. Research conducted before, during and after the 2009 election of the leftist FMLN party to the presidency captures shifts in the use of monitoring standards as social movement activists move into government.

This dissertation argues for a version of democratic theory, and institutions of democratic practice, that would call for and help to nurture a form of civic identity--individual and collective--committed to a "work of mourning" over the historical and enduring traumas surrounding racial discrimination and violence in the United States. By a reading of psychoanalytic theory in conversation with political and social theory, I show that mourning should be considered less as a limited response to particular loss--one that will resolve itself after a certain lapse of time--than as a process of identity formation through recognition of, and reflection on, formative traumas in the democratic polity. Using the work of Melanie Klein in particular, I argue that the work of mourning not only implies the working through of mundane losses and traumas, but the development of a certain identity (in what Klein calls the "depressive position") that is sensitive to the larger scenes of persecution and violence that shape the social and political landscape. For Klein, mourning is ultimately the process of establishing internal objects that enrich the self's capacity to mitigate its hatred, fear, envy, and greed with reparative guilt and love. Klein's descriptions of inter-subjective mourning have relevance outside the comparatively narrow confines of the analytic situation. I argue that Klein's theories of mourning and identity can enhance collective efforts to address the traumas surrounding racial violence and discrimination in the United States. I illustrate this connection by examining the experience of the Greensboro Truth and Reconciliation Commission (GTRC), which operated in Greensboro, North Carolina from 2004 to 2006.

This project elucidates the politics of imagination in the United States and interrogates the conditions of democratic imagination in particular. I evaluate the role of imagination in political theory and in United States history, contextualizing my theoretical arguments through analyses of the Revolution and Founding and through a case study of the Populist movement of the late 19th century. I treat imagination as a productive and representative social power that is constituted in relation to the everyday terrain on which subjects, discourses, and material realities are formed and practiced. Imagination plays a paradoxical role in the history of political theory: it is a fundamental condition of political community, and yet it has the potential to transgress any given configuration of political order. Democratic theorists commonly respond to this paradox by moving to one side of it. Those concerned with democratic stability and belonging seek to ground imagination in some incontestable cultural authority; those concerned with democratic dynamism and freedom take the power of imagination to be illimitable. Constructing a conversation between Pierre Bourdieu, Michael Bakhtin, Hannah Arendt, and Populism, I argue that freedom requires attending to the everyday tensions between the stabilizing and dynamic powers of imagination. Contemporary mergers of capitalism, technology, and administrative power centralize political imagination by incorporating, concealing, or destroying competing cultural forms and practices. For the promise of freedom to survive, and at times even flourish, it is thus crucial to cultivate dynamic traditions, institutions, practices, and dispositions that can harbor emergent imaginings of democracy.

Building independent courts is a commitment by political leaders that they are willing to tie their hands, restrain their (often arbitrary) power, and respect judicial decisions even if the courts rule against them. But if political leaders are rational, why do they persist in their respectful behavior towards independent courts even when such courts may prove adverse to themselves? In other words, how can judicial independence be credibly maintained without being eroded by political leaders? In this dissertation, I seek to answer this important but underexplored question in comparative judicial politics by examining the political and economic conditions necessary to maintain judicial independence in autocracies and democracies.

In Chapter 2, I build a theory regarding the methods by which autocrats credibly still maintain judicial independence, given the lack of formal institutions capable of constraining their ever-present chance of reneging. I develop a causal mechanism by which a regime’s economic reliance on foreign direct investment (FDI) and autocrats’ concern about their reputation interact to create strong and ongoing incentives to maintain judicial independence as a property rights assurance for foreign investors. Using panel data covering a large sample of authoritarian countries during the post-Cold War period, I find quantitative evidence of my theoretical expectation in Chapter 3, and demonstrate that a regime’s past reliance on FDI is positively and significantly associated with the current level of judicial independence. My empirical analysis further indicates that the theorized effect is restricted to the economic dimension of judicial independence, in both the medium term and the long term, and that the effect is also contingent on the type of authoritarian regime that is present in the country.

In Chapter 4, I present a modified version of the so-called insurance theory and claim that the impact of political competition on judicial independence in democracies fits a slight modification I suggest to this theory. Adopting insights from party politics literature, I argue that, beyond mere electoral closeness, the presence of “robust” political competition is conducive to generating the incumbent’s credible perceptions of threats of the loss of his power and thus this form of competition is more relevant for anchoring the logic of the insurance theory. To illustrate the significance of robust political competition and the conditions thereof, I conduct a qualitative case study of South Korea and the Philippines, which differ in the level of judicial independence despite their similar degree of electoral closeness after democratization. Drawing on each country’s political history, descriptive data, and the specific episodes of judicial independence in both countries, I find that the existence of robust political competition, backed by an institutionalized party system and a stable set of robust actors, has allowed South Korea to develop judicial independence consistent with the insurance logic. By contrast, the absence of robust political competition in the Philippines, which is attributable to a fluidic and clientelistic party system with a lack of robust opposition, has discouraged incumbents from taking advantage of judicial independence as a form of political insurance for themselves.

This dissertation turns to illiberal state violence and state formation in Latin America’s Southern Cone region as the ground for trans politics and activisms. Focusing on the entanglements of Argentine trans politics with histories of dictatorship (1976-83), I ask: how do contemporary transgender cultural producers deploy and revise historical narratives of national trauma to stake gender rights claims in the present? What sorts of political, aesthetic, and legal tactics do trans cultural producers adopt within political contexts hyper-saturated by state violence? What ethical and political challenges arise? In response, I formulate a trans framework of analysis that combines archival, visual culture, literary, and ethnographic methods to study contemporary transgender politics and cultural production as these have taken shape in response to shifting Argentine state formations.

Each chapter considers how trans activists strategically deploy existing visual and material culture, activist strategies, and legal interventions developed by antigenocide activists such as the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo to forward trans rights claims. In doing so, my work traces unexpected affinities between Argentine transgender and antigenocide politics, cultural production, and activisms. Taken together, the dissertation’s chapters evoke an interdisciplinary method that twins the study of cultural practices with histories of state violence, focusing on gender and sexuality as central to such analyses. By tracing the ways Argentine trans activists reanimate the past to meet the demands of the present, my dissertation offers an historical interpretation of trans political subjectivity that extends and revises trans studies’ geopolitical imagination, bringing Latinx American archives, national histories, and political strategies to bear on existing trans studies scholarship.

More than 26,000 children under the age of 5 die every day on average, mostly in the developing world. Malnutrition accounts for up to half of those deaths, and diarrheal diseases account for another 17 per cent. The concentration of child malnutrition and diarrhea in developing countries should be of particular interest to sociologists because of the potential role of macro, structural and institutional forces in accounting for such cross-national disparities. This study focuses on country-level development, gender inequality, and democracy as three dimensions of structural violence that have important effects on child health in developing countries. In addition, the analysis also incorporates household and maternal characteristics that have already been shown to affect child health at the individual level. Using data from the Demographic and Health Surveys and several other archival sources, I conduct a multi-level analysis of young children nested in a sample of approximately 50 developing countries. Specifically, I estimate a series of hierarchical generalized linear logit models (HGLM) that predict the likelihood that a child is stunted, wasted, underweight, or has had a recent episode of diarrhea, based on a set of country- and individual-level explanatory variables.

The introduction in Chapter 1 describes the concept of "structural violence," the orienting theoretical framework for the dissertation. Chapter 2 combines several theoretical perspectives to examine the effects of household-level socioeconomic resources as well as country-level economic development, water, sanitation, health care, and education. Household wealth and maternal education are the most important predictors of child health at the individual level; whereas, GDP per capita, secondary school enrollment, and a "capability development" scale have the most robust effects at the country level. Chapter 3 focuses on women's decision-making and resource control by examining 5 aspects of gender inequality: education, employment, political participation, reproductive autonomy, and life expectancy. Taken together, the results demonstrate that child health is likely to be better in countries where women have more education, control over their reproduction, representation in national politics, as well as longer life expectancy. Finally, Chapter 4 explores the link between democracy and child health, paying particular attention to various ways of measuring democracy. Surprisingly, bivariate correlations between democracy and child health are weak, and multivariate models do not yield consistent or robust effects. Overall, this dissertation demonstrates how child health is embedded in social, political, and economic contexts of inequality larger than the individual that partially determine who faces increased health risk factors and who is protected from them.

I am interested, broadly, in the relationship of aesthetics to politics. More specifically, I am interested in the importance of aesthetics to leftist political organizing, particularly in regard to music. This interest reflects my goals as a composer and as an activist, or, I should say, as a composer/activist: the project is the same—musical composition is a large piece of a larger puzzle. SuperConductors explores the (structural) relationships between musical objects, their means of production, and the corresponding social formations. I am especially concerned with how formal aspects of a musical composition (which, for me, include the means of performance/consumption) reflect social relations, but more importantly also forge them. So: is there a way for me to write music that challenges dominant/hegemonic social relationships? Is there a way for me to write a more democratic music?

SuperConductors consists of three divisions. The introductory division discusses the theoretical background of the project and traces historical lineages of other music and art that have been influential to this project. The second division is comprised by a series of musical compositions devoted to exploring the political and aesthetic possibilities that arise from participatory music-making. The final division consists of an article examining the emergence of web-based interactive music, pieces sometimes dubbed “sound toys”, as well as a series of my own pieces in this genre.

As a result of my work on this project, I have developed a paradigm for the production of democratic musical works through the discerning implementation of dynamically configurable forms; these principles, designed to facilitate the composition of new works in this style, are codified in a section entitled, “Guidelines for a new democratic music”.

Less democratic countries conduct elections under the majoritarian electoral formula more often than under proportional representation by a wide margin. Yet, robust democratic systems utilize both majoritarian and PR electoral formulas with great success. This dissertation approaches this empirical puzzle and tries to unveil what role, if any, electoral formulas play in politics.

To do so, it focuses on the electoral process exclusively and utilizes Judith Kelley's recently completed comprehensive dataset on election quality to perform some large-sample statistical analyses of the relationship between the electoral formula, ethno-cultural polarization and election quality. Then, it presents three in-depth case studies of Nigeria, Ghana and Indonesia to unveil in more detail institutional origins and the mechanisms of electoral manipulation, as refracted through the electoral formula.

The conclusions reached are that PR is much better suited for conducting free and fair elections in ethno-culturally polarized countries. Yet, majoritarian and mixed formulas perform just as well when polarization is low. This finding is directly related to an ongoing debate by institutional designers and academics alike and provides systematic quantitative and detailed qualitative support. The study also suggests that PR might not only mediate inter-ethnic differences when disagreement is high, but also reduces the level of polarization if applied over several electoral cycles.

American voters understand that elections have consequences, but they have become so disillusioned by their political system that approximately 40 percent have self-selected out of the two-party circus, choosing instead to identify as independent or unaffiliated which often requires them to forego their primary election voting rights. They understand that the process no longer serves its intended purpose of providing for representative government. Nevertheless, when it comes to elections, Americans get it wrong in just about every way possible. They spend so much time debating which superficial features of the electoral system—voter ID laws, polling place hours and locations, voter registration deadlines, etc.—are destroying the political process that they overlook the real cause of its decay: that political parties exercise control over the rules of the electoral system.

At the end of the day, people want a government that works. It is quite clear that the political system we have now simply does not allow for that. Less obvious are exactly why this is so, and what can be done. The role of this paper, then, is as a sort of citizen’s primer to our electoral crisis. I begin by tracing the origins of American political parties and describe how they and their agents in government mold the electoral system to their advantage in getting and maintaining control of government. Next, I discuss the ways in which that system is so deleterious to stable, functioning government and “national attachment” in the body politic. I then propose an alternative electoral system that would allow for fair and effective representation of more people, helping to rebuild the necessary trust and confidence in our fundamental political institutions. Finally, I reflect on the dangers of continuing to use a system in which political parties—private organizations—abuse state power and the fundamental institution of democracy—the election—to protect and advance their private interests, and how institutional collapse might be avoided.