Browsing by Subject "Political Science, General"

Despite 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.

Nature is under immediate and increasing threat. Tales of destruction and deforestation abound despite the myriad interventions and investments by government bureaucracies, non-government organizations, and private land-owners. As the extinction crisis looms larger and demands on the public purse grow greater, understanding how science becomes policy and policy practice is more important than ever. As a result, and in response to the increasing insularity of conservation biology that has consciously nourished a careful separation of knowledge and action, of scientist and actor, I use this dissertation to navigate the nexus of conservation science, policy, and practice. I employ case studies in forest hydrology and species conservation, as well as cognitive theory, to examine how conservation science becomes policy. I collected field data from Lake Mead National Recreation Area and from the World Bank to explore how policies are translated into practice.

Current assumptions in conservation biology apportions these three separate but equal disciplines - science, policy, and practice - into one greater and two lesser, one that is pure and two that are sticky. But the transmission of knowledge from the Academy to the domains of conservation policy and practice, though difficult, is our mandate. As much as technical competence matters in conservation biology, so too does political literacy. After all, conservation occurs within a dynamic social, political, and institutional landscape. Nonetheless, the current emphasis in conservation biology is on answering questions in the natural sciences and, to a lesser degree, in economics. This focus is important, as is protecting scholarship from the daily pressures of a society that demands quick and ready answers. But scientific data is only one commodity among many that policy-makers and conservation practitioners trade in a tournament of values. Its usefulness lies in the wider social and political environment. Moreover, conservation biology is not simply an applied subset of biology or ecology. It is a mission-driven discipline that dedicates itself to the pursuit of science to save wildlife and wild lands. It encapsulates certain values as axioms. We hold these truths to be self-evident: that the diversity of life matters and that the struggle to end extinctions is meaningful.

Therefore, though conservation science, the design of conservation policies, and the practice of conservation are separate disciplines, they are closely related. For we must understand their different rules of evidence, speak their distinctive languages, and achieve credibility in all three disciplines while maintaining a sense of intellectual integrity in each. This requires respect for their differences as well as recognizing their shared mission in the service of wildlife and wild lands.

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.

"Citizen Canine" explores the sacrificial underpinnings of politics via a critique of the boundary between human and animal in Homer, Aeschylus, and Plato. I argue that the concept "animal" serves a functional rather than descriptive role: it is born of a sacrificial worldview that sees violence as a necessary foundation for human life, and which therefore tries to localize and contain this violence as much as possible through a system of sacrifice. I begin the dissertation with Martha Nussbaum's recent work on the "frontiers of justice," but argue that she is insufficiently attentive to the roles that animality and the rhetoric of sacrifice play in her discourse. I then examine the concept of sacrifice more thematically - using Jacques Derrida and Rene Girard among others - which justifies the move back to the Greeks to understand the specific manner in which sacrifice, human, and animal are intertwined at a crucial moment in Western history. In the Greeks we see an inception of this sacrificial concept of the political, and the movement from Homer to Aeschylus to Plato presents us with three successive attempts to understand and control cosmic violence through a sacrificial order. I contend that a similar logic continues to inform the exclusions (native/foreigner, masculine/feminine, human/nature) that mark the borders of the contemporary political community - hence my dissertation is directed both at the specific animal/human dichotomy as well as the larger question of how political identity is generated by the production, sacrifice and exclusion of marginalized communities.

A majority of formal theoretic research in political science treats political parties as unitary actors, and endows them with decision-making powers not unlike those of strategic individuals. This is true both of most research in the spatial-theoretic tradition, as well as most game theoretic research in the field of comparative political-economy. In contrast, my dissertation examines strategic equilibria which arise when competition takes place simultaneously within parties over organizational control and between parties over political office. I first distinguish between three intra-organizational elements: a party's parliamentary group, its activist cadre, and its executive leaders. Chapters 2-4 develop a set of foundational game theoretic models which identify the equilibrium balance of power among these 3 organizational elements as a function of a country's electoral institutions and voters' relative responsiveness to marginal policy changes. In turn, this more complete understanding of intra-party competition sheds light on a number of important questions in comparative politics and comparative political-economy. For example, it helps to identify conditions under which Downsian vote-maximization is in fact a viable assumption in spatial theoretic models; conditions under which Duverger's argument that proportional representation (PR) should tend to generate multi-party competition may not apply; and, in contrast to Lijphart's famous argument, conditions under which PR may instigate rather than mediate social conflict. Ten months of intensive field research conducted in Turkey provide both the quantitative and the qualitative data which constitute the dissertation's most basic empirical material. This data includes primary and secondary source material on the history of intra-organizational competition in Turkey; observational and informant-based information on contemporary Turkish politics and the events of 2006-2008; and a data set of over 4,000 observations on party-switching in the Turkish Parliament (1987-2007).

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.

This study is a comparative historical analysis of the link between environmental activism and state-society relations in 20th century Russia and Mexico. It explores the three main currents of environmentalism that originated in these two countries under non-democratic political systems that originated in the social revolutions of 1910 (Mexico) and 1917 (Russia) and the roles that each current has played in the process of democratization that began in the 1980s. It is based on critical evaluation and synthesis of the following theoretical fields: collective action, social movements, political regime change and democratic transition. Scholarly literature and press sources are used to corroborate and evaluate findings from in-depth qualitative interviews with environmental activists, researchers, lawyers, and journalists as well as data from participant observation conducted by the author in Russia and in Mexico. The main findings of the study are two-fold. 1) Environmental activism affects social rather than political democratization. 2) The type of environmental activism that has the most significant impact on social democratization is social environmentalism - the current that emphasizes the synergy between the struggles for social justice and civil rights on the one hand and against environmental degradation on the other.

This dissertation uses game-theoretic modeling, statistical testing, and case studies to analyze how authoritarian governments manage the news media to maintain regime stability, control local officials, and make reform. In the first essay, ``Regime Competence and Media Freedom in Authoritarian States'', I explain why some authoritarian regimes allow more media freedom than others, as they tradeoff increased rents when the media is suppressed with the reduced risk of being misjudged by citizens when the media is free. In the second essay, ``Local Media Freedom, Protest Diffusion, and Authoritarian Resilience'', I argue that media reports about citizen protests, which may lead to protest diffusion, do not necessarily destabilize authoritarian rule. If protests are targeted at local governments, the central government of an authoritarian regime can use media-induced protest cascades to force local officials to improve governance. In the last essay, ``Central Rhetoric and Local Reform in China'', I address the puzzle of why the Chinese government would furnish the state media with conservative and dogmatic rhetoric on the one hand and allow reform on the other, by showing that this strategy is used to control local governments' pace of reform.

What are the effects of political information on public opinion, political participation, and electoral outcomes? In this dissertation, I address these questions and investigate the ways that people acquire and incorporate information based on their levels of political knowledge and attentiveness. I examine the effects of political information among three groups whom we would expect to learn differently: those people with little knowledge or interest in politics; the potentially interested who possess some, but not much, knowledge; and the attentive experts.

In my first chapter, I look at the effects of information on people with little or no knowledge of politics by asking, "Do candidate visits affect voting decisions and candidate evaluations?" I link survey data with the location and topics of all speeches given by George W. Bush and John Kerry in 2004 to empirically test the conventional wisdom that candidate appearances change electoral outcomes. I find that candidate visits do provide information to voters and that those effects are conditioned on consumption of local media. In my second chapter, I look at people with some knowledge of politics: college students. I ask, "How does the information that students 'incidentally' encounter in electronic social networks like Facebook.com shape their knowledge of current political events and their participation?" To answer these questions, I conducted a survey with an embedded experiment. I find that students do learn from Facebook, though the effects are small and vary across groups. My third chapter investigates the ways that the politically attentive incorporate information by asking, "What campaign information matters? Which campaign events are actually informative?" I develop a new measure of information flow using data from a political prediction market and a Bayesian estimation technique that adapts models from the economics literature. This measure offers a reliable way to describe the importance of campaign events that does not suffer from either post hoc judgments or reports from the principals involved in the campaign. Together, these projects address the consequences of political information in contemporary politics.

Geographic clustering has been linked to contemporary political polarization by jour- nalists and other researchers in recent years, most recently and notably by Bishop and Cushing (2008). In these accounts, clustering is motivated, in part, by shared tastes for combinations of place attributes that attract individuals with interrelated values and similar characteristics or skillsets. In order to test whether political pref- erences aligns with location choice, this paper proposes a sorting model based on the composition of migrants' political preferences.

Sorting is defined as the increase in the variation of a parameter of preference distributions of different location, in the absence of individual preference change. The model estimates the separate prob- abilities of party identification in U.S. congressional districts among migrants and non-migrants.

Based on an empirical application using the 2006 Cooperative Congressional Elec- tion Study, I find that a significant number of district satisfy the sorting condition. Aa multinomial logit model predicts that individual ideology is significant explana- tory variable in the partisanship of destination districts among migrants, even after controlling for the partisanship of originating districts.

The final chapter evaluates sorting and polarization in U.S. congressional districts based on intra-decade changes to population size. I show that overall polarization in high growth districts exceeds sorting, and suggest this results from an increase in electoral bias that could result from heavy migration into districts that begin the decade as very homogenous.

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.

Racial residential segregation is an enduring feature of America's urban landscape. Patterns of residence have become so divided along racial lines, in fact, that many social scientists have described this phenomenon as an "American Apartheid" that is justified and enforced in practice, if not codified in law. With the rise of public housing in the 1960s, the segregation of racial minorities, and particularly African Americans, reached a new level. Indeed, individuals living in public housing experience such a high degree of social and political isolation that they effectively became members of their own city within the larger metropolis.

This research examines racial segregation in public housing in Durham, a medium-sized city in North Carolina. Specifically, I sought to address why the majority of public housing projects in Durham are located in areas that are racially segregated and secondly, what role public policy has played in creating this outcome. To address this question, I utilized decennial census data from 1950 to 2000, with the tract level as the primary unit of analysis, and archival resources pertaining to housing policies in the 1960s. The conclusions reached are twofold. Firstly, the current high degree of segregation in the Southeast section of the city is the result of policy decisions on the part of the City of Durham in conjunction with the Durham Housing Authority in the late 1960s. Secondly, rising levels of segregation in northeast Durham is a consequence of the concentrated placement of public housing in this area in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and the continuance of this policy today. Racial segregation in public housing in Durham is in this way an ongoing issue that profoundly affects not only the individuals living in public housing, but also political society at large.

This dissertation examines the variation in the choice of FDI regulations. Why do some countries restrict the entry and operations of foreign MNEs while others permit and even seek inward FDI? What factors determine the choice of FDI regulations and what conditions are likely to bring about their reform? This study identifies the political dynamics leading to the improvement or deterioration of investment climates in transition economies and beyond.

I argue that FDI policies depend on the level of political competition and the anticipated distributional implications of FDI liberalization for the main constituencies that back the government in office. Democratic governments, which derive political power from domestic workers who benefit from investments by foreign firms, liberalize FDI regulations. By contrast, non-democratic leaders, who fear that FDI would upset the balance of domestic economic power and undermine the privileged position of domestic industrialists who support the regime, continue to restrict foreign investment.

I examine the choice of FDI regulations using a newly constructed database of FDI regulations in 28 transition economies between 1989 and 2008, an index of investment freedom available for a worldwide sample starting in 1994, and changes over time in three complementary case studies. The statistical analysis reveals that higher levels of political competition are associated with greater openness to FDI and the case study research shows that both increases and decreases in the level of political competition lead to the revision of the FDI legislation. While democratization has brought about more liberal FDI policies, the consolidation of authoritarian regimes has been followed by stricter FDI regulations.

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.

My dissertation seeks to understand how and why governments make major changes in financial sector regulations. I focus on two specific puzzles. First why is financial sector regulation not normally central to electoral competition and why are changes in financial sector regulation rare events? Second, why do we observe substantive intellectual debates and efforts of policy persuasion despite the conclusion of many researchers and observers that financial regulatory policy outcomes are driven by the preferences of powerful special interest groups? What are the mechanisms precisely by which ideas versus interests shape policy outcomes in a domain that is not often central to electoral politics? I investigate these questions through a formal game theoretical model of the regulatory policymaking process and through case studies of historic episodes of financial regulatory change in the United States which draw upon a wide variety of primary and secondary source historical materials. I conclude that financial regulatory change is most likely to occur when events of different types cause heads of government to perceive that the existing regulatory status quo threatens the realization of broader policy objectives. Heads of financial sector policy bureaucracies shape outcomes by providing cognitive frameworks through which leaders understand regulatory consequences. Interest groups influence policy outcomes primarily through their ability to act as veto players rather than by controlling the policy agenda.

This research analyzes one central question and two supporting questions. First, how do individual and group interactions influence aggregate behavior toward terrorism? Second, how does societal reputation impact support of terrorism? Finally, how does the structure of a terrorist organization impact reputation cascades? Applying a theoretical framework of a reputation cascade provides policy-makers and researchers a means to understand aggregate behavior patterns in support for terrorism. A reputation cascades may occur independent of government interventions. Government interventions can influence conditions that enhance a cascade of decreasing support for terrorist activity. Building on the reputation cascade framework, a computational model with government interventions along the two dimensions of information and physical policies is developed. This model indicates that governments' that increase physical intervention policies face a tipping point where increases in physical intervention increase the level of terrorist support in a society. The optimal mix of information and physical policies is determined by the level of individual value for terrorism, the costs to terrorism, and the level of cohesion in a society.