Building the New American Nation: The U.S. Army and Economic Development, 1787-1860
Year of Dissertation:
2011
Program:
Political Science
This dissertation examines the Army's integral role in the early American political economy. Notwithstanding its small size, the Army proved to be a powerful instrument for promoting economic expansion and guiding the pattern and direction of development. The Army spurred development through two lines of activity: first, the traditional application of coercion and, second, by providing public goods that neither private actors nor state governments could supply. Considering the Army leads me to reconceptualize the early American state as a bifurcated entity: a state of the periphery, dominated by the Army, and a state of the center, in which the Army still influenced economic development but other public institutions also performed key development functions.
POLITICAL INTEGRATION OF TURKS IN THE U.S. AND THE NETHERLANDS: A COMPARATIVE STUDY OF THE ROLE OF TURKISH IMMIGRANT ORGANIZATIONS
Year of Dissertation:
2010
Program:
Political Science
This study provides a comparative analysis of political integration by Turkish
The Volatile American Voter: Inconsistent Voting Behavior in the United States, 1948-2004
Year of Dissertation:
2011
Program:
Political Science
This dissertation is a study of the political behavior, demographics, and attitudes of Americans who have been inconsistent in party choice, turnout, or both in presidential elections from 1948 to 2004. Most prior scholarship has indicated that these individuals, who play a pivotal role in electoral outcomes, have comprised a minority of the American electorate. The analyses presented here, however, reveal that these "volatile" voters have, from 1948 to 2004, comprised between 50.5 and 60.7 percent of the voting public. Volatile voters are, overall, less likely to be politically sophisticated than party-loyal voters. But the aggregation of all volatile voters into one group when assessing their levels of political aptitude and engagement obscures the fact that volatile sophisticates are plentiful in the United States, and have comprised between 18.1 and 27.0 percent of the electorate since the 1948 - a segment that is decisively large. The large distribution of volatile sophisticates, and volatile voters overall, provides support for the notion that voter engagement with political issues regularly overcomes the habitual party affinities of a substantial fraction of the American public, and that issues indeed matter to voters, most of whom engage them and act upon them in a reasoning manner. I additionally provide evidence, contrary to the findings in much voting and elections literature, that volatile voters can be reliably identified and quantified using sociological measures.
From the South Bronx to Israel:Rap Music and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict
Year of Dissertation:
2010
Program:
Political Science
Despite its origins with underprivileged youth in America's urban ghettos, popular rap music in Israel is not necessarily connected with underprivileged minorities in Israel. On the contrary, generally speaking, commercially recorded rap music in Israel is either distanced from politics and adheres to a color-blind ideology, or includes expressions of right-wing Jewish nationalism. As a whole, rap music in Israel reproduces and perpetuates the social order as is, and rarely challenge it, notwithstanding moments of subversion. This anomaly - of pro-government, hegemonic rap - is possible in Israel because both rap music and Zionism, the hegemonic ideology, are perceived as an act of resistance, as "revolutionary", and as a claim for justice.
ECONOMIC-MINDED PARTISANS: UNDERSTANDING HOW ECONOMIC PERCEPTIONS AND POLITICAL PARTISANSHIP CONDITION VOTING BEHAVIOR
Year of Dissertation:
2009
Program:
Political Science
In this dissertation, I will introduce a new way to understand economic voting. I argue there is an interactive relationship between how the economy and the political environment are recognized among voters when making a vote choice. The framework for determining vote choice can be explained in the following manner: (1) During economic downturns, economic perceptions are the impetus for voters' decision making; because the economy is performing poorly, voters punish the incumbent government. (2) During economic prosperity, voters focus less on the economy and more on politics; incumbent presidents are rewarded for economic prosperity to a lesser extent because voters focus primarily on political matters. (3) During periods of mixed economic performance, voters focus on the economy; however, this focus is tinged by partisan filters. My findings indicate a significant interactive relationship existing between voters' partisanship and voters' economic perceptions in voting behavior which demonstrates that voters do not uniformly engage in economic voting. The model estimates that less partisan voters are more likely to act as economic voters by rewarding (punishing) incumbents for a good (bad) economy while stronger partisans typically use their economic perceptions as a means to reinforce existing partisan preferences when making their voting decisions.
GRENADA REVOLUTION: FOREIGN POLICY DECISION-MAKING IN A COLD WAR ENVIRONMENT
Author:
Cleveland Da Costa
Year of Dissertation:
2011
Program:
Political Science
This is a study of how decision - makers in dependent states perceive their environment, and formulate policies and specific decisions to suit.
The Revolution Will Not be Televised Anymore: New Technology, Political Choice, and Changes in Political Communication from the Newspaper to the Internet
Year of Dissertation:
2011
Program:
Political Science
The overarching goals of political communication rarely change, yet political communication strategies and activities have evolved a great deal over the course of American history. The changes in political communication have been abrupt, occurring during three periods that I identify as Political Communication Revolutions (PCR). A PCR disrupts long, relatively stable periods that I call Political Communication Orders (PCO). Each of the three successful PCRs in American political history followed similar revolutionary cycles, which suggests that revolutions in political communication take place through a recurring process. I identify this recurring process as the PCR Cycle, which begins when successful new ICTs diffuse rapidly into American homes. It is at this point that political actors must choose if they want to utilize these new tools to innovate their political communication activities. The PCR Cycle can be used to explain repeated patterns in why major political communication change occurs, compare changes occurring throughout history, link ongoing changes during the current revolutionary period, and provide a stable theoretical structure upon which ongoing research on the intersection of the Internet and politics can be rooted. Through historical research of campaign innovation, and original analysis of 2010 senate campaign websites, I find that those political actors with more resources, those who are positioned as political challengers, and those involved in competitive political contests are more likely to innovate earlier than others. The current PCR is unique in that the interactivity of the Internet dramatically expands the number of people able to create as well as consume political information, producing the potential for a decentralizing and democratizing effect on American politics. My study concludes by evaluating the extent to which this decentralization is taking place, primarily through an original web survey of politically active Internet users. I find that the Internet is decentralizing political communication especially in terms of forwarding information and reading and watching political news, but that a very small number of political actors still dominate the generation of new political information. This research should contribute to literature in political communication, the emerging intersection of information technology and politics, and American political development.
European stimuli and domestic responses: administrative reforms in Hungary and Italy during the EU/EMU accession process
Year of Dissertation:
2009
Program:
Political Science
The overall success of the European Union (EU) in making Central and Eastern European Countries (CEECs) comply with its conditions for membership has led some scholars and policy makers to consider the EU the principal driver of political reforms in post-socialist countries that have applied for membership. Similarly, the Economic Monetary Union (EMU) is often causally associated with the process of political and economic reforms that took place in Western Europe in the 1990s. Nonetheless, despite the academic enthusiasm and the political rhetoric, the causal impact of the EU on the process of institutional reforms in the Eastern and Western has not been established. Furthermore, empirical evidence suggests that formal institutional change, namely EU-pushed legislated reforms, are not always supported by behavioral change and tend to be either contested or ignored in the implementation phase. These empirical results raise very interesting questions about the process of Europeanization and about the more general question of real, as opposed to formal only, institutional change in a context in which the demand for change is coming from the outside. This thesis aims to answer two such questions: first, how and to what extent has the EU causally influenced domestic institutional change in Hungary and Italy; second, whether institutional change pushed by the EU has been real, that is, resulted in long-lasting changes in the political behavior of domestic actors. This thesis focuses on two aspects of administrative reforms, the depoliticization of the senior civil service and the devolution of politica power from the center to the periphery. In general, the EU has no formal competence over member states' public administrations. However, in its criteria for membership, the EU has required the eastern candidate countries to develop administrative structures necessary for the adoption and implementation of EU laws. Quite differently, in Western Europe, EMU did not explicitly call for the reform of national public administrations. Nonetheless, as the Maastricht convergence criteria focused on fiscal and economic reforms, Italian decision makers considered the reform of national public administrations crucial to reduce government spending and balance the fiscal budget.
Why Youth Vote: Identity, Inspirational Leaders, and Independence
Year of Dissertation:
2010
Program:
Political Science
Abstract
THE POLITICS OF SILENCE: DISCUSSING DELIBERATIVE AND AGONISTIC DEMOCRACY VIS-À-VIS GENDERED RESPONSES TO THE MILITARIZATION OF EVERYDAY LIFE IN TURKEY
Year of Dissertation:
2011
Program:
Political Science
The dissertation discusses contemporary theories of democracy in the light of the concept of silence. It questions the dichotomous thinking of speech and silence in political theory and challenges the conventional view of silence as the loss of communication. Looking at silence as consent, as refusal or protest, and as disengagement, all of which intersect at various contexts, the dissertation engages in a dialogue with deliberative and agonistic democrats on the meaning and complexity of political action and democratic practice. It analyzes the ways in which silence is framed politically, particularly in women's silent protests of state-inflicted violence in Turkey and around the world. The construction of gendered responses to the militarization of everyday life reveals subaltern women's significant contribution to building a more just society through unconventional acts of democratic engagement.