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Browsing Political science by Title
Now showing items 14-33 of 118
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Cetaceans and citizens: international norms and debates about national identity in Japan
(2007)This dissertation addresses the question of why states comply with some international norms more than others. I focus on Japan's high compliance with international norms regarding the human rights of foreign residents, ... -
China's New Social Governance
This dissertation explores the sources and mechanisms of social policy change in China during the reform era. In it, I first argue that, starting in the late 1990s, China's leadership began shifting social policy away from ... -
Church, State and Sex: How Africa's transnational churches shape human rights
Why have East African mainline churches adopted select transnational rights agendas while opposing others, and what are the consequences of these politics for women and sexual minorities? This research examines mainlines' ... -
Claiming Labor Rights as Human Rights: Legal Mobilization at the European Court of Human Rights
In recent years, labor activists have increasingly started mobilizing human rights in order to draw attention to precarious working conditions and restrictions on labor activism. Through analyzing the legal mobilization ... -
Colonial Policy, Social Trust, and Economic Resilience: The Long-term Impacts of Imperial Russian Settlement in Southern Kazakhstan
Almost every country on the planet has a colonial past as colonizer or colonized. Yet scholars still do not fully understand how differential experiences of colonialism affect social and economic processes in the long-term. ... -
The Color of Fat: Racial Biopolitics of Obesity
(2014-02-24)This dissertation employs the analytics of biopolitics, critical race theory, and feminist theory to explore the racial and gender dynamics of the political and medical construction of the American `obesity epidemic.' Its ... -
Community, Liberalism and the Capabilities Approach
The decline of community institutions and the increasing erosion of community infrastructure is a serious problem with consequences for human well-being. The political and economic theories of liberalism have contributed ... -
Confronting value strain: press coverage of health care reform in Sweden and the United States
(1999)This comparative content analysis study examines the health care reform debates that took place in the early 1990's in Sweden and the United States in an effort to understand the role that cultural values might play in ... -
Connection and Resistance: Civilian experiences of violence in conflict zones and their impact on civilians’ political preferences for violent and nonviolent resistance
Under what conditions is state use of force successful at containing militancy, and when might it simultaneously, or instead, radicalize members of the civilian population? I present a new theory evaluating social isolation ... -
A Contest of Legitimacy: The Supreme Court, Congress, and Foreign Law
(2013-02-25)Before 2003, the Justices on the United States Supreme Court routinely, if infrequently, cited foreign or international jurisprudence in their written opinions. Neither the media, nor members of Congress paid much, if any ... -
The Dance of Policy Argumentation: Recasting the Same-Sex Marriage Debate
(2012-08-10)This project is motivated by a desire to examine the patterns that evolve as activists and their opponents struggle to control how the public and policymakers understand a particular issue at the center of contention. ... -
Defining Americans: nation, state, and the politics of racial mixture, 1885-1905
(2002)Prevailing understandings about what it meant to be American underwent significant changes at the turn of the 20th century. This study examines how challenges posed by racial mixture contributed to defining and redefining ... -
Development Aid, Institutional Change, and Local Democracy: Investigating the Role and Impact of Elected Councils in Rural Indonesia
I investigate the consequences of recent attempts by multilateral and international development agencies to foster democracy at the local level across the developing world. Specifically, I examine how the creation of elected ... -
Disentangling Discrimination: The Impact of Political and Societal Discrimination on Democratic (Dis)Engagement
How does discrimination impact the political behaviors of racial and ethnic minority groups in democratic societies? Are all types of discrimination the same? The direct relationship between discrimination and behavior is ... -
Dissent Through Destruction: American Political Activism and the Utilization of Property Disruption as Protest
Despite the extensive academic scholarship considering political resistance and activism within the United States, little has been done to orient acts destroying property as a form of political participation. I argue that ... -
Electoral Violence in New Democracies: Institutionalizing Peaceful Elections
In the last few decades, thousands have died in election-related violence. In the past ten years in Africa alone, Nigeria, Ethiopia, Algeria, Madagascar, Central African Republic, Côte d'Ivoire, Uganda, Chad, Angola, Togo, ... -
Engaging Democracy: An Institutional Theory of Participatory Budgeting
This dissertation examines outcomes from participatory budgeting. Participatory budgeting (or PB) is one popular example of a growing suite of "democratic innovations" that have seen growing attention as concerns have ... -
¿Es su casa mi casa? Latinos, Socialization, and the Catholic Church
The American Catholic Church is in crisis with the highest rate of believers leaving the faith of any denomination (for every one convert, six others leave the Church). The steady growth of the Latino population is the ... -
Essays on the Demand for and Supply of Cash Waqfs in the Muslim World
I address two broad questions regarding cash waqfs, which are Islamic law-sanctioned crowdfunding-style platforms established to provide public goods and services in the Muslim world. First, why do Muslims want to contribute ... -
Explaining rural calm and rural unrest in Costa Rica: the coffee and banana export sectors
(1998)This study examines, contrasts, and analyzes the near absence of unrest in the Costa Rican coffee sector and the somewhat regular unrest in the Costa Rican banana sector. An explanation for such divergent behavior within ...