Political Science Theses and Dissertations

Permanent URI for this collection

https://hdl.handle.net/1794/6007

Browse

Now showing 1 - 6 of 6

Open Access
Between Free Speech and Propaganda: Denaturing the Political in the Early American Movie Industry
(University of Oregon, 2016-10-27) Steinmetz, John; Berk, Gerald
The American movie industry did not have to develop into the Hollywood dream factory. There were educative, religious, explicitly political, and other non-commercial alternative arrangements to America’s film industry. These alternatives, along with principles such as film free speech and movie propaganda, had to be cast aside by the emerging moguls of Hollywood. Conflicts with the vanquished liquor industries, moral and economic regulatory concerns, Republican Party politics, and the resurgent Klan all shaped the classic Hollywood system from 1906 to 1927, a 20-year period in which the American film industry depoliticized the Hollywood movie screen, shedding its democratic and propagandistic definitions for the politics of publicity and entertainment as a service to Americans. Developments in this infant industry also shaped the broader trajectory of American consumer capitalism toward big producer control and the self-regulation of the industry’s social effects.
Open Access
Bridging Social Capital, the Power and Development of Transformative Processes: A Story of Two City Clubs
(University of Oregon, 2014-06-17) Durant, Timothy; Berk, Gerald
This research examines the dynamics and workings of bridging social capital through a comparison of the Cleveland and Portland City Clubs. Bridging social capital differs from most common conceptions of social capital (often referred to as bonding social capital) in that the associational connections seek to cross an important boundary that has marked an association at a particular point in time. Each of these clubs excluded women until the 1970's; both have also sought to build a cohort of young professionals over the last decade. The goal of this research is to understand the processes behind integrating these two populations into their respective clubs to expose the development of bridging social capital. Scholars have increasingly noted that associations which can build viable bridges often experience transformative outcomes - including the broadening or re-visioning of an association's mission and its impact within the community. However, due to certain structuralist methodological and theoretical predispositions, most bridging research can often point to the existence of these outcomes but cannot explain how they transpired. How bridging relations operate and produce transformative outcomes is still poorly understood. This dissertation uses a historicist approach to address those shortcomings. It reveals that bridging relations are far more dynamic then previously presented. Bridging relations can often mitigate, and be mitigated by, politics. How they do this is crucial to their success and the outcomes they produce. I argue that acts of power articulation and capacity development are important elements in building successful bridges. Institutional variations, the creative agency of actors, and the histories of these clubs within their communities help form the playing field through which these elements unfold. To understand this complex nexus and how it produces transformative outcomes, scholars need to study bridging relations over time and within the context from which they emerge.
Open Access
Imagining the Fed: Central Bank Structure and United States Monetary Governance (1913-1968)
(University of Oregon, 2015-08-18) Thompson, Nicolas; Berk, Gerald
This dissertation analyzes the institutional development and policy performance of the Federal Reserve System from 1913-1968. Whereas existing scholarship assumes Federal Reserve institutions have remained static since 1913, this project demonstrates that the Federal Reserve was a site of extensive institutional experimentation across its first half century of operations. The 1913 Federal Reserve Act created thirteen autonomous agencies without offering guidance regarding how these units should function as a coherent system. The extent to which this institutional jumble congealed into a central bank-like organization has fluctuated over time. Institutional changes were driven by external shocks and shaped by an ongoing internal debate about normative systemic governance. Some agents called for greater institutional centralization to increase the system’s strategic capacity. Others drew upon shared liberal ideals to defend the system’s decentralized governance traditions. These debates resulted in frequent reconstitutions of the policy-making regime. This dissertation argues the Fed’s temporally-specific institutional configurations were consequential for United States monetary and exchange rate policies. During periods of relatively centralized Federal Reserve governance, internationally-oriented agents wielded control over the system’s policy-making levers to help stabilize the dollar’s exchange rate. During periods of institutional fragmentation, by contrast, monetary policies grew increasingly rigid, promoting dollar instability. Consequently, the structure of American central banking institutions has important implications for both the domestic and international political economies. This project suggests that insights from the positive study of institutions should be applied to the design of central banking institutions. Although institutional fragmentation can check arbitrary power, it likewise can paralyze the policy-making process and undermine the formation and steady pursuit of long-term strategic goals.
Open Access
The Iraq War and the Post Vietnam Narrative: Culture and Change in the U.S. Army, 2005-2007
(University of Oregon, 2012) Chastain, William; Chastain, William; Berk, Gerald
The Iraq War was an era of crisis and change within the U.S. Army. The failure of the army to adapt to the war revealed the obsolescence of post Vietnam army culture. Innovation experiences in the war were directionless and a new intellectual framework was required to deal with warfare that the army had long disliked: counterinsurgency. Major organizational change was accomplished by a coalition of generals led by Generals David Petraeus, Jack Keane, and Ray Odierno. These officers established a new intellectual framework with FM 3-24, Counterinsurgency. They challenged institutional military orthodoxy in Washington by proposing a renewed commitment to victory. Finally, they demonstrated the efficacy of counterinsurgency theory through a military campaign that “proved” FM 3-24. This major, yet limited, change in service culture fractured the consensus of the post Vietnam narrative and initiated an ongoing reinterpretation of the army’s philosophy of war.
Open Access
Labor Market Policy American Style: State Capacity and Policy Innovation, 1959-1968
(University of Oregon, 2020-09-24) Jeung, Yongwoo; Berk, Gerald
This dissertation delves into the American state’s capabilities by examining its experiments with corporatism and labor training during the 1960s. The dissertation relies on the frameworks of layering, patchwork, intercurrence, and entrepreneurship from various disciplines including comparative historical analysis, historical institutionalism, American Political Development, and the school of political creativity. The dissertation first challenges the mainstream view that regards as impossible any tripartite bargaining among U.S. labor, management, and the state. The United States experimented with the unique tripartite committee—the President’s Committee on Labor-Management Policy—in the early 1960s to address emerging problems such as automation and intractable industrial conflicts. The tripartite committee, created by Labor Secretary Arthur Goldberg, was to provide a new deliberative platform to labor, management and the state. The experiment was short-lived due to reignited turf wars between labor and management. The failure paved the way toward further encroachment on collective labor rights and the uneven rise of individual employment rights. It also contributed to the Kennedy administration’s transition in its policy orientation from conventional Keynesianism with public spending to the unconventional macroeconomic measure of cutting taxes. The dissertation also challenges previous literature that sees the American state’s fundamental limitation in implementing interventionist social and welfare policy. By examining the origins and evolutions of the War on Poverty (WOP) training programs, I reveal that the legislative history of various manpower programs was a patchwork of improvisational responses to national and regional change. From the Johnson administration’s attempts to update WOP programs to respond to the inflation of 1965, the issue of unemployed adults, and Martin Luther King Jr’s request to “hire now, train later,” I claim that the fragmented nature of the American state could promote new solutions to new problems. This study contributes to American political development scholarship by providing a non-Weberian optimistic perspective in analyzing the American state. It shows how entrepreneurial politics can promote reform in the fragmented structures of the American state, shedding light on the ways of continuously recalibrating the American state’s capacity. This dissertation includes previously published material.
Embargo
Pragmatist Policy-making: Rethinking Deliberation and Experimentation in Contemporary Environmental Governance
(University of Oregon, 2015-08-18) Hejny, Jessica; Berk, Gerald
In this dissertation, I generate a theoretical grounding for the practice of collaborative environmental governance that emerges out of practice. The overall architecture of this dissertation traces the structure of Deweyan reconstruction. I first set out the problems that plague federal environmental governance and the turn to collaborative environmental governance in practice, situating them in historical context. I use forest policy and the case study of the Quincy Library Group to illustrate both the pathologies of federal regulation and the turn to collaboration and to inform my reconstruction of deliberation. I argue that the dominant Habermasian model of deliberation is inadequate to theorizing collaborative governance due to its abstraction and focus on the justificatory aspect of deliberation. I rethink the concept of deliberation, mobilizing critiques of the Habermasian model and resources in American pragmatist philosophy to reconceptualize deliberation as embodied, narrative, and oriented to experimental problem-solving. Drawing on empirical accounts of environmental collaboration, I argue that collaboration is centrally about members of a community working together across difference to solve shared concrete problems. Rational argument plays a role in collaboration, but it is not its transformatory engine. Rather, the building of trust between participants through narrative and storytelling is what enables transformation of beliefs and interests and makes collaboration possible. In contrast to the political theory literature, I assert that deliberation is oriented not only to generating democratic legitimacy but also to solving practical problems. Collaborative governance is both deliberative and experimental, and our theorizing must account for this. In the concluding chapter, I address the practical question of the institutional design of collaborative environmental governance. This theoretical work is integral to furthering policy-making practice because it provides a way for both policy-makers and scholars of public policy to understand what is at stake in the move to collaborative governance and provides a critical standard to guide the design and evaluation of collaboration in practice. For environmental policy-makers, it sheds light on why we have reason to be hopeful about collaborative policy-making and how we can strengthen these efforts on the ground.

Browse

Browsing Political Science Theses and Dissertations by Author "Berk, Gerald"

Results Per Page

Sort Options