Political Science Theses and Dissertations

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Open Access
Risking Race: Risk Assessment and the Policing of Blackness in the United States
(University of Oregon, 2024-12-19) Scott, Brett; Lowndes, Joseph
This dissertation explores how risk governance has produced racial inequality in the United States. It is particularly interested in understanding how race informs the ways that risk is defined, assessed, experienced and policed. My primary argument is that risk is a condition of Blackness in the United States because Black people are necessarily and always connected to risk. Anti-Black racism is often mediated through the distinct relationship that Black populations have with risk, risk assessment and risk governance. Black Americans are subjected to structural violences that are often justified because under the guise of risk prevention. Black folk have been socially constructed as risky and therefore in need of control and domination. However, it isn’t simply that Black people are viewed as risks to others, but that there is a feedback loop to designation which puts Blacks at risk for harm because of their status as risky people. The dual position that Black people hold as both the bearers and bringers of risk remains an under-theorized form of racial inequality because society tends to view risk from a lens of colorblind objectivity. Nevertheless, inequalities in how risk is defined, assessed, and police continue to widen the gap between Black and white Americans and, as this study show, these inequalities exist in a multitude of institutions including the insurance market, housing industry and the criminal justice system. This dissertation takes seriously the problem of risk inequality as it plays out along racial lines in the United States. This work is a welcome addition to political science because critically engaging with the racial inequalities of risk governance allows for an analysis of racial inequality that is often overlooked by policy makers and academics alike. I hope is that this study is a springboard for future research that seeks to understand the complexities of racial inequalities in a modern world that is increasingly focused on risk prevention and mitigation.
Open Access
Why do states adopt carbon taxes when they do?
(University of Oregon, 2024-08-07) Ahmed, Saima; Mitchell, Ronald
With ever-increasing global temperatures and climate change problems, states are faced with the challenge of formulating carbon reduction policies. The objective of this dissertation is to unfold the factors that lead states to adopt carbon taxes to reduce carbon emissions. Despite being considered an effective carbon reduction policy, carbon taxes have been adopted by only 28 states, and the remaining 166 did not adopt carbon taxes. The dissertation aims to understand the determinant factors behind the decision of the adoption of carbon taxes by 28 states and also to understand the timing of their implementation to explore specific circumstances. I have applied mixed methods in this research by conducting a cross-sectional quantitative analysis and two case studies, one on Australia’s adoption and repeal of carbon taxes and another on Mexico’s adoption of carbon taxes.The quantitative study of this dissertation found a strong influence of high levels of democracy in adopting carbon taxes, indicating the implication of the institutional features of liberal democracy, such as inclusivity, diverse representation, and accountability, and discussed how they allow room for policymakers to address climate change problems by having strong carbon emission reduction policies such as carbon taxes. It further demonstrated that proportional representative systems within highly liberal democracies also have strong correlations with the adoption of carbon taxes, indicating that the institutional features of proportional systems in democracies ensure more multiparty representation in the legislature that increases the likelihood of carbon taxes. The dissertation's case studies confirmed the quantitative study's findings about the positive impact of democratic institutions and proportional systems on the adoption of carbon taxes. Australia has been a highly liberal democracy for many decades, while Mexico democratized in 2000. Australia and Mexico have some proportional representation in their mixed systems, which ensures the representation of many political parties in the legislature. The political-institutional features helped both countries to have more discussions on the policy option of carbon taxes. In addition, both case studies helped to come to the conclusion that if Green or Left parties can form governments to attain decision-making power, the adoption of carbon taxes becomes highly likely.
Embargo
A Key Mechanism of Control: Communication Strategies and Preference Formation in the U.S. House of Representatives
(University of Oregon, 2024-08-07) Asberry, Craig; Tichenor, Daniel
This dissertation explores the origins and content of strategic communication in the House of Representatives. Social science literature has established that congressional communication is mediated by various factors: personal characteristics, constituency pressures, and institutional-contextual incentives. All of these variables change the prevalence and content of MC communication. The focus of this dissertation is to explore the determinants and flavors of congressional speech from a quantitative, text-as-data perspective. In short, why do members of Congress focus on the substantive policies that they do? And how does that change the content of their speech? The answers are nuanced. Personal characteristics seem to exert the broadest influence on how often members speak about certain policies, while constituency pressures and institutional-contextual incentives can exert strong, narrowly focused effects on the prevalence of speech by members. Differences in content seem to follow procedural or identity-based rhetorical strategies, representational or obfuscatory strategies, or brand management rhetorical strategies vis-à-vis a member’s posture within the institution of congress. Elucidating these dynamics provides a greater ability for scholars and citizens alike to hold public servants accountable to the American people and take effective action to correct decades of partisan polarization.
Open Access
Staging an Insurrection: The Application of Theatre and Memory on January 6th
(University of Oregon, 2024-08-07) Reanne, Jessica; Gash, Alison
In this dissertation, I apply the concepts of theatricality and cultural memory to the January 6 th insurrection. I suggest that read together, theatricality and cultural memory tell a compelling story about the motivations and impacts of the January 6 th insurrection, more than traditional partisanship analyses. I analyze three instances of memory building during and after the insurrection: the memorialization of Ashli Babbitt and the state’s commemoration of Lt. Byrd’s actions defending the Capitol; the history and use of American flags in American culture and their deployment during the insurrection; and finally, the use of ceremony by the state during Biden’s inauguration. These three cases highlight the convergences of cultural memory creation by the insurrectionists and by the state, both of which believe themselves to be the legitimate inheritor of America’s cultural memory and legacies. This dissertation includes previously published materials.
Open Access
Prospect Theory-Based Explanation of Majority Nationalist Mobilization: Cases of Russia and Kazakhstan
(University of Oregon, 2024-03-25) Tyan, Maxim; Parsons, Craig
The current dissertation has a dual purpose of developing a theory of majority nationalistmobilization and explaining substantive variation in levels of nationalist mobilization in post- Soviet region during the first two decades after the collapse of the Soviet Union, particularly in the country cases of Russia and Kazakhstan. The study begins by pointing out at the failure of major theoretical approaches to nationalism such as modernism and perennialism to account for a phenomenon of bottom-up majority nationalist mobilization, a variation in levels of which can be observed in these two countries through the period of 1990s-2000s. It then develops a theory of bottom-up majority nationalist mobilization based on the combination of insights from the cognitive perspective to ethnicity and prospect theory. Further, using qualitative cross-case and within-case analysis, the dissertation tests suggested theory against empirical evidence in cases of Russia and Kazakhstan and demonstrates that this framework provides better explanation to divergent mobilization outcomes in these countries then existing rational-instrumentalist and non-rationalist theoretical alternatives.
Open Access
Myths of Missile Defense: International Ambition Driven by Domestic Politics
(University of Oregon, 2024-03-25) Baker, Joshua; Cramer, Jane
This dissertation investigates the paradoxical revival of strategic missile defense, a resurgence notable for high economic, diplomatic, and strategic costs and a lack of imminent threats. Despite historically incurring substantial costs, including massive downstream costs, with more projected in the near future, it is fundamentally flawed, both technologically and strategically. It creates significant diplomatic hurdles in arms control, spurs arms races, incentivizes first-strike postures and countermeasures like MIRVing ICBMs, and creates a world where we are less safe with it than we were without it. This study challenges the idea that this resurgence is driven by legitimate national security needs, instead arguing that it is best understood as a form of overexpansion—a self-defeating policy of aggression. Although Jack Snyder's theory of Coalition logrolling provides insights into overexpansion, it falls short in explaining the specific dynamics of missile defense resurgence, particularly concerning the timing, involvement of actors without direct benefits, and the lack of effective democratic oversight. Using historical process tracing and organization theory, this dissertation uncovers that the resurgence is driven by an informal network of actors bound by resource dependencies, including financial connections, information exchanges, and personnel dynamics. These actors strategically leverage resources to ensure survival, mitigate uncertainty, resist autonomy infringements, and access necessary resources. This approach allows a more nuanced understanding of the resurgence's timing, accounting for shifts in resource distribution (financial and political) following exogenous events. The dissertation tracks how network actors strategically shaped their environment to benefit the network, employing tactics that transcended immediate personal gains. It highlights their efforts to manage uncertainties, manipulate organizational environments, and create demand for network-provided resources. The study examines strategies to buffer against environmental fluctuations, including strategic secrecy, information management, and practices for perpetual resource acquisition. Network actions that undermined international agreements for the network's advantage, while resisted by actors with minimal network ties, are also analyzed. The resurgence of strategic missile defense is best understood through an organization theory lens, focusing on resource dependencies and network behaviors. This perspective comprehensively explains the policy's revival, emphasizing an influential network's strategic actions and motivations within the US defense policy sphere.
Open Access
The Shadows of American Law: Enmity, Intersectionality and Police
(University of Oregon, 2024-01-09) freeman, kahina marie; Gash, Allison
This dissertation explores the concept of public enmity and its deployment at the founding, in the nation’s most pivotal state-building arenas: the courts, the military, and the emerging institutions of internal security. The Black Seminole people represented a perennial enemy bent on destroying the fabric of the fledgling nation through violence and atrocity. American tabloids valorized every act of violence committed for the sake of liberation as an act of heinous murder against innocent people. Jackson furthered these tropes in his few public speeches, utilizing the specter of Afro-Native violence to win the southern vote in 1828. Abraham, though never directly named, emerged as a scourge on American society bent on upending civilization. Jackson used his experiences as a military commander to justify the burgeoning of the militia system, which would give way to both slave patrols and the genocidal atrocities of the US Marshals during the frontier wars. This project seeks to accomplish three goals: establish a concrete definition of public enmity; identify how it operates as an invitation for a specific kind of state-building; highlight the work that it performs in specific institutional or policy spaces. I am motivated by what I argue is a missed opportunity to connect the development of police authority in the United States to the historical roots of public enmity. I argue that the conceptual work on police in American law would benefit from identifying the central role that enmity played in development of police authority in the Jacksonian era. I bridge policing to the public enmity narrative by presenting cases from the Jacksonian era and highlighting the crucial links between the development of a white nationalist ideology on the one hand, and the role of police authority in combatting national threats in the form of “internal enemies (Taylor, 2013).” I trace the debates on public authority during the Jacksonian era highlighting what prompted these debates, what populations were identified as enemies or threats to national sovereignty, and what institutions were mobilized to defend the nation. In the two cases that follow I highlight the relationship between enmity, sovereignty, and police authority.
Open Access
States of Detention: A Comparative Historical Analysis of Migration Crises to the United States
(University of Oregon, 2024-01-09) ellis, dustin; Tichenor, Daniel
What is a migration crisis? To answer this seemingly simple question, this study juxtaposes two migration crises that have profoundly shaped the character of American political institutions and the imaginations of liberal democratic politics. Migration, crisis or not, will be the primary issue driving major policy and state-market innovations for the next century, and may pose the ultimate test for liberal democracies facing new challenges in a rapidly changing world. Proffering a diagnosis of our contemporary immigration and border politics for the purposes of thinking more holistically about the past, present, and future, this study maps out the origins of crises from colonialism to the 21st century through a comparative historical analysis that uses eclectic data collected from archives both physical and digital. The results are clear, we cannot ignore the deeply interconnected histories and geographies of the United States, Cuba, Haiti, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras if we are to understand the origins of migration crises and their implications in reproducing a future wrought with familiar paradoxical tensions between America as an idea, and America as a place.
Open Access
Good Order and Discipline: The Politics of Exclusion in the American Military
(University of Oregon, 2022-10-04) Rivera, John; Cramer, Jane
How do systemic and ideational factors shape the composition and effectiveness of the American military? From the American Revolution to the present, the American military has regularly established informal and formal discriminatory military personnel policies that have limited the availability of its military manpower, diminished its ability to fill critical and undermanned military occupations, harmed unit cohesion, reduced retention of vital talent, and made it difficult for individual service members to be the best they could be at their jobs. I contribute to the debate within security studies literature concerning the formation of military doctrine by including a focus on military personnel policies with an extensive focus on the American military’s historical treatment of African American men, gay men and lesbians, women, and transgender individuals. Existing literature suggests that national security is an area of state behavior where we should least expect ideational variables to trump systemic ones, and where states are least likely to make national security decisions that act against a state’s material self-interest. This dissertation demonstrates the United States has frequently done so and placed the enforcement of prejudicial ideas and beliefs about certain groups of individuals above national security. In a mixed-methods research study, I exhaustively review existing literature on the relationship between race, sexual orientation, gender, and transgender identity with military service, conducted archival research from the Congressional Record and various Department of Defense records, and conducted forty-five semi-structured personal interviews with civilian and military elites as well as individual military service members. My findings demonstrate that discriminatory military personal policies are entirely ideational in origin and are neither a function of systemic pressures nor military necessity and are both harmful to military effectiveness and antithetical to national security. The lengthy historical content across discriminatory military personnel policies shaped by prejudicial ideas and beliefs about race, sexual orientation, gender, and transgender identity also strongly demonstrates that elites’ justifications for these policies are strikingly similar across time and the harmful effects of individual policies are not isolated events.
Open Access
Autonomous Problem-Solving and the Creation of Community-Controlled Housing Alternatives in the United States
(University of Oregon, 2022-10-04) Farrington, Alex; Gash, Alison
In this dissertation project, I introduce the concept of autonomous problem-solving and apply it to housing struggles in the United States. Autonomous problem-solving is a mode of collective action in which everyday people experiment with self-organized and self-implemented solutions to pressing problems in their community. I show how this concept highlights a set of empirical cases that contemporary scholarship on public problem-solving has failed to address. I then analyze two cases in which organizers used autonomous problem-solving to grapple with housing precarity in their communities. I examine the creation of the first community land trust by civil rights activists in Georgia in 1969 and the creation of Dignity Village (one of the first autonomous houseless villages) in Portland in 2001. In both cases, participants generated novel forms of community-controlled housing by reconfiguring conventional property relations in creative ways.
Open Access
Political Determinants of Covid-19 Mortality; Factional Politics in Vietnam; Rising Media Enclave Extremism
(University of Oregon, 2022-10-04) Nguyen, Thuy; Vu, Tuong
My dissertation consists of three independent projects. The first one investigates possible relationships between certain macro-systemic political variables and Covid mortality rates. Using multilevel modeling, I analyze countries’ trajectories of Covid mortality rates between March 2020 and January 2022. I found that countries with a federal system, on average, tend to have higher death rates than those in a unitary system. Democracy is found to be negatively associated with Covid mortality overall, but democracy’s effects on the trajectory of Covid rates depend on what subgroup of countries are considered. Government effectiveness persists as a significant factor that is negatively associated with Covid deaths. In countries where people have higher trust in government, the curves of death tolls tend to be flatter. The second project addresses the debate on authoritarian resilience with evidence from Vietnam. The dominant view in the debate focuses on political institutions and argues that institutions help dictators resolve “the problem of authoritarian power-sharing”. I test two main claims of this dominant view: institutions facilitate power access and rule-based power succession. I found that these processes are rather superficial in the case of Vietnam and show how the persistence of factional politics, coupled with the historical context of the country, are embedded in current politics. In contrast to the expectation of institutionalist scholars, top leaders were not bound by retirement age limits. Furthermore, evidence indicates that hometown ties constitute rigid political factions. The third project examines the rise of media enclave extremism, showing how it successfully mobilized a historically inactive ethnic population into the far-right circle. My research provides insight into the production side of media enclave extremism in an ethnic minority news outlet on the far-right, The Epoch Times. I conduct a discourse-historical analysis of its political news articles and identify two main discursive strategies. First, the outlet links their traditional enemy, the Chinese Communist Party, with US political entities such as the Democratic Party, Liberals, the mainstream media, and “bad” immigrants. Second, The Epoch Times groups itself with US right-wing media, “good” immigrants, naturalized citizens, and conservatives.
Open Access
The Clothing Curse: Institutional Causes And Political Consequences Of Clothing Export Dependence In Developing Countries
(University of Oregon, 2022-05-10) Rahman, Mohammad Shafiqur; Vu, Tuong
Readymade garments (RMG) or clothing industry is the most important manufacturing export for poor and developing countries. Low capital requirement, high labor intensity and simple technology make the industry a natural starting base for internationally competitive manufacturing. In the last seventy years of growth in RMG exports, many formerly underdeveloped countries embarked on manufacturing export-led economic development with a start in RMG exports. These countries rapidly expanded and diversified their manufacturing sectors and climbed up the ladder of economic development. However, in recent decades, some of the leading clothing exporting countries seem to be stuck in long-term concentration in clothing exports without expected diversification and upgrading in industries. These clothing export-dependent countries also witnessed increasing authoritarianism in their ruling political regimes. This dissertation seeks to explain these phenomena in political economy of developing countries with theoretical arguments, cross-country empirical analysis and case studies. The main argument of the paper has three basic parts. First, distinctive sectoral characteristics of the RMG export industry make the sector a less suitable launching pad for industrial upgrading and diversification. Second, if a developing country where RMG export industry has become established, lacks state capacity to implement industrial policy, then the country is likely to fall into extended dependence on RMG export. Third, extended apparel export dependency changes the distribution of power among political and economic elites to the extent that democracy reversal by incumbent takeover becomes more likely. Although the dissertation focuses on RMG industry, the building blocks of the arguments are generalizable to characteristics of all mainstream manufacturing and service export sectors, and institutional quality in developing countries. Thus, the arguments and explanations have extensive ramifications in political economy of development for poor countries.
Open Access
The Good Student, the Bad Student, and the Celtic Tiger: The Role of National Identity and Responses to the Troika in Europe
(University of Oregon, 2021-09-13) O'Hare, Kevin; Parsons, Craig
In response to crises of unsustainable debt, which left Greece, Ireland, and Portugal locked out of bond markets, each country received assistance from the “Troika” (European Commission, European Central Bank, and IMF). They received loans in return for implementing austerity policies and liberal structural reforms. All three countries suffered painful cuts and massive recessions, but their citizens and leaders reacted differently. Greece experienced significant political and social resistance and ultimately needed a second program. The Irish rejected the government that requested the bailout and elected a new government that implemented the Troika program with little deviation from the original plan and exited its Troika program on time. Ireland also saw very little labor unrest, and limited protest. The Portuguese elected strong advocates of the Troika’s policies and saw an initial 16-month period with moderate levels of protest and strikes, before a more intense period ensued. Despite increased social pressure, the Portuguese government weathered a near collapse while maintaining its commitment to the Troika program and exited its Troika program on schedule. Many have argued that the prevalence of “neoliberal” ideas, institutional factors, or differences in the difficulty of the individual programs can account for these responses, but all of these explanations fall short in various ways. This dissertation argues that these responses were influenced by particular aspects of each country’s national identity, especially as each relates to the European Union. In this dissertation, I show that each country can be seen to have very different types of national identities, with the most prominent features of each identity being themselves a result of the historical context of each country. Additionally, the most prominent aspects of each country’s identity were the least contested in each society. Viewed through the lens of national identity, the responses from Greece, Ireland, and Portugal not only reproduced central elements of the content of each country’s national identity, but the identities interacted in real time, with Ireland and Portugal highlighting their differences from Greece, and Portugal actively striving to be more like Ireland. The interaction between identities further reinforced each country’s responses to their respective Troika programs.
Open Access
Empirical Hobbes: Science and Political Theory in the Works of Thomas Hobbes
(University of Oregon, 2021-09-13) Harding, Ryan; Baumgold, Deborah
This dissertation adjudicates the role of empiricism in the science and political theory of Thomas Hobbes. It accords “empiricism” status as a separate, coherent motivation, apart from others (like geometricization), which helped to orientate Hobbes, shaping his political theory and filtering into his scientific ideas and practices. The dissertation demonstrates that experience played a more dynamic, if misunderstood role in early Hobbesian science than is accounted by interpreters, and disaggregates the different meanings Hobbes gave “experience,” particularly in The Elements of Law (1640) and in the first (1642) and second (1647) editions of De cive. This demonstration culminates in a treatment of Leviathan (1651) that challenges methodological interpretations, and offers, instead, that the text’s exposition was, in part, crafted to address a pair of substantive concerns about the effects of un-empirical speech and causal myopia in human decision-making. The dissertation also considers the relationship between serial composition, the method Hobbes used to construct many of his texts, and his empiricism. The study of this relationship yields two principal findings. First, serial composition encouraged changes in Hobbes’s empiricism, prompting the development of new empirical concepts, analytical-empirical strategies, and changes in his political methodology. Second, the practice resulted in layered, bricolage texts, all responding to different features of Hobbes’s world, and in which are embedded different understandings of what the empirical study of that world entails. The empirical “drift” of Hobbes’s works potentially makes assembling some set of them into a whole and the search for systematicity in Hobbes’s political theory a futile task. Thus, the dissertation questions the interpretive utility of the methodological statements elaborated in De corpore (1655). A close analysis of the statements also offers an entry-point into a discussion of Hobbes’s practice of retrojecting new, emergent understandings of science and scientific method back onto previous texts. This practice of retrojection, the analysis shows, went hand-in-hand with and, to an extent, stemmed from Hobbes’s use of serial composition, combined with his empiricism. The dissertation also features a revised chronology of the Elementa Philosophiae, Hobbes’s plan for a trilogy of texts that would elaborate the elements of his philosophy.
Open Access
"The Queer Queers": Returning to the Radical Roots of Queer Liberation through Prison Abolition
(University of Oregon, 2021-04-29) Francisco, Nicole; Gash, Alison
As a phenomenological inquiry, this project is first and foremost concerned with human experiences of incarceration, queerness, and the lifeworlds that grow up in the overlay. I extend Kendall Thomas’ contention that antisodomy laws legitimize homophobic violence to say that even after their renunciation, antiqueer laws have a resonant effect and continue to legitimize antiqueer violence. Through the narrative of Jason Lydon, Black and Pink’s founder, this dissertation seeks to understand the worldmaking project of Black and Pink. Black and Pink produces an interstitial politics, growing up through the cracks between the criminal justice movement, which fails to engage queers in their fight for carceral justice, and the mainstream LGBTQ movement, which neglects queer prisoners in their fight for queer liberation. Through letter correspondence and a newspaper publication, Black and Pink members inside and outside of prison connect with each other, forging survival relationships and survival community, to respond to threats to queer survival. In a society that assumes state punitive mechanisms as necessary, Black and Pink offers a different path toward survival. Through joining concepts of Dean Spade’s mutual aid and adrienne maree brown’s emergent strategy, and employing them as social movement theory, I demonstrate how the intimate bonds between Black and Pink members cultivate connective action. Black and Pink is a complex organization working to confront carceral antiqueer violence on the micro, mezzo, and macro levels. Black and Pink produces a “fugitive” knowledge that serves as empirical evidence implicating the state as a major thread to queer survival. The stories authored by queer prisoners reveal that systems-based approaches for mitigating harm and violence not only fail to do so, but are exploited and produce altogether new antiqueer violence. When we name the violence of prisons as state-sanctioned homophobia and transphobia, it becomes imperative for queer movements to recognize that it does not make sense to seek remedy from these institutions that are themselves foundries of queer violence. Ultimately, I understand Black and Pink as a project of survival which arrives at abolition through an embodied course.
Open Access
Faith and Change in Communities of Peril
(University of Oregon, 2021-04-27) Musselman, Malori; Lowndes , Joseph
While social and climate scientists alike have attempted to present the crucial facts of climate change, their urgent warnings have seemingly resulted in comparatively little political action. In this project, I investigate the intersections of faith, environmental justice, and speculative futures in both Christian and popular literature and media in the US. Utilizing analysis based in interpretive methodologies and my own experience as a political educator and organizer, I analyze specific narratives in works of faith and fiction—each attempting to address environmental apocalypse, collective struggles for survival, and the processes of building livable futures—as works of political theory. I examine literary and cultural texts and consider ideas, values, beliefs, and strategies for surviving and adapting in the face of varying potent apocalypses. I specifically explore narratives in sermons and scriptural interpretations, novels, televised series, and podcasts as well as the strategies and processes presented to achieve articulated visions of the future. Additionally, I examine how storyteller-activists are defining and mobilizing specific communities in the face of climate disaster. My project provides a novel account of the intricate relationships between storytelling and prophecy, embodied experience, and on the ground political organizing in the US. My research seeks to identify practical strategies in hopes of facilitating movement through melancholic lamentation and doom and into sustained, creative political organizing.
Open Access
Electoral Revolutions: A Comparative Study of Rapid Changes in Voter Turnout
(University of Oregon, 2020-12-08) Lioy, Alberto; Kauffman, Craig
In the political science scholarship on democratic elections, aggregate voter turnout is assumed to be stable, and depends upon an acquired habit across the electorate. Large turnout variations in a short period of time are therefore usually attributed to negligible contextual factors. This work establishes that such variations are more frequent than commonly thought and creates a novel theoretical framework and methodological approach for systematically studying rapid changes in voter turnout across Western Europe and Latin America. I attribute dramatic changes in voters’ participation, labeled electoral revolutions, to transformations in the party system competition and institutional credibility happening inside the national political context. Methodologically, it applies a detailed qualitative codebook to large samples of broad diffusion newspapers to trace the evolution of politics before the watershed elections that took place in France (1967), Great Britain (2001), Costa Rica (1998) and Honduras (2013). It finds that voter turnout dramatically increases in the presence of strengthening opposition parties, more credible institutions and a more differentiated party systems. Conversely, electoral participation is gravely damaged when opposition formations become weaker and more divided, when the administration loses popular support and political parties become less ideologically diverse. Finally, it establishes electoral revolutions as substantially important political phenomena with deep political and societal consequences, which policymakers and scholars choose to neglect at their own risk.
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.
Open Access
Investigating the Effects of the Global Economy on Policy and Practice in Developing Countries: Foreign Direct Investment and the Environment
(University of Oregon, 2020-09-24) Neafie, Jessica; Mitchell, Ronald
Is foreign direct investment (FDI) good for the environment in developing countries? Every year the number of foreign investors in developing countries grows, and its importance leads developing nations to make the political environment more hospitable for foreign investors that seek access to natural resources and new markets. I contribute to the debate over the influence of globalization on the environment by asking: Do the effects of multinational corporations (MNCs) on a developing country’s environment reflect the commitment of the source country to environmental protection? Existing literature suggests that international economic flows are channels by which countries providing investment financing can influence the regulatory standards in the recipient country. This dissertation explores the possibility of a source effect, where countries receiving FDI begin to reflect the environmental practices of those MNCs providing FDI. In a mixed-methods research study, I use content analysis and large-n quantitative analysis to evaluate (i) what distinguishes the effects on environmental protection of FDI from multi-national corporations (MNCs) from different source countries; and, (ii) how does FDI from MNCs from different source countries lead to different outcomes in recipient countries. I find preliminary evidence that suggests that levels of development of the source countries of FDI significantly influence whether FDI improves or degrades environmental quality in recipient countries. I demonstrate that the increasing flow of FDI from developing countries is leading to pressures for and evidence of declining environmental standards and outcomes in recipient countries. This dissertation provides preliminary evidence supporting a new perspective on international economic flows, showing a ‘source effect’ in which the strength of concern regarding and interest in protecting the environment in the source country for FDI has an impact on the degree to which environmental outcomes are promoted in recipient countries.
Open Access
Never At Home: Immigrant Integration in Denmark and Sweden
(University of Oregon, 2020-02-27) Brown, Crystal; Cramer, Jane
This dissertation is a comparative analysis of immigration and integration policies in Denmark and Sweden. I compared these countries because they take different policy approaches to integration; Denmark uses assimilationist policies while Sweden takes a multicultural approach, but they are getting similar results. According to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OCED) in 2015, both countries had high poverty levels for non-Western immigrants relative to the native populations—a surprise considering that they have robust social welfare systems. Relying on more than 12 months of fieldwork in Denmark and Sweden, the central goal of this study was to understand why the differences in policies produced a similar outcome of poverty levels. I did a historical analysis of the countries, I collected data using a survey questionnaire, and I did participant observations through field research. The findings from my research indicated connections between nation-building, belonging, historical myths, the perception of non-Western immigrants, and institutional barriers. I found that social practices trumped integration policies, which created similarities in outcomes.