Political Science Theses and Dissertations

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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
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
Avoiding the Arab Spring? The Politics of Legitimacy in King Mohammed VI's Morocco
(University of Oregon, 2013-10-03) Abney, Margaret; Parsons, Craig
During the 2011 Arab Spring protests, the Presidents of Egypt and Tunisia lost their seats as a result of popular protests. While protests occurred in Morocco during the same time, King Mohammed VI maintained his throne. I argue that the Moroccan king was able to maintain his power because of factors that he has because he is a king. These benefits, including dual religious and political legitimacy, additional control over the military, and a political situation that make King Mohammed the center of the Moroccan political sphere, are not available to the region's presidents.
Open Access
'Bad Gypsies' and 'Good Roma': Constructing Ethnic and Political Identities through Education in Russia and Hungary
(University of Oregon, 2014-10-17) Dunajeva, Jekatyerina; Parsons, Craig
This dissertation seeks to unpack how the two dominant images--'bad Gypsies' and 'good Roma'--developed and are mobilized in formal and informal educational institutions in Hungary and Russia and how those are perceived by Roma/Gypsies themselves. The former ethnic category has evolved over centuries, since Gypsies were increasingly defined as the quintessential 'Other', associated with resistance to authority, criminality, lack of education and discipline, and backwardness. The latter image has been advanced over the last few decades to counter negative stereotypes latent in the `Gypsy' label. Various non-state actors are promoting a new image, that of proud, empowered, and educated 'good Roma'. Mobilization of both images is distinctly recognizable in schools--it is in formal and informal educational institutions where the 'bad Gypsy' image is most visibly sustained and reproduced, while these sites are also supposed to be indisputable tools of empowerment and positive identity building. Relying on approximately 12 months of fieldwork in Hungary and Russia, the study pursues three goals. First, it examines the origins, institutionalization, and deployment of ethnic labels used to categorize Roma. I show that two images, `bad Gypsies' and `good Roma that are contradictory in content, were reified and essentialized. Second, it investigates the mechanisms of imbuing Roma youth with normative values of these ethnic labels in formal and informal educational institutions through school instructions, curricular and extra-curricular activities, disciplinary practices, and discourse. Third, it assesses Roma response and techniques of coping to the given essentialized images about their group identity. Overall, the dissertation is composed of two sections: a historical and contemporary examination of Roma identity formation and ethnic labeling practices. I interrogate issues of nationhood, belonging, and identity politics surrounding the Roma minority by in depth study of identity formation and construction of exclusionary nationhood in Russia and Hungary. Any attempt to understand contemporary European political, economic, and social conditions cannot ignore the Roma, an issue that requires an urgent sustainable solution. Improving Roma living conditions and elimination of prejudice against Roma requires a holistic approach and a comprehensive understanding, which is the ambition that this study pursues.
Open Access
Behavioral and Neurobehavioral Features of "Sociality"
(University of Oregon, 2013-07-11) Lukinova, Evgeniya; Myagkov, Mikhail
Standard models of decision making fail to explain the nature of the various important observed patterns of human behavior, e.g. "economic irrationality," demand for "sociality," risk tolerance and the preference of egalitarian outcomes. Moreover, the majority of models does not account for the change in the strategies of the human beings playing with other human beings as opposed to playing against a machine. This dissertation analyzes decision making and its peculiar characteristics in the social environment under conditions of risk and uncertainty. My main goal is to investigate why human beings behave differently in a social setting and how the social domain affects their decision-making process. I develop the theory of "sociality" and exploit experimental and brain-imaging methodologies to test and refine the competing theories of individual decision making in the context of the social setting. To explain my theory I propose an economic utility function for a risk facing decision-maker that accounts for existing theories of utility defined on the outcomes and simply adds another term to account for the decision-making process in the social environment. For the purposes of my dissertation I define "sociality" as the economic component of the utility function that accounts for social environment, a function of a process rather than of an outcome. I follow on the breakthrough work by evolutionary psychologists in emphasizing the importance of the substantive context of the social decisions. The model I propose allows one to think about situations in which individuals may care for more than their narrowly-defined material interest and their decision may be driven by "sociality" and other non-monetary considerations. The "sociality" component of the economic utility function demonstrates the fact that individuals do not only care about outcomes but also about the processes which lead to these outcomes. In my empirical chapters I put the theory to the test in a series of laboratory experiments carried out in the United States, New Zealand and Russia and a series of fMRI and computer experiments executed at the University of Oregon.
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.
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Between Guns and Butter: Cold War Presidents, Agenda-Setting, and Visions of National Strength
(University of Oregon, 2015-08-18) Strickler, Jeremy; Tichenor, Daniel
This project investigates how the emergent ideological, institutional, and political commitments of the national defense and security state shape the domestic programmatic agendas of modern presidents. Applying a historical and developmental analysis, I trace this dynamic from its origin in the twin crises of the Great Depression and World War II to examine how subsequent presidents since Franklin D. Roosevelt have navigated the intersecting politics of this warfare -welfare nexus. I use original, archival research to examine communications between the president and his staff, cabinet members, administration officials, and Congressional leaders to better appreciate how the interaction of these dual political commitments are reflected in the formulation and promotion of the president’s budgetary requests and domestic policy initiatives. More directly, I focus on the relationship between the national security politics of the Cold War and the efforts of Presidents Truman and Eisenhower to support their objectives in either the expansion or retrenchment of the New Deal-liberal welfare state. My research suggests that Cold War concerns occasionally aided the growth of the welfare state in areas such as public health and federal aid to education, while at other times defense and security anxieties provided the backdrop for presidential efforts to diminish the political capacity of the welfare state. More specifically, I find that both Truman and Eisenhower constructed visions of national strength which framed their initiatives in national defense and social welfare as interrelated goals. In the end, I argue that the changing institutions, ideologies, and international commitments of the warfare state present both opportunities and challenges for presidents to articulate political visions in service of domestic policy advancement.
Open Access
Beyond liberal discourse: Meta-ideological hegemony and narrative alternatives
(University of Oregon, 2010-12) Anili, Bruno, 1977-
This project presents a critical engagement with the concept of ideology. It advances the view that political ideologies can be regarded as distinctive narrative styles and as such can be analyzed in their peculiar discursive formations. It specifically concentrates on liberalism, which I regard as the dominant ideology in much of "the West" today. My study contributes to the scholarship at the intersection between contemporary political theory, theories of language, and comparative politics. By employing simple instruments of semiotics I show how the discourse of liberalism organizes the production and deployment of political meaning. In particular, I argue that a critical engagement with the texts of thinkers ranging from John Locke to John Stuart Mill and John Rawls can contribute to unveiling the deep structures of liberal discourse. I maintain that these structures constitute liberalism as a "grammar" which operates by organizing political content around key concepts like individual agency, rationality, and anthropocentrism. Crucially, liberalism also acts as a "meta-ideology" capable of expressing alternative positions through its versatile grammatical infrastructure. I analyze contemporary theorists like Will Kymlicka, Robert Putnam, and Philip Pettit, and argue that they engage in similar intellectual projects, incorporating elements of communitarianism and republicanism in a liberal framework. In the second part of my dissertation I inquire into the possibility of alternative meta-ideological constellations. In particular, I focus on the contribution of Jean-Luc Nancy: I argue that his characterization of "being-in-common" as the fundamental position of existence can replace the liberal tenet of individualism as the basic assumption on human nature. Finally, I ground these abstract reflections in the concrete reality of the community of Badolato, in southern Italy, where locals and immigrants alike seem to understand and organize their relationality outside of a paradigm of liberal toleration. I present the results of the ethnographic research that I conducted in Badolato and I characterize that experience of encounter with the other as an example of the practices of hospitality envisioned by the late Jacques Derrida.
Open Access
Black Power, Red Limits: Kwame Nkrumah and American Cold War Responses to Black Empowerment Struggles
(University of Oregon, 2008-12) Valk, Adrienne van der, 1975-
Scholars of American history have chronicled ways in which federal level response to the Civil Rights Movement in the United States was influenced by the ideological and strategic conflict between Western and Soviet Bloc countries. This thesis explores the hypothesis that the same Cold War dynamics shown to shape domestic policy toward black liberation were also influential in shaping foreign policy decisions regarding U.S. relations with recently decolonized African countries. To be more specific, the United States was under pressure to demonstrate an agenda of freedom and equality on the world stage, but its tolerance of independent black action was stringently limited when such action included sympathetic association with "radical" factions. The case of the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations' relationship with the popular and highly visible leader Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana during the time of the Congo crisis is the primary case used in the exploration of this hypothesis.
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
Building Markets? Neoliberalism, Competitive Federalism, and the Enduring Fragmentation of the American Market
(University of Oregon, 2018-09-06) Springer, Benedikt; Parsons, Craig
Why do interstate barriers persist and proliferate in the US and go unnoticed by neoliberal policy-makers, while in other places, like the EU, they get systematically addressed? I challenge the common assumption that the EU is trying but failing to emulate the single market created in the US a long time ago. I show that in many ways, the EU has adopted more liberal rules for the exchange of goods and services across its members states than the US has in effect across its state borders. Focused on the US, I assemble a wide-ranging set of evidence for this assertion ranging from federal policies pursued by conservative administrations since the 1980s and conservative think tank scholarship to an in-depth study of mobility and market barriers in the construction industry. To explain this, I develop two arguments. Firstly, I argue that American and European free-marketeers fundamentally conceptualize markets differently, with American conservatives seeing them as the natural product of government-non-intervention, and European officials seeing them has a deliberate creation of central authority. This leads to different market building strategies with differential effectiveness. At the same time, I argue that the fragmentation and decentralization of the party and interest representation system in the US incentivizes state by state and sector by sector thinking and dis-incentivizes political action—leaving the bigger picture, i.e. interstate barriers, unchanged. Especially interest groups struggle to articulate preferences for inter-state or cross-sectoral cooperation due to organizational incentives. Applying a Bayesian process-tracing logic to mostly within-case and some cross-case evidence, I test conventional structural and institutional theories against my account. Tracing the lack of mobilization of conservative policy-makers and agenda-setters around federal market authority since the 1980s, and interviews with firms, regulators, and legislators about interstate barriers in the construction industry, clearly demonstrate how their imagination of markets prevents a single market building agenda top-down while institutional structures prevent it bottom-up. This is a novel argument, speaking to broader debates about the socially-constructed nature of markets. Studying the US shows that interstate barriers and local protectionism flourish when no central authority deliberately creates ‘free markets’.
Open Access
Building More Bombs: The Discursive Emergence of US Nuclear Weapons Policy
(University of Oregon, 2018-09-06) Valdez, John; Cramer, Jane
This dissertation investigates the social construction and discursive emergence of US nuclear weapons policy against the backdrop of the nuclear taboo and its associated anti-nuclear discourse. The analysis is drawn from poststructuralism with a focus on the discourses that construct the social world and its attendant “common sense,” and makes possible certain policies and courses of action while foreclosing others. This methodology helps overcome the overdetermined nature of foreign policy, or its tendency to be driven simultaneously by the international strategic environment, the domestic political environment, and powerful domestic organizations, and while being shaped and delimited by the discourses associated with the nuclear taboo. I apply this method to three different cases of presidential administration policymaking: Eisenhower, Reagan, and George W. Bush. In each, the analysis illuminates the coherent discourses that emerged, crystallized, and either became policy, or were usurped by competing discourses and their associated policies. I follow the actions of key actors as they stitched together existing discourses in new ways to create meaning for nuclear weapons and the US arsenal, as well as to limit what could and should be done with that arsenal. The case studies reveal the content of the strategic international, domestic political, organizational, and normative bases of US nuclear weapons policy. These results suggest that most challenges to the nuclear policy status quo emerge from new presidents whose own discourse is built upon personal conviction and critiques of their predecessors. Upon taking office, these sources compete with discourses emerging from organizations, especially the nuclear weapons complex, and anti-nuclear forces including: activists, the scientific community, the international public, US allied governments, and the US public. It was this political conflict and confrontation that made possible the pattern of nuclear weapons policy that characterized each administration. This work points to the strength of the nuclear taboo, and the effort that must be expended for its associated discourses to impact presidential policymaking. This insight provides an opening for managing the nuclear threat posed by the Trump administration’s new nuclear weapons policy.
Open Access
Building Stable Governments in Post-Ethnic Civil War Societies: The Importance of Community Policing
(University of Oregon, 2019-01-11) Meechan, Shawna; Parsons, Craig
States recovering from violent ethnic conflict face many challenges in trying to rebuild. Primary among these challenges is how to best provide for the security of the people. In states that choose democratic regimes, security must be provided by a civilian police force. One major challenge in the process of post-ethnic conflict rebuilding is addressing any conceptions within the community that the police are biased against marginalized groups in society. This is often particularly difficult in post-ethnic conflict states where the police have been associated, fairly or not, with one side of the conflict. In such situations, how do the police gain the confidence of the community so that policing is seen as legitimate and fair? This dissertation combines the literature on post-ethnic conflict rebuilding with the considerable literature on community policing to argue that implementing community policing may be the solution to this problem. Broadly speaking, community policing embraces the concept that the work of the police is not separate from the community but should be approached as a collaborative partnership between the police and the community they serve. This requires community input and active participation in policing at every stage from problem identification to idea formation and implementation to evaluation and reform. This style of policing builds relationships between the police and the community and works to develop community confidence in the police. This argument is evaluated through one in-depth study and one initial assessment of states that have attempted to implement a form of community policing after ethnic conflict: Northern Ireland following their ‘Troubles’ and Kenya after their 2007 post-election violence respectively. Two specific conclusions arise from this study. First, the adaptive nature of community policing enables the police to build community confidence through policing practice that is responsive to the needs of the specific communities being served. Second, the symbolism surrounding the police has a strong effect on individuals’ abilities to acknowledge or accept police reform in post-ethnic conflict states.
Open Access
The Caucusing Groups of the United Nations – An Examination of Their Attitudes Toward the Organization
(University of Oregon, 1964-03) Vincent, Jack Ernest
This dissertation has two basic purposes: ( 1 ) to describe certain attitude patterns toward the United nations by the delegate members of Caucasian groups within the organization and (to closed parentheses to test a hypothesis concerning these patterns. The descriptive component is intended to supplement political science literature concerning the Caucasian groups of the United Nations. Although Thomas Hovet, Jr. Has made a study of the voting records of caucusing groups in his book Bloc Politics in the United Nations, no one, so far, as attempted to ascertain attitudinal differences between the groups. It is apparent that attitudes are not the only important set of variables in the (present or future) behavior patterns at the United Nations. Every discussion, therefore, of the ramification of these patterns must be considered prefaced by the phrase: “to the extent delegate attitudes are pertinent.” It is assumed that these attitudes are pertinent. This assumption is made because delegates ( 1 ) frequently make decisions without directions from their home governments, ( 2 ) supply information to their home governments and hence their personal opinions are probably reflected in this intelligence, and ( 3 ) are frequently asked for their advice when home governments compile instructions. Therefore, a presentation of delegate attitudes may facilitate an understanding of the United Nations.
Open Access
The China Lobby: A Study of a Foreign Policy Pressure Group
(1953-06) Sahr, Morris G.
Open Access
The City Manager in the Community: An Exploratory Study
(University of Oregon, 1959-06) Field, Gary R.
This thesis cannot approach the magnitude of the research project suggested in the preceeding several paragraphs. A more manageable problem, and seemingly a necessary step leading to a more critical examination of city manager government, will be set forth here, however. The starting point of this study is the writer's surmise that the doctrines and concepts of the International City Manager's Association do not serve as an adequate or realistic tool, or model, by which the behavior or activities of city managers can be analyzed or understood. Before presenting what might be termed the occupation's self-conception, or its public image, in Chapter IV, two narratives of a community's experience with city manager government will be related. The first narrative describes several conflict situations Involving the adoption of the manager plan and the hiring and dismissal of several managers. The second narrative directs attention to the process of policy formation in the community. In this narrative annexation serves as the specific policy question in which two city managers in the same community were involved. In Chapter V the writer will present material which can be used as the basis for a more realistic analysis of manager government. Material from public administration and sociology will be used in this critique of the public image of city manager government. The two narratives« stressing conflict and the process of policy formation, will be used as the "anchor" for the more theoretical material. Finally, in the last chapter of the study, the writer will summarize the material which has been set forth, and make more explicit some critical thoughts about the possible results of manager government.
Open Access
Coalition Building and Cooperation Between Organized Labor and Immgrant Day Laborers in Portland, OR
(University of Oregon, 2011-06) Cesario, Loryn Nicolle, 1984-
This project explores the factors contributing to and hindering coalition building and cooperation between immigrant day laborers and the building trade unions in Portland, Oregon. The research is based on interviews with local labor and worker center leaders and an examination of public records and media discourse. It draws from a theoretical framework informed by Stuart Hall, Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe and their work on identity politics in new social movements. The research concludes that the lack of full success in this case was the result of a conflicting message that conveyed to workers that they shared a similar identity, while at the same time that they labored in separate industries. As a result, no shared identity was ever established and organized labor continued to view immigrant workers as outsiders.
Open Access
A comparative assessment of deliberative claims: The Health Services Commission, the Oregon Watershed Enhancement Board, and New Community Meeting I and II
(University of Oregon, 2009-12) Smith, Ryan Atkinson, 1976-
Considerable interest has emerged recently within U.S. policy scholarship toward deliberative democracy and its potential viability as a form of alternative democratic governance in resolving persistent policy dilemmas. Despite these claims, the deliberative scholarship is an empirically understudied field. Instead, deliberative theory is usually normatively articulated as an alternative and preferable form of governance. Secondly and to a lesser extent, deliberative scholars assert that deliberative governance can work and does exist. In these cases, often extensive deliberative claims are made but not carefully tested according to explicitly identified deliberative criteria and measures. This dissertation contributes to the systematic testing of deliberative theory that has only recently begun. Theoretically, this dissertation fits within the gulf between ideal and non-ideal deliberative scholarship. This dissertation draws from multiple sources, such as interviews, direct observation, meeting minutes, and secondary sources, to systematically evaluate and then comparatively assesses the evidence in four untested exemplar deliberative cases that took place within seemingly intractable policy issues. These cases are Oregon health care reform (OHCR) surrounding the Health Services Commission (HSC), watershed restoration and management in Oregon surrounding the Oregon Watershed Enhancement Board (OWEB), and the New Community Meetings in Lane County and the greater Eugene-Springfield metro area surrounding the issues of "gay rights" and sustainable development (NCMI/II). These cases exhibit significant variation along explanatory and outcomes variables. Overall, the findings in this dissertation suggest that at times ideal deliberative scholars establish criteria and measures that are impractical or even unnecessary for robust deliberation. The evidence in these cases suggests that non-ideal deliberative standards appear capable of yielding deliberative outcomes that are perceived by participant stakeholders in adequate terms.
Open Access
Consensus and Confusion: An Examination of Public Salience and Misperceptions of U.S. Budget Deficits and National Debt
(University of Oregon, 2018-09-06) Faherty, Michael; Tichenor, Dan
A belief that reducing the budget deficit is important has long been a matter of exceptional public consensus in the U.S. As a political issue, the budget deficit is often the framing issue around major policy debates in Washington D.C. However, the public has deep and fundamental misperceptions about the deficit, which exceed misperceptions relating to other economic indicators. This dynamic diminishes the degree to which the public can send meaningful signals to its representatives on budgetary preferences, and weakens the democratic accountability of office-holders. Polling also indicates that mainstream economic opinion about the benefits of federal stimulus in a slow economy lacks credibility with the public. Therefore, understanding the nature and predictors of public misperceptions about the deficit, as well as the predictors of public salience with regard to budget imbalance, is important for understanding modern American politics. This dissertation improves upon the current understanding of public opinion on the budget deficit through a longitudinal examination of public salience of the budget deficit issue spanning the George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations, and the development and analysis of a survey that resolves open questions about public perceptions of the issue. I find that public misperceptions on the deficit run deeper than previously understood, are significantly predicted by an individual’s approval or disapproval of the president, and are a significant predictor of increased salience of the issue. I also find that among various theories of the predictors of salience of the budget deficit issue to the public, agenda-setting by the media, a durable issue ownership for reducing the deficit in favor of Republicans, and substantially higher salience of the issue for men, have the most explanatory power for understanding public salience of the issue. I also find that variation in the relative size of the deficit itself is not a significant predictor of public salience, exemplifying how public opinion on the issue is alienated from democratic accountability.
Open Access
Contesting Democracy: A Relational Approach to the Study of Regime Change in Turkey Under the JDP Governments Until 2013
(University of Oregon, 2016-11-21) Çelebi, Mehmet; Parsons, Craig
The history of Turkey since 2002 when it has been governed by Justice and Development Party (JDP) offers an interesting puzzle for the students of regime change. JDP, which has initially been hailed as the champion of democracy, is now criticized for its authoritarian tendencies. The trajectory of JDP creates problems for dominant theoretical perspectives that focuses on deep societal/structural changes or institutional learning. Both views are incompatible with a sudden reversal by the same actors. I argue that conceiving the dominance of the norm “democracy” on a global level as a key determinant enables us to understand both JDP’s transformation to a pro-democratic force in early 2000’s and the subsequent turn to a majoritarian form of democracy by reinterpreting the norms that it deployed earlier to connect to the global normative order. To show the importance of this link, I develop a dialogical discourse analysis that tracks the interaction between narratives produced by the JDP and Western actors.