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Europeanization and the Rise of Extremist Parties

Description: The research question addressed by this study is: what is the relationship between Europeanization and the rise of extremist parties? In particular I examine the impact of Europeanization on the rise of extreme right parties in Europe from 1984 to 2006. Europeanization in this paper is defined as a process whereby the transformation of governance at the European level and European integration as a whole has caused distinctive changes in domestic politics. This process of Europeanization is one … more
Date: December 2011
Creator: Dague, Jennifer Lee
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Identity Claims and Leader Survival

Description: The purpose of this dissertation is to show a yet undiscovered link between identity claims and the survival of political leaders. Diversionary theory posits that starting foreign conflicts during domestic hardship may increase the popular approval ratings of the leader and maintain him in power. I suggest that leaders may resort to initiating identity claims as a diversionary action to stay in power. Indeed, using survival analysis, this study finds a connection between the desire of leaders t… more
Date: August 2019
Creator: Krastev, Roman
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
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Making It Personal: The Psychological Lifecyle of Witnessing before the ICTY

Description: Extant transitional justice literature examining processes and functions of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia have traditionally looked at the output and outcomes from an institutional level of analysis and have neglected to examine how the witness feels about his or her own participation in the process. This project provides deeper perspective from the individual level of analysis based on sequential phases of the testimony process lifecycle: the reason the witness … more
Date: August 2019
Creator: McKay, Melissa M.
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
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No Greater Error: Negotiated Agreements and Their Effects on the Conclusion of Interstate War

Description: Negotiated settlements, formal treaties to unilateral cease-fires, are often accepted to be the preferable method to end war. When negotiated agreements are used in the normal business of international politics they can be potentially helpful devices; however, when they are relied upon for a nation's security or war prevention and conclusion they can prove disastrous. It is the presence of force variables, and not the formality of an agreement which effectively concludes a war. I recategorize … more
Date: December 2012
Creator: Kendall, David F.
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
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Endogenous Information and Inter-state War Expansion

Description: Scholars have long debated the causes of late third party state joining in ongoing inter-state wars. This research has generally concluding that peace-time conditions, measured in terms of: third party capabilities; proximity to warring states; and inter-state alliances, are determining factors in the decision to join. However, these studies utilize theories derived from static pre-war measures of capabilities and motivation to explain late joining; indeed, the same measures that fail to predi… more
Date: December 2012
Creator: Liebel, Steven R.
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
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Minority Hiv Rates, Inequality, and the Politics of Aids Funding

Description: Since the 1990s, the HIV/AIDS epidemic has increasingly impacted minority groups in the United States, particularly African Americans. Why is this happening? Comparative studies of developing nations have convincingly established a relationship between concentrated poverty, ethnic boundaries, and lack of effective governmental response as contributing to high levels of infection in those countries. To date, however, no study has sought to apply these insights to the American context. This disse… more
Date: August 2012
Creator: Miles, Thomas
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
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Does Euroscepticism Matter? the Effect of Public Opinion on Integration

Description: This dissertation seeks to test the proposition that public opinion is a driving force in integration, and thus examines the effect of euroscepticism on EU integration. Utilizing an understanding of integration as the process of European states achieving similar legal, social, cultural, political and economic policy outcomes while ceding greater policy power to European institutions, the relationship between aggregate level euroscepticism in EU member states (the United Kingdom, Germany, Irela… more
Date: December 2012
Creator: Williams, Christopher J.
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
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The Political Determinants of Fdi Location in Prchina, 1997-2009: Application of a New Model to Taiwanese Fdi in Mainland China

Description: This research seeks to identify the political determinants that account for the uneven geographical distribution of foreign direct investment (FDI) across Chinese counties. I compare the political determinants of Taiwanese FDI (TDI) and non-Taiwanese FDI site selection across counties in China. I focus on the central-local politics in China, especially the effect of county government autonomy on FDI and TDI site selection. I investigate whether the effect of county government autonomy and i… more
Date: August 2012
Creator: Lu, Kelan
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
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Explanation for the Variation of Women’s Rights Among Moderate Muslim Countries

Description: Due to the actions of radicals and extremists, many in the West have come to view Islam as a religion of gender inequality that perpetuates the severe oppression of women. However, there is actually great variation in women’s rights across Muslim countries. This thesis presents a theoretical framework seeking to explain this variation, by examining differences in family law. The theory supposes that variation can be explained by the strategic actions of political leaders. From this theory, I hy… more
Date: May 2012
Creator: Sortor, Angela E.
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
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Federalism and Civil Conflict: the Missing Link?

Description: This thesis investigates federalism and civil conflict. Past work linking federalism and civil conflict has investigated the factors that pacify or aggravate conflict, but most such studies have examined the effect of decentralization on conflict onset, as opposed to the form federalism takes (such as congruent vs incongruent forms, for example). I collect data on civil conflict, the institutional characteristics of federalist states and fiscal decentralization. My theoretical expectations are … more
Date: August 2012
Creator: Lancaster, Ross
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
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Understanding News Media Consumption and Political Attitudes and Behavior in Latin America

Description: News media consumption is vital to understanding democracy in Latin America. Democracy in the region lacks consolidation that may be encouraged by the ability of news media to shape individuals' political attitudes and behaviors. Yet, we know very little about how citizens of Latin American countries consume news media or how that consumption affects attitudes and behavior. This study offers a region-wide examination of the factors that shape news media consumption and the effects of that consu… more
Date: May 2011
Creator: Salzman, Ryan
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
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Thucydides’ Sparta: Law, Piety, and the Regime

Description: My dissertation investigates Thucydides’ presentation of Sparta. By viewing the war through Sparta, one is confronted with debates on the moral dimensions of war. Sparta decries the imperialism of Athens as unjust and while the Athenians imply that such claims are merely Spartan ‘hypocrisy’ and therefore that Sparta does not truly take justice seriously, my study contends that the Spartan concern with justice and piety is genuine. While the Athenians present a sophisticated and enlightened view… more
Date: August 2014
Creator: Hadley, Travis Stuart
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
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Electoral Rules, Political Parties, and Peace Duration in Post-conflict States

Description: This dissertation examines the following research question: Which types of electoral rules chosen in post-conflict states best promote peace? And are those effects conditional upon other factors? I argue that the effects are conditional upon the types of political parties that exist in the post-conflict environment. Although this explanation is contrary to scholars that speak of political parties as products of the electoral system, political parties often predate the choice of electoral system… more
Date: December 2014
Creator: Kisin, Tatyana Tuba Kelman
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International Learning and the Diffusion of Civil Conflict

Description: Why does civil conflict spread from country to country? Existing research relies primarily on explanations of rebel mobilization tied to geographic proximity to explain this phenomenon. However, this approach is unable to explain why civil conflict appears to spread across great geographic distances, and also neglects the government’s role in conflict. To explain this phenomenon, this dissertation formulates an informational theory in which individuals contemplating rebellion against their gove… more
Date: August 2014
Creator: Linebarger, Christopher
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
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New Wine in Old Wineskins: Hobbes’s Use and Abuse of Religious Rhetoric

Description: Thomas Hobbes’s knowledge of religious doctrine, typology, and use religious rhetoric in his writings is often glossed over in an over-eager attempt to establish his preeminence as a founder of modern political theory and the social contract tradition. Such action, however is an injustice to Hobbes himself, who recognized that in order to establish a new, and arguably radical, political position founded upon reason and nominalist materialism he had to reform people’s understanding of religious … more
Date: December 2014
Creator: Higgins, Nicholas J.
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
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Ethnic Similarity and Rivalry Relations

Description: Research on ethnicity and conflict treats the concept of ethnicity as defining the actors in these conflicts, whereas research on the construction and maintenance of ethnic identity explores why ethnicity unifies individuals into a single social group. What happens when this unifying concept is divided between two enemy countries? How does this situation influence peace settlements over territorial issues, armed conflict, and economic relations between these countries? To answer these questions… more
Date: December 2014
Creator: McCallister, Gerald L. Jr.
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
open access

Gender, Peace and Democracy

Description: In the last several decades there has been immense international emphasis and promotion of gender equality and female participation in the social, economic, and political spheres of society. There has also been an increase in civil conflict recurrence in countries as well as countries transitioning to democracy. This study explores the effect of female participation on peace and democracy. In the first part, I focus on the effect female participation has on decreasing the risk of peace failing … more
Date: August 2013
Creator: Kelly, Eliza G.
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
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Inside the Third Sector: a Gongo Level Analysis of Chinese Civil Society

Description: This thesis investigates a new variant of the relationship between society and the states: Government-Owned (or Organized) Non-Governmental Organizations (GONGOs). Past research has typically understood civil society as a means to explain the orientation of groups of citizens towards collective outcomes. For decades, NGOs have been a key component of this relationship between political actors but the systematic study of GONGOs has been widely neglected by research. I used an original dataset co… more
Date: August 2013
Creator: Kirby, John Brandon
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
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State Capacity, Security Forces and Terrorist Group Termination

Description: This dissertation examines how different forms of state capacity affect the decision of terror groups to end their campaign. Building a theoretical framework about the relationship between state capacity and terrorist group termination, I address the following research questions: How do terror groups respond to the changes in non-repressive forms of state's capacity, such as bureaucratic capacity, extractive capacity, and how do those responses of terror groups affect the chance of their demise… more
Date: December 2019
Creator: Kirisci, Mustafa
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
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The King Arrives: Chinese Government Inspections and Their Effects

Description: This dissertation studies a critical facet of Chinese politics, inspections by higher Chinese government to villages. Principally, it looks at how village economic development determines government inspection decisions and how inspections, once conducted, impact village politics. Specifically, I argue that villages perceived as destabilizing to the Chinese regime, villages with higher levels of economic inequality and villages located at the two extremes of economic development, should see more… more
Date: August 2017
Creator: Xi, Jinrui
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
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Crossing Over: Essays on Ethnic Parties, Electoral Politics, and Ethnic Social Conflict

Description: This dissertation analyzes several topics related to political life in ethnically divided societies. In chapter 2, I study the relationship between ethnic social conflict, such as protests, riots, and armed inter-ethnic violence, and bloc partisan identification. I find that protests have no effect on bloc support for political parties, riots increase bloc partisan identification, and that armed violence reduces this phenomenon. In chapter 3, I analyze the factors that influence the targeting o… more
Date: August 2017
Creator: Stewart, Brandon
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
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Shared Norms, Hierarchical Maintenance, and International Hierarchy

Description: The dissertation studies two aspects of international hierarchy. The world of international politics is not one of completely sovereign states competing in anarchy. Patterns of hierarchy, where a dominant state has legitimate control over some actions of a subordinate state, color the globe. First, I look at shared norms and hierarchy. Most studies concerning hierarchy focus on material maximization as an explanation for hierarchy--if hierarchy increases the wealth and security of two state… more
Date: August 2013
Creator: Kurz, Aaron
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
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Selling Humans: the Political Economy of Contemporary Global Slavery

Description: Human trafficking is a growing illegal crime, both in terms of numbers and profits. Thus, important to consider, as it is a human rights, political, criminal justice, national security, and economic issue. Previous studies have these examined these human trafficking factors independently, yet none have really taken into account how they work simultaneously. This study examines why human trafficker continues to occur, particularly at the domestic and transnational level, and also why some cou… more
Date: December 2013
Creator: Balarezo, Christine A.
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
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