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open access

Leadership and Mexican-American Politics: A Study of Two Texas Cities

Description: "In an attempt to determine the effectiveness of the political leadership provided by members of an ethnic group, this thesis investigates the Mexican-American electorate in San Antonio and Laredo, Texas. Three variables were studied: the leaders, the followers, and the circumstances under which both operate...Data for this investigation were gathered through personal interviews and from voting records complied by the county clerks of Bexar and Webb Counties. "--leaf 1.
Date: August 1971
Creator: Pinon, Fernando
open access

Lebanese Internal Divisions and Palestinian Guerrilla Activity, 1967-1976

Description: This study presents the thesis that religious cleavages in Lebanon have been the major factor behind most of the country's problems since the achievement of independence in 1943. The coming of the Palestinians in 1948 and in the 1970s upset Lebanon's delicate sociopolitical balance between Christians and Muslims in favor of the latter. The study's four chapters describe the origins of Lebanon's religious groups, the arrival of the Palestinians, Lebanon's emergence as the sole Palestinian guerri… more
Date: December 1983
Creator: Sayah, Edward
open access

The Legal System and Political Development in Communist China, 1949-1969

Description: This study deals with the legal system of Communist China from 1949 to 1969 with three purposes: to discuss the role of law in Communist China's political development; to discuss the patterns of Communist China's political development as reflected in the patterns of her legal development; and to discuss some aspects of development theories on the basis of the findings of this study.
Date: August 1973
Creator: Lee, Shane R. (Shane Rong), 1942-
open access

"Let the End be Legitimate": An Analysis of Federal District Court Decision Making in Voting Rights Cases, 1965-1993.

Description: Integrated process models that combine both legal and extralegal variables provide a more accurate specification of the judicial decision making process and capture the complexity of the factors that shape judicial behavior. Judicial decision making theories borrow heavily from U.S. Supreme Court research, however, such theories may not automatically be applicable to the lower federal bench. The author uses vote dilution cases originating in the federal district courts from the years 1965 to 19… more
Date: May 1998
Creator: Morbitt, Jennifer Marie
open access

Letters, Liberty, and the Democratic Age in the Thought of Alexis de Tocqueville

Description: When Alexis de Tocqueville observed the spread of modern democracy across France, England, and the United States, he saw that democracy would give rise to a new state of letters, and that this new state of letters would influence how democratic citizens and statesmen would understand the new political world. As he reflected on this new intellectual sphere, Tocqueville became concerned that democracy would foster changes in language and thought that would stifle concepts and ideas essential to t… more
Date: December 2009
Creator: Elliot, Natalie J.
open access

Linkages between the Texas Supreme Court and Public Opinion

Description: This investigation sought to identify linkages between the Texas Supreme Court and public opinion through 1) a matching of written decisions with scientifically conducted public opinion polls; 2) direct mention of public opinion and its synonyms in Texas justices' decisions; 3) comparison of these mentions over time; and 4) comparison of 10 personal attributes of justices with matched decisions. The study moved the unit of analysis from the U.S. Supreme Court to the state court level by using c… more
Date: May 1995
Creator: Ragland, Ruth Ann Vaughan
open access

Locke and Penal Labor

Description: Interest and concern about penitential labor practices has been growing among scholars recently. The relationship of these practices to the principles of American liberalism, and in particular its Lockean roots, have not been thoroughly studied. The present investigation traces contemporary practices to features of Lockean liberalism, and offers suggestions for how to respond to widely acknowledged deficiencies while remaining within the broadly accepted principles laid out by Locke. The adv… more
Date: May 2021
Creator: McGuffee, Alaina Grace
open access

Louder and Stronger? The Role of Signaling and Receptivity in Democratic Breakdowns and Their Impact Upon Neighboring Regimes

Description: The purpose of this thesis is to establish what specific forces influence whether or not a democratic setback within one nation will diffuse to peripheral states. Past studies devoted to this topic have largely suggested that diffusion essentially functions like a contagious disease, where the likelihood of "infection" is primarily based upon the level of interaction between states. This thesis however proposes that the interaction of the signal generated from a democratic state's collapse an… more
Date: December 2008
Creator: Ludwig, Tommy
open access

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.
open access

Management of Communal Conflict in the Middle East: The Case of the Kurds

Description: The objective of this study is to describe and analyze the management of communal conflict in the Middle East, focusing on the Kurds. To this end, an effort is made to examine (1) the means that have been used to manage the Kurdish conflict by Middle Eastern countries; (2) the degree of success or failure of applied measures and (3) possible explanations for the first two questions.
Date: December 1983
Creator: Khosrowshahi, Manouchehr Rostamy
open access

Managing Water Resources in the Tigris and Euphrates Drainage Basin: An Inquiry into the Policy Process

Description: The Tigris and Euphrates are international rivers vital to the four countries through which they flow: Turkey, Syria, Iraq, and Iran. The population in the region has more than doubled in less than thirty years, and irrigated agriculture, hydroelectric power generation, industrialization, and urbanization have increased. All of these developments require more water, and the dependence of the riparian nations on the waters of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers has become apparent, as has the need f… more
Date: August 1984
Creator: Al-Himyari, Abbas Hussien
open access

Marijuana and Crime: A Critique and Proposal

Description: Of the plethora of social problems with which government has had to contend in recent history, few have generated more controversy than the non-therapeutic use of drugs. Many of those which are currently in common use did not exist fifty years ago; but the most dramatic growth in non-therapeutic use has been experienced with a drug that man has known for centuries: marijuana.1 Known generically as Cannabis sativa, internationally as Indian hemp, popularly as marijuana, and in American slang as … more
Date: December 1973
Creator: Jones, Urban Lynn
open access

Mechanistic Assumptions and the East-West Conflict: a Critique

Description: This paper addresses the influence of a mechanistic world view of East-West relations. The "classic" model of mechanism orders reality into a relationship akin to a simple clock or pump. In the model, discrete and unmodifiable parts, with no natural functional relationship to each other, are balanced and engineered into functional unity. This study shows how "environmental" conditions at the international level (ambiguity, complexity, and prolonged conflict) limit the ability of policy makers t… more
Date: December 1983
Creator: Ebers, Scott Allen
open access

Media Agenda-Building Effect: Analysis of American Public Apartheid Activities, Congressional and Presidential Policies on South Africa, 1976-1988

Description: The mass media's role in informing the American public is critical to public support for government policies. The media are said to set the national agenda. This view is based on the assumption of selective coverage they give to news items. Media coverage also influences the salience the public attaches to issues. However, media agenda effect has been challenged by Lang and Lang (1983). These scholars, in their media agenda-building theory, argued that the success of media effect on national ag… more
Date: December 1989
Creator: Agboaye, Ehikioya
open access

The Metamorphosis of the Arabian Ba'th Socialist Party

Description: Chapter I of this study of the Arabian Ba'th Socialist Party discusses the evolution of Arab nationalism and concludes that Ba'th was a natural outcome of this evolution; two intellectuals supporting Arab nationalism were Party co-founders Michael Aflaq and Salah Bitar, Part One of Chapter II summarizes their lives to facilitate understanding of their thought and its impact on Ba'th; Part Two examines the Party's first convention (source of the Ba'th constitution), the reasons for it, and the n… more
Date: December 1976
Creator: Al-Sabah, Ebtesam K.
open access

Mexico in the United Nations

Description: The purpose of this investigation is to look at the international organization from the point of view of a small, non-military nation to discover if and how it may be useful to such a nation in carrying out its foreign policy objectives in a bi-polar, nuclear world.
Date: August 1971
Creator: Barron, Stephanie L.
open access

Military Spending, External Dependence, and Economic Growth in Seven Asian Nations: a Cross-National Time-Series Analysis

Description: The theme of this study is that seven major East Asian less developed countries (LDCs) have experienced "dependent development," and that some internal and external intervening factors mattered in that process. Utilizing a framework of "dependent development," the data analysis deals with the political economy of development in these countries. This analysis supports the fundamental arguments of the dependent development perspective, which emphasize positive effects of foreign capital dependenc… more
Date: May 1992
Creator: Ko, Sung-youn
open access

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
open access

Minority Linked Fate and Race-Based Policy Initiatives: Analyzing Support Levels for African American Redress between Asian, Latino, and African Americans

Description: This thesis seeks to examine the levels of support for African American reparations amongst minorities. After providing a historical account of redress efforts separated racial group and discussing factors that influence reparations, I argue that minority groups possess cross-racial linked fate (minority linked fate) that significantly impacts their political attitudes concerning reparations for African Americans. Additionally, I argue that higher levels of minority-linked fate will equate to s… more
Date: August 2022
Creator: Ferguson, Triston
open access

Modeling State Repression in Argentina and Chile: A Time Series Analysis

Description: This study is an attempt to contribute to the emerging theoretical literature on state repression. A time-series model was developed to test the hypothesis that state violence in Argentina and Chile is largely a function of four internal political factors and their interactions: 1) the inertial influence of past restrictive policies on the formulation of current policies, 2) the annual incidence of political protest demonstrations, 3) the perceived effectiveness of repressive measures on unrest… more
Date: December 1993
Creator: King, John Christopher
open access

Modernization and Political Instability: a Theoretical and Empirical Exploration

Description: The present study is an effort to examine and understand the relationship between modernization and political instability. The following chapters focus on the effects of modernization on political instability. Data on twenty-four African nations are analyzed to test empirically the validity of the hypothesis. Chapter IV concludes the thesis by offering a general summary and conclusions.
Date: December 1986
Creator: Umezulike, Bedford Nwabueze
open access

Montesquieu, Diversity, and the American Constitutional Debate

Description: It has become something of a cliché for contemporary scholars to assert that Madison turned Montesquieu on his head and thereafter give little thought to the Frenchman’s theory that republics must remain limited in territorial size. Madison did indeed present a formidable challenge to Montesquieu’s theory, but I will demonstrate in this dissertation that the authors of the Federalist Papers arrived at the extended sphere by following a theoretical pathway already cemented by the French philosop… more
Date: December 2015
Creator: Drummond, Nicholas W.
open access

A Multivariate Analysis of Regional Political Integration the Case of the Caribbean Free Trade Area and the Caribbean Community and Common Market, 1965-1983

Description: The purpose of this study is three-fold. The first is to provide the reader with a review of the literature concerning the topic of regional political integration. The second purpose is to provide an operational definition of regional political integration which can be useful in the testing of hypotheses. Regional political integration is defined in terms of the regional decision-making process. Various levels of regional political integration are defined, operationalized, and identified. The l… more
Date: May 1987
Creator: Staten, Clifford Lee
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