Government & Politics Theses and Dissertations

Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/2775

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Abortion Escorts and Democratic Participation
(2008-04-16) Maloney, Steven Douglas; Alford, Charles F; Government and Politics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
My dissertation explores the theoretical value of political participation. I argue that some acts of political participation, such as abortion escorting, constitute "political action" as Hannah Arendt used the term. These acts do not fall under the umbrella of either civil society or activism. A more nuanced account of political participation is needed. This account must include participatory, deliberative, and republican ideals, and it must take political action more seriously than the predominant procedural, communicative, or economic visions of liberalism currently do. Here, abortion escorts exemplify the type of political participation that Hannah Arendt argued was missing at Little Rock Central High School during the period of integration. Arendt called for citizen escorts during integration, and abortion escorting provides a positive example of this behavior today. Arendt confessed she was moved to write her essay only from a photograph that she saw, and she was criticized for her lack of fieldwork. However, I went into the field to observe abortion escorting. Moreover, while Arendt's factual statements about integration and American racial politics have been somewhat discredited, I argue there are still important theoretical insights in her essay--and in Arendt's theoretical work more broadly--that need resuscitating even if her empirical account is troubled at times. As such, I use abortion escorts as an example--a means of rescuing Arendt's theory of political action and integrating it into a contemporary body of American political theory that has been both inspired by Arendt and unsettled by her contributions
Activist Globalization: How Markets, Societies and States Empower Cause-Oriented Action in Transnational Relations
(2011) Pinto, Rodrigo G.; Conca, Ken; Government and Politics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
This study examines how transnational conditions of markets, societies and states empower civic groups, social movements, advocacy networks or resisters to participate in cause-oriented action that connects two or more polities. Preliminary theses infatuated with the latest and thickest wave of globalization have blown back into a solidified antithesis. Under this influential antithesis, international interactions between states create more opportunities for transnational activism than do global flows between societies or markets. The evidence analyzed here suggests a refutation of that prevalent antithesis. Instead, it supports the synthesizing hypothesis of this study: The more markets and societies globalize and the more states interact, the more transnational activism occurs. The research conducted here develops on a promising explanatory typology that is the best attempt to answer the main question about activism in international relations (IR) studies at present. This dissertation builds on such theory, moderating short-range and statist imbalances in conventional IR and cross-national (comparative) research on the consequences of interstate regimes and political opportunity structures, respectively. The study goes on to make this prior scholarship more accurate, comprehensive and reflective. First, tests of the prime theory over a longer history, which predates 1945, here elevate globalism toward a favorable condition that is as consequential as internationalism for activism across borders. Second, this study conceptualizes four explanatory processes--or chains of causal mechanisms--that link activism mainly to encouragement from globalization. These original models expose a grand, causal theory to have outpaced its necessary processual, mechanismic bases. Finally, the study addresses the spatial transnationality and transnationalization of activism. It extends the typology of explanatory processes to distinguish the primary scale of activist actions from the locus of activist causes, along a domestic-foreign frontier. The extension renders as unexamined a conventional assumption that activism transnationalizes through a one-dimensional globalization from local toward global proportions. The dissertation uses qualitative, case-study and process-tracing, methods to compare and generalize beyond two transnational activist campaigns. These campaigns are situated temporally from the 1860s to the 1950s, geographically through inclusion of actors based in Brazil, and thematically via incorporation of biodiversity in activist deed or discourse.