Government & Politics Theses and Dissertations
Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/2775
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Item Crises and Crisis Generations: International Conflict and Military Participation in Politics(2016) White, Peter; Huth, Paul K; Government and Politics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Why do states facing high levels of international threat sometimes have militaries that are heavily involved in politics and at other times relatively apolitical, professional militaries? I argue that the answer to this puzzle lies in a state's history of 'acute' international crises rather than its 'chronic' threat environment. Major international crises lead to professionalization and de-politicization of militaries in both the short- and long-term. International crises underscore the need for the military to defend the state and highlight military deficiencies in this regard. Accordingly, major international crises lead to military professionalization and withdrawal from politics in order to increase military effectiveness. This effect persists years, and decades, later due to generational shifts in the officer corps. As the "Crisis Generation" of officers become generals, they bring with them a preference for professionalization and de-politicization. They guide the military towards abstention from politics. I test this theory using a new global dataset on military officers in national governing bodies from 1964-2008 and find strong support for the theory. Major international crises lead to two waves of military withdrawal from government, years apart. Further statistical analysis finds that this effect is most strongly felt in the non-security areas of governing, while in some cases, international crises may lead to militaries increasing their involvement in security policy-making. Further, international crises that end poorly for a state — i.e., defeats or stalemates — are found to drive more rapid waves of military withdrawal from government. The statistical analysis is supported by a case illustration of civil-military relations in the People's Republic of China, which demonstrates that the crisis of the Korean War (1950-53) led to two waves of military professionalization and de-politicization, decades apart. The first occurred immediately after the war. The second wave, occurring in the 1980s, involved wholesale military withdrawal from governing bodies, which was made possible by the ascent of the "Crisis Generation" of officers in the military, who had served as junior officers in the Korean War, decades prior.Item The Smoking Gun: Toward Understanding the Decision Calculus Behind Repressive Outcomes(2015) Munayyer, Yousef; Telhami, Shibley; Government and Politics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Why do states repress? Why are civil liberties curtailed? Explorations of these questions have departed from the assumption that security concerns motivate decisions that lead to repressive outcomes. If the state is challenged, it will repress. A state, it is assumed, must "strike a balance" between security and liberty. But what if those assumptions are flawed? If the decisions behind politically repressive outcomes are not always motivated by security challenges to the state, then we must ask a different set of questions about what can motivate state behavior and repression. This study examines the validity of these assumptions. A survey of cases of repressive episodes in the United States, using both primary and secondary sources, reveals that the decisions behind enacting repressive measures is not as straightforward as these assumptions would have it seem. A unique case, situated both contextually and historically by the preceding survey, is then explored in depth using data that is rarely available to shed a new degree of light on a decision making process. This data is overwhelming primary source information and includes declassified material from a variety of archives, material obtained from Freedom of Information Act Requests, as well as uniquely revelatory audio evidence that has only recently been made publicly available. After reviewing the case I argue that enough evidence exists to suggest the main assumptions of the repression and civil liberties literature fails to encompass all motivating factors behind repressive outcomes and a deeper understanding of how other factors can lead to repressive outcomes is needed.Item The Lame Duck Congress: Fair or Foul?(2013) Yuravlivker, Dror Itzhak; Lee, Frances E; Government and Politics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation is an in-depth exploration of lame duck sessions of Congress. The old conventional wisdom, that lame duck sessions of Congress were insignificant periods where Congress conducted some housecleaning by passing minor bills left over from the regular session, ignores a key factor: elections. Elections do not just affect the composition of the next Congress; they also affect the legislative output of the current one. Specifically, when elections result in changes in partisan control, particularly from unified to divided government and vice versa, leaders and rank-and-file members of the political party on the way out have an incentive to pass more significant legislation before they relinquish the reins of power. My research provides the theoretical basis for this expectation, weighing the different electoral permutations and discussing issues of representation, electoral mandates, and ideological polarization. Building on previous work, I create a statistical model that incorporates electoral results with measures of legislative significance and party polarization. Although this model is based on data from 1877 to 1995, it predicts with some accuracy the legislative outputs of subsequent lame duck sessions of Congress. To provide a broader context, the dissertation includes a historical overview going back to the founding of the Republic, a review of relevant literature, and in-depth case studies of the three most recent lame duck sessions (2008, 2010, and 2012). The case studies go hand-in-hand with the statistical model, validating the conclusion that elections help determine the number and significance of laws enacted during subsequent lame duck sessions. Scrutiny of the output of lame duck sessions is a significant departure from the existing literature and is central to my contribution. Ultimately, this dissertation provides a theoretical and statistical basis for the hypothesis that changes in partisan control of one or more chambers of Congress - or the White House - affect the legislative outputs of lame duck sessions.Item The Transformation of the Role of the Economy in U.S. Presidential Elections Over Time(2012) Curry, Jill; Morris, Irwin L; Government and Politics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Most studies in the presidential elections literature include only a narrow subset of more recent presidential elections. This exclusion is particularly evident in work examining the relationship between economic issues and the vote for president where early presidential elections are routinely excluded. This exclusion is often done without much justification or by leaning on the poorly defined concept of the modern presidency either explicitly or implicitly by the sample used. However, there is evidence to suggest that the influence of the economy on the vote for president occurred much earlier than well into the 20th century. Diverging from most of the existing literature, this study examines the relationship between the economy and presidential elections from 1789 to 2008. The findings of this analysis are two-fold. First, the relationship between the economy and presidential elections is an enduring one. The impact of the economy on the vote for president has been present in varying degrees for almost every presidential election held in the U.S. The role of economic issues in the vote for president is not limited to just more recent presidential elections. The second conclusion is that the relationship between the economy and presidential elections is changing over time. Even though economic issues have influenced presidential elections since the founding, the U.S. today is very different from the U.S.in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The political, economic, and social landscape of the United States has changed substantially over time. This work finds that the relationship between the economy and presidential elections is evolving in that the economic issues that influenced presidential elections in early U.S. history are different from the economic issues that have affected more recent presidential elections.Item House or Home: Nuclear Family Construction and Federal Housing Policy Development(2010) Fritz, Marie Justine; Alford, Fred; Government and Politics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The federal government's complicity in racial discrimination in the development and administration of housing policy has been well documented, but the government's role in reproducing gendered federal housing policies in the United States has been largely unrecognized in the political science literature. I argue that United States housing policy in the twentieth century is inextricably linked to perceptions of gender and the single family home, and the traditional nuclear family has been rendered a hegemonic entity. The politics of housing cannot be understood without an analysis of the effects that conceptions of gender have had on housing policy and in turn of the effects of such policy on the cultural and social norms surrounding gender. Contemporary household regulation is the culmination of a gradual process of state-building during which the state came to define and regulate the nuclear, heterosexual family. Nuclear family hegemony began during the interwar period and was institutionalized under the New Deal, became naturalized from the 1950s to the 1970s through suburbanization and urban disinvestment, and developed into policymaking that was increasingly punitive in the 1990s for those outside the nuclear- and nuptial-family norm. The system of separate benefits for nuclear families and non-traditional households that was established decades earlier made public and subsidized housing ripe for attack in a growing culturally conservative atmosphere. The HOPE VI program and the decision in HUD v. Rucker represent various ways in which the government implicated family in its attempts to regulate the homes of low-income, non-traditional households that are often headed by minority single and elderly women. Although current housing policies reflect changed policy commitments from multiple administrations, present access to housing remains family-composition specific. Nuclear family hegemony serves to reify distinctions based on sex; it incorporated women's economic dependence as an essential component of housing finance and endorsed a single standard for what a good family looked like. In drawing boundaries around citizenship through federal housing policy, the state helped to define the very meaning of family in America.Item MYTH, IDENTITY AND CONFLICT: A COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF ROMANIAN AND SERBIAN TEXTBOOKS(2009) Dutceac Segesten, Anamaria Georgiana; Tismaneanu, Vladimir; Government and Politics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The study compares two cases of ethnically diverse societies sharing a substantial set of characteristics but where inter-group relations developed in two opposite directions. In Serbia the entire decade of the 1990s was witness to widespread violence, first in the wars of Yugoslav secession (1991-1996) and later in the conflict over the status of the Kosovo region (1998-1999). In Romania, despite one eruption of interethnic violence in March 1990, there have been no further clashes between Romanians and Hungarians, even if a latent suspicion continued to be verbally manifested between these two communities. By comparing these cases, the possibility opens to verify the impact of taught history on the representations of self and others and, from this premise, to examine its influence on the potential for peaceful or conflictual ethnic relations. The questions asked are: Is myth, as identified in secondary literature in other areas (literature, media, and political discourse) present in the history textbooks of Romania and Serbia? If myths are to be found in history schoolbooks, are there differences in the ways these myths define the in-group and the relationship with the Other between a country that experienced interethnic conflict and a country that did not? The working hypothesis based upon the existing literature is simple: in multiethnic societies, history textbooks reflect the elite's, especially state elite's, interpretation of the past and outline the acceptable/ desirable representations of the dominant ethnic group and of the diverse Others with whom this group interacts. If the history and the self image of the dominant group are presented in a manner that highlights the differences and the uneven distribution of power between the dominant and the minority ethnic group(s), the possibility of domestic tensions increases and, if other conditions are present, there is even a rise in violent civil war along ethnic lines. The study finds that myths are present in the post-communist history textbooks of Romania and Serbia, both in their visual content and in their text. Despite expectations to the contrary, however, the differences in the types of myth used in a conflict case (Serbia) and in a non-conflict case (Romania) are small, thus disputing the importance awarded to history education in preventing or alleviating conflicts.