UMD Theses and Dissertations
Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/3
New submissions to the thesis/dissertation collections are added automatically as they are received from the Graduate School. Currently, the Graduate School deposits all theses and dissertations from a given semester after the official graduation date. This means that there may be up to a 4 month delay in the appearance of a given thesis/dissertation in DRUM.
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Item Making Sense of Violence: How the Lebanon War Became Sectarian(2024) Ellsworth, Ted Spencer; Cunningham, Kathleen G; Jones, Calvert W; Government and Politics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation analyzes the rise of sectarian political order in Lebanon during the Civil War. In the Middle East, religious differences are often seen as an intractable problem, and sectarian power-sharing rules, all-encompassing. When we look at the pre-war period in Lebanon, while religious differences played a role at the national level, most sectarian communities did not have robust institutions to maintain order and coordination amongst themselves. Internally, the groups were politically divided, and many political parties were ostensibly secular. Despite serious efforts to abolish sectarianism throughout the war, by the end, the system of sectarian order was more entrenched in all levels of society. At the same time, sectarianism remains just one of many relevant cleavages within Lebanon. How do we explain the trajectory of sectarian order in Lebanon? What does the persistence of sectarian order reveal about the challenges of nation building and political order? Conventional scholarship argues that violence can help construct both identities and order: external violence is thought to reinforce national identities instead of subnational ones, and intra-group violence is thought to reinforce subnational boundaries. By contrast, my argument highlights the role of framing in mediating these relationships. This inductive study is based on analysis of fourteen archives, novel event data, and a close reading of party ephemera and historical newspapers from 1958 to 1982. By combining this data within a micro-comparative framework, this dissertation reconstructs the dynamics of contention leading up to and throughout the early stages of the Lebanon Civil War. Comparing episodes of violence in Lebanon over time, I explore how external violence, inter-group violence, and intra-group violence shaped political order. I show that the relationship between violence and the creation of identity-based order is conditional on framing effects. These frames help decision-makers link specific threats to policies, including new rules and institutions to govern intra- and inter-group behavior. By examining examples of each type of violence over successive junctures, I unsettle the notion that sectarian political order in Lebanon was inevitable, instead showing how elites became trapped by their ideas as they attempted to make sense of problems that arose in the war such as Israeli interference in Lebanese politics, inter-communal massacres, and opportunistic violence. My work has general implications for how violence can shape behavior, the types of political order that emerge from civil conflicts, and the important role of ideational change during periods marked by uncertainty.Item DO ECONOMIC SHOCKS MATTER? THE EFFECT OF THE ECONOMY ON PRESIDENTIAL SUPPORT(2018) Cabezas Navarro, Jose Miguel; Calvo, Ernesto; Government and Politics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)For decades researchers argued that individual’s political attitudes, perceptions and evaluations were explained by early political socialization principles or, on the other hand, they react to different stimuli from the environment. Party identification or changes in the state of the national economy turned into the biggest predictors or explanatory independent variables when analyzing individual’s political behavior. Campbell et al (1960) coined the term ``perceptual screen” when describing the effect that party identification had over the individuals. 60 years later, different authors argued in the same fashion. ``Partisans ignore or deflect information that is inconsistent with their party” (Green et al (2002)) or ``Political party is a crucial mediating force” (Lewis-Beck et al 2008). I use mediation analysis to introduce for the first time a systematic measurement of whether this mediation effect exists and how important is it. Bringing together individual’s responses to nationally representative surveys and national macroeconomic performance indicators, I start analyzing the US from 1980 to 2016. I expand the scope of my dissertation findings incorporating 17 Latin American countries from 2006 to 2016 and I finalize analyzing Chile from 1900 to 2017. My dissertation put together a multilevel regressions approach analyzing more than 235,000 cases across different political, economic and cultural institutions. I found that changes and shocks in the economy affect directly how individuals evaluate the state of the economy, not being mediated significantly by party identification. Party identification mediates economic perceptions on what I defined as the ``Responsibility attribution stage”, or when individuals reward or punish the incumbent due to their economic management. Almost 30% of the presidential support is mediated by party identification when attributing responsibility to the incumbent in the US. Only 15% of the attribution is mediated by party identification in Latin America and 9% in the Chilean case. I also found important differences respect to the effect of party identification once one considers if the party is in office or in the opposition. I argue that this is explained by different political institutions but also because individuals evaluate variables different than macroeconomic performances.