UMD Theses and Dissertations
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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 The Life Cycle of Issue Spaces(2024) Hightower, Tristan Matthew; Miler, Kristina; Government and Politics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In this dissertation I explore the dynamics of interest group populations through the development and application of a novel life cycle theory. Building on the work of population ecologists and other interest group scholars, this theory examines the stages of formation, growth, and decline of interest groups within various issue spaces. I conduct empirical analyses across three distinct domains: the agricultural sector with a focus on cranberries, the contentious and ideologically driven area of reproductive rights, and the declining population of banking institutions. These cases illustrate how interest groups navigate their life cycles and influence policy outcomes. Life cycle theory emphasizes the role of density dependence and interspecific competition, providing a comprehensive framework for analyzing the long-term trends and adaptive strategies of interest groups. The analysis of the cranberry lobby demonstrates how group diversity and population density affect policy attention. The analysis of reproductive rights organizations highlights the complex interplay between opposing groups and the significance of group population dynamics in shaping legislative outcomes. Finally, the analysis of the banking sector focuses on how regulatory changes and economic shifts impact the life cycles of financial institutions. My findings underscore the importance of considering group populations in understanding group formation, policy attention, and democratic engagement. I conclude that interest groups are essential components of American democratic processes, providing marginalized communities with avenues for influence amidst overburdened institutions. By offering a framework for analyzing the adaptive strategies and long-term trends of interest groups, this research contributes to a deeper understanding of how interests are advanced and under what conditions they thrive.Item Follow the Leaders: Policy Presentation in the U.S. Congress(2022) Gaynor, SoRelle Wyckoff; Miler, Kristina; Government and Politics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation presents a theory of policy presentation in the U.S. Congress. I define policy presentation as the strategic development and distribution of partisan information to explain major legislative decisions by congressional leaders. Today, rank-and-file members, increasingly removed from the legislative process, rely on guidance from congressional leaders to discuss major legislative decisions with their constituents. As a result, preparing constituent communication materials has become an institutionalized responsibility for party and committee leaders, particularly for House Republicans. I also argue that policy presentation is an undocumented source of partisan polarization, as it incentivizes a partisan presentation of legislative activity—even in cases of bipartisanship and compromise. Using interviews with members of Congress and staff, computational text analysis, and social network analysis, I demonstrate how congressional leaders develop and distribute partisan messages for constituent use. I also document the conditions under which policy presentation occurs, and the members most likely to rely on party and committee leaders for assistance with constituent communication.Item Home Field Advantage: Roots, Reelection, and Representation in the Modern Congress(2019) Hunt, Charles Russell; Miler, Kristina; Government and Politics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Prior scholarship has alluded to the importance of biography and other differentiating characteristics between candidates that are reflected in divergent electoral support from their voters. However, recent trends in partisanship and nationalization of congressional elections have led many to believe that these differences are no longer meaningful to voters or elites. In this dissertation, I argue for the continued importance of one aspect of the constituent relationship that has gone previously unstudied: the lived local roots in their districts that members of Congress often (but do not always) share with their constituents. I argue that the shared local identity that emerges from these mutual roots strengthens these legislators’ constituent relationships, and as a result improve legislators’ electoral dynamics in their districts. This project has multiple theoretical and empirical aims: first, to disentangle the concept of local district roots from related but ultimately distinct concepts like the incumbency advantage, “home styles”, and the personal vote; second, to use originally-collected biographical data from nearly 3,000 members of Congress to more precisely specify what district roots are, and to capture the full breadth of benefits they provide both legislators and constituents; and finally, to use advanced quantitative methods to demonstrate the significant positive effects that district roots continue to have on the quality and durability of a legislator’s relationship with their constituents. I first demonstrate in Chapter 3 that when legislators have deep local roots in their district, they are uniquely suited to cross-cut partisanship and outperform their party's presidential nominee in their district. In Chapter 4, I demonstrate that deeply rooted legislators have broader, more supportive constituencies than similarly-situated legislators without District route, and that as a result they outperformed expectations in both the primary and general election stages. Finally, in Chapter 5, I show that in part because they are so influential the legislator-constituent relationship, district roots also have a significant effect on legislators’ campaign spending activity. Deeply-rooted legislators require significantly less campaign spending to achieve results comparable to otherwise-similar legislators without deep local roots; and when they do spend, they do so at much higher proportions within the geographic confines of their districts. All three sets of results demonstrate that district roots are not only an important component of many legislators’ relationships with their constituents, but are also positive conditioners of their electoral dynamics in the district. I close in Chapter 6 by summarizing my results, and by laying out several noteworthy implications that these findings have on future research in congressional elections and representation. I also make a broader case for why, in many circumstances, deep local roots in the district are a normatively desirable component of congressional representation.Item DEEP BENCH: CONGRESSIONAL STAFF IN THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES(2018) Burgat, Casey; Lee, Frances E; Government and Politics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Capitol Hill is bustling with thousands of congressional staffers. Despite their numbers, and members readily admitting their reliance on these congressional aides, few scholars have turned their attention towards how lawmakers make use of their staffing resources or how these choices affect their subsequent legislative behavior and effectiveness. This dissertation seeks to quantify staff characteristics and impacts within both Representatives’ personal offices and congressional committees using two authoritative, comprehensive staff databases. More specifically, this project analyzes three unverified assumptions regarding congressional aides, their use, and their impact on Capitol Hill. The first assumption is that expertise and influence is generated solely by years of experience within congressional offices. The second is that levels of congressional staff turnover are concerningly high across House offices and that lawmakers who experience higher levels of turnover are less legislatively active and successful. The final assumption tested within this dissertation is that policy-focused aides within congressional committees are the driving forces behind various committee outputs such as facilitating committee hearings, reporting out substantive legislation, and getting it passed by the chamber. While I find that while these presumptions regarding congressional staff are generally true, they are incomplete. When assigning the most important issue portfolios to policy aides, members value higher levels of staff networking in addition to, and often above, longer tenures on the Hill; alarmingly high aide turnover is not as systemic as many observers fear, but offices that do experience comparatively high proportions of staffers departing the office are less active and successful lawmakers; and finally, committee policy staff are key in producing and getting important legislation reported out of committee, but it is more connected senior staffers who are essential in getting bills passed by the chamber. In sum, this dissertation sheds new light on how the behind-the-scenes work of congressional aides contributes to congressional behavior and legislation.Item WHO ADVOCATES FOR THE DISADVANTAGED? REPUTATION AND THE REPRESENTATION OF GROUP INTERESTS(2018) McNally, Katrina; Lee, Frances; Government and Politics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)A central component of evaluating the legitimacy of a representative democracy has to rest in determining the quality of representation received by the various segments of its residents and citizenry. The question of adequate representation for disadvantaged and marginalized groups is particularly relevant, as these are groups that are already subject to additional societal barriers. This project is devoted to explaining why certain members of the U.S. Congress choose to build their legislative reputation around advocating for disadvantaged groups in society, and what sets them apart from their colleagues. Members of Congress work to build reputations for themselves that speak to what their focus is within the legislature, and on whose behalf they are committed to working. But legislators have a finite amount of time and resources, and must make specific choices about the topics on which they develop their expertise and the groups which they champion. Disadvantaged groups, though frequently requiring greater levels of government assistance or protection, tend to have lower levels of political involvement and political capital. Understanding why members of Congress choose to build reputations around advocating for disadvantaged groups offers critical insight into how and when the needs of these group members are prioritized and represented. I argue that group size within a state or district couples with the general feelings regarding a group to determine the amount of advocacy on behalf of a disadvantaged group that would conceivably be tolerated within a district. Within this “advocacy window,” discretion of the individual member becomes vitally important. To evaluate what drives members to form reputations as group advocates, I use an original dataset of all members of the House and Senate from a sampling over Congresses from the last forty years featuring an innovative variable measuring the extent to which a member’s reputation is rooted in advocating for the disadvantaged. This dissertation offers an important contribution to our understanding of when and by whom representation of the disadvantaged occurs, and also provides broader insight into how members balance personal, partisan, institutional, and electoral concerns in their legislative choices as a representative.Item The Educational Imaginary in Radical Reconstruction: Congressional Public Policy Rhetoric and American Federalism, 1862-1872(2016) Steudeman, Michael Joseph; Parry-Giles, Trevor; Communication; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Facing the exigencies of Emancipation, a South in ruins, and ongoing violence, between 1862 and 1872 the United States Congress debated the role education would play in the postbellum polity. Positing schooling as a panacea for the nation’s problems, a determiner of individual worth, and a way of ameliorating state and federal tensions, congressional leaders envisioned education as a way of reshaping American political life. In pursuit of this vision, many policymakers advocated national school agencies and assertive interventions into state educational systems. Interrogating the meaning of “education” for congressional leaders, this study examines the role of this ambiguous concept in negotiating the contradictions of federal and state identity, projecting visions of social change, evaluating civic preparedness, and enabling broader debates over the nation’s future. Examining legislative debates over the Reconstruction Acts, Freedmen’s Bureau, Bureau of Education, and two bills for national education reform in the early 1870s, this project examines how disparate educational visions of Republicans and Democrats collided and mutated amid the vicissitudes of public policy argument. Engaging rhetorical concepts of temporality, disposition, and political judgment, it examines the allure and limitations of education policy rhetoric, and how this rhetoric shifted amid the difficult process of coming to policy agreements in a tumultuous era. In a broader historical sense, this project considers the role of Reconstruction Era congressional rhetoric in shaping the long-term development of contemporary Americans’ “educational imaginary,” the tacit, often unarticulated assumptions about schooling that inflect how contemporary Americans engage in political life, civic judgment, and social reform. Treating the analysis of public policy debate as a way to gain insights into transitions in American political life, the study considers how Reconstruction Era debate converged upon certain common agreements, and obfuscated significant fault lines, that persist in contemporary arguments.Item Interest Representation as a Clash of Unequal Allies(2016) Parrott, Michael David; Lee, Frances E; Government and Politics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Organized interests do not have direct control over the fate of their policy agendas in Congress. They cannot introduce bills, vote on legislation, or serve on House committees. If organized interests want to achieve virtually any of their legislative goals they must rely on and work through members of Congress. As an interest group seeks to move its policy agenda forward in Congress, then, one of the most important challenges it faces is the recruitment of effective legislative allies. Legislative allies are members of Congress who “share the same policy objective as the group” and who use their limited time and resources to advocate for the group’s policy needs (Hall and Deardorff 2006, 76). For all the financial resources that a group can bring to bear as it competes with other interests to win policy outcomes, it will be ineffective without the help of members of Congress that are willing to expend their time and effort to advocate for its policy positions (Bauer, Pool, and Dexter 1965; Baumgartner and Leech 1998b; Hall and Wayman 1990; Hall and Deardorff 2006; Hojnacki and Kimball 1998, 1999). Given the importance of legislative allies to interest group success, are some organized interests better able to recruit legislative allies than others? This question has received little attention in the literature. This dissertation offers an original theoretical framework describing both when we should expect some types of interests to generate more legislative allies than others and how interests vary in their effectiveness at mobilizing these allies toward effective legislative advocacy. It then tests these theoretical expectations on variation in group representation during the stage in the legislative process that many scholars have argued is crucial to policy influence, interest representation on legislative committees. The dissertation uncovers pervasive evidence that interests with a presence across more congressional districts stand a better chance of having legislative allies on their key committees. It also reveals that interests with greater amounts of leverage over jobs and economic investment will be better positioned to win more allies on key committees. In addition, interests with a policy agenda that closely overlaps with the jurisdiction of just one committee in Congress are more likely to have legislative allies on their key committees than are interests that have a policy agenda divided across many committee jurisdictions. In short, how groups are distributed across districts, the leverage that interests have over local jobs and economic investment, and how committee jurisdictions align with their policy goals affects their influence in Congress.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 Information Control: Leadership Power in the U.S. House of Representatives(2011) Curry, James Michael; Lee, Frances E; Government and Politics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Most congressional scholarship argues that legislative leaders--majority party leaders and committee chairs--are strongly constrained, weak agents of their rank-and-file. This study argues that information, and leaders' ability to control it, is a significant and independent source of power for leaders in the House of Representatives. Most rank-and-file members of Congress lack the time and resources necessary to track, study, or become deeply involved in legislating on most bills considered by the House. As a result, they rely on sources that can synthesize the information they need to decide whether or not to support the bill, offer an amendment, or take other actions. The party leadership and committee chairs, because of their staff and resource advantages, are important sources of information for the rank-and-file. However, legislative leaders often exploit their informational advantages to help their preferred legislation gain easy passage through the chamber. Along with the ability to perpetually collect information on rank-and-file preferences, and provide leadership-approved information about legislation, legislative leaders also have an arsenal of tools to limit the availability of information including withholding legislative language, scheduling votes on short notice, and using large and complex legislation as a vehicle. This information control puts leaders in the driver's seat, allowing them to lead the chamber by shaping the information driving the debate on a bill. Thirty interviews with members of Congress and congressional staff, along with a unique dataset of important legislation considered by the House of Representatives are used to support this theory. Leaders are found to employ information control tactics strategically, to aid the passage of their priority legislation and in response to the potential for significant influence from outside groups. The study, overall, suggests that legislative leaders in the House are more influential than they are typically perceived to be and that participation in congressional policymaking is often restricted.Item Motivations for Change in Support for Social Policy Bills in the United States House of Representatives; 1972-2002(2008-08-22) Gibson, Lynne Marie; Oppenheimer, Joe; Government and Politics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Much of the literature in the field of Political Science is concerned with explaining voting behavior by legislators. The central research question in this study is what causes changes in voting behavior by members of the United States House of Representatives with regard to social welfare bills? This research focuses on determining which variables sometimes supercede ideology in the decision making process of members of Congress and at what times they intervene. Thus the main hypothesis is: When factors other than personal ideology become more important to the legislator, they will override ideology as the determinant of the vote. The factors that are expected to influence voting behavior besides ideology include: presidential influence; the condition of the economy; the presence of the Iran-Contra Scandal; the presence of the Monica Lewinsky Scandal; and the presence of Newt Gingrich as Speaker of the House. The influence of these factors is measured over a time span of 30 years. The aggregate level findings indicate that, during the last 10 years analyzed, the presence of Newt Gingrich as Speaker of the House caused Republican members of the House of Representatives to decrease their support of social policy initiatives. The presence of the Lewinsky scandal was associated with increasing support for social policy initiatives by Republicans.