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.

More information is available at Theses and Dissertations at University of Maryland Libraries.

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Subject: search.filters.subject.Local Politics

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    THE CONTRASTING EFFECTS OF SOCIAL CAPITAL ON NONVIOLENT RESISTANCE: EVIDENCE FROM PERU
    (2020) CORONADO-CASTELLANOS, PAVEL; Birnir, Johanna; Government and Politics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    This dissertation develops a model to understand the joint role of social capital and nonviolent resistance campaigns to obtain concessions and changes in public goods provision in new democracies and in democracies with weak party systems. The factors that explain variation in effectiveness among nonviolent campaigns have been understudied. By adding social capital to the analysis, this dissertation contributes to filling this theoretical and empirical void. I use data from Perú to provide empirical support to my theory. In Chapter 2, a micro-level theory of nonviolent campaigns is developed. This theory argues that by making cooperation easier, social capital increases the levels of participation in nonviolent campaigns, thereby making concessions more likely. A novel result of this theory is that it shows that social capital is a key feature of social life that can help to generate disruptive collective actions but also to prevent the use of such disruptive means. Thus, under some circumstances, social capital can help to reduce the observed disruptive actions. Chapters 3 and 4 test the theoretical propositions derived in Chapter 2 using Peruvian data. Chapter 3 finds that social capital has a negative statistically significant effect on some types of nonviolent campaigns but positive effects on other types of nonviolent campaigns. Chapter 3 also provides evidence that peasant communities’ organizations in the first half of the 20th century were product of persistence effects of early colonial extractive institutions (i.e. the mining mita) with colonial revolts as important channels of persistence. Chapter 4 shows that nonviolent campaigns and social capital form a positive interactive relationship to affect the provision of public goods at the local level. Social capital makes more likely nonviolent campaign’s success. Chapter 5 summarizes the main conclusions of this dissertation.
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    BUILD to WIN: Community Organizing, Power, and Participation in Local Governance
    (2009) Bullock, John Thomas; Kaufmann, Karen; Government and Politics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    This dissertation focuses on community organizing and uses it as a mechanism to compare the political environments in Baltimore and Washington over the last three decades. By conducting comparison case studies, I identify the contextual circumstances that affect the ability of grassroots organizations to achieve desired ends. The fact that both cities have functioning Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF) affiliates - Baltimoreans United in Leadership Development (BUILD) and the Washington Interfaith Network (WIN) - provides the opportunity to investigate the conditions that give rise to community organizing. Examining the interactions between BUILD/WIN and mayoral administrations over time sheds light on the varying temporal contexts while also explicating the different managerial styles of central political actors. By conducting these case studies, I highlight the optimal political conditions for the inclusion of grassroots organizations representing the interests of neglected neighborhoods.
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    Breaking into the Public Sphere: Temporality, Context, and Innovation in the Politicization of Latin American Immigrants
    (2008-11-21) Cantor, Guillermo; Korzeniewicz, Roberto P; Sociology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    This dissertation aims to improve our understanding of the political life of Latinos in the U.S., in specific local contexts and historical moments. To that end, I propose to reframe the understanding of politics and the political. Borrowing elements from political philosophy, I propose using the concept of politicization, which is primarily defined by the introduction of innovation in the public realm; the generation of consequences that affect not only those directly involved in a situation but others as well; and the intervention in a public domain that is not limited to state structures. To elaborate on this idea of politicization as well as to bring history, context, and in particular, temporality, to the center of this research, I look at two major events that crystallized the most critical landmarks in the recent political history of Latinos in the Washington D.C. area: the Mount Pleasant Riots of 1991 and "La Marcha" of 2006. In order to disentangle the process of politicization in each of the events analyzed, I examine the interplay of context (including demographic, political, and organizational features of the local Latino community), episodes of contention, attribution of opportunities and threats, social and organizational appropriation, and innovation. I then reconstruct these cases by inscribing them in their contexts and analyzing how, why, and when different consequential actions were performed. Both the Mount Pleasant riots and La Marcha involved the engagement of ordinary people in the Latino community in contentious public acts which led to the emergence of a transformed ethnically-centered political actor. I argue that this actor constitution was the result of the way in which ordinary people and various collective actors proceeded throughout the exceptional public performances, before, during, and after. My main argument is that the profile and structural location of leading organizations (e.g., dependency on government contracts, foundations' grants, employers, or ordinary people) involved in the events had a decisive impact on the actions adopted by community leaders which, in turn, affected the direction of the political path that the Latino community undertook.