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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2004 - 200912010 - 20121

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    Constituting Republics: Toward Political Conception of the Constitutional Predicament
    (2012) Dzhuraev, Emilbek; Elkin, Stephen L; Soltan, Karol E; Government and Politics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    How is a good political order constituted? This work is a critical and constructive exploration of the problem of political constitution. Recent contributions to the study of this subject have often failed to adequately recognize its political nature, and have thus fallen short of being able to inform the challenges of actual constitutional development. This thesis argues for a broader conception of constitution that overcomes the limitations imposed by the legalist, formal-institutional, philosophic, and cultural-essentialist perspectives, and one that accounts for the political-ness of the matter more satisfactorily. Correctly understood, constitution of a well-ordered society is a practical, situated, and continuous predicament. From this broad view of political constitution the dissertation moves on to elaborate a more specific instance of it, the idea of pragmatic republicanism. Pragmatic republicanism is a comprehensive idea of political constitution, comprising four main elements: a realistic vision of a good polity, a set of thin-normative procedural orientations of constitution, a set of basic empirical conditions of constitution, and the concept of constitutional crafting that is tantamount to the activity of constituting in the midst of the preceding three elements. Once these concepts are outlined, the idea of pragmatic republicanism is applied, by way of illustration, to the case of Kyrgyzstan - an instructive case of a seemingly hopeless constitutional malaise. This work builds upon a very eclectic range of literature as it makes the case for an interdisciplinary and `problem-driven' understanding of political constitution. Contra some of the conventional criteria of good social science, this work defends the view that a proper understanding of constitution must accept conceptual complexity, deficit of parsimony, analytic uncertainty, and theoretical incompleteness as unavoidable and even necessary.
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    Confederate Federalism: A View From the Governors
    (2004-04-30) Powell, Michael A.; Belz, Herman J.; History
    ABSTRACT Title of Dissertation: CONFEDERATE FEDERALISM: A VIEW FROM THE GOVERNORS Michael Albert Powell, Doctor of Philosophy, 2004 Dissertation directed by: Professor Herman J. Belz Department of History Examination of Confederate federalism to date generally has emphasized one of two interpretations: that the Confederacy either "died of state rights" or that the Confederacy, because of the war-time demands, created a government at least as centralized as the Union, if not more so. This dissertation argues that the reality was much more complex. Confederate federalism consisted of three phases. The first, or the cooperative, phase was represented by a high degree of cooperation between the states and central government and lasted from the formation of the Confederacy until the spring of 1862. The governors freely provided troops, arms, and equipment to both the Confederacy and each other with minimal conflict over constitutional lines of authority. The second phase, from the spring of 1862 to the fall of 1864, was marked by conflict between the states and the Davis administration, with the differences resolved through negotiated compromises. While conscription was a war-time necessity, compromises were negotiated between the governors and the Davis administration over exemptions, use of state courts in deciding the constitutionality of conscription, and changes in the law itself. Impressment and the suspension of the writ of habeas corpus were recognized by the governors as legitimate constitutional powers of the central government, but limitations were negotiated with respect to their enforcement. Lastly, fiscal policies were deemed by the governors to fall within the sphere of the Confederacy's constitutional authority and therefore beyond the scope of gubernatorial authority. The final phase of Confederate federalism, from the fall of 1864 until the end of the war in the spring of 1865, witnessed the states struggling for survival and the collapse of the Confederacy. The governors sought to keep troops and supplies for their states and to suppress or control local peace initiatives in an unsuccessful effort to win the war.