Theses and Dissertations from UMD
Permanent URI for this communityhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/2
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 give thesis/dissertation in DRUM
More information is available at Theses and Dissertations at University of Maryland Libraries.
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Item Mobilized Interests: How Interest Groups Influence Member Perceptions of Politics(2024) Meli, Amy D; Miler, Kristina; Government and Politics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In this project, I investigate how interest group mobilizations influence their members’ perceptions of government and politics. I theorize that some groups – especially issue advocacy nonprofits whose issues have been incorporated into the Democratic or Republican party platforms – use partisan strategies focused on electing the leaders who can help them move their policy agendas in Congress. Other groups, especially trade and professional associations, choose not to affiliate with a pollical party and instead build relationships with policymakers on both sides of the aisle so that they can move their policy agendas regardless of who is in office. I find that these two different policy strategies lead interest groups to communicate differently with their members, with partisan groups and issue advocacy nonprofits using more partisan and conflict-oriented language, while nonpartisan groups and associations use more pragmatic language. I find that these messages have effects on the people who read them. In a survey experiment, I find that independents and weak partisans who read pragmatic and bipartisan messages have warmer feelings towards the other party, while strong partisans have warmer feelings towards the other party when they hear partisan messaging. Notably, I find that these different approaches lead to varying effects on interest group members, including differences in levels of affective polarization and political efficacy. As professionals join their professional society and get more involved in their association’s activities, they have more trust in government, higher levels of internal and external efficacy, and warmer feelings towards those in the out party. Through interview research, I find that members are influenced by a number of factors, including the public policy training they receive from their interest groups, interactions they have with members of Congress and others in the political system, and messages members receive about how groups use bipartisan strategies to accomplish member goals. All of these stimuli are contributing factors to these effects.Item Taking Perspective: A Theory of Prejudice Reduction and Political Attitudes(2021) Safarpour, Alauna C.; Hanmer, Michael; Banks, Antoine; Government and Politics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation develops and tests Engagement, Perspective-Taking, and Re-calibration (EPR), a theory of how to reduce prejudice and its consequences on political attitudes. I theorize that an intervention that uses engagement to encourage perspective-taking reduces prejudice and re-calibrates the subject’s attribution of blame for America’s racial problems. This last step, “re-calibration,” shifts the target of blame from out-group members to the forces of racism and discrimination which alters political attitudes rooted in prejudice. I employ my theory of EPR to develop interventions to reduce anti-Black prejudice among U.S. citizens using online perspective-taking tasks. The interventions encourage participants to adopt the perspective of an African American individual who experiences racial prejudice and make choices regarding how to respond to the bias they encounter. Interventions designed according to EPR theory were evaluated in three randomized experiments in which participants completed either the perspective-taking treatment or a placebo task. I find that participation in the perspective-taking task significantly reduces multiple forms of racial prejudice including racial resentment, negative affect, and belief in anti-Black stereotypes. The largest effects were among those with the highest levels of baseline prejudice. These studies also show that reducing prejudice increases support for policies that would help African Americans, including government assistance to Blacks, additional changes to ensure racial equality, affirmative action, and reparations for slavery. Similarly, reducing prejudice increases support for the belief that Blacks are not treated fairly in American society, increases support for policing reforms, and increases support for the Black Lives Matter protests against police violence. My results demonstrate that a substantial amount of opposition to racial policies is rooted in racial animus. But neither animus nor opposition to racial policies are immutable, reducing prejudice through my technique increases support for policies to redress racial inequities. This dissertation offers two empirically evaluated interventions that may be used as low-cost bias reduction trainings to combat the rising hate-related incidents in the United States. More broadly, my results provide insight into the nature of racial prejudice and its impact on political attitudes.