Theses and Dissertations from UMD

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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 give thesis/dissertation in DRUM

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THREE ESSAYS IN HUMANITARIAN OPERATIONS: PREPARATION AND RESPONSE TO DISASTERS
(2024) Sabol, Matthew; Dresner, Martin; Evers, Philip; Business and Management: Logistics, Business & Public Policy; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
Three essays related to humanitarian operations are examined. The first essay addresses the impact of humanitarian operations on recovery from disasters. Event study methodology is used to demonstrate the economic impact of Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) disaster recovery operations on economic recovery. The second essay examines how political considerations can impact government response to natural disasters. Based on theories of public choice and congressional dominance, models are formulated and fixed-effects regressions are used to examine the impact of political alignment and control on government-led humanitarian response. The third essay provides a comparative analysis among four inventory management methods used to prepare for humanitarian operations, under conditions of uncertain demand. Demands for key materials are simulated, based on data from the Defense Logistics Agency (DLA), relevant to humanitarian operations. General propositions are formulated for inventory managers in preparation for humanitarian operations.
In Pursuit of Equity: The Politics of Desegregation in Howard County, Maryland
(2023) Bill, Kayla Mackenzie; Scribner, Campbell F.; Education Policy, and Leadership; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
School desegregation policies aim to redistribute educational resources and opportunities more equitably, but they have not always done so. Evidence indicates that political factors, including resistance from White parents and legal constraints, have undermined desegregation policies’ potential to fulfill their aims. Yet, a few studies suggest that windows of opportunity to desegregate schools exist. Even so, these studies often focus on how a subset of political factors shape desegregation efforts, and some political factors remain understudied. Furthermore, school desegregation research tends to focus on either the political dynamics of advancing these policies or the effects these policies have on segregation. Thus, the extent to which political factors affect desegregation policies’ potential to reduce segregation and, eventually, to advance educational equity remains an open question. My dissertation addresses these gaps in the literature by using a race-conscious political framework and a qualitative-dominant, convergent parallel mixed methods design to explore the politics and outcomes of the Howard County Public School System’s (HCPSS) recent effort to desegregate by redistricting, or redrawing school attendance boundary lines. Howard County is an ideal setting to study desegregation because it possesses several favorable conditions for desegregating schools, including racial/ethnic diversity, espoused commitments to educational equity, and a history of racial/ethnic and socioeconomic integration. These favorable conditions allow me to “test” whether desegregation is a feasible policy goal for school districts and to provide policymakers with insights about how to advance desegregation policies in ways that maximize their potential to reduce segregation and promote educational equity. I find that school overcrowding, growing racial/ethnic and socioeconomic segregation, and resource inequities led the HCPSS Superintendent and the Howard County Board of Education to initiate redistricting. The superintendent proposed a redistricting plan that had the potential to reduce segregation in HCPSS. Yet, various political factors—including resistance from wealthy White and Asian parents and limitations from HCPSS’s formal attendance boundary adjustment policy—led the board to enact a redistricting plan that had relatively less potential to reduce segregation and would have increased it at some school levels. Upon implementation, the enacted redistricting plan appeared to reduce segregation in HCPSS, but those reductions likely resulted from enrollment changes in the district. Ultimately, findings suggest that, under favorable political conditions, desegregation policies do have the potential to reduce segregation. However, realizing these policies’ potential will require districts to either a) explicitly prioritize desegregation, rather than allowing policymakers to attempt to balance desegregation with other, often competing policy goals, or b) align desegregation with other policy goals, rather than pitting it against them.
PRINTING POWER, PRESSING POLITICS: M.N. KATKOV AND THE RISE OF PRIVATE NEWSPAPER PRESS IN LATE IMPERIAL RUSSIA, 1860s-1880s
(2022) Graff, Ala Creciun; Dolbilov, Mikhail; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
This dissertation examines the rise of the private political press and its engagement in Russian politics during the 1860s-1880s. During these three decades, Russia’s newspaper press underwent a dramatic cultural, technological, and political change. Censorship liberalization and accelerating communication technology transformed the Russian newspaper from a marginal genre on the print landscape into a hub of information exchange and a vibrant forum for political discussion, where editors sought to influence not only public opinion, but also bureaucratic decision making. Whereas existing literature has focused on the influence of the state on the press (censorship) or the role of the press in shaping a civil society, this dissertation uncovers the ways in which the press influenced political discussion and decision-making.Concentrating on a handful of prominent newspapers during the 1860s-1880s, such as M.N. Katkov’s Moskovskie Vedomosti, A.A. Kraevskii’s Golos, A.S. Suvorin’s Novoe Vremia, and I.S. Aksakov’s Rus’, this study explores a variety of ways in which these newspapers and their powerful editors shaped debates, careers, and political outcomes in Russia’s political stage. The dissertation is the first to examine the increased readership and impact of the private political press within the bureaucratic ranks and at court, and to track the penetration of newspaper discourses into policy discussion and decision-making. It dissects the complex relationships of collaboration, patronage, and mutual dependency between press editors and bureaucratic officials. Prominent editors aligned themselves with like-minded bureaucratic interest groups to advance political ideas, engage in fierce polemics, and take on political rivals; their partisanship made the press a surrogate of party politics in Russia. The growing entanglements of politics and press spanned wide networks of press informants, agents, and protegees within government ranks, whose leaks fueled public debate and further eroded the government control of information. Discreet instruments of political maneuvering, private political newspapers ultimately served as vehicles for the political agendas and ideologies of their editors. This dissertation traces the emergence of the “journalist-politician” M.N. Katkov, who, as an ideologue of Emperor Alexander III’s rule, formulated a new basis of monarchic legitimacy grounded in national politics (narodnost’), an all-estate approach (vsesoslovnost’), and welfare policies (blagosostoianie). Taking a broader approach to Katkov’s intellectual legacy – beyond his national politics – and borrowing revisionist approaches in recent literature, this study builds an alternative framework for understanding perhaps the most prominent newspaper editor of the nineteenth century. Delving into Katkov’s direct work on two key reforms of Alexander III’s rule, this study sheds light on an extent of influence exercised by the press on political processes. This work contributes fresh perspectives on the role of the press on the political stage and its relationship with the state in late Imperial Russia. It reveals that the press, far from the supplicant of the government, became a powerful political actor in its own right. Ultimately, this study demonstrates that the rise of Russia’s private political press eroded the government’s control over information, over the shaping of political narratives, and finally over political processes.
“Freedom in Their Hands is a Deadly Poison”: Print Culture, Legal Movements, and Slaveholding Resistance on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, 1850-61
(2018) Chaires, Jacob Wayne; Bonner, Christopher; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
The goal of this thesis is twofold: to explain the rise of slaveholding anxiety in relation to the growing free black question, as well as to articulate how slaveholders sought to regain their power. I argue that slaveholders on the Eastern Shore politically organized around ideas and concepts produced in newspapers. Slaveholders utilized new ideas about race and the law to organize, and call upon the General Assembly to enact tougher sanctions on free black mobility. Newspapers are not only a means by which to quote mine, but they are also living, breathing, cultural organisms. They both reflect slaveholding anxieties, as well as play into them. They both record local news events, as well as conspicuously pair those local stories with similar stories from other counties, states, and nations.
Flip-Flops, Double Standards, and Other Political Sins: A Citizen's Guide to Hypocrisy in Politics
(2020) Stonerook, Jason Port; Soltan, Karol; Government and Politics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
People detest hypocrisy, and one of the reasons people hold politics in such low regard is that politics appears rife with hypocrisy. The proliferation of hypocrisy in politics can leave many feeling disenchanted and cynical about political affairs. Yet even those with a strong aversion to political hypocrisy are likely to admit there are occasions when an act that has been characterized as hypocritical is actually acceptable in politics. In some cases, the offense of hypocrisy may not be very serious, or conditioned by circumstances; in other cases, the accusation may not even be valid. This study examines the question of when hypocrisy is more or less acceptable in politics. This issue is explored through a series of case studies drawn from events that occurred in American politics between 2014-2016, an era characterized by high political polarization, high-stakes showdowns between congressional Republicans and the Democratic administration of President Barack Obama, the 2016 presidential primaries, and 2016 presidential election between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. The study is organized by type, with a focus on basic violations of principle; logical inconsistencies; double standards involving partisan competition; discrepancies between the public affairs of public officials and their private lives; and flip-flops. The study finds that the most useful and powerful accusations of hypocrisy are those that effectively assert that a political figure has inappropriately prioritized narrow partisan concerns over a broader commitment to principles related to democratic norms, the exercise of civic virtue, and public-spiritedness.
THE THEOLOGICAL AND POLITICAL FRAGMENTATION OF EVANGELICAL ELITES
(2020) Burger, Matthew Joseph; Morris, Iwrin L; Government and Politics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
This inquiry reassesses the theological and political conservatism of the white evangelical tradition, a settled assumption in the academic and popular literature, in view of changing political rhetoric and priorities among the movement’s mainstream elites. It is contended that: 1) There is growing fragmentation among evangelical elites precipitated by a departure from the hallmarks of evangelical theological orthodoxy in a liberal direction by some elites. 2) Four distinct elite types have emerged from this theological fragmentation with distinct theological assumptions and characteristics, including, traditional evangelicals, marketers, emergents, and unmoored marketers. 3) Given the relationship between theology and politics (Green 2010), less theologically orthodox evangelical elite types should also exhibit less conservative political attitudes and behaviors. 4) The emergence of politically progressive social justice priorities among mainstream evangelical elites do not represent an inconsequential adjustment in political rhetoric, nor merely a broadening of the evangelical political agenda. (Pally 2011; Rogers and Heltzel 2008; Steenland and Goff 2014) Rather, it evinces real changes in the theological commitments of these elites that manifest in real changes for their politics. Employing pastor interviews, content analysis of sermons, and the examination of congregation-specific media, this study finds substantial evidence of theological liberalism among a significant segment of evangelical elites that is strongly correlated with a politically leftward migration in the personal political attitudes and behavior of pastors as well as the political priorities they advance in their congregations. Likewise, there is persuasive evidence that this liberalization is driving fragmentation among evangelical elites suggesting a future schism within the movement. It is argued, however, that the changing theological and political commitments of many evangelical elites is unlikely to produce large changes in the partisanship or voting behavior of those in the pews. Nevertheless, these findings do have important implications for how evangelicals are measured in survey research, the relationship between evangelicals and the Republican Party, and evangelical exceptionalism (Smith 1998) to the numerical decline experienced by other religious traditions. Indeed, it is contended that liberal evangelical elites, like their liberal mainline brethren, may increasingly be catechizing those in the pews to become religious “nones”.
I Love to Tell the Stor(ies): Narrative Construction in the Christian Right
(2017) Gilmore, James Gillespie; Parry-Giles, Trevor; Communication; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
Since the emergence of the Christian Right as an identified political and social movement in the late 1970s, commentators have sought to explain it. I Love to Tell the Stor(ies) posits that Christian Right rhetoric can be defined and understood by its appeals to two narratives about the universe and the nation. The Cosmic Narrative suggests that the cosmos is a battlefield between the Christian God and Satan, hinged on the incarnation of Jesus Christ and culminating in the End Times. In the American Narrative, the nation was founded by Protestant Christians to fulfill God’s purposes, but has fallen into moral decline and must return to Christianity so that it can again be blessed by God. I Love to Tell the Stor(ies) reconstructs these narratives from texts by prominent Christian Right rhetors. The narratives resonate with one another in the parameters they set out for how the universe is held together and for epistemology within that universe, forming the foundation of the Christian Right’s rhetorical edifice. A challenge emerges for Christian Right rhetors in some of the particulars, though, as the narratives present dissonant hermeneutics for space and time, for the identity of the movement’s adherents, and for the relationship to other politically-conservative religious worldviews. This project concludes that while these dissonances threaten to undermine the Christian Right’s worldview, they can also be strategically used to bolster that worldview. Rhetors can use these dissonances to transpose methods of reasoning from one narrative to another, creating a context in which adherents’ actions have eternal consequences, the symbols of civil religion are reinterpreted as special revelation from God to those with the means to understand them, and the humanist enemy is not merely a threat to God’s purposes for the American nation but an occupying army in league with the forces of Satan in the great cosmic war. In the hands of skilled rhetors, the worldview structure constructed by these resonances and dissonances has continued to stand for decades.
King of the Renaissance: Art and Politics at the Neapolitan Court of Ferrante I, 1458-1494
(2016) Riesenberger, Nicole Joy; Gill, Meredith J.; Art History and Archaeology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
In the second half of the fifteenth century, King Ferrante I of Naples (r. 1458-1494) dominated the political and cultural life of the Mediterranean world. His court was home to artists, writers, musicians, and ambassadors from England to Egypt and everywhere in between. Yet, despite its historical importance, Ferrante’s court has been neglected in the scholarship. This dissertation provides a long-overdue analysis of Ferrante’s artistic patronage and attempts to explicate the king’s specific role in the process of art production at the Neapolitan court, as well as the experiences of artists employed therein. By situating Ferrante and the material culture of his court within the broader discourse of Early Modern art history for the first time, my project broadens our understanding of the function of art in Early Modern Europe. I demonstrate that, contrary to traditional assumptions, King Ferrante was a sophisticated patron of the visual arts whose political circumstances and shifting alliances were the most influential factors contributing to his artistic patronage. Unlike his father, Alfonso the Magnanimous, whose court was dominated by artists and courtiers from Spain, France, and elsewhere, Ferrante differentiated himself as a truly Neapolitan king. Yet Ferrante’s court was by no means provincial. His residence, the Castel Nuovo in Naples, became the physical embodiment of his commercial and political network, revealing the accretion of local and foreign visual vocabularies that characterizes Neapolitan visual culture.
The Life of Honor: Individuality and the Communal Impulse in Romanticism
(2013) Kantor, Jamison Brenner; Wang, Orrin N.C.; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
For most scholars of Romanticism, honor is a traditionalist value. It underwrites Edmund Burke's defense against revolutionary radicalism; it is the code of medieval crusaders and tribal highlanders in Walter Scott's novels; and it is a quality reserved for nobles such as Lady Catherine de Bourgh in Pride and Prejudice, who relies on honor to assert her privilege in the face of the rising middle-class. Despite these conservative connotations, The Life of Honor shows that early-nineteenth-century writers did not simply consider honor a reactionary ethos. Rather, they saw how honor could be progressive and egalitarian--a modern virtue that allowed them to grapple with the dilemmas of emerging liberal society. A personal sense of communal obligation, the modern honor ethic balanced the individualism emphasized by the republican political movement with the demands of a rapidly changing social order. Reading texts from a variety of authors and genres--Godwin's Jacobin novel, Wordsworth's autobiographical poetry, Scott and Austen's historical fiction, and the brutal slave narrative of Mary Prince--I demonstrate how this ancient civic virtue was reinvigorated in response to some of the most pressing cultural questions of the day, conflicts between the self and society that could not be resolved through the operations of sympathy or the power of the imagination. Because this modern form of honor emerged from post-revolutionary life, it was associated with a new political order: liberalism, a set of civic norms that began to thrive in the late-eighteenth-century and that still prevails in Europe today. While the Romantic honor code drew upon the liberal commitment to universal dignity and individual merit, Romantic honor simultaneously illuminated the conceptual problems of liberalism--its propensity to rank independence over obligation; to connect private commercial success with public virtue; and to abstract social predicaments from identity categories like race and gender. Responding to recent scholarship on the liberal disposition in Romantic pedagogy and nineteenth-century Realist aesthetics, The Life of Honor reveals the paradox of a civil society built around the pursuit of individual esteem and thus the wager of Romanticism's political commitments.
Incivility in Mass Political Discourse: The Causes and Consequences of an Uncivil Public
(2013) Gervais, Bryan T.; Uslaner, Eric M.; Government and Politics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
In this dissertation project, I explore the effect that exposure to uncivil political talk has on deliberative attitudes and behavior. I hypothesize that incivility in political discourse can induce anti-deliberative attitudes among the public, and increases the use of incivility in political talk. I argue that an anti-deliberative spirit among the public helps fuel mass partisan polarization, and limits the positive effects that come from public deliberation. Using survey data, I find that use of incivility by the public when talking politics has increased. This trend has come alongside changes in partisan polarization and media over the last few decades. A separate analysis confirms the tie between exposure to partisan, uncivil media and uncivil political talk; using panel data, I find that exposure to political talk radio and pundit-based television programming leads audience members with like-minded political views to mimic uncivil language and tactics when expressing their own political opinions. I use experimental methods to explore incivility's effects more in-depth. Drawing from affective intelligence theory, I hypothesize that political incivility has the ability to induce anger, which in turn reduces deliberative attitudes. In one experiment, I manipulate the amount of incivility in an online message board. I find that uncivil political talk induced feelings of anger in individuals when one's partisan in-group was targeted, and led to an increased use of incivility when the partisan out-group was targeted. When feelings of anger are stimulated in people, they reprimand the uncivil "perpetrator" on the message board, and display anti-deliberative attitudes--including a reduced propensity to consider alternative views and lower levels of satisfaction with interactive online communication. A second experiment, embedded in a national survey, confirms that disagreeable incivility and like-minded incivility have different effects. Uncivil messages that are disagreeable induce feelings of anger, decrease willingness to compromise, and boost use of incivility. While the connection between like-minded incivility, anger, and anti-deliberative attitudes is less clear, uncivil messages lead like-minded messages to mimic uncivil and anti-deliberative behavior. My findings show that incivility limits political deliberation. I conclude by noting the consequences of this, as well as directions for future research.

Theses and Dissertations from UMD

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