Theses and Dissertations from UMD
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Item Philosopher Kings, Then and Now: The Political Philosophy of IQ(2015) Smith, Brannon Wilson; Glass, James M; Government and Politics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The most fundamental question of political philosophy is “who should rule?” Socrates famously argued in the Republic that philosophers were the most precise guardians of the best city. The question of intelligence is not a theoretical one; it is relevant far beyond the building of cities in speech. The importance we ascribe to measures of intelligence informs a broad range of policy questions and could challenge our democratic processes. This dissertation seeks to understand the relationship of the modern concept of IQ to Western political philosophy by investigating the role of intelligence for Plato, Aristotle, Machiavelli, and contemporary psychometricians. Whereas intelligence has a moral dimension for the classical philosophers, Machiavelli emphasized the use of prudence in the service of ambition. Contemporary psychometrics presents intelligence as a distinct, amoral property. I argue that Freud and group psychology provide insight into the way democracy could relate to a hypothetical cognitive elite. I further suggest ways in which we could make use of the modern IQ test to improve the quality of our political leadership and make use of an important Platonic theory without abandoning representative democracy as we know it.Item Bilateral Intelligence Cooperation: Theory Development within the 'Missing Dimension' of International Politics(2012) Bock, Ryan E.; Quester, George Q; Government and Politics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Bilateral intelligence cooperation has received increased attention in recent years, thanks in part to its publicly acknowledged role in supporting sovereign states in their efforts to counter transnational threats. Until recently most of the scholarship on this topic has been descriptive and atheoretical, with a tendency to treat known examples of cooperation as unique occurrences, rather than as instances of a broader phenomenon. The aversion to theory surrounding bilateral intelligence cooperation has inhibited efforts to develop generalized and contingent explanations about it, such as why it occurs in the first place and under what conditions it is most likely to flourish and atrophy. This dissertation seeks to address these gaps in the Intelligence Studies literature by leveraging insights from two theoretical traditions from International Relations--the dyadic democratic peace and relational contracting perspectives--to develop candidate explanations of why certain pairs of states engage in greater degrees of intelligence cooperation over time than others. Two historical case studies--the Anglo-Soviet and Anglo-American military intelligence relationships during World War II--are presented and analyzed with a view to assessing the relative strengths and weaknesses of each explanation. Through the use of qualitative research methods (i.e., the congruence method and testing of observable implications) and the development of new numeric measurements to capture the depth of intelligence cooperation over time, the author finds that the normative dyadic democratic peace hypothesis and its posited causal mechanism of the regime recognition dynamic are largely corroborated in both cases, thus suggesting that they warrant further consideration as an explanation of the depth of bilateral intelligence cooperation. By contrast, the relational contracting hypothesis and its posited causal mechanism of willful hierarchy are not well supported in either case, thus raising questions about their applicability and generalizability to the larger universe of cases.