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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Item A Collection of Red States and Blue States: Out-Party Threat and Contemporary State Lawmaking(2021) Miras, Nicholas Scott; Rouse, Stella M; Government and Politics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)How does the balance of partisan control at the national level influence state politics? Unlike decades past, partisan control of the federal government is now virtually up for grabs in every election. As a result, when one side manages to gain unified control of the presidency and Congress, they face strong partisan incentives to actually act on their agenda. This is deeply problematic for those in the minority. Not only do they have little control over the national policymaking process, but their past policy achievements and favored programs are jeopardized by the majority. Outside of Washington, this political context also has implications for state lawmakers. Unlike national politics, unified control of state governments has reached historic levels, with 38 states under unified government (as of September 2021)---up from a low of 19 states in 1998. Meanwhile, average seat margins in state legislatures have expanded considerably, with veto-proof majorities also reaching all-time highs. As a consequence, majority-party lawmakers are increasingly free to run their states in a way that is consistent with their party’s governing philosophy, with little to no resistance. In this dissertation, I advance a theory of contemporary state policymaking centered on the idea of out-party threat, in which majority-party lawmakers---guided by electoral considerations---exhibit more partisan policy activism as their state’s policy preferences are increasingly threatened by federal action from the opposing party. As the balance of national partisan control changes, so does this out-party threat, which, in turn, re-calibrates the political calculus for state lawmakers. I test my theory by examining state lawmaking from 2001 to 2019, a period during which the federal government oscillated between unified and divided partisan control. Using data on bill introduction and enactment across twelve of the most common policy areas in state politics, I find that more threatening political contexts lead to higher volumes of bills introduced in states controlled by the national out-party, particularly in policy areas more important to the party's base and in states that are less nationally competitive. Only among Democratic-controlled states, however, does this heightened volume actually translate into more bills enacted into law. These results serve to re-shape our understanding of contemporary state policymaking and federal-state relations, shedding light not only on why states may choose to engage in partisan policy activism, but under which national political conditions.Item Investigation into the Effects of Aeolian Scaling Parameters on Sediment Mobilization below a Hovering Rotor(2011) Baharani, Ajay Kumar; Leishman, John G; Aerospace Engineering; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Flow visualization and particle image velocimetry (PIV) experiments were conducted on a small-scale rotor hovering over a ground plane covered with a mobile sediment bed to help understand the effects of certain selected scaling parameters on the processes of sediment mobilization, entrainment, and uplift as induced by the rotor. Flow visualization using high-speed videography was used to study the rotor flow structures, their evolution in the rotor wake, and their interaction with the ground plane. Time-resolved PIV measurements of the rotor wake flow at the sediment bed quantified the flow velocities where most of the sediment mobilization was observed to occur. Dual-phase PIV experiments were conducted using ten different sediment samples of known characteristics to vary the values of five of the similarity parameters: 1. Particle diameter-to-rotor radius ratio, 2. Particle-to-fluid density ratio, 3. Ratio of characteristic flow (or wind) speed to particle terminal speed, 4. Densimetric Froude number, and 5. Threshold friction velocity ratio. The particle-to-fluid density ratio was shown to have the greatest effect on the resulting two-phase flow, followed by the threshold friction velocity ratio. The flow was also sensitive to changes in the particle diameter-to-rotor radius ratio. Changes in the densimetric Froude number and ratio of the characteristic flow speed to particle terminal speed also showed good correlations to observations of the quantity of uplifted particles. The effects of the passage of the tip vortex near the bed was shown to increase the shear stresses on the bed, which was observed to be closely correlated to an increase in the quantity of entrained sediment particles if the threshold conditions for particle mobility was exceeded. The observations and results were used to make recommendations regarding scaling on dual-phase experiments to better simulate the problem of rotorcraft brownout in the laboratory environment.