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.
Browse
3 results
Search Results
Item Follow the Leaders: Policy Presentation in the U.S. Congress(2022) Gaynor, SoRelle Wyckoff; Miler, Kristina; Government and Politics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation presents a theory of policy presentation in the U.S. Congress. I define policy presentation as the strategic development and distribution of partisan information to explain major legislative decisions by congressional leaders. Today, rank-and-file members, increasingly removed from the legislative process, rely on guidance from congressional leaders to discuss major legislative decisions with their constituents. As a result, preparing constituent communication materials has become an institutionalized responsibility for party and committee leaders, particularly for House Republicans. I also argue that policy presentation is an undocumented source of partisan polarization, as it incentivizes a partisan presentation of legislative activity—even in cases of bipartisanship and compromise. Using interviews with members of Congress and staff, computational text analysis, and social network analysis, I demonstrate how congressional leaders develop and distribute partisan messages for constituent use. I also document the conditions under which policy presentation occurs, and the members most likely to rely on party and committee leaders for assistance with constituent communication.Item Overexposed: How a Media Market's Total Volume of Political Information Affects the Persuasive Power of Campaign Ads(2018) Turitto, Candace; Hanmer, Michael; Government and Politics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The popularity of televised political advertising has continued expanding over recent years, and now frequently attracts candidates for lower-level offices such as the House of Representatives, and even State Senate or Representative. Among its effects, this is leading to targeted voters being increasingly inundated with political solicitations in the weeks before an election. Political science has been creative, but limited, in overcoming many of the challenges presented in the field of media effects as it has endeavored to understand the basic effects generated by political media campaigns. One dearth of knowledge is a proper understanding of how varying levels of surrounding political volume might impact voter behavior and candidate evaluations. To that end, this research aims to uncover evidence of wider media market effects on the persuasive power of campaign ads. By merging voter opinion surveys with observed campaign media activity leading up to the 2014 midterms, and fielding a first-of-its-kind laboratory experiment which manipulates the amount of political information viewed, I find evidence that increasing volume and diversity of the surrounding political information in a media market significantly reduces the persuasive power of political ads. As campaigns spend more money on television advertising, these results suggest the need for a serious shift in how campaigns target and speak to voters in crowded market environments, expanding their view of relevant competition from the activity of their electoral opponent to all political actors in the greater media market. Moreover, these results suggest that some congressional candidates may need to “own” large majorities of their media market’s total political advertising to have any hope of counteracting these overexposure effects. This research also has major implications for how academics study campaign media effects, suggesting that results from isolated examinations of individual candidates or contests may be distorting our predictions of expected persuasive lift on broadcast television.Item The Mainstream Outsider: News Media Portrayals of Presidential Candidate Mitt Romney and His Mormonism, 2006-2008(2011) Williams, Lane Daniel; McAdams, Katherine C; Journalism; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This study examines how news media framed former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney and his Mormonism during his unsuccessful quest for the 2008 Republican presidential nomination. The study's central finding is that, in the aggregate, news accounts framed Mormonism as outside the American religious and cultural mainstream. This framing emerged as part of campaign's "horse-race" coverage, which focused on who was ahead in the nomination race, who was behind and why. That coverage naturally highlighted aspects of Mormonism that caused Romney electoral problems. Journalists zeroed in on the church's history of polygamy, on whether the church is a Christian faith and on current church beliefs that may appear outside the mainstream. Basic beliefs that Mormons share with other American faiths, such as helping the poor, were mentioned, but less frequently. Romney himself was framed as a generally mainstream candidate whose central problem was his faith. This dissertation also describes how news media relied heavily on an analogy between Romney's struggle to overcome his "Mormon problem" and presidential candidate John F. Kennedy's struggle to overcome anti-Catholic sentiments in 1960. Implications of these conclusions are discussed for candidates of other minority religions and further research is suggested. The study proposes a "horse-race influence model" that highlights a candidate's weaknesses, providing voters with reasons to vote against a candidate, which is reflected in the next set of horse-race coverage polls. Horse-race coverage, therefore, may create a feedback loop that increasingly harms a candidate's chances. Quantitative findings are based on a content analysis of 205 news articles that appeared in eight prominent American news outlets between January 2006 and Romney's withdrawal from the race in February 2008. Articles in the sample mentioned Mormonism at least four times and Romney at least once. The content analysis obtained a mean intercoder reliability of .84.