College of Behavioral & Social Sciences
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Item 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.Item The Economy and the American Presidency in a Polarized Era: Changes to Income and Unemployment by Class, Race, and Gender(2017) Mugglestone, Konrad Peter; Morris, Irwin L; Government and Politics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)For decades, political scientists have debated, with little consensus, whether Democratic and Republican presidents have contrasting macroeconomic records. While some scholars have argued that presidents can (and do) target economic benefits to constituents, existing research on party differences in macroeconomic politics has assumed that the two major parties have constituencies distinguished by class and that each party managed the macroeconomy to benefit these class-based constituencies. However, political and economic conditions have changed over the past thirty years. Scholars have been concerned about the effects of increasing political polarization, which has caused unusually contentious and slow-paced policymaking. High debt levels have made major budgetary changes more difficult, and monetary policy has been checked by the zero lower bound. In light of these new political and economic challenges, this dissertation utilizes a unique dataset to examine presidential administrations from 1970 to 2014. Using this data, this project seeks to answer several key questions: Do modern presidents of opposing parties have contrasting macroeconomic records? In light of changing political and economic conditions, have these differences grown or decreased from the differences observed in the past? Finally, do modern presidents reflect the identity politics of the polarized, modern era by focusing not only on class constituencies, but on race and gender constituencies as well? Some of the findings are predictable, but others are surprising. In terms of the macroeconomy, Democratic presidents demonstrate economic records superior to their Republican counterparts. However, the party of the president rarely has any meaningful impact on income growth for specific class, race, and gender groups. Even so, the party of the president does have a consistently meaningful effect on unemployment rates. On average, Democratic presidents have greater impacts than Republicans on the overall unemployment rate and the unemployment rates of some of their constituent groups: the working class, and racial minorities. Moreover, evidence suggests that other political factors sometimes matter – both divided government and an election year variable capturing the Political Business Cycle have statistical relevance, especially in unemployment models. Finally, this study finds little statistical evidence that polarization is having a meaningful impact on presidential economic policymaking.Item ESSAYS ON GRADUATION(2011) Qian, Rong; Reinhart, Carmen M; Vegh, Carlos; Economics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation attempts to address the elusive concept of "graduation", that is the emergence from frequent crisis suffering status. It contains two chapters. The first uses a data set covering over two hundred years of sovereign debt, banking and inflation crises to explore the question of how long does it take a country to "graduate" from the typical pattern of serial crises that most emerging markets experience. We find that for default and inflation crises, twenty years is a significant period, but the distribution of recidivism has extremely fat tails. In the case of banking crises, it is unclear whether countries ever graduate. We also examine the more recent phenomenon of IMF programs, which sometimes result in "near misses" but sometimes end in default even after a program is instituted. The second chapter investigates the impact of countries' institutions on their likelihood of sovereign default from both an empirical and theoretical perspective. By employing a dataset of more than 80 countries, two facts emerge: 1) high institutional quality is associated with a low frequency of sovereign default crisis, and 2) in particular, polarized governments tend to default more often. To explain these facts, we developed a model that establishes a link between institutions, government polarization and sovereign default crises. Countries that lack rules and institutional settings to limit the pressure of powerful groups on a central government's policies default more often than countries that do have good institutions. Given that there are no barriers to limit the influence of powerful groups, a more polarized government defaults more because groups do not coordinate, giving rise to a negative externality. Simulations of the model succeed in matching the cross-country differences in sovereign default frequencies, given their institutional quality and degree of government polarization in the data.