College of Behavioral & Social Sciences

Permanent URI for this communityhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/8

The collections in this community comprise faculty research works, as well as graduate theses and dissertations..

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Now showing 1 - 4 of 4
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    Initial Findings from the Maryland Trans Survey
    (Trans Maryland, 2024-03) Pease, M Valle; Taylor, Son; Blinder, Lee; Clements, Zakary A.; Galupo, M. Paz
    The Maryland Trans Survey is a community-based research project conducted by Trans Maryland and the Queer/Trans Collective for Research on Equity and Wellness examining experiences of trans people in the State of Maryland in areas such as health and healthcare, employment and economic wellbeing, and legal and policy experiences. To date, it is the largest survey of trans people in the State, with 750 trans people representing all 23 counties in Maryland and Baltimore City. Data were collected from May to December 2023 through in-person and online community outreach and the project was approved by the Towson University Institutional Review Board. This brief contains preliminary descriptive results from the project for advocates, policymakers, and community-serving entities to better understand and support the current needs of trans people in Maryland.
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    REFUGEES AND RESETTLEMENT: A QUALITATIVE ANALYSIS OF REFUGEE INTEGRATION THROUGH SOCIAL & SUPPORT SERVICES
    (2016) Enekwe, Blessing; McIntosh, Wayne; Government and Politics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    This dissertation studies refugee resettlement in the United States utilizing the Integration Indicator’s framework developed by Ager and Strang for the U.S. context. The study highlights the U.S. refugee admissions program and the policies in the states of Maryland and Massachusetts while analyzing the service delivery models and its effects on refugee integration in these locations. Though immigration policy and funding for refugee services are primarily the domain of the federal government, funds are allocated through and services are delivered at the state level. The Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR), which operates under the Department of Health and Human Services, was established after the Refugee Act of 1980 to deliver assistance to displaced persons. The ORR provides funds to individual states primarily through The Refugee Social Service and Targeted Assistance Formula Grant programs. Since the inauguration of the ORR three primary models of refugee integration through service delivery have emerged. Two of the models include the publicly/privately administered programs, where resources are allocated to the state in conjunction with private voluntary agencies; and the Wilson/Fish Alternative programs, where states sub-contract all elements of the resettlement program to voluntary agencies and private organizations —in which they can cease all state level participation and voluntary agencies or private organizations contract directly from the ORR in order for all states to deliver refugee services where the live. The specific goals of this program are early employment and economic self-sufficiency. This project utilizes US Census, state, and ORR data in conjunction with interviews of refugee resettlement practitioners involved in the service delivery and refugees. The findings show that delivery models emphasizing job training, English instruction courses, institutional collaboration, and monetary assistance, increases refugee acclimation and adaptation, providing insight into their potential for integration into the United States.
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    National Partisanship and State Policy Diffusion: The Impact of Polarized Parties on State Policy Decisions
    (2014) Wantz, Joseph P.; Morris, Irwin; Government and Politics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    This project is an examination of patterns of state policy adoption, and provides a new theory for policy diffusion research. While traditional policy diffusion research focuses on geographic proximity as the main mechanism for policy adoption, I argue that states are more likely to rely on partisan proximity and adopt policy from partisan neighbors. This is, primarily, a result of heightened polarization nationally. In the absence of national policymaking, states will feel both more pressure to create more policy as well as leeway to enact more partisan policies. In order to test this theory, I look at three cases: same-sex marriage, right-to-work, and state lottery adoption. I utilize interviews with state lawmakers and interest group staff as well as quantitative methods to show the relationship between partisanship and policy diffusion. Overall, this work adds an important element to a vast and well-established literature and provides a new way of understanding the policy creation in the American states.
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    Essays on Budgetary Institutions: Theory and Evidence
    (2006-11-27) Amoroso, Nicolas Emiliano; Drazen, Allan; Economics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    The dissertation offers an analysis of the role of budgetary institutions on the determination of fiscal outcomes. In the second chapter I provide a theoretical model that rationalizes differences in fiscal outcomes of two countries that are supposed to obey the same set of numerical constraints on the budget. I argue that these differences arise from heterogeneity in the degree of budgetary transparency that make these rules more or less binding. Moreover, the model is able to accommodate not only long run results, where stronger institutions will always cause more constrained fiscal outcomes, but also short run implications, where countries with relatively stronger institutions can be paired with relatively unconstrained outcomes. The main lesson of the chapter is that, in a democratic environment, transparency of the budgetary process is the main ingredient responsible for the good behavior of the government, and that numeric constraints will have very different effects depending on the level of transparency. In the third chapter I conduct an empirical investigation across a set of countries, of the effects of budgetary institutions on fiscal outcomes. I exploit a new dataset on budgetary practices across countries, to construct several measures of the three recognized budgetary institutions: numerical rules, procedural rules, and budgetary transparency. The main finding of the chapter is that among budgetary institutions, transparency is the only one that is consistently associated with more fiscal discipline, a finding that goes in hand with the results of the model in the previous chapter. The fourth chapter provides an empirical investigation of the effects of budgetary transparency on fiscal outcomes in the American States. I construct a transparency measure across time from the mid 1980s that allows me, not only to look at the evolution of transparency in the American States, but to take account of possible fixed effects in the estimations. My results essentially corroborate those obtained elsewhere in the literature, that greater fiscal transparency among the American States is associated with larger size of government, but I show that this effect is less robust and economically relevant than previously thought.