College of Behavioral & Social Sciences
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Item CIVIL SOCIETY AND RELATIONSHIP CULTURE: KOREAN AMERICANS' EXPERIENCE WITH THEIR ETHNIC COMMUNITY AND BEYOND(2011) Lee, Susan Sohyun; Alford, Charles Fred; Government and Politics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Along with the increase in interest in civil society among Political Theorists, there is the growing concern with the decline in community amongst Americans. Ethnic communities, however, are largely excluded from this discussion, though ethnic minorities are often found to be quite active in their communities and civil society. Diversity is hailed as an ideal, and we are uncomfortable with homogeneous groups, especially those racially/ethnically homogeneous; and yet, ethnic communities seem to be thriving. Using the Korean community as a case study, the overarching question of my dissertation is: What can we learn about building community from the Korean American community? Is the Korean community incompatible with a healthy and vibrant American civil society? Through interviews and participant observation of the second and 1.5 generation of Korean Americans in the Washington metropolitan area, I argue that there is more than common ethnicity to the livelihood of the Korean community, and that the relationship culture, the defining of oneself and others in terms of relationships, reinforces the obligatory nature of relationships that are in place within this ethnic community. I further argue that there are serious benefits the ethnic community has provided for its members, and that we need not categorically be uncomfortable with ethnic homogeneity, as diversity is not a good in itself. I conclude by acknowledging that Korean Americans are at a point in time that will not be repeated, and that while we do not yet know what the nature of the ethnic community will be for the third and later generations of Korean Americans, there is a glimpse of hope for compatibility between the relationship culture and a healthy American civil society.Item CREATIVE REBELLION FOR THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY: THE REINVIGORATION OF AMERICAN POLITICAL LIFE THROUGH PUBLIC ART(2010) Boros, Diana Zsuzsanna; Glass, James M.; Government and Politics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Drawing on the work of Tocqueville, Nietzsche, Camus, and Marcuse, this work argues that there is an urgent political and societal need for greater support of public art projects and better access to these sources of funding. More art in public spaces would revive and animate communal environments, create new relationships between the individual and the public, strengthen feelings of community, and foster the desire to participate in the public. All art creates participatory desire and behavior, but visionary art is how political progress through individual rebellion can be best accessed and articulated. This work defines visionary artistic creation as the union of instinctual creative energies and rational reflection. Mainstream art, despite its aesthetic rearrangements, fails to connect the viewer with questions that will engage them over time. Visionary art, especially the public and social, is needed to seek out and materialize the newest, alternative possibilities for our individual lives, for our societies, and for the political systems under which they abide.Item Essays in Comparative Institutional Economics(2005-05-13) Grajzl, Peter; Murrell, Peter; Economics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation examines how decentralized institutional structures and organizational forms evolve and affect economic development under different politico-economic and legal arrangements. Organized legal professions are typically viewed by economists as rent-seeking interest groups - even though they have been central in institutional development in countries with the highest quality institutions. Chapter 1 develops a model that identifies the link between the role of organized legal professions and the quality of reform. Delaying institutional reform through deliberation, the profession's participation discounts the expected benefit from welfare-inferior reform proposal for rent-seeking interest groups. Professional review serves as a screening mechanism ameliorating the self-interested government's adverse selection problem. The model's predictions cast new light on the Glorious and the French revolutions, post-communist transition, why and when civil law and common law systems differ, and why post-independence institutions are of higher quality in settler than in extractive colonies. Although common, self-regulation as an alternative to direct government regulation has been little investigated. Chapter 2 uses a framework inspired by property rights theory to address the allocation of regulatory authority. In a model of a regulatory process with bargaining, the authority to amend the enabling legislation can be either consolidated within the government, or extended to the producers in a self-regulatory regime. The chapter delineates the welfare implications of regulatory regime choice, and indicates whether the government's incentives to delegate or centralize regulatory authority lead to efficient institutional design. The model identifies those features of legal traditions that help to explain variation in regulatory arrangements across countries, illuminates the contrast in regulatory practice between the progressive era and the associational regime of the New Deal, and characterizes the mechanisms of intervention used in fascist economies. Chapter 3 discusses the channels through which civil society is expected to affect economic development. Utilizing the formal analysis laid out in Chapter 1, the chapter provides an introductory examination of the rationale for civil society aid and concludes with a conjectural interpretation of the determinants of the aid's effectiveness to bring about successful institutional change in post-communist countries.