Browsing by Subject "American politics"
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Item Anger and the politics of compromise(2015-12) Blank, Joshua M.; Shaw, Daron R., 1966-; Albertson, Bethany; McDaniel, Eric; Roberts, Brian; Jessee, StephenIn recent years, the inability of the federal government to respond to public policy crises with a timely, commensurate solution has been a seemingly regular cause for alarm. These inactions have not been due to constitutional restraints nor, should we take them at their word, the desire of the citizenry, but have most often resulted -- and in some cases emanated -- from the inability or unwillingness of elected officials to regularly engage in compromise. Public opinion polls conducted during many of these crises have routinely found a citizenry more than willing to endorse the principles of compromise, but the officials that they have elected, and those that they continue to elect, appear increasingly emboldened to engage in behaviors that hinder the reaching of a commendable solution. This discontinuity, between public expectations and the actions of many prominent, elected officials, leaves one left to ponder if, in the current age, the representational link between citizen and legislator is broken? I will argue that this link is, in fact, not broken (at least on this particular point), and that anger at politicians and the political system makes citizens, and especially the most politically engaged among them, endorse behaviors by elected officials that hinder compromise without influencing citizens' belief in the normative good of compromise itself.Item The common style in American politics : a rhetorical analysis of ordinary, exceptional leadership(2013-08) Lind, Colene J.; Hart, Roderick P.U.S. political leaders must be meritorious to warrant elected office but they also should be average so that they may demonstrate empathy and win the trust of citizens. Rhetoric makes this contradiction work, but no scholarship yet describes it satisfactorily. Worse yet, public opinion now holds politicians in historically low regard. But without a systematic understanding of how elected officials discursively bind themselves to the people, it is impossible to say if or why the rhetorical model of exceptional-ordinary leadership is failing. In this study I describe this rhetoric, which I identify as the Common Style. By listening to politicians' language choices across four speaking situations, I discovered that the Common Styles consists of distinct registers, each appealing to a conventional value, thereby indicating that politicians share something in common with everyday Americans. When speaking to a national audience under expectations of relative formality, as did presidents when delivering a weekly address, chief executives mostly appealed to the American work ethic through a language of production, and in this way presented themselves as honorable laborers. When answering a special-interest group's invitation to speak at one their meetings, governors and mayors relied on a language of progress to show themselves to be concerned with improvement, as were the citizens who joined these voluntary associations. On the nationally broadcast television talk show, leaders shared stories of their uncommon experiences and thereby satisfied the universal need to know what others go through and subtly implied that they, like everyone else, were mortal. When leaders were expected to think on their feet in the presence of local constituents--as they must at town-hall meetings--they turned to a conventional language of deference to indicate their esteem for voters and a mutual desire for respect. I conclude that U.S. politicians seek to build relations with citizens based on the presumption of shared values, but the resonance of these ideals in a fractured society remains uncertain. Future studies must therefore investigate the effectiveness of the Common Style with different swaths of ever-changing Americans.Item Constituting political freedom and the democratic way of life(2008-12) Bilakovics, Steven Philip; Tulis, JeffreyMy project uncovers and explores the democratic sources of political cynicism. I contest the conventional view that the expanding gap between the near-universal acclaim accorded democratic principles and the near-total absence of democratic political practices is a product of either “market society” or liberal political systems. Instead, I argue that the particular form of the contemporary contempt for all-things-political - the reflexive assumption that politics is necessarily corrupt and even absurd - is inscribed in modern democratic culture. In relation to the sublime freedom and equality of the idea of democratic openness, democratic political action and association cannot but be experienced as impoverished and unfree. In this sense, I argue that democracy is self-subverting, undermining the possibility of political argument and reform. I conclude by sketching out a prescription in the American context for robust democracy based upon this diagnosis. By rhetorically reorienting self-perceptions about what we are doing when we engage in politics around the elevated but not transcendent notion of participating in an ongoing constitutional project, we can transform our anti-political dispositions. Beyond issues of political legitimacy, I argue that the symbolic order of the Constitution might foster political vitality by framing a politics experienced as potentially meaningful and worthy of respect. One might say that I offer Madisonian means to Jeffersonian ends.Item Divided government, ideological polarization, and factional coalitions : a study of the House, 1947-2000(2010-12) Svensen, Eric Paul; Tulis, Jeffrey; Theriault, Sean M.To understand the dynamics of legislative gridlock, as well as account for the mixed and often conflicting findings in the divided government literature, this paper posits that the previous unidimensional approach of using divided government as an explanatory variable of interest fails to accurately reflect the changing realities of American politics since WWII. Two new and interlocking conceptual approaches are introduced that expand the dimensionality of legislative gridlock: ideological polarization explained through the temporal shift of political parties from a party system of moderation and universalistic policy outputs, to one where particularistic goals became much more common. As studies of divided government center on temporally-bound concepts, they ignore most of the inter- and intra-party variation evident throughout the latter 20th century.Item “Dr. Paul cured my apathy”: Ron Paul’s libertarian discourse(2013-08) Goad, Rhiannon Jade; Heinzelman, Susan Sage; King, ChristopherDuring the 2008 and 2012 presidential elections, many young white men found a political hero in the 77-year-old Republican Congressman from Texas, whose rallies often center on obscure, technical arguments concerning the Federal Reserve. It is because of the grassroots support of the young white men who adore him that Ron Paul has become a major figure in today’s political scene. What attracts young white men to Ron Paul? This paper explores the history and discourse of Libertarianism to better understand the political subjectivity and identity of Ron Paul supporters. In Chapter 2, I historically contextualize Paul’s libertarian discourse. I argue that the discourse of libertarianism is characterized by claims to an apolitical, ahistorical past in which Libertarian rhetoric naturalizes discourses of free market capitalism, “classical” liberalism, and “authentic” Americanism. In Chapter 3, I shift focus to Ron Paul’s career and policy positions and argue that Paul’s Libertarian discourse naturalizes existing hierarchies of race, class, and gender. In Chapter 4, I explain the interview methodology used for this project. Finally, in Chapters 5 and 6, I explore how libertarian discourse is (re)produced or disrupted through the personal political discourse of Ron Paul supporters.Item Framing the National School Lunch Program(2012-12) Brock, Clare-Lieb Rivers; Jones, Bryan D.; Lin, Tse-minThe National School Lunch Program, established in 1946 under the National School Lunch Act, has grown from a commodity surplus distribution program in its early days, to its current incarnation as a nutrition program for lower income students. This paper addresses the following question, “are particular framing choices influenced by a representatives’ district or individual characteristics, or are party considerations more important in determining framing language?” Certain frameworks may be more effective for creating policy change, and given that framing shapes the way humans conceptualize a problem space, framing should be a deliberate tool used in order to constrain the debate around certain problems. In support of this claim, existing framing literature and literature on human cognition indicates that framing plays a vital role in defining the terms of debate and mobilizing the public around certain issues. However, the actual details of debate shifts and issue framing often become a ‘black box’ in theories of policy change. Content analysis of floor statements made over a 16-year period regarding the National School Lunch Program reveals that policy framing is highly dependent on district characteristics, but that language use itself does not appear to have changed significantly in the time period studied.Item Interacting interests : exploring the nature of interest group coalition building in the regulatory state(2016-12) Dwidar, Maraam Ahmed; Jones, Bryan D.The lobbying literature is rife with studies of interest groups, spanning their democratic value, successes, failures, and the tools they employ in advocating for their positions. One of these tools is coalition building, where interest groups join forces with one another in lobbying. While the literature pertaining to coalitions is theoretically vibrant, due to difficulties in collecting comprehensive empirical data, scholars have relied heavily on qualitative evidence to answer questions concerning coalition building (Timmermans 2016). Addressing this gap, this paper presents a dataset that tracks coalition building through public comments that have been co-submitted by interest groups during the notice-and-comment periods of rules proposed by federal agencies. It contains all public comments submitted by a random sample of 40 American interest groups between 1998 and 2015. Using this data, I explore the composition, recurrence, and policy emphases of interest group coalitions.Item Political communication in the blogosphere(2006-05) Lee, Jae Kook; McCombs, Maxwell E.This thesis attempts to explain the political communication process in relation to blogs. The first concern of the thesis is the relationship between conventional media and blogs with regards to the political communication. The thesis will use both first and second level agenda-setting theory to explore the relationship between conventional media and political blogs. In addition, this study aims to investigate blog users' media use and political involvement in comparison to non-users.Item Political contradictions : discussions of virtue in American life(2010-05) LaVally, Rebecca; Hart, Roderick P.; Jarvis, Sharon E.; McCombs, Maxwell; Sparrow, Bartholomew H.; Stroud, Natalie J.This dissertation asserts that American political culture faces a crisis of virtue and explores the role of citizens, journalists and politicians in fostering it. The historic election of Barack Obama on a platform of hope and change in 2008 suggests that Americans yearn for an infusion of virtue into political life. I assert, however, that we have lacked a lexicon of political virtue, or any systematic understanding of which virtues we value and which matter most to us. Nor have we understood whether groups who constitute key elements of our democracy—citizens, journalists, politicians, men and women, Democrats and Republicans—value virtues in politics similarly or differently. Without a working knowledge of the anatomy of virtue in the body politic, what is to prevent us from having to change again? By charting the virtue systems of these key groups, I have made explicit what is implicit to reveal that political virtue is more valued—and more present—than Americans likely realize. This exploration, I believe, contributes to the scholarship of political communication by enabling a fuller and more useful understanding of American political culture—and of the contradictions, curiosities, and surprises that enrich it.Item Politics during crises : a review of existing literature(2012-08) Goodrich, Derrick Ian; Trubowitz, Peter; Sparrow, BartholomewThis MA Report explores existing literature pertaining to three aspects of politics during or directly following crises in the United States: state-building, suppression or expansion of civil liberties, and enduring alterations to the American social hierarchy. While acknowledging the many insights of all three areas of literature, the Report argues that literature on state-building is too concentrated on formal, top-down explanations. As a result, it neglects the crucial dependence state-building has on aspects, such as the active participation of civil society groups. The Report further argues that political science’s absence from research literature on civil liberties during crises needs to end. The abundance of legal and historical accounts on this subject offers a wealth of descriptive insights. However, they fail to offer causal explanations for why crises have such an inconsistent and dynamic impact on civil liberties. Finally, research over the impact of crises on American social hierarchies needs to move away from assuming social groups’ interests a priori. Instead, scholars should attempt to unearth what these interests actually were among these groups within the historical context given, looking specifically to the discursive contests among social groups as they attempt to frame crises in advantageous ways.Item Principled abstention : a theory of emotions and nonvoting in U.S. presidential elections(2012-08) Vandenbroek, Lance Matthew; Valentino, Nicholas A.; Shaw, Daron R., 1966-; Jessee, Stephen A.; Luskin, Robert C.; Philpot, Tasha S.More than a half-century of behavioral political science has shaped the dominant view of American nonvoters in terms of their engagement and resource deficits. While nonvoters on average are indeed less educated, poorer, younger and less politically engaged, other scholarship suggests that many of them actively abstain due to disaffection with the political system. My dissertation aims to reconcile these disparate explanations for nonvoting, and to better understand those nonvoters whose resources and political attention should suffice to vote. Drawing upon recent work in psychology, I advance a theory that disgust with politics causes many to abstain, irrespective of resources. These disgusted individuals feel the political system has violated deeply held interpersonal and moral norms, and believe participation will be ineffective to mitigate its affronts. As a result, these individuals withdraw from politics both in terms of voting and gathering additional information. I label this behavior “principled abstention.” To test my hypotheses, I employ observational data, including original question batteries on the 2008 and 2010 Cooperative Congressional Election Studies, and a series of laboratory and nationally representative experiments.Item Whirlpools of information: information processing in policy subsystems 1995-2010(2015-12) Shafran, JoBeth Surface; Jones, Bryan D.; Workman, Samuel; Theriault, Sean; Moser, Scott; McDaniel, EricThis project focuses on information processing in policy subsystems, specifically how congressional committees in the domestic commerce, energy, and health care policy areas prioritize available information, with an extended analysis of information supply and prioritization in energy policy. I examine the conditions under which federal bureaucrats are most likely to supply information to Congress in these three policy areas. I seek to determine whether and to what extent the bureaucratic supply of information changes by issue area, presiding congressional committee, and in response to problem uncertainty. My findings suggest that the number of bureaucrats testifying varies by both policy area and committee type. Furthermore, as the problem uncertainty for a committee increases, so too does the number of federal bureaucrats invited to testify. These findings are especially true for careerist bureaucrats. Within energy policy, my findings show that the subsystem actors most likely to supply information at a hearing varies across committees, over time, and by specific issue area. By examining who supplies information, this project will provide a better understanding of how subsystem actors are prioritized by congressional committees as information suppliers. This study is important because the information supplied by these non-elected policy elites can then influence the problem definition process, structure policy debates, and impact policy formulation.