Showing 1 - 10 of 18 Items

Date: 2024-01-01

Creator: Avery C Ellis

Access: Open access

Research focused on John Zaller's famous RAS model of political opinion formation and change from "The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion" (1992). Analyzed the mathematical and psychological underpinnings of the model, the first paper to do so in over fifteen years and the first to do so through an analysis of motivated reasoning and Bayesian reasoning. Synthesized existing critiques of Zaller's model and other literature to suggest ways to build on Zaller, utilizing fundamental reunderstandings of opinions and messages from political and mathematical perspectives. Found verification for Zaller's model, confirming its value, but also found support for the proposed RAIS model, which suggests foundational changes in the way citizens interact with information in the current political environment. Confirmed the utility of a Zallerian framework for analyzing shifts in mass opinion over time and suggested ways to improve the creation of surveys and polls for understanding elections and reported opinions on issues.

Date: 2023-01-01

Creator: Ryan S. Kovarovics

Access: Open access

The concept of freedom has always been central to the American identity, but its meaning has never been agreed on by all and has long been the subject of debate. An abridged explanation of the evolution of liberty’s meaning in political thought and American history is presented in the first chapter of this project. It demonstrates the long-standing importance of individual freedom in America and highlights some historical moments when liberty has come into conflict with other societal values. When used in American political rhetoric today, “freedom” and “liberty” typically take on a “negative” meaning that is focused mostly on individual freedom from government intervention. This is especially clear with regard to issues each party claims to “own” in the context of freedom, including abortion for the Democrats and the covid-19 pandemic response for the Republicans. To verify this partisan ownership of freedom and compare how each party uses freedom in political rhetoric, an empirical analysis was conducted of the uses of “freedom” and “liberty” in candidate tweets and campaign ads from the 2022 midterm elections. The analysis found some support for partisan ownership of freedom rhetoric surrounding these and other issues, but the most interesting finding was that Democrats and Republicans invoked “freedom” and “liberty” in their rhetoric at virtually identical rates. This shows that neither party can lay an exclusive claim to be the “party of freedom.”

Date: 2023-01-01

Creator: Ryan Supple

Access: Open access

This thesis examines the complex relationship between religiosity and voting behavior in the United States. In a country where religion has diminished in importance over time, it seems rather fascinating that it still plays such a large role in the inner-workings of American politics. Chapter One analyzes the varying ways in which scholars have approached emergent political trends between religious groups, particularly with regards to political parties, voting behavior, and government representation. Chapter Two extends this analysis to the American National Election Studies (ANES), a national survey distributed to random samples of Americans during election seasons. The information from the ANES facilitated a more in-depth analysis of how individuals with varying levels of affiliations have interacted with politics, such as ideologies, affiliations, and feelings towards religiously salient political issues. Lastly, Chapter 3 focuses on college-aged students, using both the UCLA's CIRP Freshman Survey and the Bowdoin College Polar Poll, to evaluate how America's educated youth are interacting with politics. These data allowed for a more proper investigation into how a historically unreligious portion of the population interact with religion today, and how this may affect America's religious climate in the future, as students eventually grow into educated professionals and further immerse themselves into politics. Ultimately, this paper suggests that a growing political polarity has coincided with polarization in religion, with two coalitions-- a religious and non religious one moving in opposite directions, thus amounting to further divisions and misunderstandings between the American public.

Date: 2023-01-01

Creator: Luke Porter

Access: Open access

In 2019, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Rucho v. Common Cause that partisan gerrymandering is not a justiciable question for federal courts. Four years later, the Court is reviewing a new case, Moore v. Harper. In Moore, the question presented is whether state courts can review partisan gerrymandering. The central question in Moore is the validity of the Independent State Legislature Theory. Proponents of the ISLT believe that state legislatures derive their authority to draw Congressional districts from the Federal Constitution and are therefore not subject to state-level checks and balances such as gubernatorial vetoes and state courts when redistricting. Critics argue that neither precedent nor the intent of the Framers grants state legislatures exclusive authority over redistricting. This paper analyzes the history of the Independent State Legislature Theory and outlines potential standards that the Court may adopt based off past-precedent. It then applies these standards to the redistricting process, arguing that nearly any form of the Independent State Legislature Theory would harm American democracy by making it easier for state legislatures to draw Congressional districts for partisan advantage. This paper concludes with strategies for mitigating the harm that would be caused if the Court legitimizes the Independent State Legislature Theory.

Date: 2023-01-01

Creator: Patrick Rochford

Access: Open access

In the decades following World War II, mass suburbanization remade the American landscape. While suburbs accounted for 83% of the nation’s growth between 1950 and 1970, cities bled their populations and natural resources dwindled. Treating the postwar era as a critical juncture, this thesis examines the political history of twentieth-century state land use policy to illuminate how competing interests have shaped policy outcomes across the United States. Specifically, the paper seeks to explain the passage of statewide growth management and smart growth programs. After providing a history of American suburbanization, the paper considers an emergent challenge to the postwar growth paradigm as manifested through resistance to urban renewal, open space loss, and diverse anti-freeway coalitions that combined actors from each movement. Thereafter, I detail the development of statewide growth management and smart growth programs before employing a set of case studies to discern causal factors associated with the success or failure of such legislation. Testing the theory that broad-based coalitions were essential to the passage of state growth management legislation, I perform a controlled comparison of two pairs of states, Maryland and Virginia and Oregon and Washington, employing additional within-case analysis for Washington. In so doing, I find evidence that diverse coalitions—from environmentalists and housing advocates to farmers and historic preservationists—were essential to the passage of state growth management programs. I conclude by considering the implications of these findings and the relevance of state land use policy to contemporary issues such as affordable housing and climate change.

Date: 2021-01-01

Creator: Tam Phan

Access: Open access

“Twitter Revolutions” in Iran, Tunisia, Egypt, and Moldova illustrate social media’s capacity to mobilize citizens in uprooting systems of injustice. As non-democratic regimes, these “Twitter Revolutions” offer insight into how Twitter’s microblogging, hashtags, and global user connections help broker relations between activists hoping to challenge the government. However, this thesis focuses on the democratic regime of the US and how Twitter plays a role in aiding the prison abolition movement in their effort to dismantle carceral networks that inflict racial and political violence on Black, Brown, Indigenous, and People of Color. The thesis outlines how, under the US’ classification as a democracy, the US utilizes infrastructural power to coerce American citizens into accepting carceral networks of violence as essential institutions to maintain civil society. The following sections explain the abolitionist movement’s history of attempting to dismantle the discrete formal and informal institutions of political violence, and includes the complicating development of liberal-progressive reformism that attempts to co-opt the goals of the abolition movement. The thesis focuses on the Twitter hashtag #PrisonAbolition in 2020 to explore how American Twitter users perceive the US carceral state and the prison abolition movement. The research concludes that #PrisonAbolition does not currently possess the capacity to evolve into the social mobilization seen in the “Twitter Revolutions” of non-democratic regimes because the US’ infrastructural power effectively engrained into the minds of Americans that prisons protect civil society. However, the tweets still show a promising development as American Twitter users become more engaged in abolitionist conversations.

Date: 2021-01-01

Creator: Michael Borecki

Access: Open access

Small donors have provided an increased share of total campaign contributions in the 2016, 2018, and 2020 U.S. federal election cycles, including about $3 billion of the $14.4 billion raised in 2020. Campaign funding is still dominated by an influential set of large donors, but small donations may be the basis for an effective response to the disproportionate amount of “big money” in politics. This study investigates whether candidates who are more extreme perform better with small donors, and then examines the impact of small donations and overall funding on election results. These analyses were performed using linear sum-of-squares regression models. The results in Chapter 2 show that candidates who are more politically-extreme receive more of their funding from small donations, but perform worse in general elections when fundraising is equal. Chapter 3 shows that small donations do not have an impact on candidate performance in general elections more generally, but candidates who outraise their opponent also outperform relative to the district’s partisan lean. However, that effect disappears when looking only at elections decided by less than 10 percent of the vote. These results suggest that small donors are more likely to support candidates who are more politically polarized, but the effects of small donors on the makeup of Congress is marginal at best, at least as far as general election outcomes are concerned. The project concludes by considering reform proposals that seek to broaden the pool of Americans who donate small sums to political candidates.

Date: 2021-01-01

Creator: Katherine Davidson

Access: Open access

Russia’s 2016 disinformation campaign during the U.S. elections represented the first large-scale campaign against the United States and was intended to cause American citizens to question the fundamental security and resilience of U.S. democracy. A similar campaign during the 2016 U.K. Brexit referendum supported the campaign to leave the European Union. This paper assesses the policy formation process in the United States and United Kingdom in response to 2016 Russian disinformation using a bureaucratic politics framework. Focusing on the role of sub-state organizations in policy formation, the paper identifies challenges to establishing an effective policy response to foreign disinformation, particularly in the emergence of leadership and bargaining, and the impact of centralization of power in the U.K. Discussion of the shift in foreign policy context since the end of the Cold War, which provided a greater level of foreign policy consensus, as well as specific challenges presented by the cyber deterrence context, supplements insights from bureaucratic politics. Despite different governmental structures, both countries struggled to achieve collaborative and systematic policy processes; analysis reveals the lack of leadership and coordination in the United States and both the lack of compromise and effective fulfillment of responsibilities in the United Kingdom. Particular challenges of democracies responding to exercises of sharp power by authoritarian governments point to the need for a wholistic response from public and private entities and better definition of intelligence agencies’ responsibility to election security in the U.K.

Date: 2021-01-01

Creator: Juliet Halvorson-Taylor

Access: Open access

This thesis is an exploration of how American presidents have used rhetoric for strategic ends in the US-China relationship. Whenever a president speaks, he is speaking to multiple audiences at the same time, yet he also must balance a number of important considerations. I used Robert Putnam’s “Two-Level Game Theory” as a framework for understanding the conditions surrounding a moment of significance in US-China relations in order to decipher a president’s rhetorical choices. The project is divided into five main parts. First, I used the UCSB American Presidency Project to identify broad trends in rhetoric towards China across presidencies. I found that every president has spoken more about China than his predecessor since the 1980s and that presidents are increasingly using negative rhetoric when talking about China. Then, I conducted three case studies, within the Putnam framework, on important points in three presidencies: Truman’s decision to withdraw aid from the KMT, Nixon’s visit to China, and Clinton’s reversal on the issue of MFN status for China. Lastly, I concluded that when “win-sets” on both sides (in these examples: on both the American and Chinese sides) are either large or small, a president should speak about China more frequently. I also looked at Trump’s presidency and the beginnings of Biden’s in order to see how these trends are playing out currently.

Date: 2020-01-01

Creator: Rebecca Berman

Access: Access restricted to the Bowdoin Community