Browsing by Subject "United States--Politics and government"

Now showing 1 - 7 of 7

Beyond partisanship? : federal courts, state commissions, and redistricting
(2007) McKenzie, Mark Jonathan; Shaw, Daron R.; Perry, H. W.
My dissertation examines the influence of partisanship in decision making on redistricting in state commissions and judicial rulings. My central questions are twofold. First, do Republican- and Democratic-appointed federal judges engage in decision making that favors their respective parties? Second, what is the extent of partisan voting on bipartisan state redistricting commissions? These issues possess considerable substantive importance. Some states have considered moving redistricting responsibility out of the legislature and into state commissions, while some political scientists and legal scholars have suggested more vigorous court involvement in the regulation of redistricting. Implicit in many of these arguments is the assumption that federal courts and state commissions will act as neutral arbiters. But, very little social science research exists on the behavior of these institutions. My investigation combines quantitative and qualitative evidence, using interviews I conducted of federal judges and redistricting commissioners across the country, together with statistical analyses of court decisions and commission votes. I have 138 court cases from 1981 to 2006, totaling 414 observations or judicial votes. I argue that federal judges are neither neutral arbiters nor partisan maximizers. Rather, federal judges act as constrained partisans. Judges do not necessarily favor their own party's plans in court cases anymore than they do plans created by both parties under divided government. But, when a federal judge reviews a redistricting plan drawn up by a different party, and where the judge's own party is the victim of partisan line-drawing, she will be more attuned to issues of unfairness in the process. Under circumstances where Supreme Court precedent is unclear, partisan cues become more salient for the judge, increasing the probability she will rely on partisan influences to declare the plan invalid. Interestingly enough, these partisan effects in judicial voting vanish in cases where the Supreme Court delineates unambiguous rules, such as litigation concerning 1 person 1 vote equal population claims. My analysis of state redistricting commissions, based on the votes of commissioners and in-depth interviews with them, illustrates that commissions, like courts, are also not immune to partisan decision-making. Partisan factors tend to be the overriding concern of commissioners.
Democratic capitalism in the United States
(2006) O'Connor, Mike; Smith, Mark C.
Though democracy and capitalism are both central to American identity, they admit of a deep and often unnoticed philosophical contradiction. The capitalist ideal of the distribution of goods through market mechanisms is incompatible with the democratic notion that the will of the people, as expressed through the political process, should carry the day. Yet the history of the simultaneous affirmation of these ideas in the United States reveals widespread prosperity, relative stability and broad assent. In order to address the divergence between theory and practice in this area, this dissertation offers a new theoretical and historical understanding of American democratic capitalism. Applying the American pragmatism of philosopher Richard Rorty to the problem of democratic capitalism yields the conclusion that its solution is to be found not in a philosophical analysis of the meanings of its component terms, but in an historical investigation of their construction. Such an examination reveals that Americans of different historical periods have expressed substantially dissimilar economic and political requirements, and the nation’s democratic capitalism should not be understood as a seamless celebration of political and economic freedom. Instead, it is a uniquely democratic project in which the people retain onto themselves the prerogative of defining the parameters of economic success. From one era to another, a country’s citizenry can hold varied expectations of its economy—from providing jobs to winning wars. Harnessing the nation’s production and distribution to specific projects, however, often compromises the commercial freedom that is the hallmark of the market system. In the face of these continually shifting economic goals, the nation’s political thinkers have generally sought to adapt the meaning of capitalism to the exigencies of the day, rather than reject the doctrine entirely. Thus the intellectual history of democratic capitalism in the United States is one of continual reformulation. Considering three case studies in which political thinkers or actors have, in response to the national mood, articulated or re-imagined the function of the nation’s economy, the dissertation argues that U.S. political economy, at both the theoretical and historical level, has been more democratic than capitalist.
Essays in dynamic macroeconomics
(2008-05) D'Erasmo, Pablo Nicolas, 1977-; Corbae, Dean
The focus of my research is dynamic macroeconomics and how the economy responds to changes in government policy. During the last 30 years, the sovereign bond market in emerging economies has grown considerably and many large scale defaults were observed. Existing models of sovereign debt are unable to jointly explain the debt to output ratios and the default frequency in these countries. In the first chapter, to address this puzzle, I propose a standard small open economy model with the addition that the government transits through different political states and these transitions cannot be directly observed by lenders. Moreover, after a default, the government chooses when to renegotiate and it bargains with the lenders over the recovery rate. I show that government reputation and endogenous periods of exclusion and recovery rates play a crucial role in explaining this phenomenon. In the second chapter, I use a dynamic political economy model to evaluate whether the observed rise in wage inequality and decrease in median to mean wages can explain the increase in transfers to low earnings quintiles and increase in effective tax rates for high earnings quintiles in the U.S. over the past several decades. I conduct a welfare analysis by contrasting the solution from the political mechanism with those from a sequential utilitarian mechanism, as well as mechanisms with commitment. Finally, the third chapter focuses on explaining the dynamics of firms. I ask whether an entry/exit model like that pioneered by Hopenhayn (1992, Econometrica) with a capital accumulation decision and non-convex costs of adjustment can generate size and age dependence like that found in the data. In particular, conditional on age, growth, employment creation and destruction and volatility are decreasing in size. Moreover, conditional on size, growth, employment creation and destruction and volatility are decreasing in age. The main point of this chapter is to demonstrate that a model with no financial frictions parameterized to match the investment regularities of U.S. establishments is able to account for the simultaneous dependence of industry dynamics on size (once we condition on age) and on age (once we condition on size). To explain how the economy responds and conduct welfare analysis either one has to find natural experiments or one has to build computational models and run counterfactual experiments. My research follows the latter strategy.
Essays on dynamic political economy
(2008-05) DeBacker, Jason Matthew, 1979-; Williams, Roberton C., 1972-; Cooper, Russell W., 1955-
The unifying theme of this dissertation is the empirical analysis of American politics. In particular, I use economic models to provide theoretically sound and empirically valid answers to political questions that are dynamic in nature. The first chapter focuses on the role of the seniority system in the pork barrel politics and the subsequent effect on the quality of Representatives in the U.S. House. The second chapter analyzes candidate positioning in a dynamic environment where there are electoral costs to changing position. The third and final chapter is a test of the role of political parties in time consistency problems when candidates cannot commit to future policies. Collectively, these chapters extend the research of empirical political economy in an important direction, one that accounts for the inherent dynamics of politics.
The growth of political democracy in the states, 1776-1828
(1945) Wise, Floy Singleton, 1902-; Not available
Jumping through 51 hoops : John Anderson's struggle for ballot access and its effect on the rights of independent and third-party candidates
(1985) Landis, Rebecca Lisa; Not available
Not by might : Christianity, nonviolence, and American radicalism, 1919-1963
(2003-05) Danielson, Leilah Claire; Abzug, Robert H.
This dissertation argues that Gandhian nonviolence (satyagraha) only took root in the American pacifist community after a process of adaptation and modification. Reflecting their background in Social Gospel Christianity and progressivism, pacifists were initially reluctant to adopt nonviolence because they feared that Gandhi’s tactics were coercive rather than persuasive. However, due to the challenge posed by Reinhold Niebuhr and other “Christian realists” in the 1930s, as well as their interactions with Indian nationalists, pacifists began to experiment with nonviolent resistance in the 1940s as founders of the Congress of Racial Equality. In adopting Gandhian nonviolence, pacifists reinterpreted it in the context of their religious cosmology and political traditions. No two figures exemplify this process more than A.J. Muste and Dorothy Day, who brought their experience in the labor movement to bear on the question of how pacifism and Christianity could relate to contemporary political concerns. As this study shows, nonviolence continued to evolve in relationship to the changing political context, particularly the role of the United States in the world. Mortified by the atomic bombing of Japan and concerned by the threat to democracy posed by the Cold War, pacifists revived the notion of the individual conscience against the state. By not paying taxes or registering for the draft, they hoped to convince their fellow Americans that they bore responsibility for the nuclear arms race. In taking dramatic stands against nuclear weapons and racism, pacifists served a vanguard role in struggles against racial segregation, violations of civil liberties, and nuclear proliferation throughout the postwar era. In contrast to most historians of American religion, who emphasize the rise of Christian realism (or neo-orthodoxy), this study demonstrates that Christian pacifism continued to evolve after World War II. It also argues that Christianity shaped American radicalism in the twentieth century, and points to continuities between nineteenthcentury and twentieth-century reform traditions. Finally, this dissertation demonstrates that individuals, ideas, and events in the larger world have shaped the intellectual structure of American public life, and contends that one cannot understand American political culture without reference to the role of the United States in the world.