Department of Government
As one of the liberal arts, Government - also called political science - teaches students how to think and communicate about politics. A Government major can dissect and evaluate actual or proposed courses of political action by analyzing the evidence for and against them, setting them in historical and comparative perspective, and relating them to ends that are prized or feared.
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From competition to monopoly : establishing party dominance in post-communist Russia
(2014-12)What explains dominant party emergence and strength and opposition party weakness in Russia? Important structural underpinnings of party dominance, namely a weak party system, were present in Russia even in the 1990s, but ... -
Courts, campaigns, and corruption : an empirical evaluation of the “appearance of corruption” rationale for campaign finance regulation
(2016-05)In Buckley v. Valeo, arguably their most important campaign finance decision, the United States Supreme Court argued that the appearance of political corruption alone might be sufficient to undermine the health of a ... -
Explaining resilience in clientelist voting
(2016-12)The central argument of this dissertation is relatively counterintuitive: increases in income do not necessarily cause decreases in clientelist voting. A decline in clientelist voting—voting based on individualized, ... -
No taxation with information on representation : a survey experiment on tax morale in China
(2016-12)Extant studies on tax morale emphasize the influence of reciprocal motivations on tax compliance behavior. This strand of literature views tax payments as a tax contract between governments and citizens, arguing that ... -
Interacting interests : exploring the nature of interest group coalition building in the regulatory state
(2016-12)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, ... -
Signaling intentions through narrative persuasion : an examination of the Berlin Crisis
(2016-05)This paper evaluates the criteria for persuasive international signaling in the context of an incentive to deceive. National-level heuristics interact with observable indices of behavior to condition the effects of ... -
Costly citizenship : the supply and demand of political membership in Europe, 1970-2014
(2016-08)As Europe has struggled to adapt to the modern reality of mass migration in recent decades, the question of citizenship has emerged as an increasingly salient political topic across the continent. Numerous scholars have ... -
The effect of globalization on voter turnout
(2016-05)Despite significant efforts to understand the recent decline of voter turnout in democratic societies, the empirical explanations behind this development as well as regarding the overall cross-national variation in turnout ... -
Does prioritizing education yield better learning outcomes? Evidence from Latin America
(2016-05)What effect does government prioritization of education have on education outcomes? I argue that when governments prioritize education, as measured by levels of relative spending and the average tenure of education ministry ... -
Buying support without brokers : conditional cash transfers in Turkey and Argentina
(2015-05)This master’s report examines how the implementation of conditional cash transfer (CCT) programs, which allocate benefits according to objective poverty criteria, affect entrenched patterns of clientelism, that is, the ... -
Beyond the balance sheet : performance, participation, and regime support in Latin America
(2016-05)Most studies on regime support focus on performance, or policy outputs, as the principal causal variable. This study challenges this conventional wisdom by focusing on two countries where performance and support do not ... -
Problem expansion and solution containment : news coverage and the climate debate
(2016-05)This project focuses on how news coverage of climate change structures policy debates to examine its role in slowing down the momentum for large-scale policy change, such as cap-and-trade legislation. I present a theory ... -
Natural right or history? The Lincoln-Douglas debates and the moral foundations of liberalism
(2015-12)This paper re-examines the Lincoln-Douglas debates through a comparison of two works on the subject: Harry Jaffa’s Crisis of the House Divided and John Burt’s Lincoln’s Tragic Pragmatism: Lincoln, Douglas and Moral Conflict. ... -
Will they or won't they: UN peacekeeping deployment to conflicts
(2015-12)This report examines the trends in deployment of peacekeeping troops by the United Nations to conflict areas. I argue that the most important factor in the decision by the UN Security Council of whether or not to send ... -
American military presence abroad: trends and analsysis
(2015-12-04)This paper examines one basic question: what explains trends in American military deployments abroad? In other words, why does the U.S. military establish a non- combat presence in particular countries and at particular ... -
On Plato's Hipparchus
(2015-09-23)The Hipparchus, Plato’s short dialogue on the love of gain, generally receives little attention from contemporary scholars. This essay, however, argues that Socrates’ brazenly amoral defense of seeking gain provides deep ... -
An analysis of Plato's Meno
(2015-10-16)This thesis offers an analysis of Plato’s Meno, in which the Greek philosopher addresses more directly than in any other dialogue the character of human virtue. Believing that Plato has considerable guidance to offer us ... -
The effect of democratization on election-oriented economic policy: evidence from South Korea
(2015-12-04)The purpose of this study is to explore the effect of electoral politics on macroeconomic and distributive policy in East Asian “developmental states” using empirical evidence from South Korea. Based on existing theories ... -
Exit over voice in Dominican ethnoracial politics
(2015-12)What explains why ethnoracial identity is of low salience in elections in Latin America, particularly in Afro-Latin America? Marginalized individuals in ethnoracially diverse societies, especially stratified ones, would ... -
The aim of dialectics In Plato's Euthyphro
(2015-12)This dissertation presents an analysis of Plato’s dialogue on piety, the Euthyphro. The aim of the dissertation is to understand the nature of piety and its connection with morality. Chapter One introduces the topic of the ...
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