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.
Collections in this community
Recent Submissions
-
From competition to monopoly : establishing party dominance in post-communist Russia
(2014-12-03)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
(2016-06-30)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
(2017-01-10)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
(2017-01-10)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
(2017-01-09)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
(2016-05-05)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
(2016-08-02)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
(2016-07-06)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
(2016-05-17)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
(2015-04-14)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 ...
RSS 1.0