"Audience costs" models of international relations suggest a purely informational role for domestic politics in conflict settings. Here, domestic politics serve as a rich signal of belligerents' true intentions, allowing ...

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 ...

Have steady increases in socioeconomic status (SES) and occupational prestige along with changes in residential context and subsequently social networks necessitated a shift in our understanding of Black political participation ...

My research project is a break from the current trend in the literature that focuses on the conflict associated with roll call voting—party polarization and institutional friction. I am interested in determining how policy ...

The dissertation analyzes why legislators fail to use their oversight powers over bureaucracy in democratic Mexico. While dominant institutional theories assume a unidirectional flow of authority from politicians to ...

This dissertation explains how and under what conditions voters are affected by campaign advertising, taking particular account of the conditioning role played by political knowledge and ad tone. It builds on psychological ...

Economic voting--the effect of national economic circumstances on vote preferences--is often seen as the closest thing to a law that exists in the social sciences. Why, then, do incumbents frequently win amidst economic ...

Crime and violence are regularly seen as being ripe for politicians to turn into campaign issues and win votes. This study argues, in contrast, that success on public security is not so automatic: human rights values ...

This paper considers Cicero’s dialogues concerning Epicurean and Stoic philosophy in De Finibus. In it, I consider Cicero’s portrayal both of the deep appeal of the promise of perfect wisdom and invulnerability to chance ...