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- All Subjects: Political Science
- Creators: Thomson, Henry
Description
Political scientists have long recognized the importance of representation as being critical to the American form of government. This paper begins by establishing the theoretical basis for representational studies in political science. It then turns to the empirical question of measuring the degree to which legislators represent their constituents. While there have been comprehensive studies of representation among members of Congress, several practical difficulties have prevented similar studies at the state legislature level. Underlying measures of representation are the preferences of constituents and the representational behavior of legislators. This paper proposes two metrics, a modified Partisan Voting Index and the American Conservative Union State Legislative Ratings, to compare the district-level preferences with roll call voting behavior (a form of substantive representation) of the corresponding legislators. This methodology is then tested against data collected from the Arizona legislature, specifically incorporating election returns from 2012, 2014, and 2016, and votes taken during the 2017 and 2018 sessions of the legislature. The findings suggest a strong relationship between the partisan and ideological leaning of a state legislative district and how conservative or liberal a legislator’s voting record is, even when controlling for political party. Two special cases are also examined in the context of this data. First, the three legislative districts with a split delegation are analyzed and determined to have a moderating effect on representative behavior. Second, five mid-term vacancies are examined along with the process for filling a vacancy. The paper concludes with a discussion of how this line of research can better inform legislators and help constituents hold their elected officials to account.
ContributorsFairbanks, Austin Kyle (Author) / Herrera, Richard (Thesis director) / Thomson, Henry (Committee member) / School of Politics and Global Studies (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2019-05
Description
This work explores the underlying dynamics of democracies in the context of underdevelopment, arguing that when society has not attained a substantial degree of economic independence from the state, it undermines democratic quality and stability. Economic underdevelopment and political oppression are mutually reinforcing, and both are rooted in the structure of the agriculture sector, the distribution of land, and the rural societies that emerge around this order. These systems produce persistent power imbalances that militate toward their continuance, encourage dependency, and foster the development of neopatrimonialism and corruption in the government, thereby weakening key pillars of democracy such as accountability and representativeness. Through historical analysis of a single case study, this dissertation demonstrates that while this is partly a result of actor choices at key points in time, it is highly influenced by structural constraints embedded in earlier time periods. I find that Ghana’s historical development from the colonial era to present day closely follows this trajectory.
ContributorsEllis, Alicia N (Author) / Thies, Cameron (Thesis advisor) / Warner, Carolyn (Committee member) / Thomson, Henry (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2019
Description
Regarding the question “Why do sanctions fail?” the majority of sanctions studies take the perspective of the target countries or the interactions between the dyadic countries involved, but the sender countries’ impact on sanctions’ effectiveness is largely neglected. This dissertation looks at the domestic economic actors, i.e., enterprises and consumers, of the sender countries. By answering “Who participates in economic sanctions?” this dissertation assesses one factor potentially influencing the sanctions’ effectiveness: the sanctions participation and evasion inside the sender countries. More precisely speaking, this dissertation applies the factor of the political connections economic actors have with their governments to explain their participation in or circumvention from sanctions imposed by their own countries. This dissertation consists of three independent empirical papers, respectively. The first looks at the anti-Japanese consumer boycotts in China 2012, the second at the trade controls by companies inside mainland China targeting Taiwan in 2002, and the third, the Steel and Aluminum Tariffs imposed by the US since 2018. Generally speaking, the papers find that strong political connections in China promote sanctions participation, reflected via the larger transaction reduction by organizational consumers and State-Owned Enterprises, yet facilitate sanctions evasion in the US, reflected by the larger chance for tariff exemptions for companies with more political importance and monetary investment to the governments. Dissertation findings reveal the effect of connections on sanctions, and at the same time show how divergent institutions make one variable function in the opposite way.
ContributorsKONG, FANYING (Author) / Thies, Cameron (Thesis advisor) / Shair-Rosenfield, Sarah (Committee member) / Thomson, Henry (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2021
Description
When does coercion succeed in international relations? Why do states resist coercion in some cases but concede in others? This dissertation adopts network analysis to investigate the network factors influencing the success and failure of economic and military coercion. The first chapter addresses the coercion target states’ information problem regarding how coercers would react to the targets’ resistances and concessions. By regarding resistances and concessions as network ties that can transmit information, it argues that past coercion outcomes endogenously influence targets’ current responses and coercion outcomes. Specifically, target states are more likely to concede to coercers who have been successful in gaining others’ compliance. Sender states are more likely to succeed in coercion when they had successful coercion in the past. The second chapter adds a condition to the first chapter’s argument. It argues that when being coerced by the same sender, a stronger sanction target’s compliance is likely to prompt a weaker target’s acquiescence, and that a weaker target’s resistance is likely to prompt a stronger target’s resistance. The third chapter explores how states’ positions in international security and economic networks influence the success and failure of military and trade coercion. States that occupy different network positions own different network power. I argue that when the coercion sender has relatively more network power than the target, the more likely coercion will be successful. I use interstate military alliances and arms transfer data to operationalize international security networks. International economic networks are operationalized by bilateral trade and regional trade agreements networks. Using military and trade coercion outcomes in the Military Compellent Threats (MCT) and the Threats and Imposition of Economic Sanctions (TIES) datasets as outcome variables, the statistical analysis partially supports my argument. Trade coercion is more likely to succeed when the sender has more network power. However, military coercion is less likely to succeed when the sender has more network power than the target.
ContributorsAi, Weining (Author) / Peterson, Timothy (Thesis advisor) / Thies, Cameron (Committee member) / Thomson, Henry (Committee member) / Chyzh, Olga (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2023
Description
This paper analyses key papers in audience cost literature and proposes a direction forward in audience cost literature by examining how an audience gets influenced and or how the audience's preferences are created. The paper posits that by looking at how audiences are influenced a leader's decision structure can be further clarified. The paper places an emphasis on how information and agenda-setting are crucial to developing a framework for the task of elucidating audience costs.
ContributorsMcAnulty, Miles (Author) / Peterson, Timothy (Thesis director) / Neuner, Fabian (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / School of Politics and Global Studies (Contributor)
Created2023-05
Description
Civil conflicts with ethnic motivating factors are more likely to experience recurrence than nonethnic conflicts. In this paper I conduct a survival analysis on a group of 175 conflict episodes from 1946-2005. I argue that grievances based on religion, race, culture, language, and/or history are difficult to resolve due to the concept of indivisibility that makes compromise on ethnic issues unpopular. Along with Clausewitz’s theory on the influence of passion, chance, and reason in war, I also argue the importance of following clear objectives. When goals change over time, strategy becomes confounded and conflict recurrence increases. Utilizing the Cox Proportional Hazards model, the hazard rate is found to be significantly higher for ethnic conflicts than nonethnic conflicts. They also face shorter periods of peace. To highlight how ethnic mechanisms effect similar conflict scenarios, a case study of the first Indo-Pakistani and Chinese Civil War is made. I find that in the absence of ethnic grievances through China’s cultural assimilation campaigns, they were able to effectively curb violent disputes while India could not.
ContributorsNguyen-Morris, Kelly (Author) / Thomson, Henry (Thesis advisor) / Wright, Thorin (Committee member) / Siroky, David (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2021
Description
This paper examines the possible ties between social media influencers and their potential impact on the rise in affective polarization in the United States. With the growth of social media, its transition into a primary source of news, and with the open political atmosphere, one is left to wonder about the potential impact social media and its influencers may have on American affective polarization. The survey presented within the paper was designed in hopes of drawing a connection between the two, and to what extent it might be happening.
ContributorsScotti, Heather (Author) / Neuner, Fabian (Thesis director) / Voorhees , Matthew (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / School of Politics and Global Studies (Contributor)
Created2021-12
Description
What factors influence an authoritarian state to emphasize lower-utility repressive methods to neutralize dissidents? Previous studies have addressed covert methods of repression in the form of intelligence gathering to support the state's overt repressive actions. Such constructs, however, fail to fully articulate clandestine repressive methods that not only conceal the identity of the responsible actor from the target, but also the activity itself. To fill this gap, in this study I explore the construct of disintegration as a means for states to clandestinely neutralize dissent. While effective, these methods are also resource intensive, which makes them lower utility for the state from a cost perspective relative to overt repression and in turn begs the questions of why a state would emphasize such methods in their repressive strategy. To answer this question, I forward a structuralist argument that seeks to challenge assumptions in the literature that over-rely on existing theories of state repression. By incorporating literature from multiple disciplines, I outline a causal process that identifies the linkage between a state’s legitimation strategy and its guarantees for civil-political human rights norms to create a mechanism that could cause the state to emphasize disintegration measures. I examine three periods in the history of the German Democratic Republic and find that it emphasized disintegration in its repressive strategy during the mid-seventies due to its financial and economic agreements with the West being dependent on (appeared) compliance with the human rights stipulations of the Helsinki Accords of 1975. Stemming from this case a mid-range theory of disintegration that has implications for contemporary autocracies as well as democracies. The primary contribution of this theory lies in its ability to explain this outcome in authoritarian states that are typically less restricted in their implementation of overt repression.
ContributorsRector, William (Author) / Thomson, Henry (Thesis advisor) / Hanson, Margaret (Committee member) / Bustikova, Lenka (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2023
Description
Why, how, and to what effect do states use disinformation in their foreign policies? Inductive accounts variously address those questions, but International Relations has yet to offer a theoretical account. I propose Putnam’s two-level game (1988) as a candidate theory. A rationalist approach that jettisons the unitary actor assumption, the model accounts for previous accounts’ observations and suggests their interrelation and four overarching objectives. The model also generates novel implications about disinformation in foreign policy, two of which I test via separate survey experiments.The primary implication is that states can use disinformation to encourage polarization and in turn can reverberate into commitment problems. A survey experiment tests the first link in that chain, arguing that disinformation’s effects could be underestimated due to focus on belief outcomes; potential selection bias in active-exposure studies; and probable pre-treatment effects. It hypothesizes that passive exposure to novel political dis/misinformation has ripple effects on trust, affective polarization, and participation-linked emotions even among those that disbelieve it. It thus tests both the implication that disinformation can encourage polarization and that disinformation can be used to impact multiple potential outcomes at once.
The second empirical paper tests the latter links in the disinformation-commitment problem chain. Building on a study that found U.S polarization decreases U.K. ally confidence (Myrick 2022), it argues that polarization uniquely increases chances of voluntary defection and does so not only due to government changeover risk but also weakened leader accountability. It employs a causal mediation analysis on survey experiment data to test whether a potential partner’s polarization increases their perceived unreliability and in turn decreases public cooperation preference.
The commitment problem implication receives mixed support. The first experiment evidences no impact of partisan mis/disinformation on affective polarization, though that may be due to floor effects. The second experiment finds that polarization modestly increases perceived defection risk, but this increase is not necessarily strong enough to change public cooperation preference. Beyond those findings, the first experiment also uncovers that polarization may indeed have sociopolitical impacts on even those that disbelieve it, consistent with the multiple-outcomes implication.
ContributorsCantrell, Michal (Author) / Peterson, Timothy (Thesis advisor) / Neuner, Fabian (Thesis advisor) / Kubiak, Jeffrey (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2024
Description
How does the presence of interstate patronage impact the use of physical repression by client regimes? Previous studies have failed to comprehensively conceptualize and measure these important relationships between states. Moreover, previous studies have devoted limited attention to investigating the substantive implications of these relationships on domestic and international politics. This dissertation presents an original conceptualization and measurement of interstate patronage from the United States to every country in the 1946-2010 period. The dissertation then turns to an analysis of how patterns of US patronage impact state repression in client regimes. The findings indicate that US patronage improves human rights in autocratic client states - however, the receipt of US patronage leads to worsening human rights in democratic client settings. The findings have implications for scholars, policymakers, and observers of international politics.
ContributorsTurner, Jonathan Charles (Author) / Thomson, Henry (Thesis advisor) / Wright, Thorin M (Thesis advisor) / Peterson, Timothy M (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2024