Matching Items (26)
Description
How do political elites perceive regional intergovernmental organizations that seek to promote democracy? When do political elites view regional intergovernmental institutions promoting democracy as legitimate? Many informal and formal types of regional intergovernmental institutions have sought to spread democracy. However, previous research on the nexus of regional intergovernmental institutions and democracy has focused primarily on the latter. Furthermore, these studies claim that membership in these formal international institutions (a.k.a. international organizations) increases the likelihood of the democratic survival of a newly democratic regime. Membership in these organizations provides a seal of approval that the newly democratic country intends to remain democratic. This kind of external validation should dissuade spoilers from undermining the transition and encourage ordinary people to support the transitional regime. This argument assumes that the domestic audience trusts this organization and believes it plays a vital role in society. Whether elites have confidence that the regional organization can positively impact democratic consolidation and how they perceive different types of regional organizations promoting democracy are empirical questions. This project seeks to answer these questions through a small sample and non-population-based elite survey experiment in Malaysia, Indonesia, and the Philippines. I also run a laboratory survey experiment with a larger sample of university students, giving me the opportunity for statistical power. The results suggest that political elites are skeptical of regional intergovernmental bodies promoting democracy. Meanwhile, non-elites consider regional institutions promoting democracy illegitimate when they are informal, i.e., no written shared expectations, rules, and permanent secretariat. When regional interstate cooperation on democracy operates under a formal procedure or codified in an international treaty and supported by a permanent secretariat, non-elites tend to consider them more legitimate.
ContributorsSari, Angguntari Ceria (Author) / Thies, Cameron G. (Thesis advisor) / Wright, Thorin (Thesis advisor) / Neuner, Fabian (Committee member) / Thomson, Henry (Committee member) / Shair-Rosenfield, Sarah (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2022
Description
Billionaires are a relatively new phenomenon, yet their influence is immense. Some billionaires hide in the shadows, and others are at the forefront of our society. With the advent of social media, the reach of billionaires at the forefront has expanded exponentially. Some sport their fancy lifestyles, some preach their views on the world, and some share what it takes to become like them. With 2.562 billion monthly YouTube users and millions of views for any video with or about billionaires, the reach the highly wealthy have is immense. So many are watching, raising two questions are the viewers watching with the intent of learning how to become a billionaire themselves or are they purely focused on entertainment value? Additionally, what purpose does speaking to the masses through YouTube serve for the wealthiest individuals in the world? This paper will attempt to answer these questions and dive deeper into the billionaire YouTube landscape. There will be a discussion of the immense power of billionaires, what it means to be one, and an analysis of a select few of America’s wealthiest individuals. Hopefully, this will give a better perspective on the wealth-based social media landscape.
ContributorsSchwager, Justin (Author) / Thomson, Henry (Thesis director) / Strickland, James (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / Department of Marketing (Contributor) / Dean, W.P. Carey School of Business (Contributor)
Created2022-12
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
This thesis provides an overview of the events of the 1956 Suez Crisis. It begins with a brief introduction to the history of decolonization in the immediate aftermath of World War II and proceeds with an analysis of the rise to power of Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser. Next, the events leading up to the Suez Crisis are detailed along with the motivations and objectives of the aggressor nations. A final section is dedicated to the end of the Crisis and its ramifications.
ContributorsDuntley, Eric (Author) / Niebuhr, Robert (Thesis director) / Thomson, Henry (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / School of Molecular Sciences (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
Created after the Second World War, the Central Intelligence Agency, or CIA, was a new and important part of the United States military and intelligence apparatus. Throughout the next two decades, the agency was tasked with working alongside the president and Department of State to promote the United States’ interests abroad, and work to prevent the spread of communism during the Cold War. It engaged in multiple controversial regime changes during this era and consistently drifted away from presidential authority. Despite this, the CIA never lost funding and always had complete support from the president. The CIA would face a reckoning during the Kennedy Administration, though, when its director was forced to resign. The understanding of the CIA’s relationship to the resident and his authority is crucial to analyzing the operations it performed, and the ever-increasing power the agency would wield in its global fight against communism.
ContributorsRadu, Zachary (Author) / Niebuhr, Robert (Thesis director) / Thomson, Henry (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / Computer Science and Engineering Program (Contributor) / School of International Letters and Cultures (Contributor)
Created2022-05
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
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
Description
Can the fatality of a terror attack determine the level of public support for violent retaliatory policies? Can this relationship indicate response proportionality? This replication and extension study examines the empirical linkages between exposure to non-fatal and fatal terrorism and support for violent retaliatory policies to determine whether response proportionality can be observed in public support for violent counterterrorism policies. Building upon the original study by Shandler et al. (2021), which employed a series of randomized controlled experiments to 1,848 participants across the United States, United Kingdom, and Israel to examine the political effects of exposure to cyberterrorism on support for retaliation, this study utilizes the data from these controlled experiments and employs a distinct set of statistical analyses to instead investigate response proportionality, exploring the association between terrorism attack fatality and public support for various violent retaliatory policies. Findings indicate that the level of public support for violent retaliatory responses is dependent on attack fatality, confirming the existence of response proportionality in public support for violent counterterrorism policies. This study found little evidence of response proportionality in public support for non-violent counterterrorism responses. Most critically, this study found that regardless of attack fatality, participants disapproved of retaliatory policies that result in adversary civilian harm, indicating that public counterterrorism opinions align with existing state and international norms of proportionality. As the consideration of both public support and proportionality are vital to state counterterrorism operations, this study extends to the realm of foreign policy the existence of a relationship between these two factors. While existing literature suggests public opinion favors disproportional retaliation responses, this study argues proportionality may influence public counterterrorism opinion more than research has previously established.
ContributorsTyvoll, Amanda (Author) / Kaire de Francisco, José (Thesis director) / Neuner, Fabian (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / School of Politics and Global Studies (Contributor)
Created2024-05