Responsibility is a central political concept, yet the dynamics of contemporary political life call into question commonsense accounts of individual moral responsibility; it is difficult to ascribe responsibility to individual agents when faced with political dilemmas like global climate change. In response to this dilemma, this project engages two questions....
Why do the institutional outcomes of armed separatist conflicts vary? Separatist conflicts have diverse institutional effects. Though many separatists hope to create sovereign states, few achieve their aims. More often, their conflicts lead to forms of intra-state autonomy, independent but unrecognized de facto states, or territories under foreign occupation. These...
This dissertation project is one of the first to explicitly study the theoretical and empirical relationship between public opinion and the policies of unelected administrative agencies in the United States. This research addresses two important questions: (1) given the absence of a direct electoral connection between bureaucrats and the public,...
Though more serious during the economic reform than in Mao-era, corruption has not totally got out of hand of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). It is not too rampant to control and its destructive effects appear to have been limited from impeding the economic growth. To study the "resilience" that...
For all its significance in world affairs, the United Nations is full of paradoxes. As a system - i.e. as a collection of independent yet interrelated entities - its contradictions derive from the juxtaposition of forces encouraging fragmentation and calls for improved harmonization. On its part, the reality of inter-organizational...
This research investigates under what conditions political institutions may induce longer and more expensive financial crisis resolutions by assessing the impact of power distribution on government responses to crisis situations. A new model is elaborated in which power distribution plays a key role in the evolution of financial crises, from...
Late twentieth-century architecture is increasingly charged with the task of constructing sites of meaning that generate awareness and understanding in the wake of catastrophic historical events. My dissertation explores the challenges of memorializing these events, in order to recover the importance of memory for politics. Insisting on the role of...
How can political challengers avoid co-optation and other forms of moderation? This dissertation illuminates how institutional participation led to the co-optation of the Indigenous Australian movement and the factors which equipped the Ecuadorian Indígena movement to elude a similar fate. Most contestants in political struggles must at some point consider...
The dissertation research examines the evolution of EU social and employment policy in regard to gender equality in the labor market and analyzes how EU guidelines of the European Employment Strategy (EES) and EU directives on social policy have different effects on political processes in the United Kingdom and Germany....
In this dissertation I examine the impact of core values on foreign policy opinion, the dynamics of value change, and the differences between elites and the mass public in their values change. I find that two core values - humanitarianism and democracy - strongly affect citizens' support for various anti-terrorism...