Browsing by Subject "American Politics"

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    Forty Years on the basis of sex: Title IX, the "Female Athlete" and the Political Construction of Sex and Gender
    (2013-08) Sharrow, Elizabeth
    This project employs a policy feedback framework to analyze how American political institutions grapple with inequities in educational settings, and how policy design and implementation matter for social change. Using archival data and quantitative data, I explore how political battles over the implementation of Title IX of the Educational Amendments of 1972 have shifted social and political understandings of sex and gender. I argue that battles over the implementation and meanings of the law's application to athletics have recursively altered political meanings of sexed bodies and political repertoires of gender. Further, debates over the meaning of policy have constituted the "female athlete" as a political figure germane to Title IX's policy domain, as well as broader social change over the past forty years. This dissertation historicizes the politics of Title IX, focusing mainly on the implicit definition and application of its central clause, "on the basis of sex", to the domain of athletics (and sports vis-à-vis classrooms). Throughout, the work is guided by my main research question: How have battles over the implementation of Title IX altered political and social understandings of sex and gender? Each chapter analyzes a different decade in order to illustrate the difficulties in settling cultural change (especially to gender roles) through political intervention and rights-based legislation. Attention to the politics of sex inherent to sports in Title IX illustrates how policy has cemented certain embodied understandings of what sex (and sex at the intersections of race, class, sexuality, and ability) means. In sports, "sex" is defined as a category of the body, and this meaning has been re-naturalized through political battles of the past forty years. Athletics were not mentioned in the original congressional legislation, but institutions of American government charged with implementing the law quickly became embroiled in debates over how to address severe disparities in college athletic opportunities between women and men. Throughout the 1970s, sports emerged as the most politically contentious realm of Title IX's implementation. Over the past forty years, the application of the law to sports has fueled more persistent political clashes regarding the meaning of equality than has its application to educational settings. I argue that a tension between "sex-blind" enforcement in education and "sex-conscious" guidelines for sport continues to fuel political battles over the law. Consequently, this policy designed to end discrimination "on the basis of sex" came to naturalize sex as a characteristic of bodies. Title IX's policy design did so in the realm of sports, but not in classrooms. Classrooms were by and large sex-integrated, educating girls and boys in the same spaces "regardless of their sex". Sports, were sex-segregated, first dividing girls from boys into different spaces, "by virtue of their sex". This on-going mechanism of policy design constitutes what I refer to as the "Paradox of Title IX", and this work demonstrates how it has developed and been reified through political battles over the policy. The history of sports as a U.S. policy domain demonstrates how policy development and political battles can come to generate unexpected and uneven outcomes and tensions, even within purportedly "successful" policy interventions. Although Title IX has had many positive outcomes, applying an intersectional lens helps to understand some of the law's on-going limitations.
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    The Impact of Institutional Rules on the U.S. Supreme Court
    (2018-06) Sorenson, Maron
    Assessing Judicial Certainty: The Supreme Court's Use of Questions and Statements During Oral Arguments The United States Supreme Court hears oral arguments for every case granted full consideration. These proceedings are an hour in length with each party receiving exactly 30 minutes to state its case. During this time, the justices are free to interrupt and so arguments are often characterized as a barrage of questions from the greatest legal minds our county has to offer. Despite this characterization -- of the Court rapidly firing questions at attorneys who struggle to keep up -- nearly half of the Court's utterances come not as questions, but as statements. Questions and statements are fundamentally different communication methods, however they have never been considered separately in any large-n empirical study of oral arguments. Using voice-identified oral argument transcripts, I code for use of questions and statements, finding the two theoretically and empirically distinct: questions increase a party's chances of winning while statements increase their chance of losing. The Supreme Court and Congress: Information and the Separation of Powers If the U.S. constitution functions as it was intended, a system of checks and bal- ances should afford each branch a measure of power over the others. Separation of powers research within political science focuses on whether or not these checks and balances af- fect the behavior of institutional actors. Despite the theoretical appeal, recent scholarship that investigates the extent to which the U.S. Supreme Court is constrained by the exec- utive and legislative branches produces few positive results; for the most part the Court does not alter its agenda-setting and decision-making behavior, even under conditions the Court might expect a “check” from other branches (Segal, 1997; Sala and Spriggs, 2004; Owens, 2010). Recent work by Clark (2009; 2011), and Segal, Westerland and Lindquist (2011) however, suggests scholars might be looking in the wrong places when searching for separation of powers effects. These works posit that it’s not a specific congressional override of a Court’s policy that functions as a check, but a more broad threat to insti- tutional legitimacy. To this end, I give attention to the relationship between the Court and the House – arguably the weakest relationship in the system of checks and balances – by examining the effect of MC one-minute speeches that mention the Court. Specifically, I ask whether the Court, during information-gathering at oral argument, is sensitive to this non-legislative speech as an indicator of intense elite and constituent preferences. How to Get Away With Murder: Killing Issues in the U.S. Supreme Court The U.S. Supreme Court is not a self-starting institution; it must wait for issues to come to it before deciding them. The Court’s certiorari process is, however, a powerful device that provides justices with full discretion over cases they hear and which individual questions within those cases they will decide. Thus, while the justices often grant certiorari on all questions presented by the litigants, they sometimes strike specific questions from consideration. When this type of limited certiorari is granted, there may be justices who would rather decide a case on these suppressed issues, so I seek to determine the factors that may lead justices to resuscitate issues, how they go about doing so, and how successful such attempts are. In particular, I posit oral arguments provide justices with a unique forum to take this tack. To test this assertion I examine all cases from the 2002 to 2010 terms that contain issues suppressed during the cert. stage. I then analyze whether justices attempt to resuscitate these “dead” issues at oral argument and offer several explanations for why they engage in “issue resuscitation.” Despite justices’ attempts to re-raise and therefore reach the merits of suppressed legal questions, I find that the Court’s single best way to kill a legal issue is to cut it during certiorari.
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    The Informative Power Of Campaign Advertising
    (2018-06) Motta, Matthew
    Americans' abilities to vote for candidates who represent their policy views has important implications for their representation in government. However, while policy voting theoretically requires knowing where candidates stand on major policy issues (i.e., "campaign knowledge"), it is most typically studied in relation of what people know about civics (i.e., "civic knowledge"). I advance prior research by considering how Americans acquire campaign knowledge, and whether or not this information helps voters select candidates who share their policy preferences. I theorize that policy-focused political ad exposure provides most people with campaign knowledge – especially those who are the least politically engaged. Americans in turn use this information, more so than civic knowledge, to vote for candidates whose issue stances match their own. Merging campaign advertising data from the Wesleyan Media Project into nationally representative cross-sectional and longitudinal opinion data, I find consistent support for both sets of expectations. I conclude by discussing the informational benefits of policy-focused advertising, and considering the impact of changing media and campaign dynamics on Americans' knowledge about politics.