Browsing by Subject "Political science"

Now showing 1 - 7 of 7
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    After totalitarianism: Hannah Arendt, Isaiah Berlin, and the realization and defeat of the Western tradition
    (2015-03) Winham, Ilya P.
    This dissertation explores Hannah Arendt (1906-1975) and Isaiah Berlin's (1909-1997) understanding of the Western tradition of political philosophy in the light of totalitarianism in their works of the late 1940s and 1950s. The total collapse of traditional political relations and regimes in the 1930s and 1940s put the entire discipline and tradition of political philosophy in question. As Arendt and Berlin reflected on the Western tradition of political philosophy, both decided that the tradition was not just defeated by Nazi and Communist totalitarianism, it was also in a sense realized in those regimes. In exploring their ambivalent attitude toward the tradition, this dissertation aims to illuminate how Arendt and Berlin contributed to the postwar imperative to think afresh about the Western tradition of political philosophy not only to expose its originating flaws, but also to reconstruct political philosophy on decidedly anti-totalitarian premises. This dissertation engages Arendt and Berlin with respect to the topics of totalitarianism, the tradition of political philosophy, the significance of Machiavelli for post-totalitarian political theory, human plurality as a mode of engaging politics, and modern world alienation or agoraphobia and the midcentury zeitgeist of social adjustment. When read together--which political theorists as a rule almost never do--these topics emerge as important to the development of Arendt and Berlin's respective bodies of anti-totalitarian and "pluralist" political thought. What is ultimately at stake for them in seeking to understand the complicated relationship between totalitarianism and the Western tradition of political philosophy is how to proceed in political theory in a fully post-totalitarian way. In addition to bringing Arendt and Berlin together and investigating some important thematic similarities between them, my dissertation advances our knowledge of both thinkers by revealing how deeply the concepts and issues of politics, pluralism, totalitarianism, and the Western tradition of political philosophy are intertwined in their writings. Beyond Arendt and Berlin studies, this dissertation contributes to our knowledge of the endeavor to renovate or create political theory after totalitarianism and during the Cold War.
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    Codified compassion: politics and principles in humanitarian governance
    (2012-08) Kennedy, Denis V.F.
    This dissertation analyzes recent attempts to devise rules and regulations to govern humanitarian action. Specifically, it asks: What drives humanitarian organizations to collectively regulate their principles, practices, and policies? Self-regulation, or self-organized attempts at collective action within direct state intervention, is a recent global phenomenon, affecting both the for- and non-profit worlds. In humanitarianism alone, there are now dozens of codes of conduct and other mechanisms that implicate all manner of humanitarian practice, from principles to aid provision. This research focuses on four key self-regulatory projects: the Code of Conduct for the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement and NGOs in Disaster Relief; the Sphere Project; HAP International; and the Code of Conduct on Images and Messages.Contrary to the widespread view that firms regulate for branding and competitive reasons, this study finds that principled reasons better account for the origins of these initiatives. Specifically, it shows that self-regulation has emerged out of a crisis of legitimacy in the humanitarian sector, whereby aid veterans concluded that good intentions were no longer enough as a basis for action. As Rwanda demonstrated, good intentions can lead to terrible outcomes. Through self-regulation, aid workers have sought to shift humanitarianism's ideational foundations from charity and good deeds to professionalism, technical standards, and human rights. Contestations over self-regulation, in turn, derive from different understandings of humanitarianism - of its meanings and know-how.
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    Empire of the people: the ideology of democratic empire in the antebellum United States
    (2014-07) Dahl, Adam J.
    Settler colonialism played a constitutive role in the construction of democratic culture in the antebellum United States. This dissertation argues that democratic values of popular sovereignty and social equality acquired their conceptual coherence and institutional realization through settler conquest and indigenous dispossession. Out of this dynamic emerged an "ideology of democratic empire," a distinct ideological formation in which the active agent of expansion is not colonial administration or the imperial state but the people in their sovereign capacity for self-government. In this mode of empire, settler conquest acted as a form of foundational violence that enabled the construction of a new democratic society through the elimination of indigenous sovereignty. I trace the ideological development of democratic empire in three phases. First, federalist discourses in the revolutionary period provided a new world conception of empire that privileged the equality of quasi-sovereign settler communities over notions of empire organized around the governance of colonial dependencies. Second, social equality in the Jacksonian period developed in relation to settler expansion, which guarded against the resurgence of feudal land title in the New World and ensured the priority of popular sovereignty over aristocratic systems of rule. The last phase unearths counter-narratives of democratic empire to reveal how colonial subjects challenged settler-colonial rule by reconfiguring antebellum notions of popular sovereignty. Through a conceptual-historical reconstruction of the relationship between settler expansion and American democracy, my project provides the basis for a decolonial theory of democracy that de-normalizes settler experiences as the unsurpassable horizon of democratic politics.
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    Performative socialization in world politics: Islamism, secularism and democracy in Turkey and Egypt
    (2014-08) Yaylaci, Ismail
    How do norms and discourses travel across cultural difference? How do actors negotiate the constitutive norms of liberal global governance at the juncture of the domestic and the international? This project provides an answer to these questions by developing a performative account of norm socialization and uses this theoretical framework to analyze Islamist negotiations of secularism and democracy in Turkey and Egypt. I suggest that the International Relations scholarship often takes socialization as a pedagogic process in which the non-West is made to transition into the norms of liberal modernity in a hierarchical relationship of authority. In this perspective, actors either socialize into liberal norms or resist them. After identifying the shortcomings of these narratives, I develop a reading that takes socialization as a performative process of cultural translation and norm appropriation. By so doing, I analyze the ways in which norms can be adopted non-normatively--at once inhabited and resisted. I argue that a performative reading enables a more complex understanding of the dynamics of normalization and resistance in socialization. Then I employ this framework to analyze Turkish AK Party's and Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood's negotiation of secularism and democracy by drawing mainly on the data I collected in my fieldwork research in Turkey and Egypt. More specifically, I examine the performative politics of translation and appropriation in the AK Party's notions of `democratic secularism' and `conservative democracy' and the Muslim Brotherhood's notions of `civil state within an Islamic framework' and `Islamic democracy.'
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    Senatorial deliberation and Supreme Court nominations
    (2014-08) Gregory, Charles
    Although senators actively participate in the confirmation debates, existing research that examines the confirmation debates has questioned whether the Senate is capable of fulfilling its constitutional duties. Unfortunately, this research does not fully investigate why senators participate in these important debates. To investigate the factors that influence senatorial deliberation I build on previous research that describes confirmation votes as opportunities for position taking and formally models the selection stage. I argue these two strands of research provide a framework for understanding what factors influence senatorial deliberation across the Supreme Court appointment process. Overall, I find strong support for the hypothesis that senators strategically engage Supreme Court confirmation debates. More specifically, I find political, electoral, and institutional considerations affect the willingness of senators to participate in these important debates.
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    Trading Places to Care? Humanitarians and Migrants in World Politics
    (2014-09) McCracken, Darrah
    This dissertation explores the place and significance of care in international relations through a critical comparison of migrant and humanitarian caregivers. I argue this wide lens on care provides unique insights into the meaning of care in world politics. While the expansion of international humanitarianism seems to indicate a revolution in global ethics, and progress in world politics, the persistence of poorly appreciated, poorly remunerated care in international migration and its exclusion from humanitarian norms and institutions suggest that interpretation is too optimistic. Instead of establishing the universal value of care, the institutionalization of humanitarianism has excluded a whole class of caregivers and ruled out the possibility of recognizing the contributions of the societies that send them. In the dissertation I elaborate an analysis of the history, politics, and ethics of this divergence among international caregivers.
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    Vox Populi Vox Curiae: public opinion and the U.S. Supreme Court
    (2014-08) Bryan, Amanda Clare
    Chapter 1: Public Opinion and Counter-Attitudinal Voting.For decades, Supreme Court scholars have asked whether the Court is responsive to public opinion. Despite the importance of this question, however, unsettled and often contradictory theory combined with several empirical barriers have prevented scholars from answering it. This paper takes both theoretical and methodological steps to resolve this debate and argues that there is a direct relationship between public opinion and the choices justices make. Specifically I examine the conditions under which justices deviate from their ideologies to cast votes in line with the majority will. I find that justice are generally constrained by public opinion. However, the level of that constraint is conditional on the political environment. In short, justices are most responsive to public opinion when specific support is critical -- when they expect the probability their decision will be reversed or ignored to be high.Chapter 2: Public Opinion and Setting the Agenda When the U.S. Supreme Court decides which cases to hear it weighs a number of legal and policy considerations. While scholars understand a great deal about how each of these considerations factor into a justice's decision to grant a case, each term the Court faces this same set of considerations in hundreds of issue areas. Much less is understood about why the Court chooses to hear some issues and reject others. Adding to this literature, I argue that justices choose cases with public opinion in mind. Using a novel issue-specific and justice-specific measure of likely divergence from public opinion, I argue justices are forward-looking and select cases in which they are least likely to face pressure from public opinion to deviate from their ideological preferences at the merits stage. However, the relationship between public opinion and agenda setting is not direct. Rather, it is conditioned on the level of diffuse support the Court enjoys and the legal importance of the case. I also present some of the first systematic evidence that the Court is responsive to public issue salience when deciding what to decide.Chapter 3: Public Opinion and Stare Decisis.The U.S. Supreme Court, through the norm of stare decisis is responsible for setting the direction of the rule of law in the United States. However, to date the exploration of the Court's use of precedent in the literature has focused on internal ideological and institutional explanations, largely ignoring the potential for external constraint. Taking a step away from the traditional formulation of the Court's use of precedent, I explore the role of public opinion on the Court's treatment of its own precedent over time and in its majority opinions. I find no effect of public opinion on the decision to treat precedent even when conditioning the effect on the salience of the treated case, the Court's level of diffuse support, nor the level of threat posed by Congress. In short, while justices may be highly responsive to public opinion in the more conspicuous aspects of its decision-making, they seem to largely ignore public opinion when applying or creating legal rules.