Browsing by Subject "politics"

Now showing 1 - 15 of 15
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    2000 Twin Cities Area Survey: Results and Technical Report.
    (Minnesota Center for Survey Research (MCSR), 2001) Minnesota Center for Survey Research
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    A Case of Misunderstood Identity: The Role of Rural Identity in Contemporary American Mass Politics
    (2021-08) Lunz Trujillo, Kristin
    Why do rural individuals tend to be more right-wing in the contemporary U.S.? I answer this question by treating rurality as a social identity – a psychological attachment to rural or small-town life that encompasses a particular set of values and worldview. Previous studies on rural identity by scholars such as Katherine Cramer or Arlie Hochschild argue that rural areas’ turn to the right – particularly to right-wing populism - is rooted in socioeconomic class-based concerns and anti-urban resentment. However, using national experimental and survey data, in contrast to the qualitative and ethnographic approaches typically used, I find that rural identifiers are not more likely to be lower- or working-class individuals or to express economic concerns. Further, rural social identity does not significantly differ between racial and ethnic groups in the U.S. In other words, politically speaking the white working class does not equal rural identity, something often and nearly automatically assumed in scholarly and popular accounts. Instead, I argue that the turn to the right has been due to rural identifiers’ intermediate status in the societal status hierarchy. Rural areas perceive a group status-based threat from two different out-groups, which map onto definitions of right-wing populism. The first out-group is experts and intellectuals, who rural residents believe favor lower-status groups, such as immigrants – a second out-group - allowing them to cut in line ahead of rural Americans to gain social, economic and political status. These two out-groups (intellectuals/experts and immigrants) are more likely to be urban residents but not necessarily, complicating the idea of anti-urban resentment being the primary feature of rural identity. In this work, I rely on several sources of quantitative data, including original survey data and experiments collected over three years, as well as data from the ANES (American National Election Studies), the CCES (Cooperative Congressional Election Studies), and county-level data.
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    Conservatism in a Minnesota Border Town.
    (Center for Urban and Regional Affairs, University of Minnesota., 1968) Harkins, Arthur M.
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    An Evening with Senator Al Franken
    (2017-06-02) Franken, Al; Jacobs, Lawrance
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    Fragile Energy: Power, Nature, And The Politics Of Infrastructure In The ‘New Turkey’
    (2016-08) Erensü, Sinan
    This dissertation provides a reading of political power in twenty-first century Turkey through the lens of (energy) infrastructures. By tracing the country’s bourgeoning energy infrastructures along their material, legal and financial dimensions, I examine energy’s ability to do political work and securing societal consent in Turkey, at a time when the idea of development is being privatized and the challenge of climate change encounters the country’s growing energy deficit. Relying on ethnographic and other qualitative methods collected along the path of energy infrastructures—including corridors of the bureaucracy, investment banks, construction sites, ribbon-cutting ceremonies, energy expos, local courthouses as well as electricity grids and hydropower penstocks—I argue that energy has played an under-recognized yet influential role in the establishment and sustenance of an authoritarian neoliberal experience, what is being dubbed by its founders, the ‘new Turkey’. Rather than collapsing the power harnessed from energy resources with political power, I introduce energy as a form of governmental rationality in the new Turkey that seeps into other realms of government from urban governance to counter-terrorism. The prowess of this emergent rationality, which I name as energorationality, stems from energy’s unique qualities in bringing center and periphery, urban and countryside, capital and commons together, from its ability to suture a variety of unlikely actors, policies, and ideas to each other. By examining grassroots mobilizations struggling against energy infrastructures in Turkey’s rural Eastern Black Sea Region (EBSR), I also discuss the fragility of energorationality. Mining disasters, unexpected droughts, unreliable projections, unruly villagers and urban riots, put delicate project cycles into disarray. I illustrate throughout the dissertation how energy infrastructures—small hydropower plants (small hydro, or SHP) in particular—, cause unexpected cracks as well as powerful sociopolitical alliances while converting uncharted rural and environmental settings into energy landscapes.
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    Immigrants and Radicals in Duluth: An Historical Investigation.
    (1994) Hudelson, Richard
    The work undertaken here is part of an ongoing larger study of the history of Duluth, eventually intended to be published in book length form. This larger project is being done by Carl Ross, director of the Minnesota Radicalism Project of the Minnesota Historical Society, and Richard Hudelson of the department of philosophy at the University of Minnesota Duluth. The project has had the support of the Minnesota Historical Society. On the basis of earlier research, Ross and Hudelson had identified a number of research tasks that needed to be completed as part of the larger undertaking. Summarized in this report are the results of preliminary research in a few of these targeted areas. The research work was done by students at UMD with the support of the Center for Community and Regional Research.
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    Link Lists for Websites of the US House of Representatives in 2009
    (2018-09-28) Weber, Matthew S.; msw@umn.edu; Weber, Matthew S.; Hubbard School of Journalism and Mass Communication
    Data contains hyperlinks that existed between websites that were part of the United States House of Representatives domain in 2009. The data track 12,410,014 unique URLs.
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    Link Lists for Websites of the US Senate in 2009
    (2018-09-28) Weber, Matthew S.; msw@umn.edu; Weber, Matthew S.; Hubbard School of Journalism and Mass Communication
    Data contains hyperlinks that existed between websites that were part of the United States Senate domain in 2009. The data track track 8,764,397 unique URLs.
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    Minnesota Multi-Investigator Survey 2000: Results and Technical Report.
    (Minnesota Center for Survey Research (MCSR), 2000) Minnesota Center for Survey Research
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    Minnesota Response to AIDS.
    (Center for Urban and Regional Affairs, University of Minnesota, 1992) Backstrom, Charles; Robins, Leonard
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    The More Influential, the More Controversial: How Eleanor Roosevelt and Eva Perón Broke Gender Norms and Redefined the Role of First Lady
    (2018-05) Kahlenbeck, Josie
    This thesis is a cross-cultural examination of how Eleanor Roosevelt and Eva Perón broke gender norms and redefined the role of first lady in the United States and Argentina. I examine the expectations for women in the early and mid-20th century and analyze how Roosevelt and Perón's actions were within and beyond these expectations. I find that Roosevelt's language was less forceful and groundbreaking than that of Perón, who was able to mix her strong visual presence with forceful language to create a Peronist image, and broke gender norms more than Roosevelt.
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    Political Tolerance and Ideology: Ideology as a Determinant of Political Tolerance
    (2021-05) Skroch, Tiffani A
    This study examines whether or not political ideology is a strong determinant of political tolerance, as has been found in previous studies. Participants of this study (N = 258) were asked to complete a survey asking questions that would indicate their level of tolerance. Respondents identified their least-liked group in the beginning of the survey and answered questions about procedural rights in the context of that group. The results showed that respondents in this study had generally low levels of tolerance. When compared across political ideology, there is not a significant difference in the tolerance levels between those who identified themselves as conservatives, independents/moderates, and liberals. Furthermore, political ideology is not found to be a significant determinant in level of political tolerance.
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    Strategic Ambiguity in the Production and Reception of War Dramas
    (2013-06) Hassoun, Daniel
    This project uses the rhetorical concept of strategic ambiguity to analyze how U.S. war films from 2006 through 2011 framed the politics of the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. I argue that, rather than presenting partisan propaganda or apolitical drama, these films purposefully ambiguated their political positions in order to please both supporters and opponents of the wars. I begin by examining how industrial constraints on depicting the politics the wars led to ambiguity as a representational tactic. Using the 2007 drama Grace Is Gone as a case study, I then conduct a qualitative and quantitative audience survey suggesting how viewers' can interpret the film's political positions. I conclude by arguing that, rather than criticizing Hollywood for a left- or rightwing bias in matters of war, we must instead understand how discourses of apoliticality serve the industry's military-industrial interests.
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    Women's Rights and the Irish Election
    (2016-05) Flannery, Sara J