With over two million inmates, the United States’ prison population is the largest in the world. Nearly one in one hundred Americans are behind bars, either in prisons or pre-trial detention facilities. The rapid growth in incarceration is well-documented. However, social science explanations often stop at the prison gates, with little work on treatment inside prisons. This black box approach ignores important bureaucratic decisions, including the provision of rehabilitative services and the application of punishment. This dissertation offers a systematic analysis of treatment decisions inside the American prisons. I use a mixed methods approach, combining multiple quantitative datasets with environmental observation at four prisons, and original interviews of twenty-three correctional staff members. I offer the only large-n comparative analysis of American state prisons. Characteristics of the inmates as well as characteristics of staff are explored. I am able to analyze data at the state, facility and individual level. All of this is to answer a crucial and somewhat overlooked question; how do prison staff decide who should be punished and who should receive rehabilitative treatment? I find that theories of social construction offer insight into the treatment of American prison inmates. Specifically, I find that socially constructed racial categories offer explanatory value for inmate treatment. Black and Hispanic inmates are less likely to receive important rehabilitative programs, including access to mental health and medical care. Black and Hispanic inmates are also more likely to receive punishment including the use of solitary confinement in administrative segregation units. I find, consistent with theories of representative bureaucracy that staffing characteristics also impact treatment decisions, with black and Hispanic staff members expressing lower preferences for punishment and prisons with higher percentages of black staff members utilize administrative segregation less. I provide a historical overview of the changing social constructions of crime and prisons inside the United States, from colonial to present day America. I argue that the treatment of prisoners changes as our conception of crime changes. I discuss recent bipartisan attempts at prison reform and offer my own suggestions for reform of the American prison system.

The purpose of my dissertation is to further our understanding of why some states restricted immigrant access to welfare in the 1990s while other states granted immigrants access to social programs. With the passage of the Personal Responsibility Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA), many states diverged from equal access to welfare programs, such as Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF), for immigrants arriving after 1996. Very little scholarly work examines the variance in immigrants’ access to welfare programs. Current research studying welfare attitudes and policy has largely failed to investigate whether and how the influx of immigrants over the last three to four decades has decreased public support for welfare programs and resulted in policies that both decrease benefit levels and restrict access to programs based on citizenship. This is a serious shortcoming because immigration since the 1970s represents the largest population shift since the early 20th century, a change that has increased the size of the underclass and transformed the cultural and racial makeup of theUnited States. Accordingly, in my dissertation, I will examine how changes to the American political environment, immigration levels and the increasing number of immigration media stories, trigger authoritarian attitudes that in turn form a breeding ground supporting restrictive welfare programs. The results from the individual-level analysis provide strong evidence that authoritarians prefer less welfare spending, fewer immigrants, and a waiting period before immigrants can access welfare programs. In addition, authoritarians view immigrants as a threat due to their perceived failure to socially conform to American society. Building on these individual-level results, I find that states with large authoritarian populations are more likely to adopt restrictive welfare policies.

Political scientists have conducted much work examining a court's decision on the merits of a case. We have concluded that ideology has a strong influence on the outcome on the merits of a decision. Furthermore, courts seek to render a decision that is closest to their own policy preferences. However, federal circuit courts within the judicial hierarchy are constrained by other actors according to the strategic model. There is an abundance of evidence showing that superior actors constrain courts' ideological preferences when such courts render decisions on the merits. However, there is a dearth of scholarship regarding judicial decision making on threshold issues. I argue that federal circuit courts set their judicial agendas by transforming their mandatory appellate jurisdiction into one that is discretionary. They achieve this goal by controlling the type of litigants who gain access to the courts by deciding cases on threshold grounds. I also argue that federal circuit courts are responsive to changes in Congress's ideology because Congress has power to control threshold issues through various mechanisms. I seek to establish that the grounds upon which as case is dismissed -- jurisdictional, justiciable, and procedural -- defines the parameters that constrain federal circuit courts.

In 2015, South Africa withdrew from the International Criminal Court asserting United Nation’s Security Council bias in referring only African cases (Strydom October 15, 2015; Duggard 2013) and the United Kingdom reiterated a pledge to withdraw from the European Court of Human Rights, asserting that the court impinges on British sovereignty (Watt 2015). Both are examples of extraterritorial courts which are an important part of regional and global jurisprudence. To contribute to our understanding of the relationship between states and extraterritorial courts, I examine arguably the first and best example of an extraterritorial court, namely the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council (JCPC). Drawing on 50 British Commonwealth states, this dissertation explores the factors influencing the decision to accede to an extraterritorial court and why some states subsequently opt to sever ties. I build on Dahl’s theory (1957) that the nation’s highest court interacts with the governing coalition and, for the most part, serves as an ally and uphold its policies. I argue that that governing coalition wants the final appellate court that they most expect to be an ally and extend this expectation to extraterritorial courts. As a result, the governing coalition looks at the court more critically. States may change or abolish the jurisdiction of the court if it undermines or seems likely to undermine state policy. Examining this phenomenon across the British Commonwealth provides comparative insights into how governing coalitions may view extraterritorial courts.

Countries emerging out of armed conflicts face immense challenges in their efforts to build electoral democracies. Contrary to our intuition that elections can transform violent competition to peaceful political contests, past research suggests that holding post-conflict elections only increases the chance of renewed violence. Why are elections unable to build sustainable democracies as expected? In this dissertation, I examine the question by focusing on two levels of analysis. First, I study the effects of violence on political behavior of mass publics at the individual level using the World Values survey Dataset. I argue that citizens are more inclined to support undemocratic leaders, when they are faced with threats from armed violence. Empirically, I find that presence of pre-election violence in post-conflict elections leads voters to prefer parties that are stronger in terms of their violence-wielding capacities over more moderate and peaceful parties. Second, I investigate how such an outcome might influence the risk of renewed conflicts in a country emerging out of armed conflict. The hypothesized mechanism can only be described as tragic. At individual level, fearful voters support violent parties mainly to maintain the status quo, fearing that parties with a violent reputation are likely to renew conflict if they lose the election. Tragically, however, placing undemocratic and violent parties in power only increases the likelihood of renewed conflicts. I test this expectation using an event history model to analyze all post-conflict countries from 1950 to 2010 and find that the presence of pre-election violence in a country increases its risk of renewed armed conflicts. The study has important implication for policymakers and election monitoring bodies. Rather than the current practice of observing only a single event Election Day, this study emphasizes the importance of creating a secure environment during the pre-election phase, about six months prior to the first election, in order to achieve a sustainable peace in post-conflict countries.

Political participation is paramount to the well being of a democracy. Concerns over low turnout rates across the world have prompted a growing body of research on the potential for political institutions to foster electoral participation. Amongst those institutions, compulsory voting is found to have the largest and most robust impact on maximizing participation rates. Under this system, eligible citizens are required by law to go to the polls on election day, and are subject to penalties if they fail to do so. Beyond its positive impact on turnout, we know far less about what other aspects of the democratic process are influenced by compulsory voting. The main goal of this dissertation is to inform the debate on how and when the effects of compulsory voting extend beyond voter turnout. Specifically, I draw on numerous sources of survey data across the world to investigate the impact of compulsory voting (herein CV) on three distinct political aspects: citizen attitudes towards voting, political engagement, and elite campaigning. The first step in understanding the broader effects of CV is to examine whether it influences citizens’ perceptions of the democratic act of voting. In chapter two, I develop a detailed theoretical framework that highlights whether compulsory voting increases citizens’ feelings of civic duty, or generates resentment amongst eligible voters. I also argue that the impact of CV on attitudes could be neutral—by devaluing the act of voting and making individuals indifferent towards the democratic process. Using a hierarchical modeling technique and survey data from Latin America, I show that voters living under CV are no more likely to report either increased feelings of civic duty or higher rates of resentment, compared to their counterparts under voluntary voting. Instead, individuals who are required to turn out by law are slightly more likely to feel indifferent towards electoral participation. Then, chapter three takes advantage of the recent abolition of compulsory voting in Chile to evaluate whether CV laws promote political engagement beyond election day. An empirical analysis of public opinion surveys over a 10-year period pre and post reform shows that rates of political engagement—specifically, watching and reading political news and discussing politics with family—are significantly higher under compulsory than under voluntary voting, and this is especially the case for those with lower levels of education. These findings suggest that when presented with the task of turning out at the polls, citizens seem to incur the extra costs necessary to make an informed decision. Finally, in chapter four I investigate whether mandatory voting laws alter the way political parties decide to engage in outreach during political campaigns. Using a comprehensive dataset of post-election surveys of over 40,000 individuals in 27 different countries, I find that political elites do adjust to their institutional context—when voting is mandatory, parties invest in campaign outreach at similar levels (not less) than when voting is voluntary, and that this outreach is much less skewed towards individuals of higher socioeconomic status compared to when voting is voluntary. I also show evidence that parties under CV are more likely to engage in persuasion rather than mobilization via party outreach. Taken together, this dissertation provides a comprehensive analysis of how maximizing electoral participation through a legal requirement to vote shapes individual and elite behavior, contributing to our understanding of the implications of political institutions for the quality of representative democracy worldwide.

What is the importance of political speechmaking? Do state governors discuss presidential priorities? This study addresses these questions by analyzing the contents of annual State of the State addresses given by governors from 2012 to 2014 during the presidency of Barack Obama. A descriptive paper provides evidence that governors primarily discuss employment and economic issues in their addresses, are discussing greater number of policy issues than in previous decades, and are delivering their address before the presidential State of the Union message. Examining health care and immigration policy in separate empirical papers, I theorize that contextual factors, including legislative partisanship, public approval, and presidential influence may affect the extent to which policies supported by the Obama administration are rhetorically referenced by governors. Empirical analyses found limited support for the influence of divided government, but demonstrated significant evidence for the importance of including state-centric factors, including annual employment rate and proximity to Mexico, as well as temporal effects, into future analyses of gubernatorial rhetoric.

It is the argument of this dissertation that states become tax havens as a conscious economic development strategy. These states – more properly referred to as "jurisdictions" because some lack the sovereignty of the traditional Westphalian state – do not have the natural resources or the population to pursue more traditional economic development strategies, but they do have the ability to write or implement laws that create a virtual resource: banking secrecy. These jurisdictions are able to carry out this strategy because they tend to be well-governed, stable, and relatively wealthy, making them attractive partners for the international banking, legal, and accounting firms that drive offshore finance, and then for their customers – both individual and corporate – as well. The qualities tax havens possess also enable them to calculate that the benefits they reap from pursuing this strategy outweigh any penalties assessed by anti-tax haven international collective action activities, such as the naming and shaming campaigns of 2000.

Military mutinies are occurring more frequently in the last two decades than ever before. Mutinies impact every region of the world. Given that they are occurring more frequently, impact every region, and often have disastrous implications, scholars must answer the foundational question: why do mutinies occur? What are the proximate domestic conditions that give rise to military mutinies? This project makes three contributions. First, I set out to formally define mutinies and collect a new dataset that will allow scholars to examine mutinies empirically. Second, I present a theoretical framework that explains when and why mutinies will occur. Finally, I present three novel empirical tests of the theory. The first portion of this dissertation defines mutinies and describes the data collection process. I present the Military Mutinies and Defections Databases (MMDD). Using news articles from various sources, I code 460 mutiny events from 1945 – present day. I code a number of other variables that give users details about the event, such as: whether or not violence was used, whether or not civilians were killed, and whether or not soldiers defected from the military apparatus. Next, I utilize a nested principal agent model to describe when mutinies are likely to occur. Agent models describe hierarchical relationships of delegation. A nested structure allows for multiple agents and multiple principals in a given model. I apply this nested structure to the military to generate three various nests. The first examines foot soldiers as an agent of the military leadership. In this nest, policy failures (e.g., bad strategy) secured by the military leadership will drive foot soldier mutinies. The second nest explores foot soldiers as agents of the executive, a civilian principal. In this nest, I expect that situations that place soldiers in conflict with the executive will generate shirking. The final nest considers foot soldiers and military leadership as collective agents of the executive. I theorize that risk aversion and divergent preferences will drive shirking, or mutinies, in this nested structure. The final nest presents an interesting trade-off for a coup-worried leader. I argue that while executives can utilize regime securing strategies, such strategies might actually agitate the military and drive low level military rebellions. Coup proofing, a common practice among executives that are worried they will be ousted by the military, effectively wards of coups but can generate unintended consequences. Specifically, I expect that counterbalancing measures and other coup proofing tactics should spur mutinies because the intended purpose of these measures is to create coordination challenges which likely spur military splintering. The first empirical chapter sets out to explore the relationship between civil conflict and the likelihood of mutinies. I expect that when civil wars are extremely bloody or long lasting, mutinies will be more likely as war-weary soldiers no longer want to invest in the war effort. I find evidence that indeed civil war intensity and duration contribute to the probability of a state experiencing a mutiny. The second empirical chapter explores scenarios that pit foot soldiers preferences against the executive’s. I expect that scenarios that impose steep costs on foot soldiers, yet provide some benefit to the executive are likely to spur mutinies. I find evidence that protest events and divisionary conflict spur mutinies. The final empirical chapter explores the military apparatus as a whole. I find that coup proofing measures increase the likelihood of mutinies. Additionally, I find that scenarios that are likely to spur widespread dissent among military actors will increase the likelihood of a mutiny in the context of steep coordination challenges that stifle coup activity. The final chapter concludes by providing policy recommendations. I offer recommendations for leader states (e.g., major powers and democratic leaders in the international system) and for states experiencing mutinies. I conclude by discussing the many possible extensions for this project. This section seeks to emphasis the fact that this is a young, novel research program with many promising avenues for future research.

In this dissertation, I investigate two key questions: 1) What are the specific conditions under which economic inequality undermines democratic legitimacy; and 2) How does inequality map onto individuals’ perceptions of fairness and subsequently affect satisfaction with democracy and trust in political institutions? I first argue that individuals’ perceptions of distributive unfairness are key factors whereby economic inequality undermines democratic legitimacy. Inequality - and subsequent perceptions that the economic distribution is unfair - undermine political support by signaling that the democratic process is not functioning properly and by challenging people’s normative expectations about what democracy should do in practice. I next draw from a diverse literature on social and political psychology, as well as governance quality, to derive new hypotheses about how people form their fairness judgments and use them to evaluate democracy. Right-leaning and upper-class individuals should be less upset with inequality in the first place, but even when these individuals perceive distributive unfairness, they should be less likely to express political dissatisfaction as a result. Additionally, the context in which individuals form their fairness perceptions should condition the relationship between fairness judgments and political support. In a context of good governance, individuals should be less likely to perceive inequality as unfair, and subsequently less likely to express political dissatisfaction for any perceived distributive unfairness in society. Governance quality provides alternative evidence that democracy is in fact functioning properly and should allay citizens’ concerns about inequality and distributive unfairness, at least when it comes to evaluating democratic legitimacy. To test my theory and hypotheses, I take a mixed-methods approach that combines large-N analysis of public opinion data and original survey experiments. To contextualize my quantitative results, I draw on motivating examples from original open-ended surveys, newspapers, and elite interviews. In the first empirical chapter, I conduct a multilevel analysis of data from 18 Latin American and show that perceptions of distributive unfairness are negatively correlated with trust in government and satisfaction with democracy, yet good governance significantly mitigates this negative relationship. In the second empirical chapter, I use original survey experiments in Argentina, Mexico, and the US to show that perceptions of distributive unfairness are key causal factors linking inequality to political dissatisfaction. In the third empirical chapter, I use a second set of survey experiments to investigate how governance quality moderates the relationship between inequality and political support. When individuals are presented with information about declining corruption, they are less likely to perceive their country’s income distribution as unfair, and less likely to link inequality to political dissatisfaction.