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.

Numerous authoritarian states use institutions usually associated with democratic regimes like a constitution, elections, and a legislature. This seems to be counterintuitive. Authoritarian regimes should rather shrink away from democratic institutions. Elections can be won by the opposition and legislatures can make decisions against the interests of the ruler. So, why do autocratic regimes install institutions which limit their power and threaten their survival in office? Assuming actors behave rationally, one should expect authoritarian rulers only to introduce procedures working in their favor. This study looks at the effect of institutions in authoritarian regimes. The findings suggest that legislatures significantly lower the chances of regime breakdown in the long run. However, particularly in election years, authoritarian regimes are facing a higher likelihood of failure.

The purpose of this study was to search for relationships of certain personal characteristics (authoritarianism, philosophy of social education, and instructional preferences) of a representative group of social studies student teachers to measures respectively of a) their classroom behavioral traits, b) their classroom teaching activities, and c) their pupils' classroom behavior.

The problem is to study the relationship between two personality measures, self-concept and authoritarianism, as each relates to certain academic, vocational, and biographical variables of male freshmen attending a state-supported university in the Southwest.

This study was concerned with analyzing selected Texas school administrators in an attempt to locate intrapersonal patterns of (1) values, (2) leadership traits, (3) personality traits, (4) critical thinking ability, (5) perception, and authoritarianism. A second aspect was correlating these profiles with each other. The study had a threefold purpose. The first was to perform a detailed analysis of school administrators to determine selected intrapersonal patterns. The second was to determine possible relationships between these selected profiles. The third was to generate plausible hypotheses for testing the intrapersonal patterns found and for determining the magnitude of any existing relationships. The case studies revealed the uniqueness of each participant in this study. With the possible exception of one individual, certain weaknesses were evident in each of the participants. Canonical correlation and the Pearson correlation of D matrices determined that a relationship existed between many of the profiles. Eight hypotheses were presented at the close of the study as guides for additional research. The results of this study indicated that further research was justified in these particular areas. The results of this study indicated that intrapersonal patterns existed within school administrators and that these patterns or profiles are related. However, the determination of the magnitude of these relationships was left to additional research.

Thesis advisor: Roberta T. Manning / Although born in Prague under the Austro-Hungarian Empire and dying before Stalin took control of the USSR, Kafka clairvoyantly understood the full paradox of Soviet authoritarianism. His short parable “Before the Law” provides an interesting intellectual exercise for anyone wishing to study Soviet law, for in Russia it evokes tragic truth. The man who futilely attempted to reach the law is a metaphor for Russian masses seeking the same goal. Just as the doorkeeper with his air of conscious superiority and vacillating temperament mirrors the nature of Soviet rulers. The absurdity that underpins Kafka's work poignantly and painfully parallels the arbitrary ‘justice' of Stalin's rule. The man's futile search is symbolic of the many purge victims who, while wasting away in the gulags, clung to the slim hope of using legal means to exonerate themselves. Through an intellectual and visceral response, Kafka conveys the authoritarian split between the elite and the masses in Russia. No one knows how many countless Russian and Soviet citizens' lives were wasted in the same shadow of indifferent omnipotence. And we are forced to ask why the law was kept from them. And yet, what fueled the insatiable pursuit of the law in the face of certain futility? Even the Purges took place within a legal framework, as perverse as it may have been. But was Communist legality simply an oxymoron, or was there something more? / Thesis (BA) — Boston College, 2003. / Submitted to: Boston College. College of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: History. / Discipline: College Honors Program.

A presente pesquisa teve como objetivo analisar a experiência japonesa e a aplicabilidade do conceito fascismo ao período compreendido entre a Grande Crise do fim dos anos 1920 e o fechamento total dos partidos e dos sindicatos. O caso japonês é, muitas vezes, tratado como desprezível, por se referir a uma experiência fora dos perímetros ocidentais e, também, traz consigo uma forma de esquivar-se de cada particularidade dentro de uma universalidade. O Japão, após a implantação do capitalismo em fins do século XIX, passa por diversas transformações orientadas pela mesma lógica de reprodução. A partir das distinções do caso japonês e de generalizações do conceito fascismo, foi possível perceber a unidade dos processos político-sociais. O resultado de uma arquitetura de dominação, desde a esfera social até os movimentos políticos da economia, foi exposto neste trabalho. / This study aimed to analyze the Japanese experience and the concept of \"fascism\" due the period between the Great Crisis of the late 1920s and the total closure of parties and unions. The Japanese case is often treated as negligible, because it refers to an out of the western perimeter, and also brings with it a way to dodge every particular within a universality. Japan, after the capitalism introduction in the late nineteenth century, goes through several transformations driven by the same logic of reproduction. From the Japanese case distinctions and generalizations of the concept of \"fascism\", it was possible to make out the unity of political and social processes. The result of an architecture of domination was exposed in this work, from the social sphere to the political movements of the economy.

Thesis advisor: Gerald M. Easter / Thesis advisor: Jonathan Laurence / How do authoritarian states attempt to acquire ideological resources vis-à-vis their youth populations? This thesis demonstrates that one way in which these states attempt to do so is by way of an institution I call the authoritarian youth group (AYG). Examples of AYG treated in the paper include the Hitler Jugend in Nazi Germany; the VLKSM or Komsomol in the U.S.S.R.; and Nashi ("Ours") in post-Communist Russia. Primarily on the basis of secondary-source material, I argue that, across cases, governors of authoritarian states create and maintain AYG primarily in order to curry ideological resources among young people. In particular, states use AYG principally in order to legitimate the nation-state by espousing particular national narratives and lionizing the state; to promote among young people a sense of national homogeneity; to propagate particular mores related to gender, family, sex, and sexuality; and to affect the formation of a loyal elite for the state's future. The paper aims to contribute to the comparative-politics subfield by enhancing scholars' knowledge of authoritarian governance, ideological resources in authoritarian contexts, and, most importantly, the relationship between the authoritarian state and young people. / Thesis (MA) — Boston College, 2012. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Political Science.

Esta tese traz uma reflexão acerca das transformações observadas na sociedade brasileira nas décadas de 1960-70, muitas das quais tiveram início ou se aceleraram a partir do golpe de abril de 1964, com a instauração do regime militar. A discussão proposta parte do estudo dos artigos assinados por David Nasser, em O Cruzeiro, principalmente, e em Manchete, esporadicamente, e Carmen da Silva, na revista Claudia, entre 1963-1973. Mostro, através do trabalho destes autores, as sementes do que resultou num endurecimento político baseado num aparato repressivo cuidadosamente construído, com o objetivo de cercear e punir idéias políticas diferentes daquelas que sustentavam a ditadura instaurada. Paralelamente, no campo social/cultural, observouse a abertura dos costumes e dos comportamentos, o que contradiz, neste momento da história brasileira, a noção segundo a qual: \"É mais fácil derrubar um ditador do que mudar a cabeça das pessoas\". / This thesis ponders about the transformations that took place in the Brazilian society in the 1960-70s. These changes have started or increased in pace following the civilianmilitary coupd\'état of April 1964, with the establishment of the Brazilian military regime. The proposed discussion has its roots in the study of the news articles authored by David Nasser, mostly in O Cruzeiro but sporadically in Manchete, and Carmen da Silva, in Claudia, spanning the years 1963-1973. I show, through the work of these authors, the seeds of what would later turn into the political hardening based in a carefully built apparatus to stifle and punish political ideas dissonant with the ones defended by the established regime. At the same time, other realms of society saw an increasing flexibility of societal norms and behaviors. This fact, in this particular moment of the Brazilian history, contradicts the common belief that: \"It is easier to topple a dictator than to change people minds\".

This project explains Polish non-violence and Algerian violence under martial law following peaceful protests against comparable material deprivation and authoritarian political exclusion. From narratives of state formation, institutional performance, and social movement evolution in postwar Poland and postcolonial Algeria a conditional model derives violent and non-violent opposition strategies from divergent practical citizenship regimes in formally similar autocratic systems. It argues that distinct regimes of citizen-subjectivity under authoritarian governance foster divergent practices of resistance and evaluations of states before and during emergency conditions that reduce activists to biological life, tempting violence. Where citizenship regimes differentiate social resources (means of protest) from state resources (means or sovereignty), affording regime opponents actual or immanent systemic subjectivity, social agitation remains non-violent despite objectively comprehensive political and social dispossession; in contrast, by subordinating social to state resources, undifferentiated citizenship regimes under martial law wholly eliminate systemic subjectivity, provoking violence. Neither the formal political regime-type nor the immediate experience of social suffering or political abjection distinguishes violent from non-violent responses to despotism; rather, violent versus non-violent protest strategies express discrepant evaluations of regime coercion, reflecting the elimination versus endurance of the citizenship regime that formed the iterated systemic subjectivity of regime opponents. Poland's worker-based citizenship regime endured fiscal crisis and martial law because it provided differentiated social resources: regime opponents had means independent of state solvency to compel policy concessions by withdrawing labor power from industries pivotal to ruling-elite incumbency. But Algeria's client-based citizenship - based on undifferentiated resources - tied activists' systemic means of compulsion to state largesse. Differentiated citizenship regimes endure state crises because citizens retain the social resources, however suspended, of systemic-subjectivity that ground their evaluations of state actions, minimizing incentives to violent pressure on ruling classes. Undifferentiated citizenship regimes perish under state bankruptcy or force, eradicating social resources and channeling the recuperation of subjectivity to anti-systemic acts. In short, Polish workers could strike and threaten the state under martial law; Algerian clients were effectively expelled from political status. In forming opposition strategies, citizens judge state policies or legitimacy, but also their status as systemic subjects. Evaluations of systemic subjectivity reflect experiences in using social resources, not merely immediate material or political conditions. The research design does not test a general theoretical model linking citizenship-subjectivity regimes to experiential evaluations of objective dehumanization, but its conceptual and causal variable analyses may complement other studies of state institutions and social agitations by promoting subject formation over abstract human universals as the key mechanism in reliable social explanation.