archives@tulane.edu / 1 / Ruizhong Zhang

What drives civic engagement in weak democracies? What are the psychological processes responsible for overcoming post-authoritarian learned helplessness? This dissertation argues that in non-Western political contexts, traditional psychological predictors of individual engagement in civic affairs---openness to experience, high self-efficacy, and low political skepticism---do not align with previously established Western patterns. Building on the results of a large-scale field experiment on a demographically diverse sample of 1,381 respondents, as well as multi-year ethnographic observation of community engagement in Ukraine, this dissertation demonstrates that perceived self-efficacy and collective efficacy improve respondents’ interest in civic engagement while suppressing their interest in running for office. In the first chapter, I explore what factors prompt citizens’ interest in joining an electoral commission, supporting a recycling campaign, establishing a civic council, and leading a homeowners’ association. Using original experimental data, I demonstrate that individual empowerment constitutes a sufficient condition for civic engagement. Moreover, contrary to most theoretical expectations, the effects of individual empowerment on involvement in local civic activities are comparable to the effects produced by civic education. This study represents one of the first experimental contributions to support the theory of democratic learning and shows that citizens benefit from democracy by practicing it and trying various civic activities rather than by learning democratic values through civic education and top-down democracy promotion. In the second chapter, I study the effects of personality traits on policy priorities and ideological preferences of Ukrainians. Previous research suggests that personality affects political attitudes by predisposing people to certain policies. Contrary to these findings, this chapter shows that personality predicts individual response to the revision of the status quo rather than preference for specific policies. I illustrate this logic by addressing one of the most counterintuitive associations between personality traits and political attitudes---the link between openness to experience and conservatism in Eastern Europe. Combining the results of open-ended coding and bootstrapped regression models, the analysis shows that openness to experience predicts both social liberalism and social conservatism. I build upon these findings to address the existing gaps in the personality theory of ideology by suggesting that those open to experience are, on average, more responsive to any policy suggestion that revises the status quo. In the final chapter, I examine the problem of nascent political ambition in weak democratic states. Building on the results of my original field experiment, I show that higher efficacy discourages political engagement in Ukraine. Specifically, increasing respondents’ collective efficacy, on average, disincentivizes them from running for city parliament. Most surprisingly, citizens with higher pre-treatment levels of internal political efficacy were the ones most dissuaded from running for office after the induction of collective efficacy. Their improved sense of collective efficacy might have discouraged them from political institutions that they consider powerless and inefficient. Altogether, these findings challenge existing wisdom in comparative political psychology by demonstrating that (1) psychological pathways to collective action are more context-dependent than previously assumed; (2) previously established effects of personality traits and self-evaluations on political behavior do not travel well beyond Western European and North American contexts; (3) self-efficacy and collective efficacy do not differ in their causal effects on individual attitudes and behavior; and (4) politically sophisticated individuals are put off from political office when reminded of alternative non-political ways of achieving collective goals, with this running from office creating a trap of declining political ambition in weak democracies. Thus, democratic promotion campaigns that increase self-efficacy or collective efficacy might suppress nascent political ambition when the population is skeptical of the quality of representative democratic institutions.

This project is conducted as a descriptive case-study with the aim to explore the political context that formed and articulated the nationalist thoughts of the Swedish scholar, publicist, and parliamentarian Rudolf Kjellén. Specifically, it concerns his nationalist thoughts as they are articulated in his nationalist manifesto Nationell Samling: Politiska och Etiska Fragment(National Congregation: Political and Ethical Fragments (1906)), and how they were articulated during his two initial years in the Swedish Riksdag: 1905-1906. Hence does the work conducted here constitute a study into the history of ideas. Based on Quentin Skinner's theory regarding the role of context when inquiries into history are conducted, the chief focus of this inquiry has its attention on the political context. In as much as this study reveals, the political context that formed Kjellén's nationalism was the major influence of political liberalism at the time with which this inquiry is concerned, and especially so with regards to how it influenced the results of the negotiations in the aftermath of the dissolution of the Swedish-Norwegian Union in 1905, and the discussions on universal suffrage in Sweden at the time. Additionally, this inquiry provides support for a variety of claims and ideas from previous research, both on nationalism and on Kjellén, while simultaneously delivering a more nuanced understanding of the relatively unexplored political context that articulated the specifics of Kjellén's nationalism. Accordingly, it is my aim to contribute to the scholarships on nationalism, and on Kjellén, with a thorough and structured understanding of the political context that formed and articulated its idiosyncrasies.

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Between 1955 and 1984, the Reverend Robert Schuller’s Garden Grove Community Church in Orange County, California, blossomed into a ten-thousand-member congregation of regional and national prominence. Straddling the line between evangelical and mainline Protestantism, the church was emblematic of conservative American Christianity in the second half of the 20th century. Likewise, Orange County was the quintessential sprawling, decentralized, postindustrial suburban region. Garden Grove Community Church and Orange County grew together at an exponential rate in the postwar era. Through participation in the devotional, social, and organizational activities of the church, Schuller’s congregation actively constructed their personal and collective identities. They made meaning out of their suburban lives in ways that had long-term political and economic implications for the county, the region, and the country. The church offered cultural, spiritual, and ideological coherence to a community of corporate, white-collar transplants with few social roots. The substance of that coherence was a theology conflating Christianity with meritocracy and entrepreneurial individualism. The message resonated with “Sun Belt” suburbanites who benefited from systemic class- and race-based metropolitan inequality. Schuller’s message of self-reliance and personal achievement dovetailed with a national conservative repudiation of the public sector and collective responsibility that originated in the suburbs. This drive to eviscerate the American New Deal political order state was nearly unstoppable by the early 1980s, and it received theological aid from institutions like Garden Grove Community Church.

From 1962 to 1975, General Features Corporation distributed a column by traditional conservative Russell Kirk. The column appeared on the political page of newspapers across the country under the title “To The Point”.1 The column provided social commentary on a wide variety of topics ranging from foreign policy, to civil rights, to feminism. Papers that carried the column included Los Angeles Times (1962-early 1968), New Orleans Time-Picayune (late 1962-late 1971), Detroit News (early 1970-1975).2 The research for this thesis included both primary and secondary sources. The primary sources included articles housed at the Russell Kirk Center for Cultural Renewal, Mecosta, Michigan, the University of Tennessee library, and the Sherrod library at East Tennessee State University.

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This dissertation examines the relationship between the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC), the largest and most influential denomination of evangelical Protestants in the United States, and Latino immigration in the late twentieth-century United States. Throughout this period, immigration from Mexico became a political flashpoint; it also transformed the demographics of California and other parts of the Sunbelt United States. Recognizing the evangelizing potential Latino immigrants held, the SBC heralded them as the “greatest evangelizing opportunity of the century.” In an attempt to embrace Latino immigrants, the SBC advanced the American Mosaic program in 1971—a church planting strategy that promoted separate churches where Latino congregants could practice their faith in their own language while preserving their culture. By eschewing assimilationist evangelizing methods, the SBC attempted to diversify its congregational base. An unexpected collaboration between the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) and the SBC bolstered this approach, with both advocating for evangelizing and providing social services to illegal immigrants. But with the passing of the Immigration Reform and Control Act in 1986, the SBC and INS abruptly severed their relationship. By 1994, the SBC fully rejected the compassionate approach to Latino immigration and instead embraced restrictionist anti-immigrant policies, best exemplified by Proposition 187 in California. While the SBC as an institution remained publicly silent, congregants rallied in support of Proposition 187, ensuring its passage. The SBC’s proselytization efforts coincided with the political mobilization of evangelical conservatives, representing one of the most significant movements in American religious and political history. This dissertation examines how immigration from Mexico helped to fuel and, eventually, reshape this mobilization and, also, how it influenced proselytization efforts. Divisions within the Christian Right, however, and the intensifying anxieties of SBC members over their place in society in the 1980s and 1990s, complicated white evangelicals’ attitudes toward Latino immigration. Tensions became particularly acute in California, where SBC debates over Mexican immigration flooded into the political mainstream during the struggle over California’s restrictionist Proposition 187 in 1994. Establishing a durable pattern of anti-immigrant politics among white evangelicals, compassion for Latino converts largely shifted to fear and disdain. / 2025-10-04T00:00:00Z

This thesis is a novella highlighting the struggle many religious individuals face to maintain a faith with or without physical props and boundaries, and why some people voluntarily live with pharisaical rules that make it harder to reside in the modern world. Maid for Man is the story of Caty, a young woman brought up by the strict conservatism of a combined church and homeschool group, who, after marrying a man and discovering he has no physical interest in her, must decide whether or not to divorce him, even though her family and community believe divorce is an excommunicable sin.