This study expands the literature on clergy as political actors by shedding light on the relative electoral performance of clergy who hold office in state legislatures. Kinney’s 2008 study on the occurrence of clergy in local office, as well as other works showing the divergence in attitudes towards church-state separation among racial groups and religious traditions, illustrate potential factors affecting the performance of clergy in elections. The analyses examine the factors related to differences in vote percentages, margins of victory, and campaign funding between clergy and non-clergy. These factors include racial and religious traditions and how their effects interact. The analyses find that clergy-legislators receive larger vote percentages, larger margins of victory, but less campaign funding. These effects, with the exception of campaign funding, tend to be the strongest when looking at black Protestant clergy compared to mainline Protestant clergy and non-clergy legislators.

In 2002, John Judis and Ruy Teixeira published The Emerging Democratic Majority, a book that postulated that the United States was in the beginning of a political realignment that would spell the end of the Reagan-era coalition that gave Republicans an electoral advantage on the presidency. The authors claimed an electorate that would favor the Democratic Party would emerge to take its place. Since Senator Barack Obama’s victory in the 2008 presidential election was powered by a coalition that looked much like the one Judis and Teixeira described, it appeared the authors’ thesis was being borne out by actual election results. However, the events of the 2000s and early 2010s have lent both credibility and doubt to this possible realignment, and have drawn attention to the problems of regular realignment theory. Exploring the premise laid out by Judis and Teixeira from their work, The Emerging Democratic Majority, as well as observations about the changing composition of the American electorate, I analyze key groups in the American electorate to determine if these groups are trending more Democratic in presidential and congressional races since the 1988 presidential election. Findings showed several of these groups regularly supported Democratic candidates but did not consistently trend to the Democrats from year to year. Changes across time often depended on match-ups of nonconsecutive years, with Democrats in the year 2008 drawing especially strong support from hypothesized voter groups. While Democrats can count on the support of groups such as voters who achieve high levels of college education or voters with secular outlooks on life, their success still depends highly on candidate quality and advantage on issues and cannot be taken for granted.

To what extent do unexpected, apolitical events affect governors’ popularity? Individuals’ attitudes towards government are often random, and executives at both the state-level and national-level are held accountable for events that they have little control over. In this study, I seek to understand how these unplanned events affect support for elected officials. Specifically, I examine the effect of the declaration of a State of Emergency on gubernatorial approval. I use an ordinary least squares (OLS) model and data from FEMA as well as the United States Officials Job Approval Ratings dataset to answer such questions. The results indicate that not only do natural and manmade disasters NOT have a negative effect on governors’ popularity, there is actually no correlation between the two variables at all. Instead, I find that relative to one another, major disaster declarations have a stronger negative effect on a governor’s approval ratings than emergency declarations. Though surprising, I suggest that these disasters simply do not affect enough individuals for a long enough time to have an impact on gubernatorial popularity.

This thesis examines the history of barbecue as a political institution in the United States. It pulls from a wide variety of cultural and political sources to trace the story of barbecue’s evolution in America from cooking structure to social gathering, and addresses barbecue’s varied political meanings and implementations from before the American Revolution through the twentieth century. Along the way, it discusses the ways in which barbecue as a political institution has been used to cultivate an American identity, played a role in the development of personality driven politics in the United States, and found itself at the center of debates over race and equality in America.

<p>I examined coverage of the 1997 Canadian federal election by 14 media organizations (including three 1television networks and 11 regionally important newspapers), analysing the relative importance of major election issues, and evaluating the reporting of the technical details of pre-election polls. The media played a passive role in covering the election, seldom evaluating party platforms, and emphasizing only those issues that the leaders of the major political parties introduced into the campaign. National unity dominated media coverage despite public opinion polls initially showing that voters had little interest in the issue. Only the NDP stressed health care and job creation -issues that the electorate considered most important -but the NDP was afforded less coverage than the other major parties, and coverage of these issues suffered as a result.</p> <p>Election coverage was also characterised by an emphasis on pre-election polls, where recently released poll results set the tone of coverage for other election stories. An analysis of the methods of 17 Canadian polling firms showed that there was much similarity in their survey practices. All firms used some form of probability sampling, and none used substandard methods, lending legitimacy to the media's reporting of preelection polls. The emphasis on polling results was accompanied by poor technical reporting, however.</p> <p>Finally, I examined published polling data for the five month period prior to the election to chart the dynamics of the campaign. I found that two events -the election call and the televised leaders' debates-apparently affected trends in voting intentions. During the course of the campaign, the Liberals and Bloc Quebecois experienced a decline in support, while the Reform Party and PC Party enjoyed increases in support. PC support seems to have been buoyed by the popularity of its leader, Jean Charest, following his performance in the English-language leaders' debate.</p> / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Silicon Valley has increased its political engagement over the past decade, and is becoming an increasingly powerful force in government. It defies traditional affiliation labels, and behaves differently than other industries. It embodies a blend of altruism and self-interest, which guides its interactions with government and its intentions in affecting policy changes. In order to better understand Silicon Valley's political life, this thesis outlines a brief history of its development, and then delves into three policy issues: education reform, immigration reform and encryption and security. This focus allows for an up-close, detailed look at the multi-faceted relationship between Silicon Valley and the government.

The purpose of this study is to understand the impact of candidate gender on voting behavior in presidential elections in the United States. By delving into the vice presidential nominations of Geraldine Ferraro in 1984, and Sarah Palin in 2008, I provided the baseline for the experiences of Carly Fiorina and Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaigns in 2016. Ultimately, I present the argument that the United States is ready for a female president, either this year or in the near future.

No description available.

The United States and Israel share a special relationship, but this has not always been the case. The cultivation of this alliance took many years and was done at the hands of various Presidents. While in most cases the Executive Office and State Department have shares a close relationship, in the case of Israel policy the two factions have butted heads considerably. This article argues that it has been Presidents alone who have created the policy towards Israel that set up for the special relationship the U.S. and Israel share today.

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.