The Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act of 1974 made the production of an annual comprehensive budgetary framework the central focus of the federal budget process. Before 1974, the budget process had allowed legislation from each of the revenue committees and each of the appropriations subcommittees to come to the floor separately. Congress judged the merits of individual programs without considering the overall budget. The 1974 budget act changed the organizational ethos of the budget process from incremental change to comprehensive review and from fragmented, ad hoc decision making to coordinated decision making. It helped sort members into ideologically homogenous groups by transforming many battles over separate policy priorities into one grand battle over the biggest question in American politics: What is the role of government? The 1974 shift to comprehensive budgeting, along with subsequent additional controls on budget practices, has magnified and accelerated the effects of the many polarizing forces that have characterized the last 40 years of American politics. With this conclusion come unanswered questions regarding the merits of a distinct two-party system, as well as the potential need for comprehensive budgeting despite its political challenges.

More than a half-century of behavioral political science has shaped the dominant view of American nonvoters in terms of their engagement and resource deficits. While nonvoters on average are indeed less educated, poorer, younger and less politically engaged, other scholarship suggests that many of them actively abstain due to disaffection with the political system. My dissertation aims to reconcile these disparate explanations for nonvoting, and to better understand those nonvoters whose resources and political attention should suffice to vote. Drawing upon recent work in psychology, I advance a theory that disgust with politics causes many to abstain, irrespective of resources. These disgusted individuals feel the political system has violated deeply held interpersonal and moral norms, and believe participation will be ineffective to mitigate its affronts. As a result, these individuals withdraw from politics both in terms of voting and gathering additional information. I label this behavior “principled abstention.” To test my hypotheses, I employ observational data, including original question batteries on the 2008 and 2010 Cooperative Congressional Election Studies, and a series of laboratory and nationally representative experiments. / text

This MA Report explores existing literature pertaining to three aspects of politics during or directly following crises in the United States: state-building, suppression or expansion of civil liberties, and enduring alterations to the American social hierarchy. While acknowledging the many insights of all three areas of literature, the Report argues that literature on state-building is too concentrated on formal, top-down explanations. As a result, it neglects the crucial dependence state-building has on aspects, such as the active participation of civil society groups. The Report further argues that political science’s absence from research literature on civil liberties during crises needs to end. The abundance of legal and historical accounts on this subject offers a wealth of descriptive insights. However, they fail to offer causal explanations for why crises have such an inconsistent and dynamic impact on civil liberties. Finally, research over the impact of crises on American social hierarchies needs to move away from assuming social groups’ interests a priori. Instead, scholars should attempt to unearth what these interests actually were among these groups within the historical context given, looking specifically to the discursive contests among social groups as they attempt to frame crises in advantageous ways. / text

This study examines the legal struggle over school desegregation in Alabama in the two decades following the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board decision of 1954. It seeks to better understand the activists who mounted a litigious assault on segregated education, the segregationists who opposed them, and the ways in which law shaped both of these efforts. Inspired by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People’s (NAACP) campaign to implement Brown, blacks sought access to their constitutional rights in the state’s federal courts, where they were ultimately able to force substantial compliance. Whites, however, converted massive resistance into an ostensibly colorblind movement to preserve “law and order,” while at the same time taking effective measures to preserve segregation and white privilege. As soon as the NAACP implementation campaign began, self-styled moderate segregationists began to abandon self-defeating forms of resistance and to fashion a creed of “law and order.” When black activists achieved a litigious breakthrough in 1963, the developing creed allowed segregationists to reject violence and outright defiance of the law, to accept token desegregation, and to begin to stake their own claims to constitutional rights – all without forcing them to repudiate segregation and white supremacy. When continuing litigation forced school systems to abandon ineffective “freedom of choice” desegregation plans for compulsory pupil assignment plans, these so-called moderates began using their individual rights language to justify flight to private segregationist academies, independent suburban school systems, and otherwise safely white school districts. Political and legal historians have underappreciated the deep and broad roots of the narrative of white racial innocence, the endurance of massive resistance, and the pivotal role which school desegregation litigation played in channeling both into a broader movement towards modern conservatism. The cases considered here – particularly the statewide Lee v. Macon County Board of Education case – demonstrate the effectiveness of litigation in bringing down official state and local barriers to equal opportunity for minorities and in enforcing constitutional law. But they also showcase the limits of litigation in effecting social justice in the face of powerfully constructed narratives of resistance seemingly built upon the nation’s founding principles.

Richard Nixon undoubtedly casts a long shadow on the American political conscience. Nowhere is this clearer than in the political behavior of American voters born 1950-1954. These baby-boomers were the youngest voters eligible to vote in 1972, and experienced the greatest scandal in postwar American politics at an important age. The question this thesis asks is: what happens when the most populous cohort in American history experiences one of the most contentious periods in postwar politics during the most important years of psychological development? This study finds three significant effects. First, this cohort shows lower levels of civic engagement throughout life. Second, this cohort is more likely to vote Democrat. Third, this cohort is more ideologically polarized. Not only are these trends clear, they are also distinct from adjacent cohorts.

An examination of Barack Obama's Legal Philosophy and the extent to which that is reflected in the decisions of his judicial appointees.

This thesis examines the current state of violence in Mexico that is largely attributed to drug cartel violence. In addition to noting the role of organized crime in Mexico, I include the role the United States has played in the drug industry and the increase of drug-related violence in Mexico. I analyze the implications of US gun laws and the involvement of the DEA in Mexico, along with the efficacy of such measures like NAFTA and the Mérida Initiative.

This thesis explains how the Hard Hat Riot provides a link between two of the most significant developments in postwar American history: the decline of the white working-class and the rise of the Reagan Democrat. The Hard Hat Riot was the culmination of two decades of local demographic and economic transformations as well as five years of political neglect that marginalized New York City’s white working-class. The influence of the riot, however, extended beyond the city’s five boroughs. The Hard Hat Riot prompted Richard Nixon’s administration to develop a blue-collar strategy for the 1972 election. Ronald Reagan’s presidential campaigns in 1980 and 1984 emulated Nixon’s plan to successfully court the white working-class voters who would be later called Reagan Democrats.

This thesis looks at the state of marriage equality activism in the wake of the Supreme Court’s June 26, 2013 decisions in United States v. Windsor and Hollingsworth v. Perry. Some scholars, such as Gerald Rosenberg, argue that Supreme Court decisions can never affect “significant social change,” either directly or indirectly, while others argue that such decisions can be hugely important in directly affecting policy. My focus is on how activist organizations, which have a substantial track record of directly affecting policy, are influenced by changes to the political environment stemming from major Court decisions regarding social issues. After examining how past litigative efforts such as Baehr v. Lewin and Goodridge v. Department of Public Health have affected the LGBT rights movement, and marriage equality activism specifically, I discuss how organizational strategies have changed minimally, but the political environment in which marriage equality activism is operating has shifted quite a bit, especially in terms of framing and legal precedent. I conclude that Court decisions can indeed have a significant impact on social change by affecting the way in which it is possible for activists on both sides of the issue to shape and deliver their message to the general public, legislators, and courts in future litigative efforts.

This thesis examines the relationship between the federal government and states governments. Through case studies, I determine how each body determines their access to constitutional authority.