Approved for public release, distribution is unlimited / This thesis explores international and domestic factors that constitute continuities in U.S. foreign and security policy regarding trans-Atlantic relations. Since the founding of the Atlantic Alliance burden sharing has been one of the major sources of conflict between the United States and its European NATO allies. Despite the reluctance to spend more than minimal amounts on military capabilities in most European NATO countries the issue did not become a major concern in the U.S. Congress between 1951 and 1966. It was only in the late 1960s and early 1970s that proposals - including the Mansfield Resolutions and Amendments - were introduced in the Senate calling for a substantial reduction in the number of U.S. troops in Europe. The debates provoked by these proposals threw light on the various determinants of U.S. policy towards Europe. The contemporary relevance of the issue resides in the fact that most of the elements responsible for the emergence of the Mansfield Amendments are still influential in U.S. foreign and security policy. This circumstance might lead to comparable proposals and debates in the near future. / Civilian, Hungarian Ministry of Defense

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This dissertation explores the extent to which weather and climate systematically affect political behavior. The idea that weather (and other elements of the natural world) exercise a fundamental influence on politics has long been a theme in classical and modern political thought. As political science moved from pure description to a more social-scientific form of analysis, scholars became less interested in understanding the impact of climate. If mentioned at all, weather typically is referred to as one of the various elements making up the "error term" in our statistical analyses. Recent work in the natural and social sciences, however, has suggested there are systematic and important links between weather, climate, and behavior. This work (which I review) not only inspires a return to a traditional focus of political analysis, but more importantly provides a number of hypotheses to guide our analysis of politics. Inclement weather increases the costs of moving from place to place. Sunlight enhances while extreme temperature depresses mood. Finally, hot weather is associated with enhanced aggression. These correlates of climate have implications for a variety of subfields across political science, including comparative politics and international relations. This dissertation concentrates primarily, however, on American politics, particularly from a behavioral perspective. To see if weather has a significant effect on politics, then, I explore behavior in four settings that have been especially important in mainstream studies: Presidential approval; social capital; Election Day voting; and finally elite participation (in the form of abstention on roll call voting). In terms of the first, if (as Zaller argues) a response to a telephone survey indeed entails a summing up of `considerations' regarding an issue rather than expression of a `true' attitude, then it is likely sunlight should stimulate positive responses to questions because it encourages the release of serotonin, which makes people more positive in general. Controlled logistic regression of sunlight on Presidential approval reveals that, in spring, sunlight boosts approval. The next chapter explores how hot climates and rain may reduce levels of social capital. This is because heat boosts levels of aggression, which should diminish helping behavior, and because rain makes it more difficult to volunteer and associate with other people. Analysis of state-level social capital data and city-level volunteer data provides some evidence that these propositions are correct. The third empirical chapter focuses upon voting on Election Day. While it finds that rain does have a depressive effect upon voting rates among the poor due to raising the costs associated with voting, there is little evidence that vote choice is affected by the weather. The final empirical chapter examines how weather conditions may affect voting rates among members of the United States House of Representatives, which seems possible because, like regular citizens during Election Day, House members pay costs when visiting the Capital to vote, and unpleasant weather could comprise a real if minor cost. OLS regression at the vote-level and logistic regression at the legislator level reveals that in the winter and spring, sunlight boosts voting, while summer humidity depresses voting and heat in winter has a positive effect. While these conclusions are interesting in themselves and meaningfully contribute to contemporary academic discussions, they further suggest some things about how we thing about political science. In particular, analyses of political topics could often be enhanced by reflectively considering the contents of the error term, as this exercise can offer new and useful perspective on current scholarship. Further, this dissertation also suggests that political science (and research in general) could benefit from taking a more comprehensive view of the environmental context of human behavior.

<p>Theories of ambition have taught us that higher offices are valuable commodities to certain politicians, and under the right circumstances, the benefits of running for an office outweigh the associated risks. Yet some ambitious politicians emerge as candidates while others do not. In this dissertation, I present a Theory of Strategic Candidacy Decisions to explain how primary elections unfold. With new comprehensive data on the timing of candidacy decisions, I test several hypotheses regarding the determinants of electoral and fundraising success, the timing of strategic candidacy decisions, the interactions of prospective officeholders, and the impact of strategic retirements on primary races for the United States Senate. Using both qualitative and quantitative tools, including event history techniques to capture the complex dynamics of primaries, I find that potential candidates interact with one another and the unique political context within each race and emerge from the pool of potential candidates in systematic ways. In the end, the strategic behavior of ambitious politicians has implications for the slate of candidates available to the electorate and ultimately, on the quality of representation between legislators and constituents.</p> / Dissertation

Given that Congressional hearings are established legislative and political information generating tools for committee members engaging in oversight, fact finding, and agenda setting, I examine whether or not hearings provide information to actors outside of government. More specifically, does testimony by corporate representatives provide new information to the stock market about the future profitability of certain firms? In this paper, I utilize a new dataset collected by Workman and Shafran (2009) that includes 3,300 witnesses (and their affiliations) who testified in business regulation hearings between 2000 and 2005. I identify 99 publicly traded firms with representatives testifying in 117 hearings, and utilize event study methodology to estimate the effects of testimony events on the daily stock returns of corresponding firms. I find that, even with the ‘expectedness’ of Congressional hearings, such events negatively impact stock returns both generally as well as with greater magnitude under certain conditions. This event effect is largest for politically sensitive firms and for hearings held in the Senate. When selecting a portfolio of firms that combines all significant conditions, I determine that the ‘upper bound’ of the effect is one-half a standard deviation in daily returns (or a change of -1.6% in prices). Congressional hearings with corporate testimony do, in fact, generate information for external actors. / text

My research project is a break from the current trend in the literature that focuses on the conflict associated with roll call voting—party polarization and institutional friction. I am interested in determining how policy characteristics of roll call decisions can affect legislators' vote choices. Bills not only differ according to issue content—agricultural policy versus social welfare policy—but also according to how ambiguous they are—a collection of disparate issues versus one specific issue. Using a dataset of House roll calls from 1985-2004 and the Policy Agendas Project content coding scheme, I show that variation in both policy area and policy ambiguity of a given bill is associated with variation in the accuracy of ideology in predicting roll call vote choice. / text

本研究之目的有四： （一）整理目前我國國會助理工作之特性： 藉由研究來了解國會助理工作之內容及特性為何，進而歸納出國會助理所需之勞動條件。 （二）了解目前我國國會助理勞動之條件： 由於國內多數國會助理研究並未對國會助理各項勞動條件明確予以討論，本研究試圖收集國會助理各項勞動條件，藉以了解國會助理真實的勞動環境情況。 （三）歸納目前我國國會助理勞動之權益： 藉由收集到的資料，分析及討論目前國會助理各項勞動條件之情況，並適時了解國會助理於勞動環境中所面臨之問題。 （四）明白目前我國國會助理勞動權益與條件之間的落差： 在了解國會助理的各項勞動條件後，分析與討論其與現行法令之落差，並提出改善之建議，藉以提升國會助理之勞動條件。 關鍵字:國會助理、勞動權益

Thesis (Ed.D.)--Boston University / PLEASE NOTE: Boston University Libraries did not receive an Authorization To Manage form for this thesis or dissertation. It is therefore not openly accessible, though it may be available by request. If you are the author or principal advisor of this work and would like to request open access for it, please contact us at open-help@bu.edu. Thank you. / Problem The purposes of this study were to determine what Congressional Record information on Federal financial support of education was available to Congress during the 1962 Session and to ascertain the direction and nature of this communication. Procedure The technique of content analysis was utilized. A seven-category system for the objective and quantitative description of the related conm1unioation was established from a study of authoritative works and a pilot study performed on a stratified random sample of the complete, one-session series of Congressional Records. The item and the theme were used as measuring units. All themes manifestly related to Federal financial support of education were individually categorized, classified favorable, unfavorable, neutral or ambiguous, grouped, and scored. The frequencies of all theme groups, individually and collectively, in the categories were computed and translated into percentages of the whole number of themes. All related communications were classified as favorable, unfavorable, neutral or ambiguous, with respect to Federal financial assistance to education, on the basis of this data. An adaption of an established outline for tha analysis of public opinion and propaganda was used to interpret the data. The study reliability of .87 was determined by performing a second analysis on a random sample of the Congressional Record series and computing a Pearson product-moment coefficient of correlation. Results A leadership elite was found to be the main source of 2246 communications of forty different types containing 57,549 themes. The themes formed sixty-four groups in the seven categories. Percentagewise, the themes were 76.03 favorable, 15.78 unfavorable, 7.54 neutral, and .64 ambiguous, indicating a favorable direction with respect to Federal financial assistance. Conversely, a measurable lag for Federal support was found in the nation's local community electorates, school boards, and newspapers. Expressed as percentages of the whole 57,549 themes, the totals of themes in each category were: educational needs, 43.7, economics, 22.0, national welfare, 12.8, Federalism, 9.8, religion, 6.1, social-psychological, 4.1, and race, 1.5. Conclusions On the basis of actual quantitative and comparative documentation, it was concluded that the Federal role in financing education was pervasively interrelated with the numerous aspects of major United States domestic and international issues, implicit in the categories, and problems in contemporary culture, such as alienation. It was further concluded that Congress was informed that this role was developing in a piecemeal, fragmented manner, in the form of Federal aid rather than support. It was affecting planned and unplanned change in educational administration, instruction, curriculums and research from the elementary to the post-doctoral levels and operating beyond the control of the whole educational system. A result was the initiation of numerous and varied proposals for Congressional action and legislation in the field of education, designed to increase the overall coherence of Federal financial assistance. Specific examples included cabinet status for education and greater standardization of educational statistics used in the public domain. The study determined the nature of the educational communication involved by identifying, quantifying, and describing its characteristics such as types, sources of origin, media utilized, frequencies of occurrence, and themes used on this basis, the conclusion was made that the study's category data formed an approach to the beginnings of a model of the comruunication dealing with Federal financial assistance to education, impinging upon the Congress and the public during one Congressional session. A utility was ascribed to the model as a basic framework for developing and implementing communication strategy and hypotheses designed to increase the moral and financial support of education. / 2031-01-01

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This thesis examines the determinants of presidential success with Congress. Seven essential sources of presidential power in the current era of party polarization were derived from the extant literature, and these factors were delineated into the institutional (formal) and non-institutional (informal) policymaking tools of the presidency. Variables that explain presidential legislative success include: intraparty support in Congress, the use of veto bargaining, executive orders and signing statements (institutional factors); as well as public approval, ‘going public,’ and strategic lobbying of Congress (non-institutional factors). Case studies of the presidencies of Bill Clinton and George W. Bush analyze the role of these policymaking tools in four key legislative battles of each presidency. Regression models were constructed to test the effect of these variables on presidential legislative success. The case studies elucidate the relationship between noninstitutional factors and their subsequent impact on key presidential policy priorities, particularly the interaction between public approval and going public. Findings indicate a positive relationship between a president’s strategic bargaining ability with Congress and subsequent legislative success. Findings also show no significant relationship between intraparty support and presidential success when focusing on only key legislative battles between the executive and legislative branches, contrary to the findings of prior research. Future research might examine the various relationships between these policymaking tools and how they affect the nature of presidential power in the current era of heightened party polarization and ideological homogeneity.