The management of natural resources has undergone a fundamental change over the past decade. The traditional management approach that relies on command and control institutions, and punitive measures to enforce existing statues is now being used in conjunction with compliance based strategies. Compliance based programs rely on positive incentives and the community collaborative decision making model to govern natural resources. The most widely used compliance based strategy is collaborative management. The three most common types of collaborative management are ecosystem management, watershed initiatives and forestry partnerships. This dissertation examines why state legislatures adopt collaborative management programs, and analyzes the factors effecting the stakeholder's evaluation of collaborative institutions. The theories of subsystem politics and transaction cost economics are used to answer these questions. The following transaction costs influence the likelihood that a state will adopt a collaborativemanagement program: commitment costs, agency costs, and decision making costs. Thesecosts effect adoption by affecting the exchange that occurs among legislators and their constituents, which in turn impacts the costs associated with this exchange. Additionally, the natural resource management subsystems in some states are more likely to change than the subsystems in other states. Factors such as the mean educational attainment, per capita income, and the political control of government institutions effect if a state's resource management subsystems are prone to change. The evaluation of collaborative institutions is impacted by institutional rules, individual traits and institutional characteristics. The evaluation of a collaborative institution can be done by examining how actors evaluate the decision making process used by their group. Individuals evaluate the decision make process more favorably if their group has an institutional rule limiting discussion. Stakeholders with prior management experience rate the process unfavorably because collaborative institutions weaken their influence over existing deterrence based institutions. If people believe their participation in a collaborative group will benefit them over time, they rate the process more favorably. / A Dissertation submitted to the Department of Political Science in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. / Degree Awarded: Spring Semester, 2004. / Date of Defense: March 22, 2004. / Policy Adoption, Collaborative Managment, Watershed Intiatives, Ecosystem Management, Transaction Costs, Environmental Policy, Political Transaction Costs / Includes bibliographical references. / Richard Feiock, Professor Directing Dissertation; Ralph S. Brower, Outside Committee Member; Charles Barrilleaux, Committee Member; Tom Carsey, Committee Member.

Does public opinion influence foreign policy? Much work, following the example of such scholars as Page and Shapiro (1983), has suggested that mass public opinion is stable, and is rational and that public policy outputs follow public opinion in advanced democratic countries. Using the case of Germany, I employ a process tracing analysis as well as time series and cross-national time-series regression analyses to test the generalizability of the hypothesis of an opinion-foreign policy nexus in Europe between the years 1970-2002. Results here contradict literature on expected public opinion and policy outputs in the Cold War period yet are supported after. I find that the predicted effect of public opinion on foreign policy outputs to be confounded by such factors as security threats. I conclude that a divergence between the threat perception of leaders and of the public is likely to result in a lack of congruence between public opinion and a state's foreign policy outputs. Convergence between leaders and public opinion in post-Cold War Germany and more broadly in Europe may have necessitated a reassessment of the longstanding foreign policy relationship with the US. / A Dissertation submitted to the Department of Political Science in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. / Degree Awarded: Fall Semester, 2007. / Date of Defense: July 30, 2007. / Public Opinion Opinion-Policy Nexus Western Europe, Security Threats, Germany, Security, Foreign Policy / Includes bibliographical references. / Mark Souva, Professor Directing Dissertation; Michael Creswell, Outside Committee Member; Paul Hensel, Committee Member; Dale Smith, Committee Member; Robert Jackson, Committee Member.

The conditions under which legislators engage in idiosyncratic behavior remain poorly understood. Their personal ambitions and desires constantly confront obligations to constituents and institutional constraints. Often, lawmakers pursue goals that are destructive if seen through an institutional or voter-based lens, but rational if the legislator's individual preferences are taken into account. This dissertation develops our understanding of the idiosyncratic incentives of lawmakers, and how they translate into policy outcomes. My results find that lawmakers are not driven to pursue wealth at the expense of governing. / A Dissertation submitted to the Department of Political Science in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. / Summer Semester 2017. / June 27, 2017. / elite behavior, financial gains, legislative goals / Includes bibliographical references. / Carol Weissert, Professor Directing Dissertation; Frances Berry, University Representative; Robert Jackson, Committee Member; Quintin Beazer, Committee Member.

My dissertation "Inequality, Context, and Prosocial Behavior: An Examination of Redistributive Preferences" contributes to an emergent literature on the effects of inequality on policy outcomes by illuminating the psychological and institutional factors which influence support for redistributive policies differentially among the rich and poor. In my dissertation, I advance two primary arguments. First, drawing from the evolutionary psychological literature on competition effects and the social psychological literature on the social cognition of status, I argue that at the individual-level, economic threat moderates the relationship between social status and prosocial behavior. Secondly, drawing from the resource model of political participation and models of policy responsiveness, I argue that at the institutional-level, transparency interventions fail to promote redistribution to lower-income citizens specifically when (1) lower-income citizens do not access the information released by transparency interventions and when (2) lower-income citizens do not turn out to vote at rates comparable to higher-income citizens. I evaluate my first argument using both a laboratory experiment and public opinion data from the 2012 American National Election Study (ANES). In contrast to theoretical expectations, in the laboratory experiment I present evidence that under conditions of economic threat, low and high-status subjects behave similarly: they are equally likely to perceive threat and give roughly equal amounts to one another in a dictator game. Using data from the 2012 ANES, I present evidence that while income does not predict whether an individual is more likely to blame low-status consumers or high-status Wall Street bankers as being more responsible for the 2008 financial crisis, I do present evidence which suggests that high-income individuals who blame higher-status groups more than lower-status groups are significantly more likely to support increased aid to the poor. I evaluate my second argument empirically with a laboratory experiment and state-level panel data covering the years 1978-2000. Using a laboratory experiment, I present evidence that under conditions of budget transparency, subjects endowed with the power to create budgets were more likely to allocate greater proportions of their budget to subjects who had more resources and who had the power to veto the budget. Using state-level panel data between 1978-2000, I explore the relationship between transparency, media market penetration, class bias in voter participation, and welfare expenditures in the United States. Using a series of between-within panel models, I present evidence that the effect of transparency on public welfare expenditures is conditional on the different turnout propensities of the rich and the poor: in states where wealthier citizens are significantly more likely to vote in elections than the poor, longitudinal increases in budget transparency over time are associated with significant reductions in state welfare effort. The results of my dissertation have produced important insights into the psychological and institutional mechanisms that influence the redistributive preferences of individuals and the redistributive behavior of states. My research can move the fields of political science and social psychology toward resolution of unsettled theoretical debates concerning the generosity of different social classes and from a prescriptive standpoint reinforces the need for transparency interventions to move beyond a singular focus on information-release. / A Dissertation submitted to the Department of Political Science in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. / Summer Semester 2018. / June 29, 2018. / experiment, inequality, panel data, public policy, redistribution, social status / Includes bibliographical references. / Eric Coleman, Professor Directing Dissertation; Mark Isaac, University Representative; Jens Großer, Committee Member; Brad Gomez, Committee Member.

Party identification is perhaps the central concept in political science. It has appeared in countless theories and empirical analyses across the political science literature. Party identification was originally conceived as a psychological attachment to the political parties but recent evidence shows that the standard measure for party identification, the NES measure, confounds group identity and group attitude. I show that party social identity, a direct measure of group identity, explains variation in candidate preferences in political primaries where the standard measure of party identification cannot. I also show that machine learning can be used to predict party social identity in surveys that did not directly measure it, and that these predictions can be used to revisit empirical analyses and reevaluate inferences related to party identification. Finally, I show that changes in the NES measure of party identification may be due to changes in either the group attitude or the group identity component and that retrospective evaluations, commonly used to explain changes in party identification, are only associated with changes in the group attitude component of the NES measure. / A Dissertation submitted to the Department of Political Science in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. / Summer Semester 2018. / July 12, 2018. / Includes bibliographical references. / Brad Gomez, Professor Directing Dissertation; Ashby Plant, University Representative; Matthew Pietryka, Committee Member; Robert Jackson, Committee Member.

My dissertation consists of three essays of violent conflicts. In the first essay, we propose a novel solution to improve the efficiency of third- party interventions in conflicts. When an intervener coerces the rivals of conflicts into peace, he may face a tradeoff between the effectiveness and cost of interventions. Extant studies generally suggest that severe measures are more effective, but also more costly. Using a game-theoretical model, with the assumption that the rivals' power endogenously shift in conflicts, we find that moderate measures can achieve peace by inducing a reciprocal rival that attacks aggressively only if the other side strikes first. However, when the power dynamics determine that the rival's interest lies in exploiting the other side's passiveness instead of coordinating for peace, severe measures are needed to counteract opportunism. We also show that a weaker rival is not necessarily easier to restrain, and sometimes its aggressiveness comes from its weakness. In addition, we outline the empirical implications of another finding that interventions can work exclusively through the target's expectation instead of implementation. For example, the relationship between the presence of penalties and their effects may be correlational rather than causal. In the second essay, we tackle how the ownership of endowments in dispute affects the actor's behavior in crisis bargaining and the outbreak of costly conflicts. We design tailor-made Nash bargaining games and experimentally test the hypotheses derived. The results indicate that, first, the endowment as a salient focal point serves as a strategic tool rather than a reference associated with biased valuations; and second, the legitimacy of ownership can elicit behavioral responses from the actor, when it is in line with rational expectations. We also find that, conditioned on the actors' expectations, a chance to back down can but does not necessarily reduce conflicts when the status quo and power are roughly balanced. Due to the self-selection effect, aggressive demands do not necessarily cause more conflicts. More generally, we highlight two important perspectives to understand bargaining---the strategic application of focal points, and the subtle influence of the legitimacy of ownership. The third essay is a continuation of the second one. Crisis bargaining most often is a process, in which the disputants sequentially propose a demand and try to arrive at an agreement that both sides deem acceptable. Depending on the disputants' preferences, equilibrium of a bargaining game very likely varies. In this paper, we use variants of the Rubinstein bargaining game and a lab experiment to explore how the disputants communicate about their preferences in crisis bargaining, and the effect of such communication on the likelihood of bargaining failure and conflict. We find that the players mostly communicate their preference strategically according to rational expectations. Besides, inequality aversion and some overoptimism are observed. We also find that more focal points do not necessarily lead to more conflict, and a chance to back down decreases conflict only when the player's endowment in balanced with his probability of winning. / A Dissertation submitted to the Department of Political Science in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. / Spring Semester 2018. / April 18, 2018. / bargaining, endowment effect, focal point, interventions, power shift / Includes bibliographical references. / Jens Grosser, Professor Directing Dissertation; David J. Cooper, University Representative; Robert J. Carroll, Committee Member; David A. Siegel, Committee Member; Mark Souva, Committee Member.

The incredible rise of so-called "anti-establishment" parties in Europe has left scholars scrambling to define and classify the movement. Much scholarly attention has been paid to radical right wing parties, and the sources of their electoral support. While important and intriguing, the current literature has yet to develop a cohesive definition of the anti-establishment, and has too heavily used terms such as "populist," "anti-establishment," and "radical right-wing" interchangeably. Further, extant research has based theories of these parties' electoral support largely with the radical right-wing in mind, potentially ignoring theories that could explain support for these parties from the left, right, and center of the political spectrum. Finally, current research has not substantially explored how these parties, traditionally excluded from policy-making, behave once they are seated in parliaments. This dissertation aims to remedy these three shortcomings. First, I develop a conceptual definition and measurement scheme that encapsulates both ideological positioning and anti-establishment sentiment. Then, I explore how political trust in influences electoral support for anti-establishment parties positioned at all areas of the classic left-right spectrum. Finally, I analyze their parliamentary behavior, assessing their level of activity and their preferred policy domains. My findings underscore the importance of conceiving anti-establishment parties as existing along a unique dimension, separate from ideology, whose electoral viability can be explained via a unified theory, and who behave uniquely in parliament. / A Dissertation submitted to the Department of Political Science in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. / Summer Semester 2018. / July 11, 2018. / Anti-Establishment Parties, Legislative Behavior, Voting Behavior / Includes bibliographical references. / Sean Ehrlich, Professor Directing Dissertation; Jonathan Grant, University Representative; Carol S. Weissert, Committee Member; Brad Gomez, Committee Member; Quintin Beazer, Committee Member.

International actors have championed the rule of law as a fundamental principal for national progress among developing states. But for the post-colonial democracies of the Caribbean region, the concept of the rule of law engenders questions of whether citizens and state actors have sufficient understanding and acceptance of the new institutions of justice developed to protect the basic rights of citizens functioning effectively or, as evidenced by the high levels of crime and violence in the region, are other rules more significant factors in how social order is negotiated. Do citizens in the region even expect democratic accountability on issues of safety and justice? Are there instances where incentives continue to persist in the postcolonial space for criminal justice institutions to deliver safety and justice in a prejudicial manner? And if the conventional means of promoting social order are dysfunctional, what other mechanisms might be available to support collective goals of peace and safety? This dissertation presents three essays in response to the aforementioned questions. Chapter 1 addresses the weaknesses of prior studies examining the relationship between criminal victimization and democratic accountability and provides evidence that victims of violent crime do intend to hold incumbents accountable at the polls. Violent victimization evokes anger that spurs voters to seek redress for the traumatic experience by engaging in protest voting that goes against the interests of the incumbent government. Protest voting offers expressive benefits that helps restore within victims of violent crime a sense of self-determination and autonomy by voting against the under-performing incumbent government. At the same time, the expressive value of protest voting is conditional on the degree to which the voter is politically affiliated with the incumbent government. Victims of violence who support the incumbent government are more likely to feel anger towards the incumbent government, having a sense of being betrayed by those they expect to protect their interests. Accordingly, the added sense of psychological loss will increase their use of protest voting. I test this theory with data from the 2014 wave of the Latin American Public Opinion Project (LAPOP) AmericasBarometer survey. Using the intended vote choices of 11,242 registered voters in five Caribbean countries and a multinomial logistic regression model I will demonstrate that, after controlling for alternative explanations for the focus relationship, partisan identity and violent victimization interact to influence prospective vote choices. Chapter 2 turns to the question of dysfunctions in law enforcement by exploring three explanations for the use of lethal force by Jamaican police. By adapting the social control framework to the postcolonial context and accounting for institutional factors that facilitate partisan policing, I show that the police’s use of lethal force extends beyond conventional considerations of reactive crime control to also include maintenance of social and political order. The presence of economic elites in a given area exerts pressure on local police officers to safeguard their lives and property, leading to the use of lethal force as a strong and clear deterrent. In addition, incumbent government actors may also receive political benefits from promoting the use of lethal force against the support bases of their political competition. I provide indicative findings that the presence of these two motivating factors can produce an interactive effect on the number of police fatal shootings that may largely be determined by the institutional incentives involved. This study uses original data produced from the official administrative database of the Jamaican police on fatal shooting incidents. Specifically, the scope of the study will include the 1,745 police fatal shootings that occurred annually from 2002 to 2010 and sorts them according to the electoral constituencies where they occurred to demonstrate the influence of political dynamics. Using a negative binomial regression model, I will show that the economic context and political affiliations of where a citizen resides influences the use of lethal force by the Jamaican police even after accounting for factors such as the level of serious crimes and state capacity for coercive and beneficent controls. Chapter 3 explores the potential for conditional cash transfer (CCT) programs to promote pro-social behavior among beneficiaries. I will show that design elements of CCT programs provide recipients with the resources and motivation to engage in collective problem solving that otherwise similar non-recipients would not possess. In so doing CCT programs reduce the cost for recipients to engage in collective action, making civic engagement such as voting in general elections more likely. At the same time, the positive effect of CCT recipient status on civic engagement is provisional- depending on the recipient’s ability to leverage the socialization experience based on other cognitive resources such as civic knowledge. Low levels of civic knowledge among recipients may even serve to diminish the civic engagement of CCT recipients while higher levels will spur on such engagement. I test my theory using aggregate- and individual-level data on Jamaica’s national CCT program, the Program for Advancement through Health and Education (PATH). Jamaica makes for a good case study as the prominence of clientelism in the country’s political culture will help offer a stern test of whether programmatic features play a role even when political partisanship is a salient matter. Jamaica also typifies the global trend of declining trends in electoral participation as shown in Figure 3.1, allowing my findings to potentially extend to a wider international context. By combining both macro- and micro-level analyses and employing dual measures of program participation, I will demonstrate that CCT programs do produce policy feedbacks that are substantive and nuanced. / A Dissertation submitted to the Department of Political Science in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. / Spring Semester 2018. / April 16, 2018. / Caribbean, Clientelism, Crime, Jamaica, Police, Politics / Includes bibliographical references. / William D. Berry, Professor Directing Dissertation; Eric Stewart, University Representative; Christopher Reenock, Committee Member; Charles J. Barrilleaux, Committee Member.

In this study I investigate an array of aspects concerning cultural conflict. I use Samuel Huntington's civilizations, from his theory of a Clash of Civilizations (1993), as a means of identifying different cultures. Taking advantage of an expanded data set that was not available to Huntington and most of his critics, I not only review his theory but advance well beyond it, exploring additional matters such as the distribution of cultural conflict, its intensities, underlying issues, and resolution techniques. I find support for a number of arguments including the following: different-civilization conflicts are more prevalent than those between same-civilization states, even though in general there is a higher likelihood of same-civilization rather than different-civilization conflict; this cross-cultural militarized conflict does not permeate all civilizations at the international level, but rather is principally limited to only a few; the cultures most prone to inter-cultural conflict are Islam and the West, while the Sinics (Chinese) are among the least prone; and while cultural differences play a role in this type of conflict, such issues are not among those that most frequently lead to serious conflict or war. I also find, though contrary to expectations, that cross-cultural dyads seek peaceful solutions to their differences more often than same-culture dyads, they have about the same success rate, and neither third party assistance nor bilateral negotiating techniques present a particular advantage for resolving different-culture conflict. / A Dissertation submitted to the Department of Political Science in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. / Degree Awarded: Summer Semester, 2007. / Date of Defense: May 21, 2007. / Religious Conflict, Clash Of Civilizations, Cultural Conflict, Ethnic Conflict, Huntington / Includes bibliographical references. / Paul Hensel, Professor Directing Dissertation; Jonathan Grant, Outside Committee Member; Dale Smith, Committee Member; Mark Souva, Committee Member; Tom Carsey, Committee Member.

The project focuses on the interrelationship between both government and dissident leaders' "micromotives" and the regime's/group's "macrobehavior" (Schelling 1978). That is, I explain how dissident and government leaders' individual motives transpire into events such as the clashes with riot police, cooperative agreements, and terrorist activities we observe in Chile, Venezuela, Afghanistan, and Israel. In contentious political struggles between the government and an opposition group, how does a state's choice among tactics (e.g., violence versus negotiation) influence an opposition group's choice among tactics? Conversely, how does an opposition group's choice among tactics influence a state's choice among tactics? This project proposes a theory to answer these questions and posits a research design to test the theory's implications. The theory restricts attention to a two actor world composed of a government and a dissident group, in which the government implements policies and defends those policies and dissidents challenge those policies and the government's authority to rule. Thus, the government and the dissidents are viewed as opponents of one another. Suppose further that each entity is controlled by a rational leader and that each leader gets utility from maintaining their tenure. To protect their positions of authority, leaders direct actions towards one another. Each leader's choice of action is influenced by three factors: internal threat, external threat, and resource pools. First, each leader faces threats from his or her coalition of supporters (internal threat). For leaders to remain in power, they must have a coalition of followers that support them. The likelihood of a leader maintaining power decreases, as his or her support erodes. In this simplified world, a leader's coalition of supporters judges the leader's performance in office based on the successes and failures he or she has in interactions with the opponent. Thus, one's actions are a function of previous outcomes in interactions with the opponent. Second, leaders face threats from the opponent itself (external threat) such as assassination, imprisonment, exile, revolution, and coup d'état. Thus, leaders must prevent violent backlash and upheaval. As a result, a leader's action is a function of past opponent behavior. However, each action is costly and under certain conditions, resource pools constrain leaders' tactical choices. Leaders' motives compel them to monitor the levels of internal and external threat in their environment and the availability of resources when choosing actions to direct at their opponent. Each leader chooses from an action set containing hostile and cooperative means. The theoretical implies the ways in which leaders behave towards one another in different decision-making contexts. To capture the argument, the author specifies a system of equations that s state and dissident leaders' choices in sequential response to one. Using a most-different-systems design, the author performs empirical tests of the theoretical in the countries of Chile, Venezuela, Israel, and Afghanistan using event data and time series econometric techniques. The data come from the Intranational Political Interactions (IPI) project and the Kansas Event Data Systems (KEDS) project. The results show strong support for the hypotheses in most countries and weaker support in others. / A Dissertation submitted to the Department of Political Science in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. / Degree Awarded: Fall Semester, 2003. / Date of Defense: October 10, 2003. / Repression, dissent, conflict, cooperation, rebels / Includes bibliographical references. / Will H. Moore, Professor Directing Dissertation; James Cobbe, Outside Committee Member; William D. Berry, Committee Member; Sara Mitchell, Committee Member; Damarys Canache, Committee Member.