Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Political Science, 2003. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 200-220). / The launching of liberal economic reforms in emerging democratic societies during the 1980s and 1990s arouse widespread scholarly interest. The Argentine policy shift to structural adjustment under President Carlos Menem (1989-1995 and 1995-1999) was largely regarded by the literature as a successful example of radical market-oriented reforms. Despite major policy achievements, crisis and socio-political conflict in the provincial arena pervaded the Argentine road to structural adjustment. After the mid-1990s, it was clear that the political and fiscal situation of the provinces was one of the weakest spots the Argentine unconstrained model of liberal economic reforms. In a federal country characterized by dramatic regional asymmetries, the reversal of past equalizing polices had significant political and economic effects. Although subnational responses to structural adjustment varied, successful provincial performers were the exception rather than the rule. San Luis, an intermediate development province traditionally dependent on national revenue transfers appeared to be one of the most successful cases of policy adaptation to market-oriented reforms. Not only did San Luis perform quite successfully in the hostile environment of structural adjustment but the province represents an almost unique case of enduring late state-led industrialization and state building in a situation characterized by the decreasing capacity of the provincial administrations to efficiently manage the implementation of belt-tightening economic reforms. This thesis is about an unexpected subnational outcome: / (cont.) successful adaptation to structural adjustment associated with a one-party dominant provincial state and state-led development policies in a peripheral Argentine province. The research explains San Luis' peculiar road to structural adjustment and explores, in light of this case study, the largely understudied relationship between liberal economic reforms and subnational politics in democratic developing federations. The thesis's analytical framework focuses on the role of political strategizing and political leadership in the management of change. It also proposes to unpack the historical complexities of subnational political regimes and to analyze them in their intersection with national politics and policy currents at critical political junctures. / by María Clelia Guiñazú. / Ph.D.

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Political Science, 2004. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 67-71). / This electronic version was submitted by the student author. The certified thesis is available in the Institute Archives and Special Collections. / This paper attempts to explain why the United States Coast Guard decided to undertake its most recent major capital asset replacement effort-the Deepwater Program-through the use of a systems approach. Several explanations are considered, but a series of interviews and a review of events during the 1996-2003 timeframe yield an explanation that points to bureaucratic politics and status dynamics as the most likely cause. In particular, the paper finds that the Coast Guard's low status (vis-à-vis other organizations within the Department of Transportation) combined with the Deepwater community's high status (vis-à-vis other communities within the Coast Guard) to produce a political environment that made the use of a systems approach almost inevitable. The paper closes by considering the policy ramifications of systems approaches used by relative weak organizations. / by Vikram Mansharamani. / S.M.

Thesis (M.S.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Political Science, 1995. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 82-82). / by Heather White. / M.S.

Thesis: Ph. D., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Political Science, 2015. / This electronic version was submitted by the student author. The certified thesis is available in the Institute Archives and Special Collections. / Cataloged from student-submitted PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references. / The International Relations literature has an established view of interstate crises that explains how states pursue victory in terms of signaling resolve. States make gains with credible coercive threats (compellence). In contrast, this dissertation conceives of each crisis as a strategic competition between a challenger seeking to make gains unilaterally by fait accompli and its adversary's countervailing efforts to set red lines to deter these faits accomplis. After clarifying the neglected concepts of "red line" and "fait accompli," the dissertation takes up two questions the literature has left unexplored: When are faits accomplis likely to occur? When are they likely to lead to war? The result is a theory of coercive conflict explaining why deterrent red lines that contain any of four weaknesses -- types of gray areas, in essence -- are especially vulnerable to faits accomplis. This theory is tested with two case studies -- the 1948-1949 Berlin Blockade Crisis and the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis -- and an analysis of gray areas and land grabs in territorial crises since 1918. Making extensive use of declassified documents, the case studies show that the "game" of crises need not be a matter of convincing the adversary of one's willingness to fight. Instead, states pursue victory by finding gray areas and other weaknesses in deterrent red lines that they can exploit to unilaterally take as much as possible -- often by fait accompli -- without crossing the line and overtly firing on the other side. Crises, from this standpoint, are a game of finding ways to advance without attacking. The analysis of territorial crises makes use of original data on all land grab faits accomplis since 1918. It shows first that states far more often make territorial gains by fait accompli than by coercing a territorial cession. It then focuses on the impact of geographical gray areas, which take two forms: islands located awkwardly between two core territories and border ambiguities. It finds that two-thirds of all land grabs since 1918 targeted a gray area. These gray areas render faits accomplis more effective at making a gain without provoking war and, consequently, more likely to occur. / by Daniel W. Altman. / Ph. D.

Thesis (S.M. and S.B.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Political Science, 2009. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 166-173). / How does elite manipulation of election mechanisms affect the representation of political regime opponents? While the spread of elections has reached all the continents, the number of actual democracies has not increased at a comparable rate. If anything, observers have learned that the presence of elections in a country does not necessarily mean that it is also a democracy. This thesis addresses an underexplored topic in the study of electoral politics: the manipulation of election systems in order to achieve selective representation. I focus on the experience of opposition parties in two cases, Jordan and Turkey, an autocracy and a democracy, to analyze the impact of engineered election mechanisms on their representation. I contend that parties in power exploit the rules of the electoral game to contain their opposition. This is done by different mechanisms, depending on the makeup of the country and the options available to the manipulators. Mechanisms of electoral systems are used to reduce the representation of groups that are considered a threat, and to amplify the representation of those groups that the regime would like to strengthen. Analyzing the effect of malapportioned seats and the use of a single non-transferable voting system in Jordan on the Islamic Action Front Party (IAF), the main political rival to traditional tribal politicians, I expose the power of these targeted electoral mechanisms for control. Examining how the 10% national election threshold in Turkey affects representation of the Islamist political parties in the Grand National Assembly uncovers the distorting effect of this universal mechanism on representation. / (cont.) I analyze the election results for the 1993, 1997, and 2003 parliamentary elections in Jordan, measuring malapportionment and the variation in turnout. While the motivations for the Hashemite regime are to maintain stability and power in their country, I show that there are unintended consequences for this manipulation through an analysis of turnout and a policy study of honor crimes, the cause of the majority of Jordanian women's deaths every year. I examine Turkey's elections since 1961, calculating the difference between vote share and seat share, which uncovers an increase in the disparity between votes and seats since the installation of the election threshold. I conduct a counterfactual analysis, using a set of districts and reallocating the seats in each district using a 5% national election threshold instead of the current 10% threshold. Even by lowering the threshold this much, there is a much more equal representation of votes in the parliament. Electoral systems are engineered to suit the country in question. While the characteristics of states and election mechanisms used in each country are without a doubt different and specific to each case, the concept of representation is universal to all systems. In both Jordan and Turkey, the end goal of containing the opposition has not necessarily been reached: the Hashemite regime and its tribal loyalists don't see eye to eye on all issues, while in Turkey the AKP, a conservative Islamist political party, has overcome the obstacles to become the beneficiary of the threshold. / by Raffaela Lisette Wakeman. / S.M.and S.B.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Political Science, 2006. / "February 2006." / Includes bibliographical references (p. 143-150). / Who controls the nomination in gubernatorial elections? This dissertation seeks to answer this simple question. Parties have classically been the organizations held responsible for throwing their collective effort behind a candidate and controlling the nominations. Yet, in recent years, scholars have noted a steady weakening of American political parties through a succession of major alterations in the political landscape: the loss of patronage-based organizations traditionally used to uphold party organizations; competition from interest groups; and the ascendancy of media-based campaigns and political consultants which buoy candidates' personal organizations. Not only that, recent work suggests that national party organizations have displaced their state-level counterparts. The combined result of these strains on the party system, scholars conclude, is the rise of a candidate-centered politics and of an electoral politics that can no longer count parties as critical factors in the political system. My dissertation tests whether parties have been dealt out of the nominations process in gubernatorial primary elections in six states: Colorado, Illinois, Ohio, Massachusetts, New Mexico, and Texas. My principal evidence is elite public endorsements of candidates. I find that the tempo, quantity, and quality of endorsement activity varies from election to election according to many factors. My research finds that endorsement activity fluctuates within four principal domains - across election type (general or primary), across the level of competition in a given election, across party, and across states. Contrary to many recent studies, I do not find evidence of an "extended party" - of a broad set of actors (interest groups and highly-partisan influential elites) / (cont.) that help in the nominee selection process in four of my six case studies. Instead, I find many states with strong parties that expressly do not have large numbers of important groups and individuals involved. Moreover, in states in which major groups and influential individuals are involved to a high degree, I find evidence of weak, factionalized parties. / by Rachel V. Cobb. / Ph.D.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Political Science, 1995. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 306-345). / by Dale Dennis Murphy. / Ph.D.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Political Science, 2007. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 190-202). / Ever since Latin American economies collapsed in the 1980s and early 1990s, traditional redistributive programs began to coexist with new anti-poverty programs that usually took the form of conditional cash transfers (CCT). I examine the effects of the Mexican Education, Health, and Nutrition program (Progresa), the first and largest CCT implemented in the region, on electoral behavior. I argue that Progresa not only was substantially different from traditional clientelism, but that it challenged local monopolies on political power by increasing voter's income and giving recipients implicit and explicit information about its non-political nature. This weakening of monopolies, in turn, gave political parties incentives to compete for the votes of Progresa recipients. As a consequence, recipients increased their electoral participation, at least in the short term, and clientelism was irrevocably eroded. Despite the increased competition, however, recipients rewarded parties that proposed and retained Progresa. My understanding of Progresa's electoral effects is based on theory, field research on four villages, interviews with Progresa's designers and personnel, and analysis of media sources from 1996 until 2003. To test this argument, I use the Mexico 2000 Panel Study; aggregate data at the municipality level from 1997-2003; and to explicitly deal with the historic correlation between poverty, rural residence, and support for the seventy-year incumbent party, Institutional Revolutionary Party, I take advantage of the fact that early assignment of program benefits included a randomized component originally designed to evaluate the program effects on schooling and health. / by Ana Lorena De La O Torres. / Ph.D.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Political Science, 2008. / Includes bibliographical references. / This dissertation is driven by the following question: "What explains the variation in governments' civil liberty-abridging responses to terrorist attacks?" In the United States, it was not until a year after the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing-and three years after the 1993 World Trade Center bombing-that Bill Clinton signed major civil liberty-limiting, counter-terror legislation in the form of the 1996 Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act. By contrast, George W. Bush passed the much more comprehensive and repressive Patriot Act through a divided Congress in a month-and-a-half after the September 11, 2001 attacks. In Great Britain, Tony Blair's own party blocked clauses in his anti-terrorism legislation that would have created national ID cards and extended the duration terror suspects could be held without charge to 90 days after the July 7, 2005 London bombings. Yet liberty-reducing counter-terror laws were easily passed time and again after IRA terror attacks in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s. In Israel, Yitzchak Rabin's government largely forewent abridging liberties during the Oslo peace process, but Ariel Sharon passed numerous liberty-abridging laws such as one prohibiting the granting of citizenship to Palestinians that marry Israelis during the second intifada. / (cont.) This work forwards the theory that chief executives in government, be they presidents or prime ministers, drive civil liberty-abridging responses to terrorist attacks, but that they are constrained by public opinion and institutional factors. Spikes in public fear levels after terror attacks, along with other factors, create a window of opportunity for executive action that can lead to the passage of civil liberty-reducing counter terror legislation. This work looks at cases where such legislation is passed, blocked and not pursued in order to decipher the factors that best explain the variation in passage of liberty-abridging legislation after terror attacks. / by Gabriel Rubin. / Ph.D.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Political Science, 2001. / Includes bibliographical references. / Nuclear weapons are the most powerful weapons in human history, but contrary to virtually every prediction by scholars, relatively few states have acquired them. Why are there so few nuclear weapons states? What factors lead governments to reject and even renounce the ultimate weapon? What do the disconfirmed predictions of widespread proliferation tell us about contemporary theories of international relations? To answer these questions, this study tests 15 hypotheses based on core categories in international politics: power, resources, ideas, and institutions. The hypotheses on power suggest that a state's nuclear decisions are a function of its external threats and its place in the international system. They claim that the slow pace of proliferation can be explained by several factors: a lack of threat, bipolarity, security guarantees, and superpower pressure. The resource hypotheses emphasize material capability, i.e., whether a state has the money, scientific talent, or access to foreign technology required to develop nuclear weapons. Hypotheses on the role of ideas often focus on the beliefs held by decision makers. This study tests the influence of anti-nuclear norms on proliferation decision making. Institutional explanations highlight either domestic institutional arrangements (whether a state is democratic, whether it is liberalizing economically, its organizational politics) or international institutions like the nonproliferation regime. Many of the tests employ a data set consisting of 132 nuclear decisions and outcomes. / (cont.) The data set is based on archival and interview material that documents nuclear decision making in two countries: Australia and Egypt. The test results suggest that the dominant explanations for nuclear decision making -- explanations based on power, resources, and norms -- fail to account for outcomes. By contrast, institutional explanations, especially those involving organizational politics and regimes, generate robust results. The findings have direct implications for broader theories of international relations, and in particular, for variants of Realism, where a number of scholars have used proliferation decisions as an explicit test of their theory. Overall, the findings point to the enduring and decisive importance of politics and institutions, even in circumstances where fundamental questions of security and national survival are at stake. / by James Joseph Walsh. / Ph.D.