Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Political Science, 2013. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (pages 296-310). / This dissertation investigates the policy-making process that led to three "crash programs" for alternative fuels after energy shocks in the 1970s and early 2000s: (1) the proposed Energy Independence Authority in 1975-1976, (2) the Synthetic Fuels Corporation in 1979-1980, and (3) the revised Renewable Fuel Standard in 2007. These were massively ambitious programs, with enormous budgets and unachievable technological goals. What makes them truly puzzling, though, is that they were major policies that emerged without major advocates. Although various interest groups and constituencies supported the development of alternative fuels, neither the powerful industry lobbies (oil, coal, corn, ethanol) nor the public interest groups (environment) had previously advocated for interventions of this scope and scale. This presents a fundamental empirical puzzle for public policy scholars, as it contradicts our understanding of the drivers of policy change. Typically, the policy process literature portrays radical policy change as resulting from the strategic efforts of interest or advocacy groups during a window of opportunity. Here, however, radical policy change occurred in the absence of lobbying or advocacy efforts. What explains this phenomenon? How do we account for the creation of these programs? What conditions and sequence of decision-making led to these policy outcomes? This dissertation develops an alternative model of "politician-driven policymaking." Public alarm over a deepening national crisis is the catalyst for this process. It gives rise to two coupled mechanisms: "bidding up," in which the President and Congress compete for leadership during the crisis, and "signing on," in which interest groups and minority Congressional groups bargain and often bandwagon with the legislative proposals. / by Hanna L. Breetz. / Ph.D.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Political Science. Thesis. 1971. Ph.D. / Vita. / Bibliography: leaves 308-317. / Ph.D.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Political Science, 1994. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves [489]-509). / by Jonah D. Levy. / Ph.D.

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Political Science, 2000. / Includes bibliographical references (leaf 74). / In The Law of Peoples (1999) Rawls offers a model of the world, divided into countries without pressures of nationalism, which he calls "peoples." If some of those peoples were liberal democracies, others consult all citizens, though not equally, and others were badly governed, what obligations would the well-ordered countries have to the badly-ordered ones? There is one class of unjust society called "burdened" that is not malicious but lacks the political traditions and institutions needed to be well-ordered, and it may also be unable to care for its citizens. Well-ordered societies owe these burdened ones a "Duty of Assistance" to help them become well-ordered. Rawls thinks that what they most need is political assistance to create just institutions, and perhaps some small, temporary economic aid for acute crises, for two reasons. Economics teaches that large-scale crises like famine or mass migration are caused by (bad) governments, and aren't inevitable consequences of drought. If a just people wants to prevent large-scale disasters, donating large amounts of cash won't help. The permanent cure is just government. Also, he denies that there are any real countries that have too few resources to support their population. If so, poverty or hunger is not inevitable anywhere, and what we call problems of poverty are really symptoms of bad government. I agree that political aid is extremely important. However, I disagree with the unimportance of material assistance. First I show that his empirical ground doesn't support an "institutions only" approach. Second, I argue that (a) primary goods are heterogeneous, and redistribution means different things for different kinds of goods, (b) needs for some of these may be adequately assured by good government, but not just burdened societies can have long-term need for others. The duty of Assistance requires redistribution of more goods, to more types of society than Rawls asserts. Third, Rawls argues that economic redistribution is an important matter for domestic justice, and not a concern at the international level. I challenge one of his illustrations, showing that it is not completely assured by a just domestic society. / by Karen Rothkin. / S.M.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Political Science, 2005. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 167-174). / Distributive politics plays an important role for political elites for their electoral goal. Since the resources that politicians can distribute are limited, they have to decide how to distribute them in order to maximize their utility. And region becomes one of the most important yardsticks. Politicians first distribute public goods where they are supported. Economically rational voters react to what they receive and cast votes for those who have brought most benefits to them. This establishes the relationship between politicians and voters in a region, and solidifies regional voting behavior further. Therefore, regional voting is the product of politician's strategic distributive politics and rational voters' behavior. Regionalism does not only arise from economic or social cleavages that we are able to observe, but they are also intentionally cultivated. There are numerous possible reasons why regionalism started in the first place. It could have been from ethnic cleavages, unequal economic development or historical and political events that occurred in the past. However, whether or not to breed regionalism is determined by how regionalism works for the political purpose. / (cont.) As in the case of Korea, regionalism has been the best political tool for political parties to decide where to focus for their electoral success. It has been used for the efficient redistribution and deepened the regional cleavage in Korea as a result. Therefore, it can be said that regionalism worked for political parties' electoral goals, which has been well received by electorates, who are interested in what they receive in return. In the second part of the dissertation, I question the claim that ethnically fragmented community is more likely to have poor fiscal policy. Scholars have raised many problems of this ethnically diversified society, and a lagged economic development and inefficient government spending are one of them. Many studies have speculated the negative effect of ethnic fragmentation on economies of scale. With a new study design, I show that previous studies on the relationship between ethnic fragmentation and provision of public goods and services can be misleading or be exaggerating the effect of ethnic diversification at most. / by Jiyoon Kim. / Ph.D.

Thesis (M.S.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Political Science, 1990. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 134-144). / by David Wright Miliband. / M.S.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Political Science, 2011. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references. / The puzzle: Why do states display such remarkable variation in their military effectiveness? This question is different from asking why states win or lose wars, because military effectiveness is not synonymous with victory. States can fight very well on the battlefield but still lose: consider the Germans in both world wars. Or they can fight very poorly but still win: consider the Soviets in the Winter War against Finland in 1939-40. These discrepancies exist because war outcomes hinge on all sorts of factors besides battlefield performance. The political goals for which a war is fought, the terrain, third-party involvement, the balance of material capabilities-all can influence ultimate victory and defeat. Military effectiveness bears on these outcomes but remains distinct. It pertains to the fighting power that each side is able to generate from the resources that it possesses, separate from the question of whether that fighting power is enough to bring ultimate triumph. In thinking about the challenges of U.S. foreign policy, the distinction between victory and effectiveness is especially striking. Given its overwhelming material power, the United States is almost sure to eke out some type of conventional "victory" from whatever military operations it chooses to launch in the contemporary international environment. But the price it pays for doing so is likely to vary dramatically depending on the military effectiveness of opponents. Historically, some of the poor, weak states that America has encountered have fought much better than anticipated, such as Serbia in 1999. Others, such as Iraq in 2003, have collapsed much more rapidly than expected, despite their large armies. These sorts of startling differences in effectiveness can also be found in the militaries of U.S. coalition partners and allies, even though many are rich or have received large infusions of U.S. aid and weapons. In considering these realities, it seems evident that states vary widely in their military effectiveness and that this variation drives differences in the costs, length, and settlement of wars. In particular, states seem to display puzzling differences in their ability to generate operational- and tactical-level fighting power from their resources, a type of power that I refer to in this study as battlefield effectiveness. Battlefield effectiveness requires states to perform three key tasks: to generate cohesive military units, to train those units in the performance of basic tactics, and to endow them with the initiative and coordination needed to conduct the complex operations crucial to effectiveness in modern battle. Beyond the dilemmas of current U.S. foreign policy, even a cursory examination of the last century of warfare suggests that there is significant variation in states' abilities to perform these tasks and therefore to impose costs upon their adversaries in war. Three particular types of such variation stand out. The first is cross-national variation, that is, instances in which some national armies seem to consistently perform better than others for example, the outnumbered Israeli army consistently performing better on the battlefield than its Arab opponents in the series of conflicts between 1948 and 1973. The second type of variation is over-time within the same country-for instance, the Chinese army's excellent performances against the United States in 1950 and India in 1962, followed by a rather poor showing its smaller, weaker neighbor Vietnam in 1979. The third type of variation is across different units within the same military even in the same war-for instance, the 1991 Gulf War, in which some Iraqi units surrendered immediately upon contact with coalition forces, while others stood and fought. What can account for these differences? In trying to answer this question, the study of military effectiveness has generally focused on large structural factors such as wealth, demography, culture, and regime type. But this approach is problematic, because these variables actually behave more like constants, changing very little if at all in individual states over time. As a result, they are poorly suited to explaining much of the variation just described. For example, none of these variables could explain the over-time shifts just mentioned in Chinese performance, or the cross-unit differences in Iraqi performance in 1991, because large structural factors did not change over time or vary across different military units in these individual states. Large structural variables are important, of course, and certainly condition the overall military power one would expect a state to be able to generate. They do constitute a plausible explanation for at least some cross-national variation in battlefield effectiveness. To continue the Arab-Israeli contrast mentioned above, for example, it is probably significant that Israel was a democratic, increasingly wealthy, highly unified society facing fractious, authoritarian, and economically underdeveloped Arab opponents. Nevertheless, the mechanisms that undergird the causal power of these sorts of sweeping structural forces remain poorly understood. While there may be good reasons to think that wealth, democracy, western culture, or societal unity somehow enhance military performance, it is not entirely clear what it is about these factors that actually matters. One might just as easily suspect that authoritarian regimes should have military advantages instead, with the examples of Nazi and Wilhelmine Germany, the Soviet Union, and North Vietnam immediately springing to mind, among others. What, then, can help account for the full range of variation in states' battlefield effectiveness? / by Elisabeth Rosemary Caitlin Talmadge. / Ph.D.

Thesis: S.M., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Political Science, 2016. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (pages 51-54). / For decades, scholars have debated the determinants of whites' attitudes about racialized policies such as welfare, busing, and affirmative action. While some have argued that whites formulate their positions rationally according to perceived economic threat, others have asserted that such policy attitudes are the function of one's level of symbolic racism, with little to no influence from economic considerations. Using data from the 2012 Cooperative Congressional Elections Study and demographic data, I assess the effects of actual economic competition and an individual's other attitudes on white opposition to affirmative action. Furthermore, in order to identify the levels, if any, through which the economic threat mechanism operates, this paper measures economic threat in several different ways: at both the level of the individual and the level of whites as a group, and each of these at both the zip code and county levels. I find strong support for the symbolic racism theory of policy attitude formation, as respondent attitudes are driven mostly by racial affect, ideology, and party identification. No matter the level at which economic threat is measured, objective economic conditions do not seem to influence one's attitudes about affirmative action. / by Kyle Daniel Shohfi. / S.M.

Thesis: S.M., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Political Science, 2014. / 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 (pages 102-109). / What if the United States had led its NATO allies to intervene in Syria's civil war in the midst of calls for humanitarian intervention in mid-2012? Despite the importance of this question for the study and evaluation of U.S. foreign policy, little exists in the way of systematic, open-source analysis of the military missions and material requirements for a possible Syrian intervention. This thesis assesses the scale, scope, and challenges of intervention in Syria at the time its proponents argue it would have been most effective. It does so through open-source analysis of a U.S.-led air campaign designed to mitigate the country's humanitarian crisis. The model of intervention analyzed -- broadly conceived as the establishment of safe havens around major Syrian population areas defended from the air -- offers a template for evaluating the utility of air power in the Syrian context more generally. The analysis suggests an intervention in mid-2012 to establish safe havens in Syria would have been a major military undertaking, likely requiring greater resources and facing greater risks than any of NATO's previous air campaigns in response to humanitarian crises in Bosnia, Kosovo, or Libya. The "low-risk" rationale for humanitarian intervention from the air thus appears far less persuasive in the Syrian case. The thesis concludes with implications for the application of air power to future humanitarian crises. / by Brian Thomas Haggerty. / S.M.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Political Science. Thesis. 1974. Ph.D. / MICROFICHE COPY ALSO AVAILABLE IN DEWEY LIBRARY. / Vita. / Bibliography: leaves 211-221. / Ph.D.