Thesis: Ph. D., 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 251-271). / Development scholars, heavily influenced by the cases of the four Asian Tigers (Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea, and Taiwan), have attributed success in economic development to education. Although the Philippines seemed even more promising before the Asian Tigers began developing, the educational advances in the Philippines have led to an enormous exodus of labor. Failing to integrate its highly educated labor force in the domestic economy, the Philippine state focused its attention on exporting college-educated/highly-educated workers by creating a set of elaborate institutions to facilitate overseas employment. As a result, currently over 10 percent of its citizens live abroad in over 160 countries and about 4,600 Filipinos leave the country every day for overseas work. Why did the Philippine government develop institutions for exporting labor and why has it continued for the past four decades? This dissertation explains how the management of post-secondary educational institutions influenced the initiation and continuation of the Philippine labor export program. From its start, two interrelated problems motivated the creation of the Philippine labor exporting state: (1) over-development of the educational system through an unregulated, laissez-faire approach to private higher education and (2) underdevelopment of the economy to absorb high-skilled labor in the domestic labor market. President Ferdinand Marcos and his technocrats developed the 1974 labor export program to relieve the country of these twin problems by providing overseas employment for the educated unemployed and generating foreign currency revenues from the remittances received from Filipinos working abroad. Over time, political pressures from overseas Filipinos and migrant households, coupled with growing remittance revenue and a large private recruitment industry, led to further development of the labor exporting state with the creation of new state emigrant institutions for managing, protecting, and representing Overseas Filipino Workers (OFWs). These new state institutions, overseas demand for Filipino workers, domestic demand for remittances, and a highly flexible and unregulated private higher educational system continues to drive the exporting of Filipino labor to this day. Empirically, this dissertation is based on twelve months of fieldwork in the Philippines and relies on multiple research methods: archival research, statistical methods empirically testing the relationship between post-secondary education and out-migration, over one hundred interviews of key actors in the labor export and higher education industries, quantitative data analysis using survey and census data from the 1950s through 2011, the creation and analysis of an original dataset of family ownership of all private higher educational institutions in the Philippines, and a review of government documents and legislation. / by Neil G. Ruiz. / Ph. D.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Political Science, 2001. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 214-221). / This dissertation develops a political liberal approach to multiculturalism as an alternative to its dismissal by some egalitarian liberals and its celebration by some multicultural liberals. Some egalitarian liberals overstate the liberal tension with group-specific claims, disregard the role of culture in a person's life, and exaggerate the propensity of group-specific claims to exacerbate conflict. Confusing religion with culture, they assign to religion the status of an all purpose good that liberals traditionally assign to income and wealth. While political liberals require that the state grant exemptions to religious practices that violate uniform rules, these egalitarian liberals do not. Some multicultural liberals overstate the liberal failure to accommodate group-specific political claims, exaggerate the role of culture in a person's life, and ignore the invented nature of culture. Confusing culture with religion, they assign to culture the moral weight liberals traditionally assign to religion. Political liberals, however, assign to culture the same social weight they assign to a person's family, firm, neighborhood and other associations. Political liberals also distinguish encompassing groups, such as language-nations or factory-towns, whose members primarily live, work and socialize with their own group, from other groups, whose members do not. The former have greater social weight, though not moral weight, than the latter. This leads political liberals to require state support for encompassing groups to adjust to new social and economic circumstances, irrespective of whether they are cultural. / (cont.) Unlike some multicultural liberals, political liberals do not require that such adjustment lead to the maintenance of the encompassing group because it is a cultural community. Finally, political liberals distinguish the role of reasonable differences over how to treat others as equals, from that of hate and greed in aggravating group conflict. This leads to a less pessimistic view about the prospects for resolving group conflict. By looking at reasonable differences among liberals over political claims in two group conflicts - Tamil self-determination in Sri Lanka and Black political representation in the United States - a political liberal approach to cultural pluralism can contribute to the design of just institutions that resolve group conflict. / by Ram Manikkalingam. / Ph.D.

Thesis: Ph. D., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Political Science, 2014. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (pages 153-156). / This dissertation focuses on the challenges of making inferences from observational data in the social sciences, with particular application to situations of violent conflict. The first essay utilizes quasi-experimental conditions to examine the effects of violence against civilians in Darfur, Sudan on attitudes towards peace and reconciliation. The second and third essays both address a common but overlooked challenge to making inferences from observational data: even when unobserved confounding can be ruled out, correctly "conditioning on" or "adjusting for" covariates remains a challenge. In all but the simplest cases, existing methods ensure unbiased estimation only when the investigator can correctly specify the functional relationship between covariates and the outcome. The second essay (with Jens Hainmueller) introduces Kernel Regularized Least Sqaures (KRLS), a flexible modelling approach that provides investigators with a powerful tool to estimate marginal effects, without linearity or additivity assumptions, and at low risk of misspecification bias. The third essay introduces Kernel Balancing (KBAL), a weighting method that mitigates the risk of misspecification bias by establishing high-order balance between treated and control samples without balance testing or a specification search. / by Chad Hazlett. / Ph. D.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Political Science, 1994. / Includes bibliographical references (v.2, 379-403). / by Eric Jackson Labs. / Ph.D.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Political Science, 2004. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 373-397). / (cont.) models of local governance, questioning blanket statements about the virtues of political decentralization. The managerial elitist" model favors individual participation and technical/centralized decision-making that precludes public deliberation. It hardly engages the pobladores' organizations in the local polity and policymaking, fostering organizational fragmentation, selective deactivation and cientism. The "participatory-deliberative" style combines innovative adaptation of public policies to "fit" the local demand, extensive use of networks and public forums. It generates pre-political spaces that pave the way for the pobladores' organizations to scale-up decisionmaking in the local government or along policy networks at higher levels. / In the 1990's, two state reforms in Chile placed the grassroots organizations of the pobladores--the once powerful urban squatters' movement--in a unique position to use their organizational experience in self-govenment and small-scale service delivery. Decentralization endowed the municipalities with enhanced resources and authority and new decentralized social policies demanded community participation. This favorable context was offset by institutional constraints on the national political system and by the mayor-centric and managerial design of the new municipality, both rooted in the authoritarian era (1973-1990). In addition, social policy was framed by a technocratic logic that discouraged participation. Two claims guided the investigation of the pobladores' incorporation into the local polity. In spite of a common managerial/efficiency driven formula for local administration, the style of governance has a decisive impact on the way in which organized interests are incorporated. Second, social policies are key arenas of incorporation In-depth case studies were conducted in El Bosque and Peñalolén. These municipalities share demographic and socioeconomic traits, but sharply differ in their model of governance El Bosque's actively incorporates organized participation, while Peñalolén embraces a managerial approach. From 1994-2000, over a hundred local and central state officials; politicians and grassroots leaders were interviewed. Data on social organizations, voting patterns, laws on decentralization, political institutions and social policies--education, health, and housing--covers the period between 1994 and 2000. Thepobdonrs' history is traced from the 1950s. The findings confirm the different patterns of incorporation fostered by these / by Anny Ximena Rivera-Ottenberger. / Ph.D.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Political Science. Thesis. 1970. Ph.D. / Vita. / Bibliography: leaves 308-314. / Ph.D.

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Political Science, 2005. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 83-85). / Operational surprise attacks are large-scale, theater-level intrawar attacks, which result from a country misestimating the capabilities and intentions of its enemies. This thesis analyzes how these massive surprise attacks occur during war when countries should be especially wary of their enemies and vigilant for any evidence of attack. Three hypotheses may explain the frequency and success of operational surprise attacks including operational secrecy, strategic deception, and intelligence failure. Using the Battle of the Bulge in World War II and the Chinese counteroffensive in the Korean War as case studies, this analysis illustrates these three elements and evaluates their relative causal weight in these attacks. This study concludes that each hypothesis is a contributing element to the surprise attack, but that a failure of intelligence is the critical factor. Moreover, this failure stems from a "victory disease" - a belief held by military leaders and their intelligence staff when victory appears near that one's enemy is too weak or has allowed the opportunity to mount a successful counterattack pass. / (cont.) Thus, precisely when one's enemy becomes most desperate on the battlefield countries run a greater risk of surprise attack by failing to accurately estimate an enemy's strategic intentions and military capabilities. / by Lonn Augustine Waters. / S.M.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Political Science, 2006. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 260-270). / This dissertation analyzes the factors that lead to the transformation of labor regulations and institutions after the opening of previously closed economies, using the case of Argentina as a "crucial case". In the 1990s, almost every government in the Latin American region attempted to reform its labor code and systems of labor relations. However, despite these attempts at reform, the labor codes and their systems of labor relations appeared resilient to change. The bulk of the literature on the political economy of reforms had concluded that labor unions had managed to stall or derailed these attempts, although unions had been unsuccessful at stopping all other market-oriented reforms. I conceptualized the labor codes and the system of labor relations considering the way they work in practice, including informal arrangements, and I use the notion of "labor regimes". This conceptualization differs from the dominant approach on this issue, which focuses almost exclusively on changes in labor codes approved by Congress. Using this approach, I argue that a system of rigid labor laws and centralized bargaining institutions in a more competitive, pro-business environment tends to get relaxed and more decentralized. / (cont.) However, changes do not necessarily occur through modifications in the overall national legal framework. Changes occur through: 1) layers of regulations that overlap with the old system, and 2) new practices of the main stakeholders on the ground that may create new institutional arrangements. In order to understand the direction and scope of these changes, focusing exclusively on the interests of central unions, business associations and the state at federal level will only render a partial explanation at best. Instead, a more societal and micro political approach is required. I argue that how the balance of power between business and labor at the local level plays out, the extent to which the interests of unions and business align at the local level as opposed to the legislative arena, and the characteristics of the previous institutions of industrial relations play a larger role in explaining why and how changes occur. / by Marcela A. Natalicchio. / Ph.D.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Political Science, 2011. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 304-328). / This project seeks to explain what happens to armed organizations after they sign peace accords. Why do they dissolve, return to war, or form non-violent socio-political entities (political parties or civic associations)? To explain variation in post-war outcomes, my argument centers on the human geography of armed groups. Recruitment, deployment, and post-war migration patterns generate distinct configurations of a) collective capacity, b) relations with civilians, and c) inter-armed group dynamics. I propose that, if a rebel or paramilitary unit recruits in a geographically concentrated area and deploys its fighters in their home communities, the organization will persist and transform into a socio-political entity after disarming. If instead the organization recruits in a dispersed manner, deploys its soldiers away from their towns of origin, and the soldiers either return home or displace to a third locale, the group will disintegrate; it will lose its capacity for collective action. By bankrupting some organizations and preserving others, demobilization has differential effects on armed group capacity. Where it weakens a group, it destabilizes the territorial bargains between the ex-armed group and state and between the group and its contiguous, non-state armed actors. As a result, resumed war becomes likely. If instead, the distribution of power within the system is maintained, the groups will, over time, fully demilitarize and be brought into the state's legal framework. This dissertation is based on rich data collected during fourteen months of fieldwork in Colombia from 2006 to the present during which time I went inside each demobilizing organization to reconstruct and map its postwar trajectory. Exploiting Colombia's unparalleled comparative laboratory for this research, I test the effect of recruitment, deployment, and post-war migration patterns on organizational outcomes using two strategies. First, I conduct a detailed, controlled comparison of armed groups in three regions of Colombia based on interviews of over 200 ex-combatants, civilians, and victims. The second strategy combines these qualitative sources with quantitative ones to evaluate the proposed hypotheses on the entire universe of municipality-armed group dyads in Colombia (n=1040). For this analysis, I rely on municipal-level violent event data, interviews of nearly 100 Colombian experts on the armed conflict, a database of seven years of news articles, and statistical evidence from a series of surveys of former paramilitaries (n=31,472). The empirics provide strong support for the proposed model. The project has significant implications for debates on reintegration, state-building, consolidating peace, reconciliation, decriminalization, and transitions to democracy. / by Sarah Zukerman Daly. / Ph.D.

Thesis (M.S.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Political Science, 1995. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 113-114). / by Mark R. Hutchinson. / M.S.