Thesis: Ph. D., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Political Science, 2017. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (pages 228-247). / In the 1960s, the UK had some of the most generous welfare provision in the world, assisting people 'from the cradle to the grave', in the words of its designer William Beveridge. Widely supported by voters and politicians of all stripes, it remained largely intact into the early 1980s. Yet since then, the benefits system has been radically transformed into one of the developed world's least generous, with major implications for poverty and social cohesion. Public opinion has also turned against it to a degree that is unmatched anywhere else. Until recently, both major parties largely embraced the new settlement, using increasingly harsh rhetoric to describe welfare - and its users. Looking at welfare programs that provide relief from unemployment, poverty, and disability, I ask why this transformation occurred. I offer an explicitly political and top-down explanation, focusing on the role of party competition and a large change in the composition of the UK's Labour party, which originally set up the welfare state. As it increasingly recruited legislators from outside of the working-class, both its stance and rhetoric on welfare reform shifted dramatically. I show that this rhetoric ultimately turned the British public into welfare skeptics who are willing to endorse far-reaching retrenchment. Hence this case study offers a cautionary tale of how the political coalitions underpinning social policy can quickly unravel. Political and popular support for welfare provision is by no means guaranteed, even in an era of rising insecurity and inequality, particularly as social democratic parties become increasingly unrecognizable compared to their working-class roots, and welfare is subjected to means-testing, drawing lines between recipients and taxpayers. This thesis includes six chapters, and uses a database I have assembled of every speech made about welfare issues in the British Parliament from 1987-2015, together with a wealth of public opinion data. It combines historical accounts, computational and qualitative text analysis, and quantitative observational and experimental evidence to explain how British welfare provision, rhetoric and public opinion were all transformed in the space of a single generation. / by Tom O'Grady. / Ph. D.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Political Science, 1994. / Includes bibliographical references. / by Consuelo Cruz Sequeira. / Ph.D.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Political Science. Thesis. 1972. Ph.D. / MICROFICHE COPY ALSO AVAILABLE IN DEWEY LIBRARY. / Vita. / Bibliography: leaves 590-610. / Ph.D.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Political Science, 1986. / MICROFICHE COPY AVAILABLE IN ARCHVES AND DEWEY. / Includes bibliographies. / by David Bennett Friedman. / Ph.D.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Political Science, 2012. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 491-547). / This dissertation asks: what explains variation in how other great powers respond to rising powers? It tries to explain why the emergence of a rising power sometimes leads to tension, rivalry, and war, and other times leads to less competitive responses. This project analyzes the effect of the rising power's grand strategy-whether it is reassurance or coercion--on the severity of the balancing response by the other major powers. I develop a theory of successful reassurance that shows how a rising power can prevent or minimize the severity of the balancing response by other great powers. Reassurance can limit the balancing response through two causal mechanisms: 1) reduced estimates that rising power is a threat; and 2) reaping the benefits from a rising power. I also develop a theory of coercion backfire that shows how a rising power that implements a grand strategy of coercion is more likely to make others feel especially threatened, and therefore more likely to provoke an early and especially firm response, exacerbating the severity of the balancing response. I apply this theory to explain the balancing responses to the rise of Germany from 1871 to 1907 and the rise of China in the post-Cold War world. The empirical tests and process tracing evidence demonstrate that rising powers, contrary to the expectations of most realist balance of power and rationalist accounts, have considerable agency to affect the balancing response. In the cases of the rising powers of contemporary China and Bismarckian Germany, grand strategies of reassurance convinced states to minimize the severity of their balancing responses, even as the rising power's material power continued to grow. In contrast, Wilhelmine Germany's grand strategy of coercion antagonized the other powers and pushed them to respond by balancing very severely. For the contemporary case of the rise of China, I use a variety of sources such as Chinese-language materials and extensive interviews from over two years of field work in China and Asia to examine China's grand strategy of reassurance and its effect on the responses by the United States, Japan, Russia, and India. / by Michael A. Glosny. / Ph.D.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Political Science, 2009. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 294-325). / The theoretical question this dissertation addresses is how do international norms emerge and spread. The theory I propose focuses on changes in the ideational content of norms and on the international agents who facilitate these changes. In the norm emergence stage, the theory's first explanatory variable is a successful precedent, which provides an important point of reference for the ideas associated with the practice. The second explanatory variable is an active epistemic community, which is a committed network of professionals who are strongly attached to the practice and to its rationales, and who actively advance the practice. The third variable is change in the content of the norm, which reflects the assessment of why a specific practice is positive or good and what is it good for or for whom. In the norm cascading stage, the theory proposes two necessary processes: the international institutionalization of the practice; and the emergence of new international expectations and incentives that motivate state leaders to act in accordance with the norm. In the dissertation I utilize my theory to explain the worldwide proliferation of truth and reconciliation commissions. I argue that in the last decade truth and reconciliation commissions and the truth-seeking principle they endorse have emerged and become institutionalized as an international norm. My research traces the emergence of this norm to the Transitional Justice epistemic community, which was consolidated during and after the South African TRC. / (cont.) I demonstrate that members of this epistemic community introduced new ideas about the scope and goals of truth-seeking, particularly the framing of the positive link between truth commissions and democratization, reconciliation, and national healing. These "truth-seeking experts" and their professional activities account for the international spread of these ideas. This spread has created a new environment of international expectations. Accordingly, states have increasingly been motivated to have their own truth commissions in order to establish a benign image and gain international prestige and legitimacy. / by Michal Ben-Josef Hirsch. / Ph.D.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Political Science, 2004. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 305-320). / (cont.) the USSR and finds that a focus on opportunity provides the best explanation for the presence or absence of mass mobilization. Finally, the dissertation argues that conventional state security concerns best explain the start of escalation. Union republic opponents, Azerbaijanis and Georgians, perceived regional mobilization to be manifestations of broader "interstate" conflicts pitting Azerbaijan and Georgia against, respectively, Armenia and Russia. They did not consider the actions of regional groups to be a product of group insecurities. The dissertation concludes by applying the above findings to the practice of conflict resolution. / This dissertation investigates the origins of ethnic conflict in the South Caucasus. It explains the mass mobilization of regional groups in Mountainous (Nagorno) Karabagh, Abkhazia, and South Ossetia from 1987 to 1989, variation in the goals of these groups (and of other regional groups in the USSR), and the start of the conflict-spirals that ultimately led to ethnic war. The dissertation examines three aspects of mass mobilization: group motivation, the commitment problem, and perceptions of opportunity. Utilizing historical memories, leadership rhetoric, signals of opponent intentions, and evidence of shifting capabilities, the dissertation assesses four hypotheses for group motivation: fear of violence, cultural extinction, demographic shift, and economic discrimination. It concludes that all three groups were mainly motivated by a fear of future demographic shifts and economic discrimination. The dissertation argues that the three regional groups also shared a political commitment problem--the absence of a mechanism that guaranteed union republic opponents would protect their demographic and economic interests after they agreed to a compromise. Contemporary signals of intent and historical precedents led groups to believe their opponents were committed to state centralization, not the expansion of regional autonomy. Regarding opportunity, two regional groups believed their demands coincided with Mikhail Gorbachev's commitment to rectify "deviations" from the early Soviet path of state development and could thus persuade the central government to accommodate their demands. The third regional group did not and so pursued a more modest political goal. The dissertation applies the above findings to cases of regional mobilization (and its absence) elsewhere in / by Cory D. Welt. / Ph.D.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Political Science, 1987. / MICROFICHE COPY AVAILABLE IN ARCHIVES AND DEWEY. / Includes bibliographies. / by Stephen Potter Amberg. / Ph.D.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Political Science, 1999. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 541-560). / by Archon Fung. / Ph.D.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Political Science, 1987. / Bibliography: leaves 336-342. / by Boaz A. Tamir. / Ph.D.