Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Political Science, 1995. / Vita. / Includes bibliographical references ([205]-228). / by Sybil Francis. / Ph.D.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Political Science, 1987. / Bibliography: leaves 523-543. / by Joerg Franz Baldauf. / Ph.D.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Political Science, 1990. / Includes bibliographical references. / by Ashutosh Varshney. / Ph.D.

Thesis (S.M. and S.B.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Political Science, 2010. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 64-67). / Foreign bribery - the payment of bribes across borders - poses a classic collective action problem in theory. A firm may extract benefits through the payment of bribes to foreign public officials without its own country bearing the associated costs of governmental corruption, and hence while eliminating foreign bribery may be in the best interests of all who are engaged with the global economy, there are few obvious incentives for any one national government to be the first to take action. Over the last two decades, however, an unprecedented degree of multilateral cooperation on the issue of foreign bribery has been achieved. In particular, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) has been a key institutional locus of activity, serving as the coordinating body for the monitoring and enforcement of a comprehensive anti-bribery convention that was adopted in 1997. This convention appears to have been largely successful at least in terms of spurring legislative change: all OECD member countries as well as several nonmember nations have since adopted laws that explicitly criminalize the act of bribing foreign public officials, and the capacity of the state to monitor, detect, and prosecute the offense of foreign bribery has ostensibly been enhanced. Given the potential for collective action problems to develop, it is thus important to ask whether the legislative action that has been taken thus far is meaningful in any measurable sense. I answer this question by constructing an original measure of the strictness of foreign bribery legislation, which I then employ as the main independent variable in an empirical study of export data, utilizing both difference-in-difference estimators and regression analysis. The results of my analysis provide support for the hypothesis that the enactment of stricter foreign bribery legislation amongst the countries party to the OECD convention has reduced exports to more corrupt countries more so than it has exports to less corrupt countries. These findings are robust to a variety of sensitivity tests, and I thus conclude that the OECD's multilateral anti-bribery initiatives have indeed had a meaningful impact on business decisions in the international economy. / by Kevin Lim. / S.M.and S.B.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Political Science, 1984. / MICROFICHE COPY AVAILABLE IN ARCHIVES AND DEWEY. / Bibliography: leaves 535-541. / by William Warren Lazarus. / Ph.D.

Thesis: Ph. D., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Political Science, 2016. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references. / How do leaders win power struggles in Leninist regimes? Many political scientists emphasize the importance of institutions in such regimes. Such institutionalization allegedly provides a mechanism for distributing patronage and debating policies, stipulates rules that delineate a group that selects the leadership, and prevents the military and secret police from playing a special coercive role. This dissertation instead argues that the defining feature of one-party states is weak institutionalization. Power struggles are therefore determined by prestige and sociological ties, the manipulation of multiple decision-making bodies, and politicized militaries and secret police. Leaders with legacies as successful warfighters are especially capable of dominating such systems. Institutionalization can only explain why elites do not pointlessly and unnecessarily violate ambiguous rules, losers rarely defect from the party or resist decisions after suffering defeat, and the coercive organs never blatantly wield force against united civilian leaders. These arguments are based on a theoretically rigorous examination of the power struggles fought by Nikita Khrushchev, Deng Xiaoping, and Kim Il Sung. The historic failure to institutionalize leadership selection had a tragic legacy: its absence is crucial for understanding the origins of Soviet stagnation, the tragedy at Tiananmen Square in 1989, and the Kim family multi-generational personality cult. / by Joseph Torigian. / Ph. D.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Political Science, 2009. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 326-352). / This project explains the growth of the West European Radical Right in the late-1980s and early-1990s, using that explanation to model the growth of small, programmatically-focused ("niche") parties in previously stable party systems. I find that a key mechanism of niche party growth is the re-weighting of issue priorities or social identities generated by unanticipated, high impact events, such as a severe economic downturn, terror attack or ethnic riot. These "shocks" represent a perceived threat to the economic security, physical safety or group position of some individuals, increasing the attention (salience) they pay to a related issue or identity dimension, such as the economy, domestic security, or one's feelings of national or religious belonging. Niche parties grow when 1) the salience of the dimension they emphasizes increases and 2) the distribution of voter preferences gives them a comparative advantage if the relevant dimension is salient (the niche party is an "issue owner" on the relevant dimension). My analysis focuses on the growth of West European anti-immigrant ("nativist") parties, the major subset of the Radical Right, in the late-1980s and early- 1990s. Many countries in Western Europe were faced with unprecedented, unsolicited migration during this period, and immigration in these countries became a highly salient political issue. Nativist parties, with a popular stance on immigration, leveraged increased salience into significant electoral gains. / (cont.) The continued support for nativist parties, despite declines in immigration, represents a durable (though limited) political realignment along a new, ethnic dimension of political contestation, with nativist parties championing the demands of the "native" ethnic group. To generate my hypotheses and causal mechanisms, I conducted two years of research in Germany and Austria, including an analysis of past public opinion research, a content analysis of four regional newspapers (1960-2005), 185 elite interviews (50 with nativist elites), and an analysis of nativist party literature. To test competing hypotheses I constructed a cross-national dataset of nativist support in Western Europe (1973-2006), as well as state- and local-level datasets in Germany and Austria. / by Christopher Wendt. / Ph.D.

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Political Science, 2011. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 61-64). / Economic globalization and growing interdependence have greatly facilitated the flows of trade, investment, and ideas among formerly hostile countries. However, political antagonism driven by nationalistic sentiments continues to break out in countries with increased inflows of foreign investments, such as China. The media identifies that a majority of participants in China's recent anti-foreign antagonism are urban young Chinese and nicknames them China's "angry youths". This thesis focuses on the micro-foundations underlying expressions of nationalism in the forms of economic protectionism and xenophobic political hostility, and musters both public and original survey data to examine the dynamic effects of interpersonal contact and patriotic predisposition as explanations for individual attitudes on international policy issues. The empirical analyses of three main hypotheses suggest that the Chinese generation of "angry youth" is not as radical as the media has portrayed. Yet, their significantly higher levels of comfort with western values and rules of the game in the era of globalization do not necessarily mean that they are any more eager to embrace the global and transnational socioeconomic and sociopolitical identities than their seniors. This thesis finds that China's integration into the global economy over the past three decades has not yet promoted more popular cosmopolitan identities and perspectives among the general public as various theoretical accounts project, even among citizens who have high levels of exposure to foreign business and economic influence. The persistence of nationalistic worldviews and identities among the Chinese public has serious implications for foreign businesses and governments that wish to proactively engage a rising China in international and regional affairs. / by Peng Claire Bai. / S.M.

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Political Science, 2010. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 119-124). / Civil-military relations describe the interactions and balance of power between the civilians and the military in a nation state. Due to the organizational apparatus and capacity for forcible coercion that the military possesses, it can be an important determinant on whether a civilian government survives or falls, as well as what policies are formulated and implemented. This thesis analyses Southeast Asian civil-military relations in a comparative perspective. By looking at seven states in the region - Thailand, Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia, the Philippines, Vietnam and Myanmar - it finds a rich diversity of such relations, ranging from situations of civilian control to civil-military partnerships to military control. The thesis therefore aims to answer the question: why has there been this variance in civil-military relations in the region? The thesis first examines briefly the history of civil-military relations theory as well as the history of the seven states mentioned above, building an analytical framework and proposing three alternative explanations for variance. Firstly, it asserts that pre-independence legacies created path dependencies that structure the shape of civil-military relations in the region. Secondly, the thesis argues that the structure of the political party environment mattered and assesses the case studies through indicators of concordance and discordance. Finally, the thesis looks at the presence of military entrepreneurship, asserting that variance depends on military capacity to engage in external business activities and civilian willingness to allow such activities. The thesis concludes by assessing the explanatory power of the three factors above and concluding that a combination of pre-independence legacies and party structure best explains civil-military relations in the region. / by Jia-Chuan Kwok. / S.M.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Political Science, 2003. / Includes bibliographical references (p. [321]-334). / This dissertation explores newly emergent community-based organizations that are tackling work and wage issues at the local level and includes two lengthy case studies of the Workplace Project in Long Island and Solidarity in Baltimore. The thesis is built upon five interconnected claims. First, that into the breach left by the decline of the labor movement and political parties in late twentieth century America, a new type of labor market institution had emerged that was trying to fulfill the dual role of raising wage standards and giving political voice to low wage workers. Second, that the emergence of these community unions implied a break with the "work/home divide" thesis, which argued that in the United States historically, while class functioned as a constitutive category for workplace struggle, when it came to politics, it was trumped by other categories. On the contrary, I found that in community unions, class and ethnicity, class and race and class and gender march hand in hand, both at the workplace and in the community. Third, that in community unionism forms of identity, such as race, ethnicity and gender stand in for craft or industry and that this represents a third model, distinct from craft or industrial unionism. I argue that this third form was not just a recent phenomenon, but has been present throughout labor history and provide several historical examples including the United Farmworkers and 1199. Despite significant differences in origin, the Workplace Project and Solidarity ended up with a strikingly similar set of strengths and weaknesses. / (cont.) They created dynamic organizations for constituencies who had no place else to turn to pursue work-related issues, but their numbers remain small by union standards and they have not been able to regularize membership through systematic collection of dues. Both organizations have had a very concrete impact on the way the media reports and the larger public perceive low wage workers and their issues.They have drafted, campaigned for and won important and imaginative new public policies. But neither organization has succeeded so far at large scale economic intervention or worker organizing. At present, they seem to be best at bringing community organizing strategies to bear on labor market issues through politics and worst at doing so through economic strategies. / by Janice R. Fine. / Ph.D.