In order to investigate the validity of the claim that college has a liberalizing effect on students, the research reported here focuses on how transitions into college shape one’s political orientations. Studying the changes in ideological views and party identification over time have been explained in previous literature by three theories: Life Cycle Changes, Socialization Effects, and Generational Effects. These theories were then applied to the qualitative data obtained by conducting interviews with Claremont McKenna College (CMC) alumni of the last five years. Through analyzing data from CMC’s (millennial) alumni, my goal was to examine the development of their ideological views and party identifications during their four years at CMC and upon entering the workforce. My study is loosely inspired by the Bennington Studies, a well-known group of studies conducted throughout a span fifty years which measured the party identification of Bennington College alumni at three different points in their adult lives. Using these studies as a model, my study expands on these along with other existing literature to provide a more in-depth account of the political identification and potential political shift of the current generation of young adults, Millennials. Due to the temporal limitations of this thesis, however, the study I conducted only examines the identifications of a specific alumnus at one point in their adult lives, after graduating from CMC. Therefore, the possibility of accrediting party identification changes to Life Cycle Changes is excluded. This thesis seeks to explain why and how the political ideology and party identifications of recent CMC alumni changed during their time on campus.

Since its inception the European Union has made great strides in the realm of regional integration. However, the political and economic crises of the last decade have fundamentally changed the political landscape of the EU and have had important implications for continued support of the European project. In the era of the “constraining dissensus” many argue that a true European demos cannot exist and questions of EU legitimacy have taken center stage. As such, we are left with questions of to what extent to individuals view themselves as European and what contributes to this identity? How might the legitimacy of, and therefore diffuse support for European institutions be strengthened? And finally, what factors contribute to support for continued integration in Europe? To understand how, and indeed if, the EU can continue to grow and integrate we must first examine the extent to which a European demos does exist as well as the extent to which the EU is viewed as a representative institution. To this end, this project examines the factors that contribute to an individual level European identity, how this identity influences trust in European institutions, and finally how the influences of these factors on individuals’ support for both continued widening and deepening in Europe. / A Dissertation submitted to the Department of Political Science in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. / Spring Semester 2019. / April 15, 2019. / European Union, Identity, Institutional Trust, Integration, Public Opinion / Includes bibliographical references. / Sean D. Ehrlich, Professor Directing Dissertation; Jonathan A. Grant, University Representative; Brad Gomez, Committee Member; Quintin Beazer, Committee Member.

The Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) was originally formed in 1967 by five members as a means to promote peaceful relations and prevent the spread of communist influence within their sovereign states. Since then the regional organization has doubled in size and now includes communist states amongst its membership as it seeks to establish itself as a strong economic and political hub for the greater region as two large military powers, China and the United States, vie for hegemonic influence. The American presence in the region must be governed by a firm understanding of ASEAN's unique nature and goals. When compared to other regional organizations that formed over similar time periods, such as the European Union, ASEAN has not taken a cohesive path with less of a firm timeline for integrating institutions as it instead continues to reshape its policies in small iterative steps to evolve to the changing world. If our existing paradigms of the role of regional organizations do not match with the structure of ASEAN, we must establish a new toolset in order to guide future policies for involvement in the region. This thesis seeks to provide a clear description and thus understanding of the institutions and behavior of ASEAN as a regional organization. The questions posed include whether ASEAN conforms to the institutional and behavioral predictions of the major paradigmatic approaches to international theory, namely realism, liberalism, and constructivism. The thesis begins with a brief history of ASEAN over four distinct phases and an overview of regional organizations and international theory. The three dominant theories are then analyzed in their application to ASEAN in the areas of security, economics, and human rights. Conclusions are drawn that each of the three theories has its value for descriptive insight, but all fall short in creating a holistic understanding of ASEAN. Therefore, I propose a new way of describing ASEAN as a reactive, isomorphic, and anti-fragile regional organization. The potential of this approach is that it utilizes tools latent in the existing theories to examine ASEAN's nature.

My dissertation examines how an environment containing politically favorable policies influences political engagement of Latinos and Asian Americans in the United States. The threat hypothesis claims that living in a threatening environment provokes a sense of anxiety, which leads to active engagement in politics. The assumption underlying the hypothesis is that living in a non-threatening, or favorable, environment, conversely, will not motivate individuals to be engaged in politics. The dissertation aims to investigate this untested assumption: How does a favorable environment influence individuals' political involvement? I examine this question using two separate survey data-sets for Latinos and Asian Americans, combined with aggregate-level data for contextual variables. The dissertation argues that, opposite of the assumption of the threat hypothesis, those living in a favorable environment will be more likely to be engaged in politics. I call this the "nurturing hypothesis." My argument builds on social identity theory, which emphasizes the importance of collective membership and the significant impacts that group membership can have on behavior. Latinos and Asian Americans in a favorable environment will be offered with both opportunity and motive for active political participation. In terms of opportunity, due to high publicity regarding the adoption of minority policies, a progressive environment provides Latinos and Asian Americans with more political information. Since individuals need information in their political decision-making, it will nurture their political involvement. In terms of motive, residing in a progressive environment will mobilize Latinos and Asian Americans. The progressive context leads to a heightened concern with the issue of fairness and equality. Considering that minority policies have been mostly concerned with distributive equality in the society, this situation will trigger concerns for group entitlements in procedures. Therefore, Latinos and Asian Americans in progressive states will feel that there still exists inequality. Ironically, for Latinos and Asian Americans, having pro-minority polices is actually perceived as threatening or unsatisfying. The perception of social injustice will result in feelings of resentment or dissatisfaction, which in turn will motivate people to be actively involved in politics in order to improve the situation.

This dissertation develops a theory of interstate monetary security to show what determines the role of a currency in the international economy. This theory underscores that even if a state has outstanding economic conditions, the international use of its currency will still be inhibited if other states are worried about security threats. This is because cross-national monetary relationships can be exploited for political coercion in interstate disputes. Given such security concerns, at least one of the two political conditions below should be satisfied so that the currency of a state with superior economic conditions but also serious security threats to other states can play a critical international role. One is if the issuing state makes other states believe that it will not employ monetary coercion in major political disputes with them. The other is if other states are protected by defensive military alliances lowering the likelihood of such disputes. In particular, states with credible property rights protection are more likely to satisfy the first political condition. I tested this theory with a series of statistical analyses along with two historical case studies. For these statistical analyses, official data on cross-national monetary relationships are mostly kept confidential. I thus created a global dataset using an econometric method of estimating part of those relationships together with data from the International Monetary Fund. The covered period is from 1968 to 2007. As for the historical case studies, they look at challenges from the US dollar and the Reichsmark to the British pound’s role in the world economy before WWII. After the general tests, I applied the theory to the rise of China’s currency, the renminbi (RMB). This research models how the efforts of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to survive have given birth to some institutional mechanisms conducive to the international use of the RMB. Several preliminary tests of this model highlight that the prospect of the RMB’s rise depends on whether China can maintain not only the rapid economic development but also those institutional mechanisms in the Xi Jinping era.

How does religion influence politics in the United States? Religion and politics are intertwined because individual citizens often use their religious background to inform their political decisions. Scholars have studied how which religious group a person belongs to, how often they participate in religious activities, and how the strength of religious beliefs all shape political attitudes and opinions. Most research in this area, however, has been limited to examining religion of the individual, rather than religion of place. An overlooked aspect of the religion-politics link is the impact of the religious environment all around us, or the blending and mixing of religious groups in our communities. The American religious landscape has changed quite a bit over the past several decades, and politics has changed with it. This study introduces a new way to measure religious affiliation of state populations, and examines its role in shaping how Americans view politics. The religious makeup of the state a person lives in has a direct effect on which party Americans prefer, Americans’ leanings toward liberal or conservative ideologies, and on public opinion across a wide variety of issues. Both the overall religious diversity, and conflict between religious-conservative and secular-liberal groups play an important role in how people view politics, growing in importance over the past three decades.

The purpose of this dissertation is to provide a comprehensive explanation of how race continues to affect the origins and consequences of electoral structures in American cities. The existing literature presents few answers regarding how race, specifically the racial context, affects attempts to modify the existing electoral structures at the local level. Although scholars have examined how electoral structures affect African American and Latino representation on city councils, few studies have evaluated how electoral structures determine the emergence of African American and Latino candidates in these elections. I address these gaps in the literature by providing a comprehensive examination of how race affects attempts to modify existing electoral structure and how once they are adopted, certain electoral structures affect both the decisions of minority candidates to run for city council seats and their success. I examine the following questions in my analyses: what is the impact of racial diversity upon attempts to change existing electoral structures? How do electoral structures affect minority candidate emergence and the outcomes during city council elections? I use several types of data including a public opinion survey, a nationwide survey of city officials and city council election data to complete my analyses. I conclude that race and electoral structures continue to share a unique relationship where one factor continues to affect the other at the expense of African American and Latinos throughout cities in the U.S.

Is the American electorate ideologically polarized as its representatives are polarized in Congress? How ordinary citizens have responded to growing elite polarization? The goal of this dissertation project is to answer these two questions. I conceptualize polarization here as having multi-dimensional characteristics and distinguish between polarization as a state and polarization as a process. Based on the conceptualization of polarization, I argue here that most existing literature has not only focused on polarization as a presence, but the empirical strategies adopted by previous research are more appropriate for assessing the existence rather than gradual polarization as a process. I assume that the degree of ideological polarization among the mass public would not be dramatic, thus scholars are more likely to be divided regarding the existence of popular polarization due to the less apparent changes in public opinion distribution. Therefore, I propose here using relative distribution method to evaluate a level of opinion polarization developed in the other field of social science. Using the alternative method, we can assess how a comparison cohort of a recent period is more or less polarized compared to a reference cohort of a previous period. I first apply the relative distribution method to congressional roll-call data (DW-NOMINATE) to demonstrate the distributional comparison analysis on quantile bases. Then I analyze the cumulative American National Election Study (ANES) 1948-2008 survey to assess the relative degree of mass ideological polarization. As I analyze ideological preference of individuals, I construct the two ideological measures based on a factor analysis, rather than using a combined single indicator. In addition to the analysis of mass opinion polarization as a whole, this dissertation also examines some political consequences of ideological polarization both at elite and mass levels focusing on mass political awareness and engagement. In particular, I also test if heterogeneous effects of polarized political environment exist on citizens conditional on their existing levels of political resources such as political knowledge or formal education. Just as many detailed characteristics of distribution might be untapped by summary measures (e.g., mean), behavior of extremists might not be explained properly by the conventional regression analysis based on conditional mean effect. While the ordinary regression analysis focuses on the representative characteristics of a majority in the sample, in polarization analysis we are more often interested in the behavior of extremists placed far from the mean. So I adopt a qunatile regression to account for potentially differential responses of the mass public to polarized politics depending on their positions in the distribution of a dependent variable. Empirical evidence suggests that polarizing political environment has brought about many significant changes in mass political attitudes and behavior. I demonstrate that the distributional center of measures of political ideology have progressively declined in later periods, though the opinion distribution of the later periods do not dramatically exhibit a text-book style polarized distribution (e.g., bimodal distribution). In addition, I find that the majority of mass public has responded to the changing political environment by becoming politically more aware. Therefore, the overall findings of this project indicate that the electoral link between the elite and the masses became either transformed or is transforming rather than being broken as the mass public assimilate the polarized politics.

The purpose of this study will be to explore the feasibility of consolidating present public health services within Weber County, Utah into a unified consolidated health department and if such consolidated health department seems desirable to offer an analysis of certain proposals for unification. Public health is a social-political activity by which society attempts to increase longevity and the enjoyment of life.

Thesis: Ph. D., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Political Science, 2018 / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (pages 420-444). / How do nuclear-armed states maximize strategic leverage to coerce their adversaries in limited wars? Although the existing literature has examined how states have used their nuclear weapons as sources of strategic leverage, it has not fully explored the challenges states face in using these extremely destructive weapons in limited wars. China's approach to maximizing strategic leverage offers one possible solution to these challenges. It has pledged not to use nuclear weapons unless it first suffers a nuclear attack from an adversary. Instead it threatens to use space, cyber and conventional missile weapons to maximize strategic leverage against an adversary in a limited war. I develop a theory of strategic substitution to explain why states might substitute space, cyber, and conventional missile weapons for nuclear weapons as sources of strategic leverage in limited wars and how they select force postures for each of these weapons. / First, I develop a typology of force postures for these non-nuclear strategic weapons based on how much they increase the risk of the state using its most destructive space, cyber or conventional missile weapons. Second, I outline two variables that determine whether a state pursues a non-nuclear strategic weapons capability and, if so, which force posture it selects. States pursue a coercive capability if they have a need for strategic leverage because they cannot respond to changes for the worse in their threat environment with credible threats to use nuclear weapons or their conventional military forces. States select postures by estimating the expected cost of an adversary's retaliation if they have to carry out a threat to use a non-strategic nuclear weapon. To demonstrate the explanatory power of the theory, I conduct comparative case studies of all seven Chinese decisions about its space, cyber and conventional missile postures since 1988. / Using original Chinese-language sources, I provide the most comprehensive account of China's post-Cold War strategic force posture choices in the existing literature. I show how China's nuclear posture, conventional military power, and its force postures for new military technologies are related, although they are often examined independently of one another in the existing literature. / by Fiona S. Cunningham. / Ph. D. / Ph.D. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Political Science