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Presidential approval ratings are a political resource that presidents and their advisors hope to influence through strategic action in order to achieve their policy goals (McAvoy 2008, 284). Through 1999, scholarly literature had largely ignored the president's use of unilateral powers. Since Moe and Howell (1999a, 1999b), however, the literature on the unilateral presidency has expanded rapidly. Despite the rapid growth of literature examining the unilateral presidency, and 45 years of presidential approval ratings literature, literature examining the link between the president's use of unilateral powers and subsequent presidential approval ratings is virtually nonexistent. Existing research has not statistically examined what effect, if any, the president's issuing executive orders has on subsequent job approval ratings. This thesis seeks to address that research gap. By modeling aggregate and individual-level presidential approval ratings, using fixed-effect models, OLS regression, and binary logistic regression, this thesis finds evidence indicating the president's issuing of executive orders has a negative impact on the subsequent presidential job approval ratings that individuals report. If an executive order is salient to the public, presidents receive lower presidential approval ratings from persons of all political parties; however, if the executive order is non-salient then presidents only receive lower presidential approval ratings from members of their own political party. Members of the opposition party report higher presidential approval ratings when the president issued non-salient executive orders. Thus, this thesis concludes that the president's issuing of executive orders has significant effects on subsequent presidential job approval ratings, and future research should be conducted to explore this relationship further.

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Digitized by Kansas Correctional Industries

Digitized by Kansas Correctional Industries

Religious Studies & Arabic / M.A. (Religious Studies)

This thesis studies the way that the single-party state has renovated the political identity of the armed forces in the reform era of the People’s Republic of China (PRC). It argues that the Chinese Communist Party succeeded in doing so and therefore was able to use the national military as a prop of continued single-party rule. Engaging with theories of civil-military relations, this study challenges the dominant view of military professionalism according to which an armed force must be separate from politics to become truly professional. I show that the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) professionalization process, triggered by the establishment of the National Defense University in 1985, was completed by 2010, when the National Mobilization Law was issued. It provided the PLA with clear responsibility, esprit de corps, and area of expertise, these three core components of professionalism being put under firm regulatory control. This process, however, was not isolated from the political developments under way in the PRC during the same period. Instead, the ruling party turned the military into an active agent of its ‘spiritual civilization’ policy by tying it more closely to local governments, by giving it the duty to teach civic education to university students and the wider population, and by committing an increasing number of troops and other PLA resources to the United Nations peacekeeping program. This work is based on an extensive reading of the untranslated literature published, mainly, by the PLA itself, to account for the way that it adapted its tradition of ‘political work’ (the system of indoctrination and human resource management linking it to the ruling party) to the requirements of military professionalism. I completed this account with about 60 interviews with Chinese serving and retired military personnel, foreign military attachés, and students with experience of military training in Chinese universities.

The subject of the thesis is that of the transformation of the Roman empire in the third and fourth centuries. The starting date in the title reflects a belief that the impetus for this change was generated by the decree of the emperor M. Aurelius Antoninus (Caracalla), whereby all free subjects were made citizens in AD 212. This laid the foundations for the transformation of the Roman empire, centred on the city of Rome, into a Roman nation-state, with a government dissociated from that of the City. The study is divided into three parts. Part One is an examination of the impact of the Constitutio Antoniniana. It is argued that both the extent and nature of this impact can be measured by an examination of the changes that Roman naming practices underwent in the subsequent period, and that the new naming practices of the later third century onwards reflect the creation of a new basis for the social hierarchy. Part two analyses the development of the praetorian prefecture, an office which is recognised to be one of the key institutions of the late Roman state. It traces the change in the nature of the office from one of personal service to the emperor to its later fourth-century incarnation as virtual viceroy for civil affairs over discreet portions of the empire. This is followed by a prosopographical catalogue of the prefects from 284-344, and appendices laying out the documentary evidence for the analysis. In Part Three an analysis of the holders of the ordinary consulship from 260 to 360 is undertaken. This begins with a prosopographical catalogue, in which the consuls are classified as to social origin and occupation. These results are analysed statistically in order to elucidate the relationship between the magistrates of the city of Rome and the imperial administration, concluding that there was a symbolic divorce between the two during the reign of Constantine. Appendix 3 provides revised fasti for the consulship 260-360. The Conclusion draws together the findings of these three studies to show their implications for our interpretation of the nature of the late Roman state.