Learning Agility (LA) is catapulting our understanding of the relationship between the measurement of LA and leadership success, a critical component for succeeding in a volatile, uncertain, complex (VUCA) environment. While the business sector has benefited from the research and practice around LA, this exploratory study takes an initial look at the applicability of LA to higher education leadership through in-depth interviews with eleven college presidents, coupled with the results of the Burke Learning Assessment Inventory (BLAI). Administered to the presidents and their senior teams, the BLAI was created by W. Warner Burke to measure nine dimensions that demonstrate specific behaviors related to LA. Overall, both the interviews with the presidents and BLAI scores evidenced strong LA views and behaviors. A close examination of the senior team roles and the need for LA revealed strengths and alignment with key dimensions of the BLAI, while noticeable gaps surfaced between the presidents’ views and BLAI self-ratings, illuminating opportunities for growth and further research. A strong relationship was revealed between presidents’ BLAI scores and those she deemed higher performers across the critical dimensions, providing a snapshot of the LA behaviors of successful higher education leaders. All presidents acknowledged a relationship between LA and higher education leadership success, with 64% stating that there was a strong relationship, and the remaining 36% stating that there was a relationship, but to varying degrees, identifying some of the key dimensions as less applicable to higher education.

This dissertation presents the results of a series of large-N, demographically representative survey experiments conducted at different stages of the 2020 presidential election cycle, designed to test the effects of highlighting intraparty policy conflict on subjects’ political beliefs. I find politicians of both major political parties are able to persuade followers to take on counter-party policy positions with limited electoral risk, and that these persuasive effects are enduring, still detectable nine months after treatment. While subjects updated their own policy positions in response to treatment, they did not update the policy positions they prefer when selecting among hypothetical candidates, in contrast to issue voting theorists predictions. While politicians appear to be far more effective opinion leaders than parties, therefore, their persuasive abilities may not significantly alter the shape of the partisan electorate as faced by other candidates. These findings refine our scholarly understanding of individual politicians as opinion leaders in the contemporary United States, and demonstrates the challenges political parties face in checking their popular politicians.

In this dissertation project, I make three separate contributions on how we can improve aggregate election forecasting models with respect to modeling choices, interpretability, and performance. Two of the three papers are applications to particular cases, the U.S. and France specifically, while the third points to a cross-national pattern in polling errors. The first paper addresses how we can make more reasonable prior choices for key parameters – such as the variability of non-sampling error – by using past pre-election polls. I showcase this approach on U.S. presidential elections. The second paper shows how to create and aggregate predictions in a multi-party contest while keeping the individual forecasts intact. This is useful to see convergences or divergences in the forecasts which might affect our confidence in the aggregate prediction. I develop a new aggregate forecasting model for French presidential elections to demonstrate this idea. The last paper shows and investigates a pattern in polling errors. We see that across multiple countries and electoral systems, polling errors favor the lesser party in two-party contests, i.e. polling errors favor Democratic candidates in Republican states and vice versa. We demonstrate a simple adjustment procedure based on this pattern to reduce the mean absolute polling error. We achieve a 16% reduction in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

You can't judge a book by its cover. The cliche may be trite, nonetheless it is applicable to Harry s. Truman. The feisty Missourian wrested greatness from the hands of his challengers who would have denied it to him because of his background. His lack of a college degree seemed to rankle the press, and as far as they were concerned disqualified him as President of the United States. Based largely on contemporary accounts, this thesis traces the color and drama of Truman's 1948 campaign. In order to appreciate fully the triumph of the President’s victory, it was necessary to follow his career from the time of his unexpected ascendancy to the highest office in the land to his ultimate triumph in 1948. The developments on the international and domestic scene, fraught with danger and anxiety for the American public, provided the backdrop which enabled Truman to prove his resourcefulness and courage. This thesis does not pretend to solve the mystery of the 1948 election. Rather it has proven to be an exercise in research instead of a revealing analysis of the presidential campaign. No new material has been made available to the public which would help answer the question of why the press was so consistently wrong in its analysis of the outcome. Nor has the press admitted to an unreasonably biased view of Harry Truman. They maligned him unmercifully, still he prevailed. He was indeed the "uncommonest of common men."

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The problem of this investigation was to identify the persuasive speaking techniques of private Black college and university presidents in their fund-raising efforts to support the educational programs of Negro colleges and universities. This study did not seek to defend nor justify the arguments for the existence nor nonexistence of these institutions. It focused on techniques of speaking whereby men attempted to alter reality by adjusting ideas to people and people to ideas. The evidence tended to support the conclusion that there is some relationship between speaking and fund-raising. The speeches probably produced some effect on the audiences. They (1) provided a voice to make the appeals for funds, (2) defended the posture of private Black colleges and universities, (3) provided a primary source of information about these institutions, (4) reinforced common beliefs, and (5) provided impetus for the like-minded to persevere.

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / The impact of new technology on the current presidential campaign has prevailed. A small but fundamental change quietly took place in the candidate’s website—Barack Obama’s official campaign blog. The campaign is now operating two sub-blogs at the same time, the Obamablog (also known as the Obama HQ blog) and the Community Blog. The former becomes a must-have tool in a political campaigner’s strategy, whereas the latter, which allows visitors to actually write, publish, and manage posts, is novel. This new function seems an audacious step up from the rest of the blogs of this kind since the 2004 presidential election because it gives citizen users freedom to express their own ideas that could put the campaign on an impromptu situation to respond.