Framed by insights from critical human geography, political economy, and educational studies, this dissertation offers a critique of the contemporary education reform movement in the United States (hereafter U.S.). The overarching argument made here is that the powerfully positioned individuals and groups at the head of this movement have been less motivated by a desire to actually pursue social justice than by the political expediency that comes with appearing to be doing so. The three papers that follow speak to the existing critical literature on public schooling in the U.S., which argues that the perpetual discussion about how to 'fix' the U.S.'s educational system should be seen as an attempt by its powerfully positioned interlocutors to collapse popular discontent with a variety of persistent social injustices into a focused dissatisfaction with the public schools. This literature has also argued that although the public education system in the U.S. is indeed quite inequitable as it presently exists, and thus an appropriate target for transformation, the education reform movement's efforts to that end have actually reproduced many of the social and pedagogical causes of educational inequity. This dissertation builds on the literature just summarized by demonstrating that the rhetoric of the individuals and groups associated with the education reform movement coalesces around a spatial discourse through which the causes of a variety of social ills are presented as endogenous to the spaces inhabited by the individuals and groups that suffer them with the greatest frequency and intensity. Further, the artificially discrete, enclosed spaces conjured in the name of education reform are enrolled as part of a broader project of legitimizing coercive, individualizing, and competitive-rather than supportive, dialogic, collaborative-forms of pedagogy, and governance more generally.

For years political fundraising was structured around who could raise the most to outlast their opponent. The 2016 presidential elections showed that this standard was no longer the case. Fundraising was a core aspect of campaign finance that was further advanced with the introduction of Citizens United. It established new outlets of fundraising known as super PACs that changed the dynamics in campaign finance. This further incentivized presidential candidates to raise as much funds as they could. Former Governor of Florida Jeb Bush embodied this new gold standard in his 2016 campaign run. On the other hand, celebrity mogul Donald Trump completely defied all standards with his self-funded 2016 campaign. Bush’s defeat and Trump’s victory represents a new era of campaign finance for future elections.

Venezuela experienced one of the most dramatic political transformations of the twentieth century. After initially developing a system of representative democracy hailed among the most resilient in the Western Hemisphere in the 1950s, the country endured wave after wave of economic turmoil until, in 1998, Hugo Chávez was elected to the office of the Venezuelan presidency, fundamentally altering the governmental structure of the country and contributing to the desperate economic conditions Venezuela finds itself in today. This thesis attempts to explain the societal factors that led to Chávez’s election through an examination of Venezuelan economic policy in the final decades of the twentieth century. By charting the attempts made by specific Venezuelan political actors to address the unique conditions and dilemmas generated by the country’s largely oil-based economy during this period, it is argued that the economic policies enacted by Venezuela’s representative democracy systematically failed to address the needs and concerns of the country’s poor and working classes. As a result, political disillusionment among these social groups became increasingly more pervasive, finally reaching its full expression in the election of Chávez as an outsider candidate pledging to overhaul the Venezuelan political system in favor of poor and working class social sectors. Moreover, this text attempts to situate Chávez’s election as the result of a broader trend of inadequate economic policy beyond the commonly examined neoliberal reforms of the 1990s and ultimately serves to caution against an economic worldview that overlooks potential repercussions for society’s most vulnerable sectors.

This paper measures the party incumbency advantage for the Democratic Party in state legislatures nationwide. To do so, this paper employs regression discontinuity design (RDD), following the structure laid out in Lee (2008). The results show a stronger incumbency advantage in state legislatures than the 8% figure found for U.S. House of Representative elections by Lee (2008), with a finding of a 14% advantage for lower houses nationwide and a 12% advantage for upper houses nationwide. Furthermore, this paper finds a strengthened incumbency advantage in states that hold their elections in off-years (34% in lower houses and 21% in upper houses). The paper concludes by suggesting that the boosted incumbency advantage for off-year states is a consequence of depressed voter turnout, testing this hypothesis using the Virginian lower house as a case study. Analysis suggests that the incumbency advantage drops substantially to 8% during years with a gubernatorial race and high voter turnout, and jumps substantially to 25% during years without a gubernatorial race and low voter turnout. However, large errors prevent these results from being statistically significant.

This thesis is a collection of essays on the political economy of the interwar years. It aims to address two of the most prominent and characteristic aspects of the interwar international economy; the break-up of the Gold Standard system and the rise of trade protectionism. I argue that extensions to the franchise are crucial to understanding both of these phenomena. Using evidence based on macro-level panel data analysis, micro-level public opinion surveys as well as numerous qualitative sources, I construct an argument that stresses the importance of these changes in voting rights to economic policy decisions; changes that can help explain the unusual nature of the interwar international economy. The effect of the extended franchise will not be examined in isolation however, with the influence of a number of other important aspects of the political and economic environment also taken into consideration. As arguably the most interesting and novel result of these analyses is the suggested effect of the granting of voting rights to women, the voting preferences of women are examined more closely in an additional chapter using a unique record of women’s voting from Weimar Germany. This allows for the difference between men and women’s actual voting preferences to be explored, something that is usually impossible due to the use of secret ballots. The fact that the separation of votes by gender occurred during one of the most important periods in modern history gives the analysis an even greater significance.

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<p>From 2008-2012, a dramatic upsurge in incidents of maritime piracy in the Western Indian Ocean led to renewed global attention to this region: including the deployment of multi national naval patrols, attempts to prosecute suspected pirates, and the development of financial interdiction systems to track and stop the flow of piracy ransoms. Largely seen as the maritime ripple effect of anarchy on land, piracy has been slotted into narratives of state failure and problems of governance and criminality in this region. </p><p>This view fails to account for a number of factors that were crucial in making possible the unprecedented rise of Somali piracy and its contemporary transformation. Instead of an emphasis on failed states and crises of governance, my dissertation approaches maritime piracy within a historical and regional configuration of actors and relationships that precede this round of piracy and will outlive it. The story I tell in this work begins before the contemporary upsurge of piracy and closes with a foretaste of the itineraries beyond piracy that are being crafted along the East African coast. </p><p>Beginning in the world of port cities in the long nineteenth century, my dissertation locates piracy and the relationship between trade, plunder, and state formation within worlds of exchange, including European incursions into this oceanic space. Scholars of long distance trade have emphasized the sociality engendered through commerce and the centrality of idioms of trust and kinship in structuring mercantile relationships across oceanic divides. To complement this scholarship, my work brings into view the idiom of protection: as a claim to surety, a form of tax, and a moral claim to authority in trans-regional commerce.</p><p>To build this theory of protection, my work combines archival sources with a sustained ethnographic engagement in coastal East Africa, including the pirate ports of Northern Somalia, and focuses on the interaction between land-based pastoral economies and maritime trade. This connection between land and sea calls attention to two distinct visions of the ocean: one built around trade and mobility and the other built on the ocean as a space of extraction and sovereignty. Moving between historical encounters over trade and piracy and the development of a national maritime economy during the height of the Somali state, I link the contemporary upsurge of maritime piracy to the confluence of these two conceptualizations of the ocean and the ideas of capture, exchange, and redistribution embedded within them.</p><p>The second section of my dissertation reframes piracy as an economy of protection and a form of labor implicated within other legal and illegal economies in the Indian Ocean. Based on extensive field research, including interviews with self-identified pirates, I emphasize the forms of labor, value, and risk that characterize piracy as an economy of protection. The final section of my dissertation focuses on the diverse international, regional, and local responses to maritime piracy. This section locates the response to piracy within a post-Cold War and post-9/11 global order and longer attempts to regulate and assuage the risks of maritime trade. Through an ethnographic focus on maritime insurance markets, navies, and private security contractors, I analyze the centrality of protection as a calculation of risk and profit in the contemporary economy of counter-piracy. </p><p>Through this focus on longer histories of trade, empire, and regulation my dissertation reframes maritime piracy as an economy of protection straddling boundaries of land and sea, legality and illegality, law and economy, and history and anthropology.</p> / Dissertation

While Jane Jacobs' frontal assault on "modern planning" is now over forty years old, communities around the United States are still struggling to deal with the legacy of modernist interventions that dramatically altered the historic urban form and culture of their downtowns. In the worst cases, whole zones were transformed into nearly unusable space. Reintegrating these lost spaces into the urban fabric is one of the most significant challenges of urban planners and designers today. Despite the ubiquity of lost spaces in American cities, comparatively little research has been done on the specific historic urban forms that were altered. This dissertation seeks to explore the processes of landscape change through a case study of Louis Armstrong's downtown neighborhood in New Orleans. It employs an urban morphological framework to uncover the specific landscape changes that occurred in the neighborhood over time. This micro-level view is broadened through an examination of the political economic forces that helped to transform the once vibrant neighborhood into the lost space of today. This study concludes that while it is tempting to identify the twentieth century modern interventions as the cause of lost space in New Orleans, such a reading unnecessarily isolates the modern development era from the historical continuum of land use that helped define the city. When the scope of inquiry into the causes of lost space is widened to include the historic formation of landscape remnants, long-standing patterns of lost space development begin to appear that stretch back to the founding of the city. Modern development, seen in this light, exacerbated existing negative landscape features more than created them.

The popularity and economic strength of professional football is unsurpassed among other sports in the U.S. due in part to the ascendency of television as the most popular form of mass media. Though aided by the popularity of that medium, the National Football League's success is also tied to governmental favors, monopolistic practices, nonprofit tax status, complicated subsidiary structure and other factors forming a beneficial economic context. The structure of the league and its business ventures reflect the nature of these arrangements, all of which are borne out of the commodification of the game. This study examines the nature and structure of the political economy of the NFL. In particular, it focuses on the relationships among the NFL (including individual teams and subsidiary businesses), the government, and the media. Employing a political economic analysis of the policy and business agreements among these agents will further elaborate the structural dimensions of the NFL as well as the implications for other sports and media in the culture industries. / 10000-01-01

In the wake of the digital revolution, the Musicians' Union of Ghana has begun a massive campaign to re-establish its membership base, advocate for enforceable copyright policy changes, and introduce the technology necessary to make its members' music available for sale to digital consumers. However, despite the excitement behind this project, the vision of a professional class of musicians, enabled by the digitization and digital sale of Ghana's new and existing music, is problematic. Recent revenue reports collected from musicians based in the United States suggest that revenue collected from digital sales may not be the silver bullet Ghanaian musicians hope it will be. Analyzing corporate, government, development, and news documents, this study examines the history and the political economy of the current digitization efforts in Ghana to determine who claims to benefit from the project and who stands to bear the costs. Overall, this study recommends the introduction of new forms of cultural protectionism alongside existing copyright protections to avoid the potential exploitation associated with musical success. The empowering and imperial effects of the project are also debated.