The first chapter of this dissertation analyzes voting behavior across multiple elections. The voting literature has largely analyzed voter turnout and voter behavior separately, focusing on individual elections. I present a model of voter turnout and behavior in multiple elections. The assumptions are consistent with individual election preferences and decision is derived from utility maximization. Additionally, I provide necessary moment conditions for identification. The framework is applied to the 2008 California elections. The exit polls made national headlines by linking the historic turnout of African-Americans for Presidential candidate Obama in helping pass Proposition 8. The results show that the African-American turnout and voting share for Proposition 8 was lower than indicated by the exit polls. As a counterfactual, I look at the turnout and outcome of Proposition 8, without the presidential race on the ballot. As predicted, there is lower voter turnout: on par with midterm elections. I also find a lower share of Yes votes on Proposition 8 - enough that the referendum would not have passed. / Economics

Abstract There has been an increase in land grabbing in the world over the years and the trend seems to be increasing in the same direction. Whereas, the phenomenon is said to be happening across all continents except Antarctica, in this Africa is the primary target. Uganda too has not been spared and the discovery of oil in 2006 added an insult to an injury. Though, the phenomenon has lived with the world for some good time, it continues to happen with less efforts being made to curb it. As a result, a study was carried out to gain a deeper understanding of the drivers of land grabbing in Uganda’s Albertine Graben. It was a desk study and employed an abductive approach though some primary data was also collected to back it up. The political economy approach was employed to understand the different political and economic dynamics involved in land grabbing. The study found out the issue of absentee land lords and the discovery of oil in 2006 as the main reasons that explain the occurrence of the phenomenon something that is different from the many scholars’ view that agricultural reasons are the main cause. Land grabbing was further seen as mainly negative as it leads to loss of economic livelihoods, lack of cooking energy, displacement of people among others. The study learned that massive sensitization of the people about their rights; strict implementation of the existing laws by the government would help to reduce or solve the problem. Key words, Land grabbing, land acquisition, Albertine Graben, Bunyoro, political economy approach.

Despite recent trends toward more participatory processes within development and hazard management, technical expertise remains privileged compared to other forms of knowledge. This dissertation explores the epistemological and material consequences of an urban renovation and landslide management project that has excluded residents from participation in planning and execution. The municipal government of Manizales, Colombia intends to resettle thousands of impoverished families from the landslide-prone hillsides of the city into subsidized apartments. While commendable for an enormous investment in the safety of residents, the focus on physical vulnerability will likely enhance socio-economic dimensions of vulnerability and leave many residents in more difficult living conditions, even to the point of settlement on other slopes. The municipal government relies on rational ordering to develop economic and land use policies associated with the renovation project, but simplification leaves important components of livelihood strategies and well-being illegible. As a result, the efforts will likely exacerbate both socioeconomic and physical vulnerability of an already marginalized population. As residents negotiate for greater influence over the process and outcomes, they must challenge the hegemonic epistemological structures or work within them. This dissertation discusses some of the strategies used by residents and the challenges they face, as well as the implications of this work for other topics dominated by technical expertise. Understanding why people live in hazardous areas in the first place is critical for developing a more complex and more effective urban hazard management strategy, which should include consideration of livelihoods, social interactions, and non-technical knowledge.

Even though aid is a cornerstone of the Egyptian-American relationship, there is little research about economic aid's role in achieving US objectives, especially in producing policy alignment that would normalize Israel. Likewise, an under-studied derivative question is how the stipulation to maintain peace with Israel affected the (1) economic and structural processes of aligning Egypt with the American vision of `market-democracy' and (2) Egyptian critical assessments of the (non-military) effects associated with alignment into the American orbit? I argue that a reforming and democratizing narrative was used to transform Egypt into a stable "market-democracy" whose prosperity entailed pursuit of a "warm" peace. The transformation depended upon a dual strategy, combining the targeting of "natural allies" among a complicit elite as well as on privatization to align businesses, territories, civil organizations, and institutions or segments therein with American interests. The strategy's success in achieving alignment was also its weakness. Dependence on an autocratic elite for the implementation of reforms had the counter-effects of facilitating corruption and of reducing regime incentives to expand its constituencies of support beyond direct beneficiaries of the neoliberal privatizing changes. Instead of debate and engagement with opposing views to build new alliances, the strategy superseded and avoided sites of opposition. Therefore, contrary to the original aim of aid provision, the peace remained cold while its normalization dimensions became discursive triggers used as prisms with which to judge aid, the neoliberal reformist agenda, as well as normalization. The new partnerships provoked the production of competing conceptualizations of the proper relationship between the state and its citizens, conveyed in legal and constitutional re-definitions and re-distributions of rights and duties, as well as in divergent nationalist visions for Egypt's future. These competing ideas ranged between a nationalism that is globalizing, free-market, US- and regime-supported and another vision that is traditional, historically-informed, and socio-culturally-sensitive. Normalization's connection with aid had the counter-theoretical effect of reducing aid's ability to engender Gramscian hegemony. The US strategy of targeting allies and of privatization to effect normalization could not overcome extant socio-political forces whose discourses charged that aid produced anything but subordination (taba'iyya) - which differed significantly from promises of "peace, stability, and growth". Ultimately, even "reforming and democratizing" aid efforts could not disguise the subordinating effects of market and political alignment, and thus were not sufficient to elicit a new "common sense."

The recent rediscovery of institutions in the study of international development has drawn considerable attention to macro arrangements, but sparked much less interest in mid-range, sectoral institutions and how they are reshaped under dynamic domestic and nondomestic constraints. This study joins the few examples of this latter research focus by offering a typology of sectoral institutional pathways in contemporary late developers. The typology incorporates four variables: pre-existing institutions, international norms, technocratic engineering, and coalition politics. It is argued that from careful pairings of these variables, for which the sectoral effects of internationalization and the intensity of domestic political competition are used as the main criteria, it is possible to deduce distinct ideal-typical pathways: insulated accommodation, insulated innovation, negotiated accommodation, and negotiated innovation. The typology models the complexity of institutional trajectories, but it cannot predict concrete institutional profiles. Its value is in providing guidance for empirical analysis. The bulk of the study is devoted to applying this framework to the evolution of Turkey’s fiscal, financial and agricultural regimes of governance from 1980 to 2007. This comparative exercise unlocks several empirical mysteries at once: the failure of Turkish governments in the 1990s to readjust the novel fiscal and banking regimes to preempt the perils of democratic instability and rapid financial integration; the surprising persistence of populist-corporatist forms of market governance in agriculture despite the neoliberalism of the 1980s and 1990s; the stark divergence in reform outcomes across these regimes during the intense restructuring efforts of the 2000s; some odd instances of institutional complementarity; and the exotic twists in the fortunes of Turkish peasants and bankers throughout the entire period. A separate chapter extends the typology to four non-Turkish cases to gain comparative insight into the different types of reshaping: Chinese banking, South Korean corporate governance, Mexican agriculture, and Argentine labor markets. Among the main findings of the study are the need to get beyond dichotomous notions of institutional continuity and change, the problematicity of the quest for good institutions via externally-inspired reforms, and the value of mid-range institutional analysis for understanding shifts in collective fortunes and preferences under processes of macro-transformation.

As the locus of cotton production shifted toward the newer southwestern states over the first half of the nineteenth century, the city of New Orleans became increasingly important to the slave-plantation economy of the U.S. South. Moreover, because of its location near the base of the enormous Mississippi River system, the city also thrived on the export of agricultural commodities from western states farther upriver. Handling this wide-ranging commerce was the city's business community: bankers, factors, and wholesalers, among others. This globally oriented community represented an older and qualitatively unique form of wealth accumulation, merchant capitalism, which was based on the extraction of profit from exchange processes. However, like the slave-based mode of production to which it was closely allied, the New Orleans merchant community faced increasing pressure during the antebellum decades even while its fortunes seemed otherwise secure. The city lost most of its market share in western grain products to railroads and other routes linked directly to northeastern urban centers, and its merchants' failure to maintain port infrastructure or create a viable manufacturing sector reflected their complacency and left them vulnerable to competition from the fast-developing industrially-based economy of the North. These and other weaknesses were fatally exposed during the Civil War and Reconstruction. As a result of many changes to the regional and national political economy after northern victory in the war, the New Orleans merchant community was never able to recover its previous commercial dominance, and the former first-rank American city quickly became a site of notorious political corruption and endemic poverty. Much the same can be said of the postbellum southern economy in which it was embedded, where the practices of merchant capitalism nevertheless managed to persist by becoming dispersed throughout the agricultural interior in the form of "country stores." Under the sharecropping system that became prevalent in cotton production, rural merchants furnished seasonal credit to the small farming households that had replaced plantation slavery. Although these stores played different roles in Louisiana cotton and sugar parishes, the culture of merchant capitalism hampered economic development in the South for many decades to come.

During the period of 1992-1998, Russia underwent a transition from a centralized economy to a market economy with devastating socioeconomic consequences, and industrial decline, which has resulted in demographic crises. The central argument driving this thesis is that during its transition to a market economy, through shock therapy from 1992-1998, Russia’s social and economic infrastructure went through a regression in the form of refeudalization, which is empirically revealed through health and demographic indicators. Remarkably, the effects of this socioeconomic regression was buffered from further devastation through a set of social compromises between workers, unions and industrial managers, which stabilized the brunt of shock therapy, but still resulted in the refeudalization of Russian society. The objective of this study is to construct a comprehensive model to conceptualize Russia’s socioeconomic regression during the period of transition from 1992-1998, and to explain the causes for the regression within the model. / This thesis conceptualizes socioeconomic regression as a feature of political economy within a mode of production model, and applies the model to explain Russia's socioeconomic transition during the period from 1992 to 1998.

The Ontario Tories' 42-year hegemony in government (1943-1985) was wrought through clever policies which often utilized Crown institutions to promote prosperity or to oblige or mollify vying interests. Ousted in 1985, though, they used their time in opposition to revise the Tory doctrine. In the 1995 election, the Tories emerged a tougher, more truculent group quite unlike their predecessors. Campaigning on their Common Sense Revolution (CSR) platform, they promised to eliminate red tape and vowed to obliterate all ostensible economic barriers which were impeding commerce in the province. In the CSR, the Tories identified Ontario Hydro (OH), the province's lauded publicly-owned power monopoly, as a troublesome and inefficient Crown entity which required fundamental reform. Portions of OH, they hinted, would likely be sold. Once elected, the Tories worked hurriedly to demolish OH and destroy public power in Ontario. For nearly 100 years, OH proved a pivotal component within the province's political economy for its provision of affordable, reliable power and its function as a policy tool to incite and direct development. A Tory government fought to instigate public power in the early 1900s and, in the late 1900s, a Tory government was fighting vigorously to rescind it. Why would they now renounce Crown power? It is the intent of this thesis to elucidate the Tory government's involvement in the transformation of Ontario's electricity industry from 1995 to 2003. Distinguishing electricity as a special, strategic staple, this thesis uses a pro-state, pro-staples industry political economy approach to discern how and why the Tory government sought to restructure the electricity sector. Essentially, it posits that the onslaught of neoliberalism, the emergence of novel generating technology, and the faltering of OH's nuclear wing all had a huge part to play in provoking the Tory government to initiate its reforms. Their reforms, though, proved too hasty, haughty, and fraught with ambiguity to work properly. While their open, competitive power market and attempts to privatize Hydro One failed horribly, the Tories' energy re-regulation strategy did hold promise to allow the state to retain a prominent role in the power industry. / Thesis (Ph.D, Political Studies) -- Queen's University, 2007-08-27 23:05:37.549

This thesis synthesizes theoretical and methodological insights of actor-network theory with the political economy of communication in order to trace the history of the Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America, 2005-2009. The purpose is to demonstrate how a power elite of transnational corporate actants are increasingly structuring transnational border policy, encouraging the deployment of ubiquitous surveillance technology and the liberalization of transborder data flows and markets, primarily for the purposes of maximizing capital accumulation, ideological legitimation and the suppression of resistance. This hybridization of state and corporate actants exemplifies how prosperity partnerships and other similar informal working groups are increasingly being used as powerful vehicles for mobilizing the private sector into influencing border policies throughout North America, effectively creating powerful socio-technical scenarios for influencing global markets. The argument advanced is that borders are increasingly becoming topological spaces which unevenly distributed objects and people across various networks and flows, in turn re-shaping urban landscapes towards private interests. As such, topological prosperity entails configuring networked infrastructures and spaces such as borders and airports in ways which favour particular socio-economic groups, primarily an ascending global economic elite. / Thesis (Master, Sociology) -- Queen's University, 2011-08-28 15:18:47.858

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