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Political public relations is far from a science and candidates employ teams of public relations practitioners in an effort to gain as much support as possible from their constituency. This is most evident during an election, where a candidate attempts to garner enough support to either remain in office or be elected for the first time to the position. A way must be determined to attract individuals to vote on Election Day. The average American voter is not the individual that are being interviewed on television about the candidate they support, they are the people that spend less time thinking about the upcoming election and more time concerned with the aspects of their lives that deserve immediate attention. The individuals a person sees on television supporting a candidate at a rally or giving an interview about whom they support. The majority of voters are the ones with drastically less developed notions about the candidates seeking office and are labeled by many political analysts as swing voters. The purpose of this study is to discover if the uncertainty reduction theory can be applied to the political communication process. With voter turnout being as incredibly low and entire voting demographics feeling disenfranchised with their political representative something needs to be done. This study is poised to address both of them and propose potential remedies. It is important for a candidate to reduce a voter’s uncertainty about them and by appealing to their true beliefs, values, and attitudes a vital connection can be made. This study is important because its results will provide political candidates with a framework of how to campaign can effectively appeal to different demographics of the population, which in the end will prove more successful at building a positive public opinion than any political advertisement can. / Department of Journalism

There is no abstract available for this thesis.

There is no abstract available for this thesis.

This thesis has explored the political attitudes of 149 high school seniors in Muncie, Indiana in the hope that such exploration would provide some insight into the effects the addition of eighteen year old voters to the electorate will have on the political process.The study concentrated especially on the partisan identification with a political party of the study sample since this particular phenomenon has very great influence on electoral behavior. Particular topics examined in the study included: the partisan identification of the study sample, the agreement in partisan preferences between sample respondents and their parents, the confidence of the respondents in the political parties as problem solving mechanisms, the liberal-conservative nature of the sample's ideology, and the amount of alienation from politics present in the study sample.

This dissertation examines Catholic lay women's roles in the Church-State conflict in Mexico during the 1930s. After the Cristero Rebellion (1926-1929), clergy and laymen who publicly supported the Catholic Church were threatened with legal sanctions and government reprisal. Thus, Church leaders called upon Catholic women to assume public roles and to work creatively in defence of their faith, albeit following strictly delineated, gendered norms of behaviour. The Introduction discusses the lack of nuanced analysis of women's participation in the Catholic Church in Mexico. Chapter 1 traces the history of Catholic Social Action as envisioned in Europe and as adapted to Mexico from the end of the nineteenth century through the Cristero Rebellion, and includes a discussion of the roles envisaged for women in the Church hierarchy's strategy to concentrate and centralise lay people's efforts into the Acción Católica Mexicana (ACM). The first chapter also includes an overview of the Church-State conflict in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Mexico. Chapter 2 presents the reorganisation of various Catholic lay women's social and civic associations into the Union Femenina Católica Mexicana (UFCM). Chapters 3 and 4 form a case study of the UFCM in the Archdiocese of Guadalajara and the state of Jalisco. Chapter 3 concentrates on the Guadalajara Diocesan Chapter of the UFCM and on Catholic women's activism in the context of urban and regional issues. Chapter 4 compares the experiences of women in smaller towns and rural communities throughout the diocese and state, examining women's collective and independent responses to anticlerical legislation, the Mexican state's programs of socialist and sexual education and agrarian reform, the Church hierarchy's calls to action, and their own perceived need for religious and social organisation. The Conclusion evaluates Mexican Catholic women's responses to the social conflicts of the 1930s, their accomplishments, and the legacies of their mobilisation.

This thesis is motivated by a desire to explore the implications of recent debates in labour history circles on fundamental questions of theory and methodology. It is written in search of "history from below". (For complete introduction open document)

Previous studies of Chinese labour resistance have largely focused on the institutions and actors involved in disputes, including worker activists, labour NGOs, and official trade unions. The focus has been on the emergence, evolutionary path, and strategies of labour protests. As a result, scant attention has been paid to the consequences of labour protests. Based on my fieldwork in Guangdong between 2013 and 2016, this study seeks to understand the outcomes of labour disputes, arguing that the organisational characteristics of labour protests and the use of disruptive action in strikes are two key factors shaping protest outcomes. To explain the dynamics of organisational factors in Chinese labour protests, three distinctive organisational patterns have been identified, relating to the actors involved in labour protests, which can be categorised as worker-led, union-led, and NGO-intervened. A worker-led protest involves a dispute initiated by workers' activists or leaders, and is generally a one-off action with weak core leadership. In an NGO-intervened protest, workers can build a more or less sustained leadership structure to organise collective actions and reach the stage of collective bargaining. A union-led protest is organised by a workplace trade union, which, while often confronting enormous institutional constraints, also creates opportunities for the success of the protest.. This research demonstrates that worker protests with different organisational structures tend to adopt different forms of disruptive action to achieve their goals; this, in turn, affects the various outcomes of labour protests. I argue that, when the protest structure is better organised, workers are less likely to resort to violent disruptive actions. In addition, their collective actions are more likely to lead to collective bargaining. When protests are less well organised, workers who lack resources and coordination are more likely to use forcefully disruptive tactics to gain more leverage from the outside.. I further contend that, in an authoritarian country like China, how the state responds to labour protests also greatly determines their favourable or unfavourable outcome for workers. This study regards protest policing as evidence of the state's attitude to labour strikes. My findings show that local governments are more likely to apply temperate and moderate protest policing to labour collective actions that are well organised, refraining from violent disruptions. Likewise, as less well organised protests and unorganised riots often lead to massive disorder and even violence, they are likely to trigger a harsh crackdown by the police force, as well as legal punishment. Hence, this study suggests that the interactions and reciprocal adaptations between protesting workers and the policing tactics of local governments have coefficient influences on the outcome of collective labour actions.. This study further argues that, in addition to outcomes that can be measured in economic terms, labour protests also have an enduring impact on institutions. Although it is not easy for protesters to achieve all of their goals, collective actions have played a role in generating incremental institutional changes in the labour relations system. Attempts by local governments and trade unions to experiment with collective bargaining and develop mechanisms for collective dispute resolution can be viewed as a consequence of protracted labour disputes in Guangdong.

This thesis is an attempt to examine interpretations of the May-June Hundred Flowers Movement in China in 1957 through the examination of a principal participant among businessmen: Chang Nai-ch'i. The Hundred Flowers Movement is comprised of a series of violent outbursts and extreme statements. The May-June Hundred Flowers Movement was the last act in what might be termed China's Hundred Flowers Period, a period of intellectual liberation concurrent with the "Liberalization" in the Soviet Union. China, like many other socialist states, is a closed society from which information is often difficult to gather. The criticism, as printed in Chinese newspapers and journals, provides detailed information on factional struggles and organizational difficulties found within the Chinese government. The criticism, though often bountiful in number, is short, emotional and takes the form of a vignette. The existence of a source of official criticisms against Chang Nai-ch'i allows for the examination of the actions of a leading Hundred Flowers participant both prior to, and during the Movement. The method used to examine, compile and evaluate criticisms of Chang Nai-ch'i is the frequency chart in which quantitative examination is made of various critics' statements, and the duration of these statements. Through the use of this technique, over forty criticisms of Chang Nai-ch'i found in two Chinese language businessmen's journals are ordered, placed into chronological sequence and evaluated. These criticisms are then examined against existing information, and in particular, Chinese journal and newspaper accounts to examine their significance and validity. The thesis is divided into three chapters examining three chronological groups of criticisms. The first chapter examines criticisms referring to Chang's past (1927-1951), the second examines criticisms of events immediately prior to the Hundred Flowers Movement (1952-1956) and the third examines criticisms pertaining directly to the Hundred Flowers Movement. Existing interpretations of the Hundred Flowers Movement stress the spontaneity of the Movement, the importance of factional differences within the Chinese leadership, and the importance of the emergence of "disturbances" beyond the expectations of the Chinese leadership. An examination of the criticisms of Chang Nai-Ch'i suggests that the Hundred Flowers Movement was not in any sense spontaneous, and that the "disturbances" which led to an about-face by the Chinese leadership, may have been a product of weaknesses within the Chinese political process, weaknesses that were both factional and historical in nature. / Arts, Faculty of / History, Department of / Graduate

Descriptions of the contemporary student radical movement in North America by writers in the social sciences have varied enormously. Some have described the movement as a relatively unified entity opposed to the dominant, social and cultural order,while others have found a collection of rival political groups and styles which will not give one another support. My thesis will attempt to uphold the second assertion, i.e. that there exist irreconcilable rifts within what is commonly called "the student movement”. Two radical political groups who held meetings at a large western Canadian university in 1968 will be examined with the aid of transcript data taken from tape-recordings. Evidence of tension and conflict between the differing political orientations adhered to by these two groups will then be presented. Kenneth Keniston's description of "political activist" and "culturally alienated" poles within the student movement provides a loose set of categories in terms of which the two groups may be viewed. The group calling itself SDS is seen to resemble Keniston's "political activists" who follow more traditional means of organizing political protest. Members of SDU, the group which preceded SDS chronologically, fit into Keniston's category of "culturally alienated" by being involved in a search for intensified subjective experience. They depart from his description, however, by emphasizing intersubjective encounter in a public group setting rather than remaining alienated social isolates. While SDS, with its goal of confrontation politics, resembles many other New Left groups described by writers on the Movement, SDU, with its goal of achieving a sense of community, remains unique. It is because of SDU's unique character that the problem of recruiting new members is explored in the final portion of the thesis. Newcomers to SDU had a difficult time understanding what was taking place as the meeting situation departed so greatly from their expectations of what a radical political meeting should look like. Problems with newcomers and the appearance of SDS as a rival political group led to the abandonment of SDU as an unusual attempt to create a communal experience of interpersonal encounter on campus instead of the more usual tactics of confrontation politics. / Arts, Faculty of / Anthropology, Department of / Graduate