A new examination of the linkages between electoral competition and the development of partisan organizations with their relationship to roll-call voting is generated. The study found a close association between variable electoral contestation, competition and success of minority parties in formerly one-party state house legislative chambers and the development of both minority and majority party organizations in these chambers. The model linked the features of increasing electoral competition to the development of greater chamber competition, greater proportional representation on substantive committees for the minority party, and the development of caucus organizations. These features of party organization, in turn, were linked to increasing intra-party cohesion and decreasing partisan conflict in roll-call voting in the chambers. The study is a comparative cross-state cross-time study of chambers which have formerly been one-party dominant.

Why do House members delegate authority to party leaders? This dissertation provides a new theory to address this question. It explains why it is individually and collectively rational for congressional members to delegate authority to party leaders, when we ought to expect that delegation will occur, as well as what form of delegation provides maximum benefit with minimal risk to members. This dissertation provides a new principal-agent theory of variable leadership involvement, progressive in nature across the stages of legislation as the risks of defection diminish. Members minimize the risks of delegation though screening and selection mechanisms, as well as through institutional checks throughout the legislative process. This work empirically tests and finds support for the predictions derived from the agency theory at four distinct stages of the legislative process. Leadership selection, bill introduction and referral, party scheduling with the Rules Committee, and conference committees are all found to conform to the hypotheses generated by this framework. The powers of the leadership are cumulative in nature as one passes through the stages of legislation. By severely curtailing the powers of leaders at earlier stages, the risk of adverse results is greatly minimized, allowing the members to safely delegate more authority to save the exponentially increasing transaction costs borne by leaders in the later stages.

Mass media is the major source of information citizens use in forming their political opinions. As such, decisions made by the media define the scope of what we know about the political world. This dissertation argues that what the media decides to cover is a result of its own institutional and organizational structures, and that this has important implications for the information citizens are left with to make political decisions. Like any institution in a political context, the media is subject to its own internal pressures and organizational dictates. Institutional factors operate in media organizations as they do in any organization, with norms, rules and incentives shaping decisions and behaviors. Interestingly, how these factors work to shape the news agenda has not often been studied by political scientists. Though many acknowledge the vital role of the media as an institution within our political system, we lack any complete empirical investigation of the institutional factors by which the behavior of media outlets is governed. This work addresses the following research question: How do the institutional and contextual features of local media outlets affect their coverage of local political issues? Using election 2004 news coverage of two major competitive statewide races, I examine the election coverage of 40+ individual news media outlets as a function of their institutional characteristics and market context.

The European Parliament is a unique legislative body. It is a supranational legislature with directly elected members. The policy authority of the EP has increased dramatically as the European level legislation has grown both in depth and scope. This thesis addresses the question of what political pressures most influence members of the EP when they are voting on legislation. The members are directly elected from national constituencies as members of national political parties. Once elected to the EP, members sit according to ideology in transnational party groups. Potentially then, the national constituency, the national political party, and transnational party groups all pressure MEN to vote a particular way on given pieces of legislation. I propose a principal-agent theory that assesses the relative strength of these competing pressures. While there is reason to expect each 'principal' to pressure MEPs, I argue that it is necessary to take the policy content into account. Specifically, I hypothesize that distributive policies are more likely to bring national pressures to bear, while voting on regulatory policies is more likely to be governed by ideological considerations. I test these hypotheses using a large sample of roll-call votes chosen specifically for their policy content during the period 1984--1994.

The goal of this project is to determine how well our current models of public opinion---the on-line and memory-based---predict the course of public opinion during political campaigns. Unfortunately, the dynamic implications of these public opinion models have not been explored to the point where they can provide an answer to this question and the dynamic implications of these models have not been leveraged in the empirical evaluation or theoretical refinement of the models themselves. My approach to this task is two-pronged. I first formalize the theoretical arguments into mathematical equations to produce dynamic maps of the movement of public opinion. Consequently, I test the theoretical models by collecting data on campaign communications in eight congressional and gubernatorial campaigns and use these data as the inputs in the equations. The result is a predicted course for public opinion over the campaign, given the campaign communications that actually occurred. I then examine public opinion data to evaluate which of the two models accurately predicts the course of public opinion over the campaign. The results suggest that neither model can adequately account for the dynamics of a political campaign; therefore, I suggest a path for future research aimed at understanding the relationship between memory for campaign information and candidate evaluation.

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An argument that the use of terror in cases of national separatism, particularly for the cases of the IRA in Northern Ireland and the FLQ in Quebec, is not indiscriminant or mindless, but part of an overall strategy used by groups based on societal determinants and the long term and short term goals of the terrorist group. The main societal determinants appear to be the past use of violence in the area under question and the ability for the nationalist community to effectively control its situation through political representation. For the terrorist group, while separation is the obvious long term goal, other goals for the group, the community it represents, the system in which it acts and the government from which it wishes independence also play an important role in the choice of violence and its possible effects on interfering with accomplishment of other goals.

James V. Allred, Governor of Texas during the New Deal, illustrates the paradoxes of Southwestern political/legal history. Allred was a liberal who followed President Franklin D. Roosevelt's policies, but was simultaneously a Southern demagogue with implicit beliefs in white superiority that characterized most southern politicians of that age of segregation. Allred influenced law and society with his blend of Populist, New Deal, and regional beliefs. After his governorship, Allred remained in Texas on the United States District Court, Southern District. As a judge, Allred employed a reflexive, intuitive style reminiscent of the chancellor of an equity court. He maintained strict control over his courtroom and his docket and wrote workmanlike opinions. Allred resigned his lifetime position on the federal bench to run for the U.S. Senate, but narrowly lost to Senator William L. "Pappy" O'Daniel. President Roosevelt re-appointed Allred to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, but political repercussions blocked that nomination. Allred was finally returned to the Southern District bench by President Truman.