This thesis investigates if and how poor, mostly minority citizens can be mobilized by a campaign whose principal policy objective would materially enhance their lives by including them in a major public program. The question is put to the test through a multi-dimensional study of voter mobilization in Alabama during the 2014 election for Governor. At stake in the election was whether Alabama would expand Medicaid through the Affordable Care Act in Alabama, an issue emblematic of "submergedness" (Mettler, 2011). In order to understand the extent to which the policy was submerged - measured by knowledge and awareness of the policy, along with its key provisions - I distributed a survey to 868 Alabamians weeks before the election. The survey used the experimental design of conjoint analysis to test which aspects of the policy were most persuasive among the target population. Additionally, I performed a randomized field experiment across the four major metropolitan areas of Alabama, micro-targeting 6,021 registered voters living in the "Coverage Gap," citizens who could gain health insurance if Medicaid were expanded. The campaign yielded negligible effects on voter turnout among subjects in the Coverage Gap, even though the interventions shifted voter knowledge, 'surfacing' the policy. In addition to the survey and field experiments, this research benefits from qualitative insights gathered in 22 semi-structured interviews conducted among poor Alabamians, many of whom were uninsured. From these interviews, it became clear that the political disengagement of the poor is deeply entrenched, prohibitive of policy-based mobilization. Disengagement is driven by a complex mix of barriers to registration and perceptions of political inefficacy based on interpretations of extant policy designs. These results have important implications for our understanding of the limitations of policy-based mobilization, suggesting that more attention must be paid to how current policies shape predispositions for mobilization.

There is mounting evidence that the public's political decisional processes are heterogeneous (Rivers, 1988; Sniderman, Brody & Tetlock, 1991; and Johnston, Blais, Gidengil & Nevitte, 1996). All citizens do not reason the same way about politics: they rely on different considerations, or they give different weights to similar considerations. However, our understanding of this phenomenon remains sketchy, in many regards. I address the conceptual and empirical ambiguity by exploring the nature, the sources, the extent, the consequences, and the campaign dynamics of interpersonal heterogeneity in political decision-making. The analysis relies on Canadian and American public opinion survey data. The evidence reveals that heterogeneity is a very important phenomenon. Relationships between dependent and explanatory variables are rarely stable and consistent across the entire population. Most political decisions (especially the more common ones) and most independent variables exhibit interpersonal diversity in coefficient strength. Hypothesis-testing and explanationbuilding can be led astray if researchers limit their analyses to the whole citizenry. Normatively, heterogeneity is responsible for individual and aggregate deviations from enlightened preferences. Heterogeneity, however, is a very complex phenomenon. One can not deal with it in any simple way. A researcher can not simply capture it, take it into account, and move on to other concerns. Heterogeneity permeates through our models of political behaviour in significant, pervasive and perplexing ways. This research raises concerns about the complexity of political behaviour and our ability to understand citizens, campaigns, elections, and democracy. The world is not a simple, straightforward and easily comprehensible subject. It is much more intricate and difficult to grasp than we currently believe. In order to understand reality, our approaches, theories, and models need to be as complex and multidimensional as reality. Striving for oversimplification can only lead to misconceptions and fallacies. / Arts, Faculty of / Political Science, Department of / Graduate

There has been much scholarly attention directed at the Iraq war's role in determining voter choice. I attempt to extend that research into voter turnout to determine what role the Iraq war played in 2006 voter turnout. This paper argues that turnout at the state level could be explained by the number of US deaths each state had sustained from the Iraq occupation at the time of the election. A theory of voter activation based on information availability is put forth to explain the relationship between national events and voter turnout wherein national events like the Iraq war will raise the amount of information voters have at their disposal, which will increase the likelihood of their voting on election day. Regression analysis comparing the turnout rates of the 50 states to their casualties in Iraq revealed no relationship between the two factors, indicating that something else is responsible for the high turnout of the midterm.

Attempts to solve the continued problem of low youth voter turnout in the U.S. have included get out the vote drives, voter registration campaigns, and public service announcements targeting 18- to 25-year-old voters. Pay Attention and Vote added to this effort to motivate young voters in its 2006 campaign. This thesis analyzes the rhetorical strategies employed by the Pay Attention and Vote campaign advertisements, measures their effectiveness, and adds to the limited body of knowledge describing the attitudes and behaviors of young nonvoters. This thesis applies a mixed method approach, utilizing both rhetorical criticism and quantitative method. The results of both analyses are integrated into a discussion which critiques current strategies of addressing the youth voter turnout problem and offers suggestions for future research on the topic.

With disasters increasing in frequency and costs each year, this study seeks to explore ways greater public participation can assist emergency managers in their mission to keep communities safe. Specifically this study examines the policy process and administrative functions of emergency management to illuminated the benefits and hindrances involved in greater participation. This study conducted a qualitative analysis of governmental documents, disaster case studies, international research, as well as political science and administrative doctrines, to arrive at its conclusions. The results of this study reveal that the public is a largely untapped resource in the emergency management field. Engaging the public dialogically in early policy stages and emergency management phases is essential to successful inclusion for both administrators and communities. Specifically, public inclusion creates expanded knowledge, shared learning, personal responsibility, and increased social capital. Faced with the growing threat from disasters, emergency management can create communities that are both more resilient and sustainable by increasing public participation.

This dissertation addresses voters' information heterogeneity and its effect on spatial voting. While most spatial voting models simply assume that voter uncertainty about candidate preferences is homogeneous across voters despite Downs' early use of uncertainty scale to classify the electorate, information studies have discovered that well and poorly informed citizens have sizeable and consistent differences in issue conceptualization, perception, political opinion and behavior. Built upon the spatial theory's early insights on uncertainty and the findings of information literature, this dissertation claims that information effects should be incorporated into the spatial voting model. By this incorporation, I seek to unify the different scholarly traditions of the spatial theory of voting and the study of political information. I hypothesize that uncertainty is not homogeneous, but varies with the level of information, which are approximated by political activism as well as information on candidate policy positions. To test this hypothesis, I employ heteroskedastic probit models that specify heterogeneity of voter uncertainty in probabilistic models of spatial voting. The models are applied to the U.S. presidential elections in 1992-2004. The empirical results of the analysis strongly support the expectation. They reveal that voter uncertainty is heterogeneous as a result of uneven distributions of information and political activism even when various voting cues are available. This dissertation also discovers that this heterogeneity in voter uncertainty has a significant effect on electoral outcomes. It finds that the more uncertain a voter is about the candidates, the more likely he or she is to vote for the incumbent or a better-known candidate. This clearly reflects voters' risk-averse attitudes that reward the candidate with greater certainty, all other things held constant. Heterogeneity in voter uncertainty and its electoral consequences, therefore, have important implications for candidates' strategies. The findings suggest that the voter heterogeneity leads candidates' equilibrium strategies and campaign tactics to be inconsistent with those that spatial analysts have normally proposed. / text

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / Prior studies on state legislative elections have found gubernatorial coattails playing a key role; however, they fail to examine the temporal and state-based trends of this phenomena. Using precinct level data from nine states (Alabama, Arkansas, California, Minnesota, New York, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas, and Wyoming), over two election cycles (2002 and 2006), I measure the importance a state’s ideological makeup, and a governor’s institutional powers has on gubernatorial coattails. Findings reaffirm the importance of coattails, and previously researched variables; however, the addition of the above measures greatly affects coattail strength, dependent on host of controlling factors.

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / This thesis is a critical literature review on the studies of social movements and contentious politics in the U.S. and China. Thanks to theories of contentious politics, we can analyze the studies of America’s social movements and China’s collective actions in the same “frame.” By making a comparison, this thesis tries to construct a theoretical dialogue between the studies across both countries. At the same time, it criticizes over-generalizing the mode “democratic-nondemocratic” in analysis of repertories of contentious politics and downplaying capitalism’s role in the social movements. From the various empirical studies in both countries, this thesis argues that a generalization should be based on the diversity of this realm, not just from the western perspective.