<p>Immigration is a policy area that is becoming increasingly relevant among researchers in international relations and comparative politics as they address the difficulty advanced industrialized countries have in controlling their borders. Most research on immigration policy examines this issue by focusing on external and macro level internal factors which influence policy choices and policy outcomes. While these explanations are useful, they neglect the manner into which policy choices are translated at the implementation stage by officers in the field. This dissertation suggests that field officers have a great impact on policies and on their outcomes as they are the ones who are responsible for interpreting and implementing the policies designed by policy makers. It is argued that a micro approach utilizing interactive theories of public policy and public administration which takes into consideration the discretion of the individual civil servant is a useful supplement to macro and meso theories about immigration. This conclusion is reached by a study of two countries (Canada and the United States) and one province (Quebec). The dissertation considers the external selection process and examines the circumstances under which field level discretion is exercised. Its conclusion is that Canadian officials operate with a higher level of discretion than their US counterparts, while Quebec agents enjoy an even higher level of discretion. These differences, it is suggested, are explained by variations in political institutions, organizational structure, organizational resources and the degree of importance attached to some overriding goal--in this case the concern for social and cultural integration in Quebec.</p> / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

<p>Nearly thirty years after the introduction of water pollution management legislation in Canada and the United States, water pollution remains an important public policy problem. Very basically, water pollution problems can be divided into two types: point source and non-point source. Point source categorizes those cases where inputs into natural ecosystems come from easily identifiable sources such as industrial effluent and municipal sewage treatment outfalls. Non-point source water pollution characterizes inputs into natural ecosystems that are dispersed and multi-sourced such as urban and agricultural runoff, overflow sewage inputs and groundwater contamination. Although in many industrialized states non-point sources are recognized as the primary barrier to meeting water quality objectives, jurisdictions internationally have tended to limit the scope and focus of water pollution management efforts to more easily identifiable point-sources. This dissertation examines intergovernmental institutional arrangements and policy instrument strategies being implemented in Canada and the U.S. to address non-point source water pollution. This research indicates that an important determinant of instrument choice, design and comparative policy effectiveness is institutional capacity. More specifically, jurisdictions that have higher levels of vertical (intergovernmental), horizontal (cross-medium), stakeholder, monitoring and evaluation capacity are more likely to have effective policy instrument strategies. Based on six case studies examining three different policy instrument strategies, the dissertation provides evidence that jurisdictions in the U.S. have higher levels of institutional capacity to manage these complex water pollution problems than jurisdictions in Canada.</p> / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Master of Arts (MA)

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My dissertation uses several different methods to examine the role of compassion in politics, both at the citizen and elite level. I explore elite appeals to compassion through a content analysis of a selection of congressional and presidential speeches, finding that politicians often appeal to concern for others in need but that the parties differ widely in their use of these appeals. I combine this with an analysis of several waves of the General Social Survey to understand how individuals connect compassion to their political preferences. I find that proclivities toward compassion do not differ between partisans in the public but that partisan differences emerge in the effects of compassion. I find that highly compassionate Democrats have more liberal views on issues for which Democratic elites have made compassion more relevant, as outlined in my content work, such as capital punishment and help for the poor. Likewise, highly compassionate Republicans have more pro-life views, in accordance with the messages of compassion for unborn children by Republican elites. Highly compassionate individuals of both parties are more charitable in the private sector, indicating that compassion has similar effects on partisans when it is not tied to politics. I link these approaches with a sequence of experiments that reveal that compassionate rhetoric by elites activates individualsâ compassion. Perceptions of controllability might also influence whether or not people connect compassion to their preferences. I begin to test this hypothesis in my second experiment, and I find some evidence suggesting that perceptions of controllability are also influential in explaining political divisions.

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One of the most consistent findings, to date, in the human rights literature asserts that democracy decreases the likelihood of state repression. Several studies have noted the pacifying effects of democratic norms, competitive elections, and institutional checks on the executive as aspects that make democracies less repressive. However, the basic dichotomous measures that are commonly used in the literature only capture the presence or absence of these democratic characteristics and cannot account for the variation that exists between countries within these democratic institutions. In this paper, I suggest that electoral outcomes resulting from variation in institutional choice may have certain implications for a state's likelihood of using repression; one such electoral outcome is disproportionality. I argue that the level of consensuality of a democracy, represented as vote to seat disproportionality, should have different implications for state repression depending on how secure the government officials feel in their political survival. Using paneled data I create an ordered logit model and find that when job insecurity is high, high levels of disproportionality will encourage the most extreme levels of repression. However, when job insecurity is low, majoritarian systems are more likely to not repress their citizens.

The lack of consensus on the significance of ethnicity on civil conflict derives from the measures used, not from the concepts lack of merit. Current measures, such as the ethno-linguistic fractionalization index (ELF), examine differences in demographics rather than how the diversity becomes politically relevant or when the diversity leads to conflict. By using Horowitzs (1985) theory of ethnic voting and a measure for how closely a states political parties are aligned with ethnic groups, one can better assess how countries ethnic groups are politically organized and how this organization is associated with civil conflict. Using an original measure derived from Round 5 of the Afrobarometer indicating the extent to which a states political parties are aligned ethnically and the UCDP/ PRIOs Armed Conflict Dataset, the following study finds that states with high levels of ethnic political parties are associated with an increased probability of civil conflict, while those states with a proportional legislative electoral system are associated with a decreased, though not statistically significant, probability of civil conflict.