Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Political Science, 2010. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 98-105). / This thesis examines the effect of party-level partisanship on social spending outcomes. Building a model in which party-politician bargaining plays a central role in determining the passage of bills, this paper develops a theory predicting the superior performance of moderate parties in proposing and passing legislation. Testing this theory using historical roll-call and social spending data, this paper finds that the effects of ideology are not so simple, and that the effects of partisanship on party effectiveness varies with the type of policy examined. / by Matthew L. Fisher. / S.M.

Thesis: S.M., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Political Science, 2014. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (pages 158-173). / Indonesia has experienced six insurgencies since it declared independence in 1945. Of these insurgencies, three were resolved through negotiations. There is great variation in the manner the negotiations occurred. The state negotiated with Portugal over East Timor with the United Nations (UN) as mediator while negotiations with the Acehnese were first mediated by the Henry Dunant Centre for Humanitarian Dialogue (HDC) and later the Crisis Management Initiative (CMI). Finally, the state refused any mediators in the case of West Papua, where Indonesia's longest and bloodiest insurgency continues to take place. What explains the variation in the decision to have mediation and the choice of mediators? This is the central question of the thesis. In examining this variation, I hope to contribute to the literature on bargaining in insurgencies as well as examine the effectiveness of mediation, which is disputed. I argue that a state that is not committed or has very low levels of commitment to negotiations will not have a mediator. The more committed the state is to negotiations, the stronger the mediator the state will seek. The level of commitment is a function of the balance of power between the incumbents and insurgents, domestic support, and international pressure for peaceful resolution. Domestic support is the pivotal factor with the military being the most decisive actor. Based on this argument, I develop a scenario-based framework in which states could possibly find themselves in and test it on the three cases of insurgencies in Indonesia. The findings show that the state was more committed to reaching a settlement in East Timor and Aceh than in West Papua and so had mediators to ensure the success of the peace processes, which would not have occurred otherwise. In addition, the findings also suggest that a hurting stalemate is not a necessary precondition for successful mediation, contrary to the literature on mediation. The thesis concludes by drawing some policy implications and directions for further research. / by Keng Meng Tan. / S.M.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Political Science, 2012. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 447-467). / This dissertation evaluates claims that nationalism is rising in post-Cold War Japan by first noting the disconnect between existent social science conceptions of nationalism and those needed to examine how nationalism might change in contemporary, peaceful, wealthy, and stable democracies such as postwar Japan. This study defines nationalism as a discourse that constructs and reconstructs points of identification and differentiation that define both a political community (i.e. "nation") and the form of its domain over a modern territorial state. It argues nationalism is best understood as reoccurring "nation-state narratives" that tell the story of how the nation's putative qualities or past experiences define the present nature of its territorial state. Change in nationalism is evaluated through content and discourse analysis of five narratives expressing the relationship between the Japanese people and their state in a sample of elite discourse drawn from the period 1952-2007. The analysis reveals that references to all five narratives peak in the immediate postwar period and again in the 1980s before declining to lows in the post-Cold War period, which also saw the highest level of contestation over these narratives in the nearly sixty years of the study. In particular, the narrative depicting Japan as an anti-militarist/pacifist nation-state as well as the narrative emphasizing Japan as an ethnically homogeneous nation-state proved the most contested during this period, while the narrative affirming Japan as a democratic nation-state went uncontested. Political struggles over reforming institutions associated with the narratives were found to be the major drivers behind these changes, although characteristics of the narratives, especially the specificity of their normative claims, also shaped this process. The post-Cold War period is thus one of transition in nationalist discourse in Japan, although the scale of change is somewhat limited. For example, while the anti-militarist/pacifist narrative saw exceptions attached to many of its normative claims, its anti-nuclear components and cognitive claims remained unchallenged. Finally, Japanese nationalist discourse continued to legitimate democracy and was found to shape important electoral reforms, even as it shifted away from more insular and exclusionary forms, which may create space for more open immigration policies moving forward. / by James Patrick Boyd, III. / Ph.D.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Political Science. Thesis. 1970. Ph.D. / Vita. / Bibliography: v. 3, leaves 848-854. / Ph.D.

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Political Science, June 2012. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 93-94). / This study develops a general theoretical framework for the analysis of organizational behavior by focusing on the notion that organizations develop unique information-processing frameworks, which it labels "organizational images" or "images of operations," that strongly determine their behavior. The model is then used to draw inferences about the forms of counterinsurgency strategies practiced by the US military in the second war in Iraq and the war in Afghanistan. The paper argues that militaries tend to view the tasks they undertake in terms of the coercive application of force, and that this tendency tends to determine the forms of counterinsurgency strategies they chose, leading them to eschew strategies that rely on bargaining with enemy forces. The purported dominance of this coercive "image of operations" is then investigated in military field reports from the war in Afghanistan. / by Krishnan, Neel. / S.M.

Thesis: Ph. D., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Political Science, 2015. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (pages 195-210). / Over the last few decades, countries across the European Economic Area (EEA) have granted local governments considerable discretion over social policy. This project examines the consequences of these reforms. Drawing on unique data from over 28,000 European local governments, it demonstrates that decentralization has not been accompanied by declining levels of provision, as predicted by extant theories, but rather by significant expansion in the scale and scope of redistributive activity. Explaining this puzzle, the dissertation argues that local government behavior is shaped by the 'politics of proximity', which provides clear incentives for incumbents to invest in redistributive policy for electoral gain. These hypotheses are tested across five empirical chapters, each of which leverages micro-level data, natural experiments, and speech evidence to explore this emerging form of redistributive politics. / by Jeremy Ferwerda. / Ph. D.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Political Science, 2009. / Includes bibliographical references. / This project sets out two broad aims. First, I seek to explain the persistence of racial inequality in an era of formal racial inequality. I offer a theory of power, historically evolved socially embedded power. The theory states that racial inequality is to be explained in the first instance by the way historical racial norms become embedded in practices and processes of path dependent institutions, shaping the way institutions value persons of color. Subsequently, this impacts the way broader society values persons of color, and the way they value themselves. This sets up the conclusion that the problem of racial inequality is fundamentally a problem of racial valuation rather than a problem of distributive justice. In articulating the theory of power, I depart from orthodox analytic political thought methodology by relying on a cross-section of empirical resources, such as history, sociology, and social psychology. Second, I conclude from the above that a theory of justice appropriate for the needs of racial inequality must center on a normative ideal as its primary aim to counteract this more fundamental dynamic. Given the above characterization of racial inequality, I argue that self-respect is the necessary ideal and the social bases of self-respect are the appropriate currency of justice. By self-respect I mean, one's disposition towards oneself such that plans and perceived purposes are reflectively developed in line with an autonomously articulated morally appropriate conception of the good life. / (cont.) By the social bases of self-respect I mean, the public commitment and efforts made by major social institutions to embrace and affirm persons of color as substantive equals in a way that reckons with both the history and contemporary reality of racial injustice. I formulate justice as democratic partnership as the appropriate conception of racial justice. It states that justice obtains when institutions consistently provide the social bases of self-respect as per a defined set of institutional principles, and persons of color utilize this resource, as per a defined set of personal principles, by conceiving and pursuing the good of their lives just as the more socially and politically advantaged are able to. / by Christopher J. Lebron. / Ph.D.

Thesis (M.S.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Political Science, 1995. / Vita. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 65-66). / by Andrew P. Cap. / M.S.

Thesis: Ph. D., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Political Science, 2016. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (pages 331-399). / This thesis uses the case of large-scale, expropriatory nationalization of private coal mines to investigate the puzzle of uneven policy implementation in China. It casts new light on the role media coverage and public opinion play in the Chinese policy process, on the party-state's disciplinary (wenze) practices, and on the dynamics of China's state capitalism and the apparent "advance of state and retreat of private firms" (Guo Jin, Min Tui) in the late 2000s. Despite being an authoritarian state, China often finds implementing policies that damage the interests of local political and business elites difficult. Decisions-making and implementation usually require extensive bargaining, and stasis often prevails. Yet occasionally dramatic change does occur. One particularly puzzling case is coal mining. Since the late-1990s central-state actors had sought to consolidate the industry under large state-owned enterprises (SOEs), and eliminate the substantial privately-owned mining sector. However, this clashed with the interests of owners and local officials, for whom the private mines were major providers of fiscal revenue and bribes. A major closure campaign by the Center in the late-1990s failed. Yet after 2007 - in the face of much conflict - several, though not all, of the major coal provinces forcibly nationalized most of the private mines, creating the SOE-dominated coal industries that local officials had previously resisted. These different outcomes resulted from the interaction of varying accident patterns, uneven media coverage, and state disciplinary practices. Nationalization occurred only after the Chinese media began reporting extensively on mining accidents, and only in those provinces most under the media spotlight. Variation in coverage was driven by geologically-based variation in accident patterns. Intensive coverage turned accidents into "sudden incidents" (tufa shijian) perceived to threaten social stability and state legitimacy. This media-generated pressure was reinforced by the disciplinary apparatus, which was itself responsive to media coverage and accident patterns. A subset of coal provinces thus came under particularly intense political pressure to implement central policy and resolve the industry's safety problem, leading ultimately to nationalization. / by Nicholas Martin. / Ph. D.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Political Science. Thesis. 1969. Ph.D. / Vita. / Bibliography: ℓ. 423-440. / Ph.D.