Common knowledge dictates that cynicism and mistrust of politics is rampant among US citizens, wreaking havoc on participation in the American political process. Social Capital theories are commonly used to effectively explain US political behavior, but fail to account for alienation from the political process or the influence of peers. I argue that models of political participation would be improved by the inclusion of political alienation variables, which have fallen into disuse in recent decades. Using data from the US Citizenship, Involvement, and Democracy Survey (2006), this paper relies upon negative binomial regression with nested models to compare the explanatory power of social capital variables with models including political alienation and peer influence variables to assess the value of such concepts. Results indicate that while the parent variables of political alienation (powerlessness, meaninglessness, and mistrust of political institutions) improve model accuracy and influence political participation, the latent variable remains ambiguously useful. Powerlessness and mistrust revealed significant effects, but mistrust failed to fit into the latent concept of political alienation, and meaninglessness did not produce significant results. Peer influence only significantly affected political participation when participants specifically discussed political matters with peers. Implications and concepts for future research follow.

Rural poverty has been characterized as invisible. This has been true since Michael Steinbeck published The Grapes of Wrath in 1939. Building upon this characterization this thesis explores six pathways out of rural poverty in relation to the particular quality of invisibility. This study reviews scholarly literature and federal policy, as well as adds new interviews focused on a case study of Mecca and Thermal, two small, unincorporated communities in California’s Eastern Coachella Valley (ECV). Through these techniques I found that rural poverty is characterized by a unique invisibility and that although there are certain pathways out of this poverty, these pathways are unlikely, temporary, and too insubstantial to make significant change.

Given the critical role of food justice organizations in providing for the 49 million Americans who live in food insecure households, one of the most important questions that can be answered today is what determines the success of such an organization. This paper analyzes case studies from Sitka, AK and Portland, OR, aiming to communicate a better understanding of which factors result in an organization’s success and which factors lead it to failure. That information is used to establish guidelines that other organizations seeking to be relevant contributors to the food justice movement can follow. Ultimately, my research discovers that in order for a food justice-oriented program to maximize its success it should educate the people it serves, have ample financial support, and fit soundly with its host community’s strengths, resources, and values.

On January 7th, 2015, two gunmen attacked the Paris offices of French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo. Later identified as two French brothers of Algerian descent linked to Al-Qaeda, the shooting was perceived as a targeted and deliberate attack on the freedom of speech. Millions throughout the world declared "Je suis Charlie," in solidarity with the victims and in defense of free speech. Critics argued back and forth over whether Charlie Hebdo's right to free speech is in fact absolute, or if it's content could be considered hate speech. This thesis offers an alternative angle to this discourse, and that is a discussion on the narratives of French identity at play within the Je suis Charlie movement. What did it mean to declare oneself Charlie? Who was not Charlie, and why? These are the questions I seek to answer in my thesis by placing the event within the historical context of French Enlightenment, Revolution, and colonialism.

This thesis seeks to explain, via four key reasons, the shifting role that women have played in the self-determination movement in Kashmir over time. It focuses on the rise of young women in stone-pelting protests, analyzed through the lens of recent events that have triggered protests, the role of Islamism with regards to women in Kashmir, and the role of young women in the conflict generation. More importantly, the author analyzes the protests of women who have lost family members to enforced disappearances at the hands of the state. It is found that these women use a political strategy that upholds the politics of respectability and relies on the visual, which young women in stone pelting protests also rely on to highlight their cause.

In September 2017, the Trump administration announced its plan to rescind The Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals Program (DACA). Since then, program recipients, who have in recent years assumed the name "Dreamers," have fought back. This thesis explores how Dreamers use storytelling as a means of articulating individual and collective identity as a form of resistance in the sociopolitical climate that is Trump's America.

Welfare state scholars have amassed competing theoretical explanations for the development of welfare policies. When considering the U.S. case, a discussion of federalism is central to these theoretical examinations. How power in policymaking is distributed amongst the varying levels of government is influential in the construction of the U.S. welfare state. Standard quantitative approaches to U.S. welfare research have offered a limited analysis of how theoretical explanations change after historical moments of welfare reform. In this study, I examine the institutional changes introduced to U.S. welfare in 1996 by way of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA). This study examines the changes in welfare maximum benefit levels for a 3-person family from 1987-2015. However, I apply an alternative quantitative approach to studying the effects PRWORA has had on benefit maximums by splitting models into two separate time periods and running analyses separately: pre-PRWORA (1987-1996) and post-PRWORA (1997-2015). By applying this methodological approach, I demonstrate how the influence of different sets of theories change after institutional reforms, such as PRWORA. The results offer new insights to the temporal applicability of different theoretical explanations and the construction of social citizenship.

This thesis examines the rhetoric surrounding sex education crafted by two major types of advocacy groups: the Christian Right and the Liberal Left. I conducted a qualitative analysis of content on sex education produced by six high-profile organizations: The Heritage Foundation, Family Research Council, Focus on the Family, American Civil Liberties Union, the Guttmacher Institute, and Planned Parenthood. I found that these polarized organizations do not debate each other; instead, they focus on parents whose political leanings match their own. Sex education is at the center of other issues that also divide the Christian Right and the Liberal Left: healthcare, morality, marriage, education, and STIs. I analyze the arguments advocacy organizations make, the liabilities of their appeals, and their strategies to mobilize parents emotionally. Both conservative and liberal organizations aim to secure the beliefs of the next generation through their parents, not to find common ground.

The purpose of this study was to determine if local elected officials in Tennessee perceive ethics training will affect ethical behavior, and, if so, what format they recommend for ethics training including length of time, delivery methods, and instructors' qualifications. This study provides information regarding whether ethics training is likely to be efficacious and how officials feel about the training. Specifically, this study informs officials and others who invest with both time and financial resources about the value of training, what to teach if they are going to offer ethics training, and who should teach ethics. More than 2,000 local elected officials in Tennessee were surveyed asking their perceptions on the format, content, instructor, and length of time necessary for ethics training. In addition, survey participants were asked their personal definition of ethics and were asked to share the unethical behavior they have observed in other elected officials, if any. This study provides rich information for those responsible for designing and delivering ethics training for elected officials as well as for those making financial decisions regarding ethics training. An additional benefit of this study was as a contribution to the body of literature on the subject of ethics training. This study should be useful for those in government or training and development as they consider offering ethics training.

The United States held almost 500,000 enemy combatants within her borders during World War II. Out of those 500,000 men, 380,000 were from Nazi Germany. Nazi POWs were confined to camps built near small rural towns in almost every state. It was not something that was well known to the American public. Even less known was the American Military's effort, through reeducation, to introduce Hitler's soldiers to a new political ideology-democracy. This thesis will explore how the reeducation program was formed; examine the people, both German and American, who participated in it, and make a determination on whether or not it was successful. While Special Projects did not completely win over the majority of the German POWs, it was my finding that for the Americans to have done nothing when faced with such a situation would have been foolish.