Call number: LD2668 .T4 1955 O96 / Master of Science

In 1992, Ross Perot, billionaire entrepreneur from Texas, headed the most powerful independent presidential candidacy of the twentieth century, garnering nearly 19 percent of the popular vote. Perot's rhetoric demanded fundamental reform through a seemingly contradictory message calling for both individual responsibility and collective patriotism and sacrifice: corporate populism, a traditional, albeit profoundly paradoxical ideological appeal. Perot spoke of rekindling the "American Dream" for the next generation, whose prospects appeared bleak because of a post-Cold War credit crisis and withering of the United States' industrial base. He saw linkages between this crisis and a host of social problems, and advocated controversial solutions that made coalition-building difficult. Perot looked to his followers to develop consensuses on many issues of the day. Heading a "grassroots" movement organized from the top down, with disciples from all points on the ideological compass, however, Perot found consensus a rare commodity. As a result, his campaign lacked cohesion. Perot's methods, personality, and wealth raised disturbing questions about the future of representative democracy, but his unfolding campaign also highlighted shortcomings in American electoral institutions and processes. Perot's treatment by the press, for example, provides a case study of the mass-production of political portraits and the impact of those images. That so many citizens voted for a man often portrayed as a suspicious, morally rigid, unscrupulous, vengeful demagogue indicates how widely disaffection with American political institutions had spread. Tapping this discontent, Perot created the potential for a new kind of politics in the United States. He catalyzed discourse on policy issues like foreign trade, welfare reform, military policy, and Executive branch responsibility. He focused attention on chronic problems like the national debt, the annual budget deficit, and the insolvency of "entitlement" programs like Social Security and Medicare. His presence seems to have provoked an unusually high turnout on election day. He helped pioneer a new era of direct dialog between candidates and citizens through the use of interactive and electronic media. Finally, Perot's candidacy symbolizes the emergence of a new centrist political movement--a force which in 1994 began to dramatically reshape the American political landscape.

This study used case studies to examine the leadership frames of female presidents of four-year, public and private, coeducational research institutions both from the Intensive and Extensive Carnegie classifications within the United States. The population (N=30) surveyed was sent the Leadership Orientation Questionnaire (Self) developed from the previous research conducted by Lee Bolman and Terrance Deal. The Bolman and Deal leadership frame theory condensed existing organizational theories into a four-frame perspective consisting of a structural, human resource, political, and symbolic frame. Bolman and Deal theorized that the ability to use more than one frame is considered to be critical to the success of leaders and intensify that leader's capacity for making decisions and taking effective actions. The Leadership Orientation Questionnaire (Self) contains five sections that include rating scales for personal demographics, the four frames, eight leadership dimensions, and management and leadership effectiveness. The research questions sought to identify the demographic characteristics and academic histories of the survey participants and the associations between these variables, the leadership frames represented among the survey participants, and how many, and which, of the four frames the survey participants use collectively. This study allowed its participants to examine their perceptions of their own leadership frames in order to analyze the frame that dominates the way certain universities communicate. Thirteen of the thirty presidents (43%) completed and returned the survey. Survey participants who had 20 or more years of experience were more likely to exhibit the human resource or symbolic frame as their dominant style; presidents whose years of experience numbered less than 20 years exhibited a mulitframe perspective in their decision-making process. Overall, this research found that the survey participants exhibited most often the human resource frame, followed by the symbolic, structural, and political frames.

The problem of this study was the status of administrative assistants in higher education with special emphasis on (1) the role of the administrative assistant, (2) the internship aspects of the position, as perceived by college and university presidents throughout the United States, and (3) the professional qualifications held by persons filling positions as administrative assistants.

This study identified and compared characteristics in the career progression of African-American college presidents of institutions in the continental United States. The study was concerned with personal, educational and professional characteristics of these senior level administrators. From a population of 141 individuals, 73 presidents participated in this study. Frequencies, means, percentages, chi-square, crosstabulations and analysis of variance (ANOVA) were employed in the analysis of data. The level of significance was set at 0.05.

Whig campaign strategists in the presidential election of 1840 developed new campaign tactics that included widespread use of campaign songs. They used these songs to sing the praises of their own candidate and policies while at the same time attacking the opposing party's candidate and policies. As early as 1842 these songwriters began writing songs in anticipation of the campaign in 1844. Prior to the nomination of candidates in May, 1844, the Whigs had published several songbooks including hundreds of song titles. In addition to supporting the candidacy of Henry Clay as the Whig candidate, the songs ridiculed several potential Democratic candidates including Martin Van Buren, John C. Calhoun, James Buchanan, and others. Whigs also used imagery to support their candidate and attack the foe. Despite extensive efforts to influence the election with campaign songs, no hard evidence exists that documents the effect of campaign songs, either positively or negatively.

The study begins with an overview of the 1948 political situation, followed by the evaluation of Truman's use of ethical appeal using criteria developed by Thonssen, Baird, and Braden. Each of their three constituents of ethical appeal--character, sagacity, and good will--is applied to four speeches. Results of the analysis establish that Truman utilized a strong ethical appeal during the campaign. Conclusions are that his use of ethical appeal probably had a significant effect on the voters of America. Regardless of the quality of his use of pathos or logos, a less capable use of ethical appeal would probably have had a fatal effect on his campaign.

The purpose of this study is to examine two major psychological determinants of the vote in presidential elections - candidate image and party orientation. The central thesis of this study is that candidate image, as measured here, has been a greater determinant of electoral choice in the majority of presidential elections since 1952 than has party orientation. One of the vices as well as virtues of a democratic society is that the people often get what they want. This is especially true in the case of electing our leaders. Political scientists have often concentrated their efforts on attempting to ascertain why people vote as they do. Studies have been conducted focusing on the behavior of voters in making that important decision-who should govern?

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

Not available / text