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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.

This paper will attempt to explore the history and function of judical disagreement behaviour using information from both the Canadian Supreme Court and the US Supreme Court. The evolution of national high court decision making, highlights the changing role of courts within the political and public spheres, as well as the increasing authority courts have over policy. This changing role reinforces the need to study the role of courts on law. I will use minority opinions from the Laskin and Dickson courts to study what disagreement reveals about the decision making process. Judicial disagreement has largely been summed up into two deficient stereotypes: the dissent as "serious" disagreement and the separate concurrence as inferior disagreement to the dissent. I will dispel this fallacy by introducing the five categories created to describe a new way of thinking about judicial disagreement and to shatter the old stereotypes. / vii, 149 leaves ; 29 cm.

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On April 11, 1951, President Harry S. Truman dismissed General Douglas MacArthur as Commander of United Nations forces in Korea. Since the dismissal, contemporaries of the Truman-MacArthur era and historians have tried to make sense of Truman's momentous decision to relieve one of America's greatest military heroes. While a great number of studies have devoted attention to the controversy, few if any have placed the Truman-MacArthur conflict within the context of the unprecedented militarization of American foreign policy that took place during the early cold war. This study departs from the traditional "blame-casting" that has dominated Truman-MacArthur scholarship in the past and concludes that General MacArthur was a casualty who was dismissed because he failed to grasp the global nature of the post-World War II American foreign policy agenda.Chapter One analyzes the literature dealing with the Truman-Macarthur controversy and illustrates why historical scholarship has failed to grasp the larger forces at work in American foreign policy while MacArthur was UN Commander in Korea. Chapter Two traces the tumultuous events of the controversy from the outbreak of war in Korea to MacArthur's April 11 dismissal. Finally, Chapter Three analyzes the Senate hearings that followed MacArthur's dismissal, illustrates the importance of the Joint Chiefs of Staff's testimony, and explores the broader, global issues the Truman Administration faced in transforming its foreign policy while General MacArthur failed to grasp the nature of this transformation. / Department of History

This thesis examines three case studies in presidential rhetoric in order to explore the genre of domestic crisis rhetoric as defined by Theodore O. Windt (1990). Windt (1986) notes the impressive scholarship on the rhetoric of war and international crises, but also laments the “neglect” of research into “equally significant speeches on domestic „crises,‟ especially those concerned with economic issues” (p. 104). Windt (1990) proposes a generic model that views domestic crisis rhetoric through a dialectic lens that explores how the discourse defines the president‟s policy and how it depicts the policy of the president‟s opponents. This study examines three of the most important presidential rhetorical texts on domestic issues of the last 50 years, each by a different president and each addressing a different domestic political issue – Barack Obama‟s September 9, 2009 address on health care reform, George W. Bush‟s September 19 and September 24, 2008 speeches on the financial crisis, and Lyndon Johnson‟s call for a “war on poverty” in his January 8, 1964 State of the Union address – with the goal of testing the generalizability of the genre across time and gaining a better understanding of how presidents respond to – and create – exigency through rhetoric. / Introduction and overview -- Literature review -- Method -- Barack Obama and health care reform -- George W. Bush and the financial crisis -- Lyndon Johnson and the "war on poverty" -- Conclusions. / Access to thesis permanently restricted to Ball State community only / Department of Communication Studies