Esta pesquisa pretende investigar as origens do Direito Internacional na América Latina, tendo como berço as construções jurídicas inauguradas no Congresso do Panamá, em 1826. Embora parte da literatura considere a Primeira Conferência Pan-americana, realizada em Washington, no ano de 1889, como o marco inicial do sistema jurídico internacional na América, mostraremos que o Congresso do Panamá lançou bases para a construção e fortalecimento do Direito Internacional Regional e consagrou princípios relevantes hodiernamente considerados como pilares da Ordem Jurídica Internacional. Nesse sentido, o objeto de estudo concentrar-se-á na construção jurídica e na codificação de um Direito Internacional na América Latina que tem como foco o Congresso do Panamá, expressão máxima da atuação internacional dos Estados recém-formados da América Latina. / This research aims to investigate the origins of International Law in Latin America, cradled legal arrangements inaugurated by the Congress of Panama in 1826. Although part of the literature considers the First Pan-American Conference in Washington, in 1889, as the beginning of the international legal system in America, we will show that the Congress of Panama launched bases for building and strengthening of international law and established relevant principles, nowadays considered as pillars of the International Legal Order. Accordingly, the object of study will focus on the legal construction and codification of a International Law in Latin America that focuses the Congress of Panama, maximum expression of the international performance of the newly formed States of Latin American region.

I situate this dissertation and its contributions at the edge of the literature on interest group political behavior and congressional responsiveness. In particular, I use new strategies and tools to study interest group influence. In the first essay, I find that a machine-learning text-analysis detects latent patterns in the frequency of lobbying by the telecommunications industry in 2015. Meanwhile, members of Congress primarily focus on healthcare and taxes when they discuss policy issues on social media. In the second essay, I measure the change in political behavior of interest groups by ideology after the surprise result of the 2016 presidential election. The evidence suggests there was an increase in political spending by ideologically polarized interest groups shortly after the election. Finally, the cornerstone of this dissertation evaluates the results of two field experiments measuring congressional responsiveness to issue advocacy with a non-profit, non-partisan political advocacy organization. Counter to expectations in the interest group literature, I find that members of Congress are responsive on social media to interest group requests on a low-salience, non-partisan issue. These findings have important implications for representation and responsiveness in the U.S. Congress by highlighting areas of research that need further study and deeper evaluation.

Ao longo das últimas décadas, o estigma relacionado a grupos minoritários em virtude da religião, etnia, sexualidade, gênero ou outras características tem consistido em tema de debate em diferentes lugares do mundo. O Brasil não constituiu exceção a essa tendência. Em 08 de dezembro de 2011, o Projeto de Lei da Câmara nº 122 (PLC 122/06), cujo objetivo principal era criminalizar a LGBTfobia no país, foi debatido na Comissão de Direitos Humanos e Legislação Participativa do Senado Federal. O projeto, proposto pela deputada federal Iara Bernardi, consistia em uma resposta aos alarmantes números da violência em função de identidade de gênero e orientação sexual no Brasil. Participaram do debate os senadores Paulo Paim, Marta Suplicy, Magno Malta, Marinor Brito, Cristovam Buarque, Lídice da Mata, Marcelo Crivella, Eduardo Suplicy e Sérgio Petecão. O registro e a transmissão do debate foram feitos pela TV Senado. O debate foi marcado por intensa discordância entre senadores favoráveis e contrários aprovação do projeto. O dissenso entre esses grupos marcou-se linguísticodiscursivamente de variadas formas, entre as quais destacamos a construção de analogias de que seus membros lançaram mão com o objetivo de justificar seus posicionamentos políticos e de argumentar em favor deles. A tese defendida neste trabalho é que as analogias, em virtude da seletividade que lhes é inerente, colaboram para a construção de conceptualizações da realidade, as quais podem ser manipuladas a depender dos objetivos argumentativos dos oradores. Pressupomos, pois, que as analogias utilizadas têm função argumentativa e podem influenciar a maneira como se conceptualiza o projeto de lei, seus defensores e aqueles que a ele se opõem a ele. Tendo isso em vista, este trabalho objetiva identificar e analisar qualitativamente as analogias empregadas, a fim de desvelar as representações do PLC 122/06 e dos debatedores com cuja criação elas colaboram. A fim de viabilizar a identificação e análise das analogias, procedeu-se à transcrição do registro do debate feito pela TV Senado, o qual ocupou aproximadamente 1h33 de uma sessão da comissão de Direitos Humanos e Legislação Participativa do Senado Federal. A transcrição do debate foi feita em conformidade com as orientações do Projeto de Estudos da Norma Linguística Urbana Culta de São Paulo (Projeto NURC-SP). Constituem a base teórica deste trabalho estudos nas áreas de Argumentação (PERELMAN & OLBRECHTS-TYTECA, 1996 [1958]), Estudos Cognitivos da Analogia (HOLYOAK, 2005; GENTNER & BOWDLE, 2008; GENTNER & FORBUS, 2011) e Estudos Críticos do Discurso (VAN DIJK, 2014, 2012, 2008, 2006), entre outros. A análise do corpus permitiu constatar que os grupos discordantes, por meio do recurso a analogias, negociam o significado da aprovação do PLC122/06 para a sociedade brasileira, ora defendendo uma pretensa aceitabilidade deste, ora negando-a. A análise permitiu, além disso, que se descrevessem os usos de analogias dos senadores em termos de nichos analógicos e amálgamas, os quais têm função estruturante e argumentativa no debate sob análise. / The stigma directed toward minority groups because of their religion, ethnicity, sexuality, genre and other features has been a debate topic in different parts of the world throughout the past decades. Brazil was no exception to that tendency. On December 8th, 2011, bill no. 122/2006, which aimed at outlawing prejudice against the LGBT community in Brazil, was debated by the Human Rights and Participative Legislation Committee of the Federal Senate. The bill, proposed by Federal Deputy Iara Bernardi, was a response to the alarming rates of crimes motivated by sex orientation and genre identity in Brazil. Senators Paulo Paim, Marta Suplicy, Magno Malta, Marinor Brito, Cristovam Buarque, Lídice da Mata, Marcelo Crivella, Eduardo Suplicy, and Sérgio Petecão participated in the debate, which was recorded and aired by TV Senado. The debate was characterized by profound dissensus between senators who were favorable and unfavorable to the approval of the bill. The dissensus between those two groups was marked linguistically and discursively in various ways, including analogies, which are used by senators to justify the political stands they take and to argument in favor of them. The thesis that is defended in this work is that, because analogies are intrinsically selective, they may create different conceptualizations of reality, which means that they may be manipulated to meet the argumentative objectives of the speakers. It is thus assumed that analogies in discourse have argumentative roles and may influence the way in which the bill, its supporters and its opponents are conceptualized. Considering that, the objective of this work is to identify and analyze qualitatively the analogies used by the senators, so that the conceptualizations of the project, its opponents and its supporters they suggest can be observed. The transcription of the debate has been done according to the guidelines published by the Project of Study of the Standard Urban Linguistic Norm of São Paulo (Projeto NURC-SP). The theoretical basis of this work is to be found in studies in the areas of Argumentation (PERELMAN & OLBRECHTS-TYTECA, 1996 [1958]), Cognitive Studies of Analogy (HOLYOAK, 2005; GENTNER & BOWDLE, 2008; GENTNER & FORBUS, 2011), Critical Discourse Studies (VAN DIJK, 2014, 2012, 2008, 2006), among others. The analysis of the corpus made possible to conclude that the two groups of senators, by means of analogies, negotiate the meaning of the approval of the bill for the Brazilian population, sometimes defending the acceptability of the bill, sometimes calling it into question. The analysis also allowed the proposal and description of the concepts of analogical niches and amalgams, which both structure the debate and are used for argumentation purposes.

The thesis focuses on the congress tourism, situation of Prague and other 4 competing cities. It describes the specifics of marketing in tourism, congress tourism and destination management. Then follows the comparison of destinations and activities of each city convention bureau and the resulting recommendations for the Czech capital.

The RDP is a plan to address the many social and economic problems facing our country — problems such as...violence, lack of housing, lack of jobs, inadequate education and health care, lack of democracy, a failing economy. The RDP recognises that all of these problems are connected. For example, we cannot successfully build the economy while millions do not have homes or jobs. And we cannot provide homes and jobs without rebuilding the economy. We need policies and strategies to address all of the problems together. The RDP aims to do this. The RDP is a programme to mobilise all our people and all our resources to finally get rid of apartheid and build a democratic, non racial and non sexist future. The RDP was drawn up by the ANC-led alliance in consultation with other key mass organisations and assisted by a wide range of nongovernmental organisations (NGOs) and research organisations. This inclusive approach to developing and implementing policy — involving as many organisations as possible — is unique in South Africa’s political history. The ANC — because it is a liberation movement and based on the traditions of the Freedom Charter — is the only political organisation which can bring together such a wide range of social movements, community-based organisations and numerous other sectors and formations. This widespread and broad-based support throughout South Africa will allow the ANC within a Government of National Unity successfully to implement the RDP.

Willis Duke Weatherford, a liberal pioneer in Southern race reform, argued that the ethics of Christianity obligated Southerners to address the social and economic problems faced by blacks in the early twentieth century. His strategy for improving race relations centred on educating Southerners and promoting economic uplift for blacks. Weatherford advocated race reform through the Young Men's Christian Association, the Southern Sociological Congress, and other voluntary organizations. He published books, taught courses, preached sermons, organized conferences, and raised funds from Northern philanthropists. Through an analysis of Weatherford's published writings and of his papers archived at the Southern Historical Collection, the present study provides a biographical profile of Weatherford's life and career, examines the development of Weatherford's racial views in the social and political context of his time, describes Weatherford's program of race education developed for college students, and discusses an interracial conference held at the Blue Ridge Assembly in 1917.

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This dissertation seeks to explain variation in legislative strategies to control policymaking across institutional contexts. Of these many strategies, I focus particularly on the use of statutory language meant to direct agency action and on the use of oversight hearings. I argue that while low levels of oversight activity need not imply that a legislature is helplessly abdicating policymaking responsibility to unelected agencies, this may be the case in some circumstances. With the goal of establishing when the lack of oversight may mean such normatively problematic abdication, I develop a signaling model of delegation and oversight which proposes that oversight depends on institutional features (such as legislative capacity, the existence of legislative term limits and a legislative veto), political features (such as policy conflict within the government and within the legislature and the policy preferences and activism of important judicial actors), and the legislature's initial delegation of policymaking discretion to an agency. Critically, the pursuit of either strategy depends on alternative strategies available as well as on the likely actions of other institutions with the power to affect policy outcomes. The dissertation extends our theoretical understanding of legislative-executive relations and provides one of the first large-scale empirical analyses of legislative policymaking. In the first empirical chapter of this dissertation, I assess the predictions of the theory concerning congressional oversight activity from 1947-2006. I find that both the extent to which a congressional committee's ideology diverges from an agency's and the policy-specific expertise of said committee affect the number of oversight hearing days the committee holds, but only when policy disagreements are sufficiently conflictual. This last condition suggests, contrary to previous research, that the extent to which oversight should be necessary, to either legislative policymaking or democratic legitimacy, varies across preference arrangements. In the next empirical chapter, I switch my focus from the analysis of a single legislature over time to a cross-sectional study of the extent to which U.S. state legislatures delegate authority to bureaucratic agencies. Here, I find that the amount of discretion that a legislature delegates to an agency charged with implementing Medicaid policy is nonlinearly related to the extent to which state courts are likely to affect policy outcomes, as captured by a new measure of judicial activism. These analyses confirm that legislatures consider alternative methods of control as well as the likely actions of external institutions when crafting their policymaking strategies.

This dissertation investigates the interaction of gender and party in the political communication of members of Congress (MCs). The study focuses on the tweets of all MCs in the House of Representatives during two weeks of the 114th Congress (9,374 tweets from 431 MCs). I conduct an in-depth content analysis of these tweets to extract important message characteristics related to issue areas, electoral behaviors, and constituency targeting. I find that MCs emphasize their partisan ties when they tweet about women’s or men’s issues, but Democratic congresswomen and Republican congressmen go further to address feminine and masculine issue areas respectively. In their electoral behaviors, congresswomen posted more advertising tweets than congressmen, especially Republican congresswomen. Republican congresswomen took individual credit for legislation at high rates and shared very little, while Democratic congresswomen shared credit almost as much as they took individual credit. Furthermore, while both Democratic and Republican congresswomen see themselves as “surrogate representatives” (Carroll 2000) of the women beyond the boundaries of their districts, Democratic congresswomen target national constituencies significantly more often than their colleagues. These results provide evidence that gender is not enough to understand how MCs communicate – the key lies at the nexus of gender and partisanship.

For the researcher, education is concerned fundamentally with the notion of human emancipation. In other words, it is only worth the name if it forms people capable of taking part in their own liberation. Education policy in South Africa prior to African National Congress victory in 1994 was dominated by the ideology of apartheid which led to a variety of malpractices in defining the role and status of education. The ANC victory in South Africa ushered in a period of awakening from a situation of oppression to the establishment of alternative education structures promising a redress of past imbalances through equality, justice and democracy as fundamental human rights. While the ANC policy documents may serve South African society in an educative way, it is equally important that this also implies, at a practical level, an increase in collective learning levels. This has to be done in ways that are undistorted and ways that do not devolve all authority to experts. As a preliminary to improving practices, it is vital to penetrate below the surface of the ANC policy documents to understand the true nature of things found to expose internal and external contradictions and distortions. As Durkheim (1994) says why strive for knowledge of reality if this knowledge cannot serve us in life. This implies that the pursuit of knowledge is of little value unless it can serve our interests as social and cultural beings. This thesis aims to examine the role played by the Reconstruction and Development Policy in South Africa's education system. It questions the viability of implementing the policies as set out in the policy documents, which the African National Congress claim to be derived from critical theory. The focus was on the reconstruction of the central and decisive events that have had implications for present educational policy and development. A methodological tool derived from critical theory was applied since it provided a form of meta-critique with an emancipatory rather than manipulative interest in criticism. Critical theory hence became a method of rational valuing and a powerful tool of internal and external criticism with the potential for use in practical as well as theoretical research. It thus becomes of value not only to a policy-maker but to a researcher or classroom practitioner as well. With regards to South Africa's present status, critical theory offers us a clear, less-distorted picture of how things are and at least suggests through transcendence of the existent, the possibility of how things may be different. / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)